Emergence: What is it?
First, thanks to all for the participation on the intuition question. I’m sure we’ll come back to that. How something comes into being is one of those mysteries of life. Why it comes into being is equally as mysterious.
Thrownness
Martin Heidegger coined the term “thrownness.” He thought humans are completely shaped by the culture they are thrown into. While we are born with capacities, it’s through our interaction with environment that possibilities are realized-or not. There is evidence to support our innate ability to use language will atrophy if not nurtured by onset of pubescence.
But whether or not we can understand how ideas burst into being, or the how the illusive nature of any electro-chemical state in the brain can be reproduced, we can perhaps get better at looking and listening for emergence. In other words, it seems reasonable to understand the likely environment, or way of perceiving changes in personal mood, energy, focus, curiosity, action, and awareness of an external environment that will lead to a creative act.
Language is the medium of thought
When we speak we don’t think first in some kind of meta-language that gets translated into language. Language is the medium of thought. I’ll modify that to be, language is the medium of conscious thought. There are those processes incubating of which we are not yet aware. As we discussed earlier, this is the wellspring of intuition.
It’s curious how, when writing, we see our words on the page or screen often with surprise. It’s as if someone else wrote those words. Isn’t this idea embodied in the Muse? She is the one who speaks and the writer is merely the channel, or so it seems. Many fiction writers report their characters having a life of their own. What happens next is suggested by what has gone before. The writer is listening to his or her Muse.
Serious imaginings
Children play “let’s pretend.” Actors take on roles as if they were someone else. Economists and planners consider “what if.” All of these things require imagination and the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.
We don’t necessarily have to shine the laboratory light on the mystery of how emergence works. But we can learn to be better prepared to listen to what is emerging by working with and developing our imaginative faculties. If ever, “Use it or lose it,” were true, it’s true when it comes to imagination.
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And just for good measure, here is Wikipedia’s definition of emergence.
