timelets | Entries tagged with imagination

“Fairy tales are one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse; their characteristic manner is matter-of-fact—describing a wolf devouring a young girl, ordering a palace chef to cook a young woman, or chopping up a child to make blood pudding arouses no cry of protest or horror from the teller. “This is as it is, as it happened; the tale is as it is, no more no less.”

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“The poet W. H. Auden, discussing these imaginary zones, adopted the term ‘Secondary World’, which had been used by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and declared, ‘Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating … Stories about the Primary world may be called Feigned Histories; stories about a Secondary world myths or fairy tales.’ ”
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“but whatever their atmosphere, they’re also laboratories for experiments with thought, allegories of alternatives to the world we know.”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

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Дакоты предполагают существование четырех душ. Есть душа тела, которая умирает вместе с ним. Далее есть дух, кото- рый всегда остается при теле или пребывает в его близости. Далее есть душа, ответственная за поступки тела и отправляющаяся по одним, — на юг, по другим — на запад. И, наконец, четвертая всегда остается в пучке волос мертвеца, который родственники сохраняют, пока не представится случай бросить его в страну врага, где эта душа начинает бродить в качестве привидения, насылающего смерть и болезнь (Levy-Bruhl 65).

...душа или одна из душ, вышедшая из мертвеца, сама становится причиной смерти других. Другими словами, одна из душ объективируется, становится самостоятельным страшным существом, теряет связь со своим хозяином, и она-то и вызывает смерть.
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...душа мыслится как самостоятельное существо, могущее жить вне человека. Для этого даже не всегда нужно умереть. И живой человек может иметь душу или одну из душ вне себя. Это так называемая внешняя душа, bush soul. Обладателем такой души является Кощей.

Умершим, существовавшим в силу объективистического момента. визации души как самостоятельные существа, приписывались два сильнейших инстинкта: голод и половой голод. На первых порах на первом месте стоит голод. Смерть-пожирательница древнее других видов смерти.

В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.

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They put their hopes in time especially, and in the vicissitudes of fortune, since they knew not how to save themselves by their own efforts, but turmoil, terror, and rumours of evil possessed the city [of Rome]. At last something happened that was like what Homer often mentions, although people generally do not wholly believe it...

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people despise Homer and say that with his impossible exploits and incredible tales he makes it impossible to believe in every man's power to determine his own choice of action. 5 This, however, is not what Homer does, but those acts which are natural, customary, and the result of reasoning, he attributes to our own volition ...

...while in exploits of a strange and extraordinary nature, requiring some rush of inspiration, and desperate courage, he does not represent the god as taking away, but as prompting, a man's choice of action; nor yet as creating impulses in a man, but rather conceptions which lead to impulses, and by these his action is not made involuntary, but his will is set in motion, while courage and hope are added to sustain him. 7 For either the influence of the gods must be wholly excluded from all initiating power over our actions, or in what other way can they assist and co-operate with men? They certainly do not mould our bodies by their direct agency, nor give the requisite change to the action of our hands and feet, but rather, by certain motives, conceptions, and purposes, they rouse the active and elective powers of our spirits, or, on the other hand, divert and check them.

--- Plutarch, Lives (Coriolanus 32).
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Coriolanus*.html

"I wish, with all my heart, that you may be the most lovable Prince in the world, and I bestow it on you, as much as I am able."

The Princess had no sooner pronounced these words, but Riquet with the Tuft appeared to her the finest Prince upon earth; the handsomest and most amiable man she ever saw. Some affirm that it was not the enchantments of the Fairy which worked this change, but that love alone caused the metamorphosis. They say, that the Princess, having made due reflection on the perseverance of her lover, his discretion, and all the good qualities of his mind, his wit and judgment, saw no longer the deformity of his body, nor the ugliness of his face; that his hump seemed to her no more than the homely air of one who has a broad back; and that whereas till then she saw him limp horribly, she found it nothing more than a certain sidling air, which charmed her.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_fairy_tales_of_Charles_Perrault_(Clarke,_1922)/Riquet_with_the_Tuft

Tyrion Lannister seems to be a version of Riquet, although the former didn't manage to bestow his wit on Daenerys.

Я бы предположил, что подполковник Карбышев был в конце 1917 убит, а его документами завладел некий большевик, который и изображал до 1945 года Карбышева.
На первый взгляд нелепо, но это прекрасно все объясняет.

https://alex-vergin.livejournal.com/351192.html#comments

Proof is a constraint on thought invented by Greek philosophers. By dropping the requirement for proof, we can suspend disbelief and explain the unexplainable,

Another good graphic from "A history of commerce, 1907" - before and after the age of explorers (mid-15th century).

Geographic discoveries of the 15th century provided another incentive for the Northern Europeans to break away from Catholicism:

The non-Christian world was divided between these two powers by a papal decree which gave to Portugal Africa and Asia except the Philippines and to Spain the Americas except Brazil. So long as other European states obeyed papal authority and feared the might of Spain and Portugal, they were bound to respect this division and the first period of discoveries was followed by a series of voyages carried on especially by English and Dutch seeking a passage northeast or northwest through Arctic seas that would enable them to evade the monopoly granted by the Pope.

Major inventions of the 17th and 18th centuries: log and chronometer:

The simple means of the later Middle Ages could give some idea of a vessel's latitude but very little of its longitude. The introduction of the log in the seventeenth century enabled a sailor to measure distance traversed more accurately and the invention of the chronometer in the eighteenth century gave at last a reliable and practical means of determining longitude at sea.

Crossposts: http://timelets.livejournal.com/624206.html

David Gelernter on a connection between creativity and emotion:

it's a general observation--that creativity often hinges on inventing new analogies. ... Now, what makes me come up with a new analogy? What allows me to do that? Generally, it's a lower-spectrum kind of thinking, a down-spectrum kind of thinking, in which I'm allowing my emotions to emerge. And, I'm allowing emotional similarity between two memories that are in other respects completely different.
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Emotion is a tremendously powerful summarizer, abstractor. We can look at a complex scene involving loads of people rushing back and forth because it's Grand Central Station, and noisy announcements on [?] to understand, loudspeakers, and you're being hot and tired, and lots of advertisements, and colorful clothing, and a million other things; and smells, and sounds, and--we can take all that or any kind of complex scene or situation, the scene out your window, the scene on the TV (television) when you turn on the news, or a million other things. And take all those complexities and boil them down to a single emotion: it makes me feel some way.

To me, coproducts feel like the Grand Central Station in Gelernter's description - a mess, with some unknown undercurrents that I may be able to figure out. Continuing with this analogy, products feel like night. That is, a moment in time when (most) everybody and everything find their places: people in their houses, animals in their holes, trains in their depots, etc. The mess turns into a world of neat pairs and triplets. It would be cool to eavesdrop on their dreams and see where they actually want to be. That would show us a potential innovation path.

Another interesting way to use his thought would be to apply the emotional approach in workshops proactively and think about various topics with different emotions.

"TRUMP TARIFFS: President Signs Tariffs On Steel and Aluminium Imports (FNN)" (Watch on YouTube)

"On Getting Creative Ideas" (Watch on YouTube)

Going over Treatise of Intuitionist Logic, by JG Granstorm for the second time (see fig and text below):
Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 11.00.37 AM

This points to an possible interesting connection between imagination that creates concepts and the process of "learning by doing" that converts the concepts into things. The more complex the thing that embodies the concept, the more communications we need to have with other people who participate in doing the thing. As a result, the expression side of the triangle begins to grow. (upd. In a dynamic model we need expressions to communicate between the same person at diffent time periods.)

Based on this model, to represent a system in terms of the Category Theory, we would have to have at least three types of Objects that play Sources and Targets, and at least three (or likely six?) types of Arrows that go between them. For example, an individual's artistic sci-fi imagination can be formalized as: ImaginationA: Concept -> Expression,
while Edison-style craftsman imagination as: ImaginationE: Concept -> Thing

Furthermore, if we want to model an evolution of the system, we would have to introduce all these objects at at least two times periods, e.g. today and tomorrow. This will cause us add three more arrows, e.g.
EvolveConcept: ConceptAtTime1 -> ConcepAtTime2

* I'm using "thing" instead of "object" to avoid confusion with objects in the Category Theory.