Imagination: Key to Learning

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Imagination: Key to Learning

Empathy—the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this.

If I wish to comprehend what frontier life in the early history of the United States might be I could empathize with the family moving West in a covered wagon, picking a piece of land, and making that their home.

If I did imagine the efforts of such a family what would I discover about the concept ‘creativity’?

I have come down this path because I am trying to understand the concept ‘creativity’.

Can there be an experience more creative than that which such a family might enjoy?
The survival of the family depends upon the creativity they manage.

This reminds me of the movie “Patton” when General Patton says something to the effect that “War is man’s deepest expression of total commitment—God how I love it”.

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we can learn (what did future man say in that old thread again? i’ll go dig it up…)“pointless esoteric knowledge test” hmmm,looking up meaning of ‘esoteric’…
es·o·ter·ic Audio pronunciation of “esoteric” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (s-trk)
adj.

    1. Intended for or understood by only a particular group: an esoteric cult. See Synonyms at mysterious.
    2. Of or relating to that which is known by a restricted number of people.
    1. Confined to a small group: esoteric interests.
    2. Not publicly disclosed; confidential.

OK so that has nothing to do with my post! ANYWAY:

we can learn stated facts that do not catch our interest,but ones that DO catch our attention often get imagined upon,which are significantly expanded upon in our minds. some of this imagined stuff may not have happend however some of it may have,which is not even written in the text book! hence imagination is key to extrapolation.

(and escapism,but that is not related to my post)

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Mmm, yes and no. Imagination is somewhat a blind function of the mind, although it is strictly necessary in the process of building knowledge. Basically, imagination synthesises different representations in the quest to blend their diversity into a knowledgeble fact. Imagination represents the spontaneity of our thought and usually goes undetected, that is until people with time on their hands start thinking about thinking.

Coining imagination as the unlocker to the assimilation vehicle (key to learning) is, although not far off, a bit cumbersome in relation to other faculties. Descartes included imagination among the four sources of theoretical knowledge, alongside the intellect, memory and tradition, but offered it no special status in reference to the others, as you can plainly see that, in Descartes’ acception, none of them decisively has the upper hand.

You probably associate imagination with artistic creativity (as I reckon, given your example of empathy), whereas I find it necessary and present (in a most fascinating way, I might add) in mathematics and in the ability to operate with abstract thoughts in general. Being the spontaneous function that it is, regulative and not constitutive, it works only with representations acquired beforehand empirically or, in the case of pure sciences, independent of sensorial processes. This appears clear when solving math problems, especially the more difficult ones, that invite the subject to use his capacities at their fullest. Different synthetical associations breed different results, which in turn broaden the spectrum of knowledge. Imagination, not key to learning, but more to finding out.

And so on, and so on.

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imagination needs a context to have meaning.

so, i say abstraction is the key to learning.

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Mucius

I have been studying “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson. This contains a theory that is grounded in what is called conceptual metaphors.

What the author is saying is that the experience of perceiving consists of the actions of categorizing, inferring, and conceptualizing. When a woman sees a tree these processes make up the experience of perceiving. Perceiving and/or moving through space are actions that require categorizing, conceptualizing, and inferring.

Likewise when a tadpole sees something swimming by the tadpole has a similar type action within its neural network. I say this to accent the theory that these actions, generally considered to be mental functions disconnected from bodily functions, are not disconnected plus the fact that the reason we humans have this capacity is because our non human ancestors also have this capacity.

In a nutshell this theory that I call metaphor theory states that the motor and sensory neural system does reasoning type functions. This metaphor theory also says that we have experiences that are called primary metaphors wherein the neural network contained in the mental space for this primary experience can and is mapped into another mental space and there it becomes part of another concrete or abstract concept.

A metaphor is not just a manner of speaking but this book builds a complete new and revolutionary idea that says that metaphors are the contents of mental spaces and these contents can and are mapped unconsciously to form the foundation of another experience that might be a concrete experience or an abstract experience.

Note regarding conceptualization and imagination.

The authors speak of the centrality to conceptualization and reason of imaginative process such as metaphor, imagery, metonymy prototypes, frames, mental spaces, and radial categories.

It appears to me that the authors are saying that imagination sets the stage for conceptualization by constructing several of necessary structures and that these structures become part of the concept.

“Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are mapped onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.” All of these bodily induced structures remain part of the “DNA” of all concepts both concrete and abstract. It is these constant structures that ground all of our concepts to our bodily modes of behaving.

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learning is the process of committing everything you see to memory and recalling bits at certain points in time.

However if you wish to think, ie arrange your knowledge in different ways, you require something that can make up new things, new contexts, eg the hypothetical. In order to be able to use hypothetical systems you need an imagination. So i don’t think imagination is the key to learning. rather that knowledge you posess can help your imagination.