| Bronowski, J. (1979). The origins of knowledge and imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1978). |
 
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 08/01/2017, 13:40 |
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| Imagination "is squarely rooted in [the eye] ... We cannot separate the special importance of the visual apparatus of man from his unique ability to imagine" |
| "most of the time we use vision to give us information about the world and sound to give us information about other people in the world." |
| Byrne, R. M. J. (2007). The rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality. Cambridge: The MIT Press. (Original work published 2005). |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 27/08/2011, 04:49 |
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| "One of the more surprising aspects of counterfactual imagination is that there are remarkable similiarities in what everyone imagines." |
| The similarities in imaginative scenarios suggest "that there are "joints" in reality, junctures that attract everyone's attention." |
| Clark, A. (2013). Expecting the world: Perception, prediction, and the origins of human knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, CX(9), 469–496. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 26/07/2018, 10:36 |
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| The top-down, predictive model "puts together the most likely set of causes whose interaction would yield (hence explain) the present input." |
| Evans, D. (2001). Emotion: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 28/05/2011, 07:52 |
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| "Some memories seem so fresh and vivid when we recall them that we may have the impression of reliving the event exactly as it happened, but this is an illusion caused by the power of our imaginative reconstruction. When we compare such recollections with those of others who were in the same place at the same time, we may find that the accounts differ markedly, while the differing versions seem equally vivid and real to each person." |
| Remembering is never precise because items in memory are not recorded in their fine details. They are filed under keywords; these are extrcted and "educated guesswork" fills in the blanks. "It is more like reconstrcuting an antique pot from a few broken shards than replaying an old movie" (p.80). |
| Hoshiyama, M., Gunji, A., & Kakigi, R. (2001). Hearing the sound of silence: A magnetoencephalographic study. NeuroReport, 12(6), 1097–1102. |
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| "Our results suggested that the initial activity for sound retrieval was not related to the primary auditory cortex but to the IF-INS regions, although the activities of the primary auditory cortex might follow later in the neural processes of retrieval." |
| Lee, K. M. (2004). Presence, explicated. Communication Theory, 14(1), 27–50. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 01/07/2021, 07:58 |
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"If sensation is the sole basis for the perception of physical objects, the feeling of compelling reality will not be possible unless all human sensory cues are provided. Thanks to the subjective nature of the perception process, however, people can sometimes have the feeling of presence despite the poverty of sensory stimuli in current media. That is, imagination and other information-processing mechanisms simulate the remaining sensory cues and create a compelling sense of reality. That might be the reason people can sometimes feel a strong sense of presence based solely on cognitive stimuli for imagination (e.g., written narratives) without receiving any direct sensory stimuli."
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| Riddoch, M. 2012, September 9–14, On the non-cochlearity of the sounds themselves. Paper presented at International Computer Music Conference, Ljubljana. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 23/09/2020, 21:36 |
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Riddoch proposes three types of non-cochlear sound:
- Synaesthetic -- the perception of sound via stimulation of another sense.
- Infrasonic sound -- sound waves below 20Hz can be detected by the skin and the chest cavity resonates at 80Hz and below. Riddoch also points to the example of profoundly deaf (from birth) percussionist Evelyn Glennie who maintains that hearing is a specialized form of touch (Glennie 1993).
- Auditory imagination -- including memory, imagination, hallucination, dreaming which all excite the auditory cortex.
Glennie, E. (1993). Hearing essay. Retrieved April 28, 2014, from https://www.evelyn.co.uk/hearing-essay/ |
| Szabó Gendler, T. (2010). Intuition, imagination, & philosophical methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 21/10/2023, 06:42 |
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| "[A] thought experiment is just a process of reasoning carried out within the context of a well-articulated imaginary scenario in order to answer a specific question about a non-imaginary situation." |
| "...imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sort of restrictions that govern believed content" -- mirroring in pretense-episodes. |
| "The rule-based governedness of generative principles is part of what allows us to structure imaginative space in a way that lets us make sense of its content." |
| Imaginative resistance: "the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant." |
| "The trick that allows an author complete freedom in dictating whether or not character A murders character B is much less effective if what the author wants to dictate is that the murder is, for instance, praiseworthy, or noble, or charming, or admirable. So the puzzle is this: what explains why a trick so effective in so many realms is relatively ineffective here?" |
| "whether or not we are inclined to respond with imaginative resistance [depends on] why we think we're being asked to imagine [certain scenarios]." |
With regard to realistic fiction, non-distorting fiction, things can be learned and exported from the fictional world to the actual world, adding them to a stock of knowledge about the world.
"cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual repertoire." (p.199) |
| "imagination is distinct from belief on the one hand and from mere supposition on te other. It is this which explains both our general capacity to imagine morally deviant situations and our general unwillingness to do so." |
| SG follows the work of Antonio Damasio and Paul Harris in suggesting that it is not necessary to believe situations and characters to be non-fictional in order to have real emotional responses towards them. "Rather, we will suggest, our cognitive architecture is such that without the tendency to feel (something relevantly akin to) real emotions in the case of merely imagined situations, we would be largely unable to engage in practical reasoning." |
| "Imagination [in some cases] gives rise to behavior via alief. What happens in imagination may have (non-pretend) effects beyond imagination--but it does so when the process of imagining activates a subject's innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way." |
Imaginary scenarios allow us to make judgments about the imaginary case, which features are essential etc. which can be applied to the actual case.
This is supposed to be the rationale for using such scenarios but the author thinks such methodology unreliable. |
An essay about the reliability of judgments derived from imaginary scenarios and thought experiments.
The conclusion is that judgments are often not reliable because the derivation of such judgments proceeds from the framing of the scenario. i.e. the telling of the story affects the outcome. |
Discussing pretense. Children's games of pretense exhibit two features.
Quarantining: "events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that pretense-episode".
Spilling pretend tea from a teapot will not really wet the table.
Mirroring: "features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues".
Tipping the teapot will make the table wet within the pretense-episode.
The exception to quarantining is 'contagion'; the exception to mirroring is 'disparity'.
'contagion' may be 'affective transmission' (child scared of the dark because of imagined monsters) or 'cognitive transmission' (child playing at bird-watching may ascribe bird-like features to partically seen animal -- dog behind hedge).
'disparity' -- imaginary content in its difference to believed content may be 'incomplete' or 'incoherent'. |
| Successful imagination may be incomplete or incoherent -- exhibit disparity. If incomplete, even in pretense, some features may be unspecified or unspecifiable. If incoherent, some features are logically or conceptually incompatible. The illusion that the pretense is complete and coherent comes "from imaginative reliance on a picture that treats imagining as just like belief, only off-line, and from a picture of prop-based pretense that treats principles of generation as complete, uniform mappings from one realm to another." (p.150). |
| In some cases we recognize that deviance from fact-established concept is not intended for export from the storyworld -- export is not the intent of the author. In others, "because we recognize that there are instances of actual moral disagreement" (p.200), it is unclear to us if the author intended them to be exported or not. Hence imaginative resistance. |
| Re imaginative resistance: "The Impossibility Hypothesis traces the failure to a problem with the fictional world. It says essentially: we are unable to follow the author's lead because the world she has tried to make fictional is impossible. My alternative proposal traces it to a problem with our relations to the actual world. It says essentially: we are unwilling to follow the author's lead because in trying to make that world fictional, she is providing us with a way of looking at this world that we prefer to not to embrace." |
