Ingenuity

I've always admired children for the simple fact that there are rarely any inhibitions concerning their creativity. The world is a brand new place, and while they don't really know the rules, they have a distinct advantage in that their imagination is a very real guiding force in their lives. Sometimes I feel blessed with all the knowledge that I've acquired as I've aged, but it's almost just as easy to become burned by this very same knowledge.

The more you know about the rules of life and 'the way things work' in our interpersonal communities and in nature, the more your imagination becomes restricted in a way. Our notions of how we have come to believe the world works becomes so embedded into our minds, that it becomes genuinely difficult to approach a problem from outside of a given paradigm.

I think that part of the problem is that, as adults, we have far too much faith in the things that we have learned. We take for granted, quite frequently, the possibility that we could in fact be mistaken. This is where children are at such an advantage. Children are used to, on a daily basis, hearing claims about the way things work, coming up with their own ideas on the matter, and all the while being corrected by their parents on the way things actually are. Children are more than willing to refine their own ideas, because they are in an inherent position of ignorance, and on some level, they know this.

However, having nothing more than their imagination at their disposal, children are in the position of being able to think in completely uncommon ways about the world that is presented to them. Sometimes these methods of approaching problems are not very useful. However, when trying to find solutions to problems that elude our more traditional means of reasoning, sometimes assuming the mental frame of a child can actually open up doors that we weren't even able to see in the first place.

A solid example of this is brainstorming. Brainstorming is a very common tool across many disciplines, even in the professional world. Brainstorming is a particularly effective tool for two very important reasons: It allows for a free, non-judgmental space for the exchange of ideas, and it allows us for a brief moment to tap into the immense power of our imagination, of our subconscious.

Daydreaming is not a conscious act. This isn't to say that we aren't aware of it, or that we can't guide it. But the fact remains that the act of daydreaming or fantasizing is often one of the last imaginative links that we have to our subconscious when we grow out of adolescence. Across the duration of humanity we have slowly replaced activities that demand a great deal of imagination for ones that require less or none. The art of storytelling was lost to books, books to television, board games to videos games, and so on.

Technologies have allowed us to replace mentally challenging activities for ones where the entirety of the visual and aural experience is presented to us. I'm not here to pass judgment on the effects of technology, but instead provide observations.

Technology unburdens us from a plethora of tasks. We no longer have to hunt and gather, live seasonally, or follow animals for food. However it is particularly important to remember that Technology, with a capital 'T', isn't inherently one thing or another. It isn't evil, it isn't good. Technology can be almost anything that changes the way we interact with the world around us. This includes things like tools, but also more abstractly things like methodologies and techniques.

The reason that there is so much discussion concerning the inherent morality of technology is probably linked to the fact that quite often if a technology can be invented to solve a given problem, and the foreseeable gains outweigh the foreseeable consequences, it will most likely be implemented. The problem is that the things we actually lose in the implementation of these technologies are seldom plainly visible from the place that we are standing. That, coupled with the overwhelming excitement and curiosity that we tend to experience around new technologies, lends to a very reckless human history of technological progress.

More on this infinitely digressive diatribe later.