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9 - Capturing the Imagination

from Part I - Theoretical Perspectives on the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2020

By
Arne Dietrich  and
Sandra Zakka
Edited by
Anna Abraham
Anna Abraham
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Summary

To paraphrase the famous beginning of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Imagination is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.” And it must be important, if even neuroscientists have noticed it. With momentum gathering to get a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary grip on the human imagination, at a time when still no one has much of a clue about this hypercomplex realm of the mind, we can expect to be treated to an initial proliferation of ideas, views, frameworks, and theories on the matter. But that is a good thing. There must be variation before there can be selection. Taking advantage of this temporarily heightened tolerance for speculation, this chapter proposes that the process of navigating an imaginary space can be described by different evolutionary algorithms that vary according to the prior knowledge we have of the topography of the imagined landscape or, put another way, the degree of sightedness we have of the fitness function of the imagined domain. Seen from this perspective, the category “novel combinatorial” of Abraham’s (2016) framework is best dissolved, with creative thinking being distributed and embedded into all other forms of the imagination.

Keywords

CreativityDarwinismevolutionary algorithmspredictionsightedness
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination , pp. 132 - 142
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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