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This Element is about change. Specifically, it's about the underlying mechanisms that cause change to happen, both in nature and in culture; what types there are, how they work, where they can be found, and when they come into play. The ultimate aim is to shed light on two barbed issues. First, what kind of system of change is culture and, second, what kind of change in that system counts as creativity; that is, what are the properties of the mechanisms of change when we explore unknown regions of the cultural realm. To that end, a novel theoretical framework is proposed that is based on the concept of a sightedness continuum. A sightedness framework for the mechanisms of change can integrate the three mechanisms causing gradual, adaptive, and cumulative change – evolution, learning, and development – into a single dimension and provide a clear view of how they cause change.
To paraphrase the famous beginning of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Imagination is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.” And it must be important, if even neuroscientists have noticed it. With momentum gathering to get a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary grip on the human imagination, at a time when still no one has much of a clue about this hypercomplex realm of the mind, we can expect to be treated to an initial proliferation of ideas, views, frameworks, and theories on the matter. But that is a good thing. There must be variation before there can be selection. Taking advantage of this temporarily heightened tolerance for speculation, this chapter proposes that the process of navigating an imaginary space can be described by different evolutionary algorithms that vary according to the prior knowledge we have of the topography of the imagined landscape or, put another way, the degree of sightedness we have of the fitness function of the imagined domain. Seen from this perspective, the category “novel combinatorial” of Abraham’s (2016) framework is best dissolved, with creative thinking being distributed and embedded into all other forms of the imagination.
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