I seem to spend half my time refining definitions. Been circling ‘nerve’ and ‘imagination’ in the sense of Clarke’s hazards of prophecy for 2-3 years now. V 13:
nerve: willingness to look at what is
imagination: capacity to see what else it could be
sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Socie
Conversation
3 kinds of imagination+nerve: introspective, extrospective, intersubjective
Introspective: What’s within you (and presumed to be within others)
Extrospective: What’s outside you materially (Buber’s I-it)
Intersubjective: What’s between you and others (Buber’s I-thou)
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I tried order the 3x2 kinds by difficulty but failed, both for my personal case and generally. There is no fixed order, it varies by specifics. But nerve is loosely harder than imagination. It’s harder to look at what is than what else could be.
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Notice a logical dependence: nerve has to come first for imagination to be well-posed. It is seeing what ELSE could be, in the adjacent possible. Which presupposes seeing what is.
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People fail in one if 2 ways: the demands on nerve exhaust them so much they fail to *completely* see what is and lock on to partial “natural” theories of what must be, and have no energy left to see what could be.
Or they skip the nerve phase and just build castles in the air.
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