Imagination Builds On Our Experiences
...you can’t have a storage space that is filled to the brim with boxes. How would you ever come inside? Where would you pull out the boxes to find what you need? How would you even see what boxes were available and where they might be found? You need space. You need light. You need to be able to access your attic’s contents, to walk inside and look around and see what is what.
And within that space, there is freedom. You can temporarily place there all of the observations you’ve gathered. You haven’t yet filed them away or placed them in your attic’s permanent storage. Instead, you lay them all out, where you can see them, and then you play around. What patterns emerge? Can something from permanent storage be added to make a different picture, something that makes sense? You stand in that open space and you examine what you’ve gathered. You pull out different elements, try out different combinations, see what works and what doesn’t, what feels right and what doesn’t. And you come away with a creation that is unlike the facts or observations that have fed into it. It has its roots in them, true, but it is its own unique thing, which exists only in that hypothetical state of your mind and may or may not be real or even true.
But that creation isn’t coming out of the blue. It is grounded in reality. It is drawing upon all those observations you’ve gathered up to that point, “consistent in every detail with what has already been seen.” It is, in other words, growing organically out of those contents that you’ve gathered into your attic through the process of observation, mixed with those ingredients that have always been there, your knowledge base and your understanding of the world. Feynman phrases it thus: “Imagination in a tight straightjacket.” To him, the straightjacket is the laws of physics. To Holmes, it is essentially the same thing: that base of knowledge and observation that you’ve acquired to the present time. Never is it simply a flight of fancy; you can’t think of imagination in this context as identical to the creativity of a fiction writer or an artist. It can’t be. First, for the simple reason that it is grounded in the factual reality that you’ve built up, and second, because it “must be definite and not a vague proposition.” Your imaginings have to be concrete. They have to be detailed. They don’t exist in reality, but their substance must be such that they could theoretically jump from your head straight into the world with little adjustment. Per Feynman, they are in a straightjacket—or, in Holmes’s terms, they are confined and determined by your unique brain attic. Your imaginings must use it as their base and they must play by its rules—and those rules include the observations you’ve so diligently gathered. “The game is,” continues Feynman, “to try to figure out what we know, what’s possible? It requires an analysis back, a checking to see whether it fits, it’s allowed according to what is known.”
Notes:
It works within the confines of what we know and how we can work with that knowledge.
Folksonomies: knowledge imagination
Taxonomies:
/science/physics (0.643973)
/home and garden/home furnishings/sofas and chairs (0.496661)
/business and industrial/aerospace and defense/space technology (0.472998)
Keywords:
permanent storage (0.932370 (neutral:0.000000)), unique brain attic (0.871757 (positive:0.517297)), observations (0.694078 (negative:-0.400289)), hypothetical state (0.659452 (negative:-0.332714)), storage space (0.645054 (positive:0.250200)), different picture (0.644595 (positive:0.414699)), different elements (0.641559 (positive:0.224447)), present time (0.639879 (positive:0.262459)), vague proposition. (0.635702 (negative:-0.646696)), different combinations (0.635286 (positive:0.284305)), open space (0.634481 (positive:0.354119)), little adjustment (0.623197 (negative:-0.560584)), fiction writer (0.622831 (neutral:0.000000)), Holmes’s terms (0.609377 (neutral:0.000000)), knowledge base (0.593640 (positive:0.365352)), Feynman (0.592417 (positive:0.344406)), imagination (0.581730 (positive:0.424512)), reality (0.545029 (neutral:0.000000)), boxes (0.527695 (positive:0.201289)), imaginings (0.493151 (negative:-0.376716)), observation (0.457786 (positive:0.661296)), thing (0.457570 (negative:-0.318340)), contents (0.456941 (positive:0.233588)), creation (0.452781 (positive:0.363639)), world (0.441701 (positive:0.188622)), brim (0.399356 (positive:0.201289)), confines (0.394642 (positive:0.914927)), straightjacket (0.392239 (neutral:0.000000)), Experiences (0.378535 (positive:0.914927)), patterns (0.375319 (neutral:0.000000))
Entities:
knowledge base:FieldTerminology (0.744906 (positive:0.365352)), Feynman:Person (0.728095 (positive:0.344406)), Holmes:Person (0.492290 (neutral:0.000000)), open space:FieldTerminology (0.415075 (positive:0.354119)), writer:JobTitle (0.340920 (neutral:0.000000))
Concepts:
Scientific method (0.953484): dbpedia | freebase
Knowledge (0.941209): dbpedia | freebase
Philosophy of science (0.845689): dbpedia | freebase
Hypothesis (0.749586): dbpedia | freebase
Observation (0.722685): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Time (0.695451): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Cognition (0.624173): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Existence (0.592574): dbpedia | freebase