Yes, but if we took that to be true (or even a remote possibility) then continuing this debate would be essentially pointless, no?
Well you asked if the "event" could be purely imaginative, which I agree it could be. But since it came about through normal neural processes, equal to that which you use to perceive the reality that you experience, then anything is possible, even me in a Matrix imagining this whole thing.
But to be more specific with my original answer, yes, it could be totally imagined.
It is entirely possible that we have not previously developed a "sixth sense", so to speak, for a stimuli that we had not been presented with. That, or, conversely, we have been presented with it at some point and time (or even still are), and there has just been no need to develop a sensory system for it.
Cool. Then could it would be safe to assume that there could exist something in nature that we can't evidence using our limited sensory inputs?
Up until about a hundred years ago, we knew next to nothing about processes on the atomic level. If your prediction is correct, we should still know nothing about atomic processes simply by virtue of the fact that we cannot view these processes on a macroscopic level.
I think you missed my point. Granted, machines do help us go where our normal features are limited and can't further investigate, but before the machine is built to do a specific task, like the LHC, much has to be known about what is going to be investigated. The machine is told where to go search because we have very good evidence that something should be there (ie. Higgs Boson).
But how did, as you put it, "awareness" of these microscopic levels arise in the first place? By machines we invented to help detect them.
We had the mathematics before any machines were built, and experiments were conducted without machines. But again, we can only investigate what we "see" with our sensory functions, anything outside of what we can experience with these functions isn't going to be known to us, much less will we be able to built a machine to find that which we don't even know exists.
But, we can be in the process of experiencing it, with our brains at higher levels of consciousness, however, since these experiences are always equated with religious god(s) people reject them off hand.
Maybe this is a bit too presuptuous.
There's no good data to fall back on, other than that we know simpler life forms don't have the depth of understanding we do.
I guess it's all in what you consider "good" data. But you're right, for now we muse, shoot the shit and contemplate.
"I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks
"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky