This is kind of abstract. Maybe it will get firmed up. I raise it now because of a long, relatively coherent dream I had where all kinds of imagery came up. Great dryness of mouth but ice cubes turned to dusty pebbles in my mouth and full water bottles went empty as I picked them up. Masses of undifferentiated, trudging people surrounding me, others moving with great urgency and purpose, but with shifting activities coming from varying directions. Everything IIRC was in black-and-white. I was trying steadily and nearly desperately to escape this hive, but though I knew I was dreaming, I didn't try to wake up. I just decided to roll with it and keep walking. Everything was in the context of walking. I'm prepared to believe all this imagery was already in my brain, but I don't think I could have come up with so much of it in ordinary waking consciousness. When I did wake up I could see how entire novels may seem to arrive fully formed in the human mind.
Mozart didn't laboriously compose; he heard music in his head and turned it into a score. Michelangelo could see a neglected block of marble and grasp exactly what needed to be chipped away to achieve a staggering masterpiece. Isaac Newton was a towering genius of math and science - which fields arise from simply counting and looking. All three men were fervidly religious, but I do realize that in their eras secularism was scarcely an option.
On a more mundane level, the almost intuitive, even instinctive pastime of soccer went from being a game a dog could understand to an incredibly complicated, diverse global culture - almost a religion of its own.
If I knew enough, I could probably argue strongly that all four examples can be explained in terms of human outliers, evolving complexity, cultural imperatives, and on and on. But they all seem to me like near-miracles. So do a lot other phenomena that are much easier (for me) to see as purely human innovation building on previous innovation. Like cooking. We don't really know how that happened, although it's not hard to hypothesize. What's harder for me to understand is why humans tamed fire to begin with - and how a naked ape with no claws, teeth or fur innovated its way to dominating virtually every species on the planet. And how looking for something good to eat became a science and a passion that is evolving to this day - when all we really "need" is a few relatively simple nutrients. Humans are driven to innovate. It's a defining feature. This may be all of a qualitative piece with every other life form, but it sure looks different. (And why life, anyway? Was the cosmos incomplete without it? But that's another issue.)
This may be too big a topic to actually discuss, but I wanted to get those thoughts out of my head and into pixels.
Where does imagination come from? Is thought an emergent property of the universe?
Mozart didn't laboriously compose; he heard music in his head and turned it into a score. Michelangelo could see a neglected block of marble and grasp exactly what needed to be chipped away to achieve a staggering masterpiece. Isaac Newton was a towering genius of math and science - which fields arise from simply counting and looking. All three men were fervidly religious, but I do realize that in their eras secularism was scarcely an option.
On a more mundane level, the almost intuitive, even instinctive pastime of soccer went from being a game a dog could understand to an incredibly complicated, diverse global culture - almost a religion of its own.
If I knew enough, I could probably argue strongly that all four examples can be explained in terms of human outliers, evolving complexity, cultural imperatives, and on and on. But they all seem to me like near-miracles. So do a lot other phenomena that are much easier (for me) to see as purely human innovation building on previous innovation. Like cooking. We don't really know how that happened, although it's not hard to hypothesize. What's harder for me to understand is why humans tamed fire to begin with - and how a naked ape with no claws, teeth or fur innovated its way to dominating virtually every species on the planet. And how looking for something good to eat became a science and a passion that is evolving to this day - when all we really "need" is a few relatively simple nutrients. Humans are driven to innovate. It's a defining feature. This may be all of a qualitative piece with every other life form, but it sure looks different. (And why life, anyway? Was the cosmos incomplete without it? But that's another issue.)
This may be too big a topic to actually discuss, but I wanted to get those thoughts out of my head and into pixels.
Where does imagination come from? Is thought an emergent property of the universe?
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3mwm4kx
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