Discussion

This is an edited version of the Ways of Knowing discussion from 2010.09.30 at
http://ways-of-knowing.wik.is/Discussions/2010.09.30_-_Imagination

I was reading the homework reports on imagination.. always some surprises there, and some more expected things .. That's imagination at work.  On the one hand is the perspective "hey I don't have imagination" ... on the other - that imagination is a property of awareness in general 
An important issue there is ... does it get in the way, or does it serve as a gateway, or maybe when and how

Q: Are there other perspectives you were considering?
There are so many perspectives
One homework for instance takes two complimentary sides - that (1) imagination is part of all mental perception, and (2) it keeps us from what is "actually going on" by being too powerful
We can segregate these different ways of knowing by how we define them ... or perhaps they are part of the "machine" of how the organism works .. it is hard to discriminate these two reasons for categorizing our capacities.
Each definition of imagination of course is the perspective of the way particular people think about it and use it.  Like evolutionary biologists explain it in terms of a survival function

Q: I am curious, Calvino, first of all, what motivated you to choose this topic
I chose it because it seems like the fertile ground where awareness encounters reality - where the rubber meets the road.  And it may be a global integrative process for all more specialized ways of knowing, and given that this group is Ways of Knowing, it seemed interesting to take that approach

Eliza Madrigal: that would need a little more unpacking... re all specialized ways of knowing... it does seem a kind of base

Q: do we mean visualization or fantasy?

Q: I'm still unsure imagination being a way of knowing here. For me imagination is a creative way of sythesising memories etc.
Artists and poets experience a creative side of imagination that seems more than just rearranging the data of memory

Q: sound like you are also using imagination as a way of getting at the constructed nature of things?
Yes.  I think that's a useful perspective too

I was also interested in how it relates to our feeling of having intentions
Q: intentions?
Q: i Think there cant be an unintentional experience
Q: I suppose that imagination does factor into decisions, even if unbeknownst to ourselves...
Yes, like the idea of the "self" using "imagination" for some purpose ....and then it gets kind of dried out, but when it's experienced as unintentional, then it seems more juicy or something. That dryness might be because only a very small part of cognitive and other activity is conscious.  so to control it with that conscious process, diminishes its potential. If we don't know where our thoughts come from, then it's called intuition
By intention, sometimes people mean a sense of agency and of being at choice... in philosophy it could refer to the "me-ness" of experienced world, even if there seems no choice

Q: I think imagination in the context of meditation is interesting...for some a tool for others a distraction

Q: I was thinking, vis a vis imagination, that if you think abouit memory we don't seem to store full "copies" of what happens, like a videotape. it's much more likely that we store hints, and then more or less use those hints to create imagined memories -- which is perhaps why false memories are so compelling

It seems we're not recorders - more like we "reimagine" the world in a way that basically tries to match what's happening
Q: nods.  yes I was somehow picturing imagination as a substance that kind of wires things together, the more flexibly the more options are sees as available

Q: we recreate memories -- imagination concrns the future mainly though?

Memories supposedly of the past .. imagined also

Q: I think imagination is the past and the future, really
Q: ah, imagination is present... using all material, past future...
Q: ah but that is 'imagination' as a false recreation surely
Q: You can imagine a past situation, and reimagine it in a different way surely?
Q: real imagination [imaging] in the moment
Q: or that is, imagination is present, projections of the past and future

and then get stuck with their identifications -- Which is interesting - people may "give up" on re-imagining the past, but not the future.  Like the feeling - it already happened ... I can't change it :)

Q: but the imagination only draws on the past
Q: Only what you've experienced so far I guess
Calvino Rabeni: but the meaning can change radically of the past

Q: yes, even things we think are "known" about the past are mostly fictions
Q: shaped by what?
A: imagination
Q: an imaginary past is a false past then?
Aphrodite Macbain: and our own desires?
Eliza Madrigal: well all past is false?
Zen Arado: just a mistake
Shaped by desires,wishes, and "reality check" things I suppose

Q: if past like future multiple of possibilities past may be modified
Q: I'm sure we reimagine the past every time we think of it
Q: highlight some things - suppress others

Q: "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we ...have forgotten are illusions- Friedrich Nietzsche - "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Q: If this is true, if the past is just a story we tell ourselves, what can we learn from the past?

I feel there's no valid way to define a "mistake" in any airtight
Q: Isnt truth the dropping of intellectualisms
 I don't think so --  Why would we expect our non-intellectual faculties to be any truer?
Nietzche was digging in fertile ground

Zen Arado: illusions is better than 'mistakes'
Dianket Wobbit: but also what is done ,is done not even god can chage it
Calvino Rabeni: I think that's the same idea, Zen
Zen Arado: is ther any 'true' view of ourselves?
Xeno Octavia: yes drop emotuional and physical too
Zen Arado: we and everything else are always changing
Calvino Rabeni: illusions and mistakes are both derogatory judgments of experienced realoty
Aphrodite Macbain: derogatory?
Calvino Rabeni: Derogatory - means it has a negative connotation that may not be the whole story
Zen Arado: but the 'illusion' judgement might be true
Calvino Rabeni: And it is a metaphysical question, is there anything left after all the supposed inaccurate knowing is dropped
Xeno Octavia: do we distinguish relative from absolute truth
Zen Arado: agree - we are working with an assumption of a 'true reality' somewhere
Mitsu Ishii: I think truth is not about propositions
Xeno Octavia: true reality doesnt exist - is non-existential
Calvino Rabeni: We imagine ... that there is a true reality
Aphrodite Macbain: propositions are a form of question
Zen Arado: like PLato
Eliza Madrigal: well, more 'beliefs' ?
Aphrodite Macbain: another truer world beyond our experience
Zen Arado: 'propositional attitudes'
Eliza Madrigal: hidden beliefs, I would 'imagine'...
Calvino Rabeni: Propositions are a tacit way to ignore most things about reality and imagine that some of them deserve more importance in a particular moment and context
Calvino Rabeni: Interesting, Zen
Calvino Rabeni: another story?
Zen Arado: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_attitude
Calvino Rabeni: Unconscious propositional attitudes
Calvino Rabeni: a term for "myths"
Zen Arado: it's a stance in philos of mind
Zen Arado: just observing change it
Heloise Toussaint: Sorry, I was mid sentence then wandered off to find that link
Aphrodite Macbain: changed by our memoery of it?
Calvino Rabeni: I was wondering whether the group title - Ways of Knowing - indicated a preference for an experiential approach - instead of Types of Knowledge for instance
Zen Arado: it sounds open to me
Zen Arado: but I am less and less impressed by conceptual knowledge
Aphrodite Macbain: but we would have to remember it to observe it
Xeno Octavia: yes Zen --what i meant by intellectual
Aphrodite Macbain: so the only way to change the past is to remember it differently?
Calvino Rabeni: Re-imagining the past ... remembering differently
Calvino Rabeni: given the influence it has on us - it could change the quality of the present
Aphrodite Macbain: Isn't that called revisionism?
Calvino Rabeni: That woudl be a derogatory term Aphro
Xeno Octavia: actually i'd say to foeget attachment to Aphro
Agatha Macbeth: The Ministry of truth
Aphrodite Macbain: absolutely
Zen Arado: suddenly realizing my clinging to a 'true' version of the past
Calvino Rabeni: Imagination might reveal - revelation as Eliza put it in her report
Calvino Rabeni: might reveal new, latent, but also true possibilities not seen before about the past
Xeno Octavia: why stay in past
Calvino Rabeni: not so fixed, then ...
Eliza Madrigal:  I consider imagination to be very present friend to awareness
Calvino Rabeni: By "past" you mean the fixed story I think Xeno
Xeno Octavia: yes Cal
Eliza Madrigal: I imagine that when we embody here in SL right >here< >now> it takes a bit of imagination
Calvino Rabeni: oh yes
Dianket Wobbit: think again the past, do a new healthy construction, and the present will change
Calvino Rabeni: but if it'
Calvino Rabeni: yes
Zen Arado: live in the present moment and deal with whatever comes up from the past?
Zen Arado: past events are stored in our body too I thinnk
Calvino Rabeni: agree DIanket
Eliza Madrigal: empathy requires imagination as well
Heloise Toussaint: yes very much so, I agree
Calvino Rabeni: Yes zen, stored in our body
Calvino Rabeni: if that's true then what we do now with our body can affect the experienced past
Xeno Octavia: change what u store changes body!?
Zen Arado: what our mind does to our body
Calvino Rabeni: and vice versa, giveen that they are one
Calvino Rabeni: bodymind
Calvino Rabeni: or dreambody
Xeno Octavia: also is basis of Rolfing
Zen Arado: ah yes - another way of false thinking I cling to :)
Zen Arado: mind/body dualism
Calvino Rabeni: I've noticed often - my felt sense of the significance of the past is carred in the body of the present by it being held a certain way
Heloise Toussaint: I'm sure there are things you remember that make you maybe feel sad, and it affects your body and you slump etc
Xeno Octavia: what of those who use the future to go 'forward'
Calvino Rabeni: I'd guess yoga practitioners or martial artists too would experience the bodymind connection as it affects appraisal of the past
Zen Arado: you know about Tolle's 'pain body'?
Calvino Rabeni: yes
Aphrodite Macbain: It's called muscle memory
Agatha Macbeth: My muscles have amnesia
Xeno Octavia: ida Rolf has a body integrative priocess that rids one of past that are buried in body
Calvino Rabeni: theres the ideas of the "subtle bodies" in general
Aphrodite Macbain: /me sits forward to listen
Mitsu Ishii: recognizing the ways in which we imagine our past and even our present, gives us a way to find something prior to that
Eliza Madrigal: /me nods @ Mitsu... questioning the fixedness of things
Zen Arado: but should we 'dig up' the past
Zen Arado: ?
Agatha Macbeth: Archeologists would say yes
Aphrodite Macbain: why not?
Mitsu Ishii: it's not that we should dig up the past, it's that we should see the way we construct the past right now
Zen Arado: :) aga !
Eliza Madrigal: depends on what you're going to do with it ;-)
Aphrodite Macbain: If it's fertile soil
Calvino Rabeni: That is what happens after "dropping"
Calvino Rabeni: imagination can break up the fixedness and open the door to somethng more fluid, different, *maybe* more revealing of othe aspects of reality
Calvino Rabeni: plowing the field
Heloise Toussaint: in a way the past makes us who we are now, we are a sum of our past sort of?
Mitsu Ishii: actually I don't think we're the sum of our past, I think we're much freer than that
Agatha Macbeth: Would ddefinitely agree Hel
Xeno Octavia: our personal pasts are so little a part of our authentic reality
Heloise Toussaint: I'm not saying that it's fixed
Calvino Rabeni: Hopefully somewhat freer than a simple sum of some past "stuff"
Eliza Madrigal: seeing the construction allows us to work with it... question it....
Heloise Toussaint: I don't mean defining ourselves by our past
Susan Aloix: *digging up the past* or *re-reading the past*? the lived past is not found in archaeological digs
Eliza Madrigal: /me nods
Heloise Toussaint: just what we have experienced so far informs us
Eliza Madrigal: yes
Xeno Octavia: but is good time had
Calvino Rabeni: I think it's importanto to distinguish practically, between our experienced semi-bondage to past conditions, and the *ideal* that we might somehow be completely free
Calvino Rabeni: BUt tremendously influenced
Zen Arado: sometimes think it's better to just deal with what surfaces in the present than uncover things we are not ready to face from the past
Calvino Rabeni: Very true Zen
Aphrodite Macbain: The ting about digging - you never know what you migh find. A treasure or a bunch of worms
Xeno Octavia: we can sorta save this past : ))
Calvino Rabeni: We shouldn't invoke a demon, unless able to handle it
Dianket Wobbit: can be interesting to hear next time how this chat changed us
Eliza Madrigal: The reports are probably really important to the discussion also
Eliza Madrigal: interesting voices and imputs, just great