by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: February 19, 2009

I will try an unconventional approach to synthesizing together the topics of imagination and knowledge. It is too easy to yield to the politically correct version of philosophical writing that tends to exclude philosophical activity from philosophical writing forums. One might like to offer a sanitized version of scientism's literature such that knowledge is already known and it exists before us out there knowable to scientific investigation.

I think a reductio ad absurdam of a paradigm might help to explain the circumstance of how knowledge is processed to become knowledge in the mind rather that arriving as complete theories...One just needs to leave philosophical ideas out of such an opinion and get right on and concede that knowledge pre-forms in the mind directly from sense data. Awaiting in the empirical world are Newton's theory, Copernican Theory, Ptolemaic Theory, and all other contingently valid theories as real things themselves that are perceived and strike the eye and nose, ears and skin and form impressions in the mind. More complex ideas also form in the empirical world when the time is ripe for a change of theories to be input by the senses-these ideas ripen in Aristotelian fashion like grapes in season empirically hanging like clusters heavily from natural lattices to let humanity know when its the right moment to input Einsteinian relativity to replace Newton's theory and when evolution theory needs to be advanced from a Hegelian to a Darwinian approach.

The location of the knowledge bits that grow in the empirical world perhaps from super-string loops cannot be certain, yet they probably exist something like Google knols as facts 'out there' that pop up on the computer screens of one's eyes to become new and appropriate programming for the senseless humans relying upon true knowledge originating in the 'really smart' empirical realm.

Imagination is another topic. Images arise in the mind. Martin Buber the philosopher and theologian developed a very interesting theory of human imagination in the role of sin and of evil. Imagination is what allowed Eve to be tempted by the Devil into 'tasting' the flavor of the apple sufficiently that she was willing to pick it. Imagination is a natural human force of creativity that is a sort of self-tempting. In the human will the making of an image of how things will be, or how things can be-a sort of abstract designing for one's self interest is the basic cause of violence, of discontent, yet of change. Buber

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