Imagination, more important than intelligence?

From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed Dec 09 1998 - 13:31:19 MST


Brian Atkins writes:

> It seems like the key ingredient to sparking a real >H revolution
> in the rest of the population is not brainpower, but rather
> simple imagination. The reason that people are not turned

As a kid I read a lot of SF, often averaging 4-5 hours/day (while
being a fast reader). Towards the end, I did it deliberately, as I
intuitively felt it to be some kind of mental calisthenics, a valuable
end in itself, if no other application could be found. Out of
curiousity, how many of you have not been readers of SF or fantasy
either during your childhood/late teenage? [No, I won't sum it up,
ask somebody else]

> on by our ideas may not be due to intelligence, but rather
> simply because they cannot imagine what we describe, no matter
> what detail we go into.
 
Why worrying? With a sufficiently advanced technology, human
population can be first dwarfed, then superseded as both an economical
source and sink. You don't have to grok a concept to be obsoletified by it.

'gene



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