Imagination
23 Jun 2024 13:56Varieties (James, following Galton, classified them by the sense simulated --- visual, verbal, kinetic, etc.) and their inheritance (if any). Evolution, neurology, cognitive mechanisms. Aids to the imagination --- mental techniques, chemicals, machines. (I don't know of any chemicals or machines which work, but would be happy to learn.)
Machines with imagination --- the first to claim that such were possible was, implicitly, La Mettrie, since he (1) claimed human beings are machines and (2) that all human mental faculties are forms of imagination (an idea not uncommon among the pre-romantics and Romanticists, but not what one expects of the hard-core Enlightenment). I think this idea then pretty much lay fallow for two centuries, until people started building computers, at which point questions of machine creativity came up very swiftly. Recently there've been a flurry of computer models of human imagination and creativity, and computer programs intended to create in their own right. Some of them aren't bad --- certainly Aaron draws and EMI composes better than I do.
- Recommended:
- Margaret Boden, Precis of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms
- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium [Some very beautiful passages, and some interesting reflections, but no theory, and hardly even conclusions]
- David Cope ["Computer Modeling of Musical Intelligence"]
- William James, Principles of Psychology, ch. 18
- John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
- Peter Medawar, "Two Conceptions of Science", "Science and Literature" and "Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought", all in Pluto's Republic
- There's a lot of interest on mental imagery in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, ch. "The Mind's Eye"; I don't think he touches on non-visual imagination.
- Yi-Fu Tuan
- Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress [Imagining things better than they are, and what it leads to]
- Escapism
- To read:
- Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms
- Ruth M. J. Burne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality [Blurb]
- Frank L. Cioffi, The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers [Blurb, first chapter]
- Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
- Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
- Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art
- Alice Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain [Review by Carolyn See]
- O. B. Hardison, Jr., Poetics and Praxis
- John Spencer Hill, Imagination in Coleridge
- Amy Kind, Imagination and Creative Thinking
- Erik Mueller, Daydreaming in Humans and Machines [Also a web-site]
- Nancy Nersessian, Creating Scientific Concepts
- D. N. Perkins, The Mind's Best Work
- Ilona Roth (ed.), Imaginative Minds
- Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book
- Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism
- David Shulman, More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India
- Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, The House of Make-Believe: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination
- Jerome Singer, Daydreaming: An Introduction to the Experimental Study of Inner Experience
