The mystery of human imagination

[Minoosh]

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?

 

[Scorpion]

The famous people who you gave as examples of creative genius are just a few people in a long list who have seemed to have more ability than you would expect from a hairless ape just down from the trees. There is Dickens, whos creation of characters came to him in a sort of waking dream. There is Churchill, who used to go into a kind of trance when composing his speeches. General Patton believed he was the reincarnation of a Roman solider.
From my point of view it is easily explained by the theory of reincarnation, in that we have lived many lives before. I heard a medium in a trance say that Mozart had been a musician in nine previous lives. Our soul retains the gifts and qualities we have acquired in these previous lives, and some of those lives may have been on other planets.
There is also the idea that we are directly influenced by the spirit world working to inspire us from behind the scenes.

Obviously nobody else on this forum is going to see it my way. But I think imagination is an attribute we use to reach beyond our conditioned mind and touch higher realms.

 

[Thor 2]

The famous people who you gave as examples of creative genius are just a few people in a long list who have seemed to have more ability than you would expect from a hairless ape just down from the trees. There is Dickens, whos creation of characters came to him in a sort of waking dream. There is Churchill, who used to go into a kind of trance when composing his speeches. General Patton believed he was the reincarnation of a Roman solider.
From my point of view it is easily explained by the theory of reincarnation, in that we have lived many lives before. I heard a medium in a trance say that Mozart had been a musician in nine previous lives. Our soul retains the gifts and qualities we have acquired in these previous lives, and some of those lives may have been on other planets.
There is also the idea that we are directly influenced by the spirit world working to inspire us from behind the scenes.

Obviously nobody else on this forum is going to see it my way. But I think imagination is an attribute we use to reach beyond our conditioned mind and touch higher realms.

My, my, there's a surprise. Reincarnation is the answer to it all you think?

You're suggesting Mozart had been a musician in those previous lives, thus explaining the gift he had in the life we know of. Well what about the first of those nine lives then? Were did he get his gift from in that life? If he could get it from scratch then why not in his life we all know about?

 

[Paul2]

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.

There's really no need to go to near-miracles to explain those examples, and you've outlined a probably good enough explanation - outliers, etc. - without having to go to miracles. Sure, it seems miraculous, but seems doesn't really go anywhere in the face of other explanations.

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

That's pretty easy to hypothesize, too. Warmth and cooked food are advantages.

- and how a naked ape with no claws, teeth or fur innovated its way to dominating virtually every species on the planet.

I don't think we have dominated virtually every species on the planet. There are 400,000 species of just beetles, and we haven't dominated the vast majority of those, I suspect.

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.

Have you ever had really good lox on a really good bagel? 'Nuff said.

Where does imagination come from?

Lemme think creatively and intuitively about that.

 

[turingtest]

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?

My (un-educated) guess would be something like "emergent and additive property." If you are a sentient creature with sufficient brain capacity, you are able to set goals; and, no matter how short-term, setting goals is an act of casting thought into a future that doesn't exist yet, an act of imagination with the potential to shape that future. The first example of cooking was probably an accident- somebody's meat fell into a fire; the "cook" decided it tasted better that way, and set a goal of replicating the effect. (Of course, this is oversimplified, the accident most likely happened many times in many places before it clicked as an idea) Once that goal was set, the art of controlling fire was necessary- the effects were additive, in that one desire led to a necessity that then was applied to other situations, such as heating a cave; and every further refinement led to a next. And the refinements, to be passed on, required a means of communication complex enough to handle abstractions- language. The smarter we got, the smarter we had to get.

I would suggest that all your examples, music, sculpture, math, science, games, started the same way, simply, and evolved to complexity sort of naturally, a kind of snowball effect. Imagination is a natural outgrowth of sentient necessity; thought isn't an emergent property of the universe, I don't think, in the sense of an inevitability (other than as being something that probably would occur in a vast enough time), or something like gravity, that is necessary to the fabric ; maybe it's just a nice bonus.


Or, I dunno, "the spirits."

 

[Minoosh]

That's pretty easy to hypothesize, too. Warmth and cooked food are advantages.

The weird part to me about that is, cooking provided an advantage, but at the cost of other potential advantages. On the way to becoming modern anatomical humans we lost a lot of other adaptations. Given the length of a human generation, natural selection must have happened pretty damn fast. How much have other mammals evolved in 100,000 years? Ones with much shorter generations.

I don't think we have dominated virtually every species on the planet. There are 400,000 species of just beetles, and we haven't dominated the vast majority of those, I suspect.

I overstated the case, but our environmental manipulations drastically speed up the cycle of extinction events. Humans could still be standing while the biodiversity reservoir is rapidly depleted. We can make a lot of other species go extinct while preserving our own through technology. Dominating in that sense.

I don't really understand why we haven't dominated the hell out of flu, but we haven't. We're trying to dominate Covid. Meanwhile we actually did eradicate smallpox in the wild, though TONS of the stuff were manufactured in Soviet bioweapons facilities.

Have you ever had really good lox on a really good bagel? 'Nuff said.

And that's another mystery to me. Why does food taste so good? If you're hungry enough everything tastes wonderful anyway.

Lemme think creatively and intuitively about that.

Let me know what you come up with. You could always point to natural selection favoring creativity and intuition but it seems to me things exploded quickly in a time frame that can't be explained that way. We came up with a way to transmit knowledge that did not depend on memory - is that what happened? So knowledge could accumulate? We've learned how to exploit the environment to an extent that boggles my mind. No other animal has managed that.

 

[Paul2]

The weird part to me about that is, cooking provided an advantage, but at the cost of other potential advantages.

Apparently, the advantages were sufficient to drive the increased survival of those who had the abilities to cook food, and that's all that matters in evolutionary terms.

On the way to becoming modern anatomical humans we lost a lot of other adaptations.

Sure, the only thing that matters is which combination of adaptations will help survival better than other sets.

Given the length of a human generation, natural selection must have happened pretty damn fast. How much have other mammals evolved in 100,000 years? Ones with much shorter generations.

I don't think humans have evolved much over 100,000 years at all. The big thing is that we always had the capacity, and we had to wait for culture and civilization to really take off.

I overstated the case, but our environmental manipulations drastically speed up the cycle of extinction events. Humans could still be standing while the biodiversity reservoir is rapidly depleted. We can make a lot of other species go extinct while preserving our own through technology. Dominating in that sense.

Yeah, I getcha, but there's no guarantee we sustain that dominance for anything close to and evolutionary time scale, whereas there are plenty of species that have been around much, much longer than we have. The length of time is another way to measure the success of a species, as opposed to whether one species causes or helps another to go extinct.

I don't really understand why we haven't dominated the hell out of flu, but we haven't. We're trying to dominate Covid. Meanwhile we actually did eradicate smallpox in the wild, though TONS of the stuff were manufactured in Soviet bioweapons facilities.

There's SO many factors that come into play with that. That's a hard question to answer, at least for me.

And that's another mystery to me. Why does food taste so good? If you're hungry enough everything tastes wonderful anyway.

Evolution played it safe by making damn sure that food tasted good so people would always want as much of it around as possible. Similar consideration for sex.

Let me know what you come up with. You could always point to natural selection favoring creativity and intuition but it seems to me things exploded quickly in a time frame that can't be explained that way. We came up with a way to transmit knowledge that did not depend on memory - is that what happened? So knowledge could accumulate? We've learned how to exploit the environment to an extent that boggles my mind. No other animal has managed that.

Sorry, I was being a bit humorous. My response was talking about using my imagination to figure out where imagination came from.

 

[Elaedith]

Imagination and forecasting do depend on memory. The same brain regions are involved in remembering past events and imagining future ones.

Brain damage that causes episodic memory impairment also causes deficits in imagining the future.

 

[Minoosh]

My (un-educated) guess would be something like "emergent and additive property." If you are a sentient creature with sufficient brain capacity, you are able to set goals; and, no matter how short-term, setting goals is an act of casting thought into a future that doesn't exist yet, an act of imagination with the potential to shape that future.

I wonder then what "sentience" is and why/how it developed. We generally assume other animals don't have it. Beavers build damns, bees put up reserves of honey but I don't generally see that as conscious behavior. Bears get fat before winter. For a lot of creatures body mass is the only "wealth" they can accumulate.

The first example of cooking was probably an accident- somebody's meat fell into a fire; the "cook" decided it tasted better that way, and set a goal of replicating the effect. (Of course, this is oversimplified, the accident most likely happened many times in many places before it clicked as an idea) Once that goal was set, the art of controlling fire was necessary- the effects were additive, in that one desire led to a necessity that then was applied to other situations, such as heating a cave; and every further refinement led to a next. And the refinements, to be passed on, required a means of communication complex enough to handle abstractions- language. The smarter we got, the smarter we had to get.

If it were up to me we'd still be hitting dinner over the head with rocks.

I would suggest that all your examples, music, sculpture, math, science, games, started the same way, simply, and evolved to complexity sort of naturally, a kind of snowball effect.

I don't dispute that it's natural but it still seems strange.

Imagination is a natural outgrowth of sentient necessity; thought isn't an emergent property of the universe, I don't think, in the sense of an inevitability (other than as being something that probably would occur in a vast enough time), or something like gravity, that is necessary to the fabric ; maybe it's just a nice bonus.

It's not necessary to the fabric - I don't think - but it might be inevitable, statistically, because it's a big universe. I imagine imagination popping into being repeatedly; but I wonder if it might be self-limiting. I find it hard to imagine humanity not destroying itself in the relatively near future, but maybe it won't.

When people post "History will not treat Trump kindly" I always think it sounds wildly optimistic to assume there will be "historians" and "history" in 100 years.

Or, I dunno, "the spirits."

I really don't want to be accused of saying that "the spirits" are the only explanation, but in the sense of "the human spirit" it seems we're positing something different about humans compared to other animals. That's dualism, I guess.

 

[Minoosh]

I don't think humans have evolved much over 100,000 years at all. The big thing is that we always had the capacity, and we had to wait for culture and civilization to really take off.

But why did we have the capacity to begin with?

Yeah, I getcha, but there's no guarantee we sustain that dominance for anything close to and evolutionary time scale, whereas there are plenty of species that have been around much, much longer than we have. The length of time is another way to measure the success of a species, as opposed to whether one species causes or helps another to go extinct.

Maybe I have a too-apocalyptic mindset, but I'm used to thinking humans could wipe out those resilient species in a virtual heartbeat, whereas they couldn't do the same thing to us. THAT kind of dominance. Things like nuclear holocaust and global meltdown are the downside of imagination and innovation. It's the acceleration of extinction events that haunts me.

Sorry, I was being a bit humorous. My response was talking about using my imagination to figure out where imagination came from.

I know you were. But my question was serious. Imagination seems like a damn strange phenomenon to me.

 

[Athyrio]

My, my, there's a surprise. Reincarnation is the answer to it all you think?

You're suggesting Mozart had been a musician in those previous lives, thus explaining the gift he had in the life we know of. Well what about the first of those nine lives then? Were did he get his gift from in that life? If he could get it from scratch then why not in his life we all know about?

Yes, that would really suck. Considering I’m a dumbass now it would make me a dumbass in all my previous incarnations.

Unless I’m on my first time around.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

I heard a medium in a trance say that Mozart had been a musician in nine previous lives.

Did the same medium mention that Mozart had access to the new technology of the pianoforte, which allowed a current environment for his genius?

 

[Hlafordlaes]

There is a significantly "smarter" learning engine in your brain that took care of learning your native tongue when a child. Though that particular "engine" loses potency at puberty, making learning languages harder, the brain is most certainly comprised of a host of heuristics, learned and innate, that operate largely outside conscious thought, but thoughts they are. On occasion, the unconscious brain will drop something in your lap.

In terms of personal experiences anyone might share, we have the well-known phenomenon of attempting, say, to remember someone's name, a place name, or a word. While the answer may come to us fairly quickly, it may pop out in the shower or while driving and engaged in entirely unrelated thoughts days or even months later. This is your friendly big brain dropping a delivery in your inbox.

Creativity seems mysterious because it often relies on non-conscious processing. This is exploited in corporate training programs that do not focus only on the problem at hand, but jolt and stimulate the mind through exercise (the brain is an organ, after all), employ exposure to radically different mental stimuli (get that engine primed and humming!), and finally return to the formal matter at hand, often now with fresh perspectives and insights, all while never having formally brought it up nor spent major time on it since a brief intro to the weekend course.

 

[angrysoba]

Well, from what I understand, the work by people such as Ericsson who co-wrote a book called Peak, suggest that all the people we regard as geniuses who "effortlessly" created masterpieces (such as Mozart) actually worked really hard and were able to construct mental images of how to do things, and to refine those mental images all the time in a process called deliberate practice.

Essentially, through focus rather than just going through the motions.

 

[Scorpion]

Well, from what I understand, the work by people such as Ericsson who co-wrote a book called Peak, suggest that all the people we regard as geniuses who "effortlessly" created masterpieces (such as Mozart) actually worked really hard and were able to construct mental images of how to do things, and to refine those mental images all the time in a process called deliberate practice.

Essentially, through focus rather than just going through the motions.

Mozart started composing significant music at the age of five. How much hard work could he have done at that age?

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Wait, am I the only one using a Nuermberg Funnel?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Mozart started composing significant music at the age of five. How much hard work could he have done at that age?

The answer to your question is in the previous sentence. Most 5-year-olds don't sit down to compose music. That's the hard work, right there.
As for reincarnation, apart from your reliance on an entirely unproven phenomenon to support your claim, I'm wondering if this medium named the nine previous musicians it is claimed Mozart is the reincarnation of? Presumably, there will be clear similarities between the compositions of Mozart 1.0, 2.0 etc., so we can see the evolution of this ability. Who were they?
The 'trance state' you mentioned before allows the subconscious to work, and then for the results to reach the conscious mind. The 'trance state' of mediums, on the other hand, is just theatrical trimmings on an obvious fraud.

 

[Paul2]

But why did we have the capacity to begin with?

I think we're talking about brain capacity, by the way. I'm guessing, but it appears to be a mere side-effect of having the brain power. The brain power used to talk and cooperate to do the tasks of living gets used for a completely different purpose. This happens in evolution in other ways, too.

Maybe I have a too-apocalyptic mindset, but I'm used to thinking humans could wipe out those resilient species in a virtual heartbeat, whereas they couldn't do the same thing to us. THAT kind of dominance. Things like nuclear holocaust and global meltdown are the downside of imagination and innovation. It's the acceleration of extinction events that haunts me.

Sure, we have more raw power than other species. Although it's entirely possible that a virus or bacteria could wipe out the human species. I guess that hits a little too close to home nowadays.

I know you were. But my question was serious. Imagination seems like a damn strange phenomenon to me.

Ah, good, I didn't want to have a joke at your expense, but with you. The key to imagination, obviously is in the brain, and we're only just starting to understand it.

 

[Bikewer]

I’ve mentioned that I’m currently reading “The Neuroscience Of Intelligence” by Haier. Indications are that intelligence is primarily heritable (about 70%) and the other 30% influenced by environmental and epigenetic factors.
Intelligence would include creativity...

The important factors appear to be the formation of neural networks in various disparate parts of the brain, and the ability of these networks to efficiently connect with each other through the “white matter” networks. These things are strongly influenced by heredity.

It’s known that creative people (and fluent liars!) have brains that very fluidly and efficiently communicate within their own structures. So a good storyteller can access information from a variety of sources very efficiently, and spin out yarns quickly and extemporaneously.
The same would be true, I imagine, with good stand-up comics and folks who can improvise music easily.
I don’t think we need to look for supernatural causes for “creativity”, it appears to be part and parcel of the human experience.
I wonder how many “reincarnations” were necessary for the artists at Chauvet and Lascaux to put those lovely paintings on the cave walls? Seems to me that if there were anything to reincarnation, these folk’s previous lives would not even have been human.....

 

[Minoosh]

So a good storyteller can access information from a variety of sources very efficiently, and spin out yarns quickly and extemporaneously.

This was one of those feats of imagination I was talking about. I can construct a plot, but someone like Rudyard Kipling could engage a 3-year-old with his "Just So" stories. A very critical audience, it turns out.

ETA: And an audience of one who died tragically young - but her dad kept spinning yarns.

I wonder how many “reincarnations” were necessary for the artists at Chauvet and Lascaux to put those lovely paintings on the cave walls?

There would have been time for a few, but those earlier incarnations wouldn't have much experience with cave painting. Which is quite a good example of what I was originally talking about. A pre-writing, even pre-verbal way of communicating meaning that does not depend on either one generation transmitting learning to their immediate successors, or DNA coding that takes many generations to prevail. Or reincarnation.