Enabling individual re-imagination of a future-engendering present

Engendering Viable Global Futures through Hemispheric Integration (Part #9)

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The argument to be developed follows from Ellyard's distinction between makers and takers. The question is how individuals can "make" a future for themselves without "taking" from others. Similarly, how can the "takers" take, without depriving others?

One response lies in the realm of imagination and reframing. However, as a process, this suggests that creative imagination could well be applied to imagination and reframing -- rather than necessarily accepting how convention defines them to be. There is a sense in which the self-reflexive process is dealing with cognitive "stuff" in the moment. Curiously the New Scientist devoted a recent special report to The Meaning of Stuff: our strange relationship with the things we own (29 March 2014). Clearly much of this stuff takes the form of concepts about reality which we individually loan -- or lease, or variously appropriate -- echoing the problematic conventional implications of property ownership. Squatting comes to mind. The framings of the Aboriginal peoples clearly then merit consideration. Is there effectively a cognitive Terra Nullius open to all?

The stuff of reality, in the light of current understandings of physics, necessarily merits consideration as a complex of matter, energy and information -- however we may choose to dream about it, as suggested by Stephen Hawking (The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: the most astounding papers of quantum physics -- and how they shook the scientific world, 2011). Physicists have acquired an unchallenged licence to dream -- funded by tax-payers -- suggesting a mode from which others could benefit.

A fundamental challenge to conventional society is indeed framed in terms of "energy" -- with potentially catastrophic outcomes, as remarkably analyzed with respect to the Roman Empire by Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization, 2006).

A key initiative on which conventional hopes for energy are currently built is the tokamak design of the toroidal nuclear fusion reactor: ITER: the world's largest Tokamak. There is a case for "re-cognizing" its design principles as a key to processing imagination by which personal futures can be engendered and nourished, as separately argued (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing, 2006; Massive Elicitation of Psychosocial Energy: requisite technology for collective enlightenment, 2011).

The remarkable preoccupation regarding the viability of a fusion reactor is to ensure that the spinning plasma does not come in contact with the walls of its toroidal container. Is this suggestive of a key design requirement in imaginatively engendering the future?

In a conventional world in which reality is increasingly framed by "spin", such a reactor design suggests that more may be made of insights into oral traditions through which tales are "spun". The coherence of reality, and the attractive power of any tale, might be fruitfully married with the insights of physics. A case can be made that the mnemonic associations, so valuable to that coherence, can benefit from more radical cognitive appreciation of music, song and poetry -- so valued otherwise (Being a Poem in the Making: engendering a multiverse through musing, 2012).

This suggests that the problematic socio-political implications of Ellyard's binary framing of takers and makers might be reframed through the design of some form of cognitive "take-and-make" -- perhaps a "mokatak" -- echoing the design challenges of the tokamak.

In cognitive terms, all are potentially free to "take" insights from the reality to which they expose themselves -- and to "make" of them whatever appears fruitful. Curiously this freedom echoes the choice -- or obligation -- of many to recover discarded objects through which they can construct what they need. The point is succinctly made by an Australian journalist:

I'm an incorrigible scavenger. I've been known to climb into dump trucks because I've seen an interesting table leg sticking out of the rubbish. I've furnished whole apartments from things I've found on the street. (Lee Tulloch, My Souvenirs Are Not Snow Globes, The Canberra Times, 22 February 2014).

More to the point however is the possibility of "re-cognizing" that there are cognitive analogues to the "dump trucks" and to the "table legs" to be found there. This can be argued more generally (Reintegration of a Remaindered World: cognitive recycling of objects of systemic neglect, 2011).

More curiously, whilst any such freedom may be constrained by property rights, the capacity is constrained to an even greater degree by the deprecation and prohibition of such taking-and-making with regard to cognitive stuff. This may be specifically condemned as syncretism. -- in a period in which the producers of that conventional stuff, and those claiming ownership of it, have proven to be more than incapable of addressing the problems to which their possessiveness gives rise.

The argument here is that individuals are free to "mix-and-match" as they will -- irrespective of intellectual copyright restrictions and dubious claims in that regard. The proviso is however that they avoid efforts to claim exclusive possession within the world of conventions, or to expect others to "buy" their creative production -- unless that exclusivity can itself be spun into a more attractive "tale".

Some arguments of political economy promote an understanding that it is up to individuals to "make their own future". This might be described as basic to the mythology of the American Dream. Rather than framing this advice within the conventions of political economy -- so evidently failing in their global delivery capacity -- the question here is how indeed individuals can "make their own future" from a more radically creative cognitive perspective. The possibility has been argued separately (Engendering 2052 through Re-imagining the Present, 2012) in a critical review of a recent report to the Club of Rome by Jørgen Randers (2052: a Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, 2012). As a radical engagement with the meaning of the present moment for the individual, the case can also be made otherwise (Presenting the Future, 2001; Now as the Ultimate Cognitive Strange Attractor: a continuing invitation "down the rabbit hole"? 2014).

The question to be explored, in a reality framed by the rigid conventional definitions of joblessness and other problems, is whether there are possibilities of reframing them which are open to the individual, irrespective of social conventions (12 Mindsets Ensuring Disappearance of Employment Opportunities: towards a systemic reframing of the job culture, 2012; Psychosocial Implication of Without Within: enjoying going solar for oneself, 2013).

There are of course numerous sources of metaphor to enable creative imagination. Returning to the comment on Ellyard's preference for "cosmonaut", metaphors are effectively a vessel through which to travel the pathways of connectivity -- the songlines of the noosphere (Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future, 1991).

Various "metaphor projects" have been initiated following the influential work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980). Current possibilities can be discussed in terms of Psychosocial potential of analogy detection (2013), notably in the light of the Metaphor Program initiated by the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to build a world repository of metaphors enabling a computer system capable of understanding metaphors used in a variety of languages.

Subsequent to the Metaphor Project within the above-mentioned Encyclopedia, metaphors explored of relevance to governance have included: polyhedra, diamond, traffic, marine nautilus, sexual intercourse, music, multi-part singing, quantum mechanics, ballooning, game-playing, extraterrestrials, death, flowering and deflowering, nothingness, cyborgs, stellar evolution, astronautics, questions, marriage, ignorance, being stoned, pointlessness, biomimicry and technomimicry, financial management, invagination, weaving, change of climate, carpets, underworld, disease, burkha, bullfighting, ballistics, crop rotation, and walking. Each could be considered an insightful lens between which attention could shift for a deeper stereoscopic perspective -- to employ the much-favoured vision metaphor in exploring the future (Metaphor and the Language of Futures, 1992).

The ubiquity of metaphor is illustrated by the account by Mark Forsyth (Poetic pageantry in the metaphors of money managers, International New York Times, 14 April 2014). He is the author of The Etymologicon: a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language (2013)

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