Philosophy Now Forum

Einstein once said imagination is more impt than knowledge because imagination encircles the world and encompasses all that we will ever know. Any counter claims people? I'm personally not very comfortable with this claim .

Imagination is the spice that makes the food taste and makes me say "yummi!". Without it, knowledge would be circular, immanent instead of transcendent. Mathematics is founded on imagination, even if it derives from the patterns of the world, it is the symbolizing of it which has made it formal and something we can use in-between ourselves. Mathematics is, rough and simplistic speaking: a whole bunch of imagination. Same with history as I told you, and same physics, Einstein's field, and especially psychology because psychology needs a lot of transcendence to be reasonable; that is, without imagination it would be dull statements of somebody's confessed inner life, but people can lie, secretly protect and defend, and they can see things which aren't there, etc, and you need the obedience of your own imagination to reason your way through such things, it doesn't help fully to "know" like a procedure, because people are different, you need to go beyond the simple and piece together a clear picture of how things really are.

If any field needed little imagination it would probably be Sociology, which is why it is to me the most boring of all fields. Though you need some for the theories, it generally holds to document and survey and run statistics and you think you can state facts.

does one imagine that one knows anything?

-Imp

Any interesting counter arguments that can be made? hmm... like imagination allows us to visualize what is not present to our senses like Einstein relativity.. yet since no one can see it, we cannot proof it... Any takers

Impenitent wrote:does one imagine that one knows anything?

-Imp

a double-edged sword that is.

First, while you might have imagination which you treat as knowledge, it wouldn't be imagination of knowing would it if you knew yourself that it was just a practical imaginary piece of knowledge.

On the other hand, you could of course think that you knew things but that your knowledge is not equal to any objective reality, or "deeper" reality. Problem with this one is the question: "What makes something more real than something else?". Personally I hold "lasting" as the deepest form of reality, like Descartes held his belief in "Cogito Ergo Sum"

sprintdominator wrote:Any interesting counter arguments that can be made? hmm... like imagination allows us to visualize what is not present to our senses like Einstein relativity.. yet since no one can see it, we cannot proof it... Any takers

We can prove things which aren't there by proving their usefulness to determine other forms of reality. Just like mathematics. There's nothing real to mathematics, or grammar and language in general, but it is useful to convey a deeper reality.

The Voice of Time wrote:

Impenitent wrote:does one imagine that one knows anything?

-Imp

a double-edged sword that is.

First, while you might have imagination which you treat as knowledge, it wouldn't be imagination of knowing would it if you knew yourself that it was just a practical imaginary piece of knowledge.

On the other hand, you could of course think that you knew things but that your knowledge is not equal to any objective reality, or "deeper" reality. Problem with this one is the question: "What makes something more real than something else?". Personally I hold "lasting" as the deepest form of reality, like Descartes held his belief in "Cogito Ergo Sum"

cogito ergo cogito

the cogito was a circular argument to appease the church (rene saw what the church did to galileo )

-Imp

Impenitent wrote:
cogito ergo cogito

the cogito was a circular argument to appease the church (rene saw what the church did to galileo )

-Imp

"I think therefore/hence/that means/that implies/etc. I'm conscious/there is consciousness/I perceive/I know/etc." isn't circular, it doesn't "repeat" itself. I just states that because there are things existing, so must there be something for which sees it. "I drink therefore I drink" is circular because it doesn't expand on any ground, it "circles" whereas "cogito ergo sum" more "spirals slightly up before going out of sight". The further result being that there is a transcendent direction, an expansion of knowledge, an "up" reaching somewhere unknown.

His god argument may not be much useful, since he just assigns god qualities which would be equally good on their own footing, but cogito ergo sum certainly deserves to be called transcendent as it opens up for question, whereas "i drink therefore I drink" only opens up for the question: "why do I drink?", cogito ergo sum opens up for binding elements together, from "i think therefore I am" he could ask questions like "a ball drops therefore, no, it doesn't just drop, there is something *else*, it falls, and because it falls, therefore it lands, and because it lands, therefore it suddenly deforms", and so on. He created a reasoning where the assignment done upon the first word always had to be different than the word itself. That's progressive logic, spiralling not circling.

Hey haha could you enlighten me about deeper and long lasting reality with respect to knowledge created by imagination?

sprintdominator wrote:Hey haha could you enlighten me about deeper and long lasting reality with respect to knowledge created by imagination?

Sure, anything that lasts has value, whether imagined or naught, because you can't know more than its lasting and so everything else becomes a guess.

hmm.. can i clarify something? Since imagination enable knower to conceptualize what is not present to the senses (Hume), how can one make sense of the value of the knowledge created?

The Voice of Time wrote:

Impenitent wrote:
cogito ergo cogito

the cogito was a circular argument to appease the church (rene saw what the church did to galileo )

-Imp

"I think therefore/hence/that means/that implies/etc. I'm conscious/there is consciousness/I perceive/I know/etc." isn't circular, it doesn't "repeat" itself. I just states that because there are things existing, so must there be something for which sees it. "I drink therefore I drink" is circular because it doesn't expand on any ground, it "circles" whereas "cogito ergo sum" more "spirals slightly up before going out of sight". The further result being that there is a transcendent direction, an expansion of knowledge, an "up" reaching somewhere unknown.

His god argument may not be much useful, since he just assigns god qualities which would be equally good on their own footing, but cogito ergo sum certainly deserves to be called transcendent as it opens up for question, whereas "i drink therefore I drink" only opens up for the question: "why do I drink?", cogito ergo sum opens up for binding elements together, from "i think therefore I am" he could ask questions like "a ball drops therefore, no, it doesn't just drop, there is something *else*, it falls, and because it falls, therefore it lands, and because it lands, therefore it suddenly deforms", and so on. He created a reasoning where the assignment done upon the first word always had to be different than the word itself. That's progressive logic, spiralling not circling.

no, it is circular

the first premise "I think" already asserts the conclusion "I am a being which thinks."

http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/klima/ ... ummary.htm

-Imp

Yeah yeah, but then let's rephrase it: "Think therefore am".

As the word "think" is just assigned as a name to the content of consciousness (you can argue historically but I couldn't give a less damn about historical correctness when it's the usefulness of the sentence which is interesting), "therefore" doesn't need explanation, and "am" could be "is" or "are" and therefore just asserts that "something" is conscious of the content of consciousness. I think the "I" may be a downer for Descartes but if we care to rephrase it we get a meaning for which serves us well. "Think" itself does not priorly assert that "somebody" thinks, as we can speak of "thinking" in the abstract and we can speak of "thinking" as a definition of a special pattern (whatever function of "thinking" you're aiming at it could be said to be a kind of processing of information), we are just used to it being in relation to "somebody", usually human. However, the sentence becomes true because we are used to abstract thoughts not making sense, that is; thoughts without relativity. So you make relative the "think" and get "x thinks".

The Voice of Time wrote:Yeah yeah, but then let's rephrase it: "Think therefore am".

As the word "think" is just assigned as a name to the content of consciousness (you can argue historically but I couldn't give a less damn about historical correctness when it's the usefulness of the sentence which is interesting), "therefore" doesn't need explanation, and "am" could be "is" or "are" and therefore just asserts that "something" is conscious of the content of consciousness. I think the "I" may be a downer for Descartes but if we care to rephrase it we get a meaning for which serves us well. "Think" itself does not priorly assert that "somebody" thinks, as we can speak of "thinking" in the abstract and we can speak of "thinking" as a definition of a special pattern (whatever function of "thinking" you're aiming at it could be said to be a kind of processing of information), we are just used to it being in relation to "somebody", usually human. However, the sentence becomes true because we are used to abstract thoughts not making sense, that is; thoughts without relativity. So you make relative the "think" and get "x thinks".

existence as a result of the rules of language is not proof

verb therefore subject doing verb?

oh, special verb therefore existence of subject doing verb...

language is fun

-Imp

sprintdominator wrote:Einstein once said imagination is more impt than knowledge because imagination encircles the world and encompasses all that we will ever know. Any counter claims people? I'm personally not very comfortable with this claim .

I think his intention was to invite us to consider what the world would be like without it.
If you cannot imagine the case, then there can be no new knowledge. All knowledge in this sense is derived from formulating hypotheses from ideas generated from the imagination.
Einstein was famous for declaring that the first time he conceived the theory of relativity was one sunny day when he imagined what it would be like to travel on a light-beam.