Important transitions in society had often to do with revolutionary approaches to increase the production of goods, i.e. in agriculture, in mass-manufacturing and nowadays in the production of media and information. Outstanding work in all areas are attributed to "very intelligent" people. But what makes intelligence, creativity and genius ? One problem with these questions is that we assume to understand the mechanisms behind those words. In his book Society of Mind (SoM), Minsky discusses that it is dangerous to define something which is not yet understood. His attempt to define intelligence comes down to:
"Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. 'Intelligence' is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand."
Although this is a short post and maybe again too summarized, the idea of this post actually was triggered by the following sentences: "Why assume that what our greatest artists do is very different from what ordinary people do - when we know so little about what ordinary people do. Surely it is premature to ask how great composers write great symphonies before we know how ordinary people think of ordinary tunes. ... We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas."
(to explore further the importance of the generation of new ideas in the information society: http://www.tdctrade.com/econforum/hkcer/hkcer010701.htm)
2 comments:
"We know so little about what ordinary people do?"
Do we know so little about it though? As an ordniary person with lots of ordinary friends, I think I have a decent grasp on our lives. Many non-ordinary authors do as well - English and American literature is full of books about the ordinary.
Nevertheless, I'm going to check out that book.
How was your first working day? Are in a flat yet?
Hey Zach, no, am still busy with moving between Belgium and Germany. Will start working on Friday.
I agree that the ordinary is a tremendous interesting subject for study. I think that the actual point is, that there does not really exist something "ordinary". Every point in time-space is changing all the time, there are never two exactly identical things. Also, we selfs keep getting older, but somehow we have the impressions that we keep the same person. There must be a lot of communication involved inside the brain to keep us believing that everything stays the ordinary, known thing. How this illusion is produced is quite unknown seems to me. One idea is that we actual keep only updating differences from older situations, which gives on a higher level of abstractions metaphors and analogies.
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