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Cerebral challenges
Deconstruction
Most of our thoughts contain several assumptions that we take for granted. We seldom reflect on whether these assumptions are, indeed, correct. We follow our thoughts through and arrive at conclusions which may seem reasonable to us, without thinking that they may be wrong because our hidden assumptions are wrong. What may have been true before, may no longer be true today.
Our thoughts are constructions with foundations and several levels of assumptions and deductions, which, taken together, amount to our ideas of what the world is like. With these ideas we meet other people who carry other types of constructions around, and communication is complicated because they may not have the same foundations, assumptions and deductions than we have.
If we are to arrive at a meeting of minds, we need to deconstruct our constructions and examine our respective foundations, assumptions and deductions and put them to the test of dialogue.
In a more philosophical context, from which the term deconstruction has been taken, the term goes deeper into the analysis of language and texts - launched by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Permutations
Creativity is generally associated with the capacity to combine new elements and ideas with older, established elements or ideas. In music this is done all the time, and musicians are called creative when they combine music styles that have not been combined before. In all areas of culture and thought, this kind of activity will very often give interesting results – and sometimes important insights and openings to whole new areas of research and thinking.
The term permutation comes from mathematics, where it refers to the act of combining elements and values in different ways. In the same way you can combine figures, you can combine ideas and elements in innumerable ways – and see what comes out of it. You can do it as an intellectual game, without any particular plan, or you can do it methodically in a context of systematic research. If you want to know more about this notion, you can look here.
Constraints
Another form of creativity is obtained when you deal with the analysis of constraints surrounding a given area of analysis. Science fiction literature very often makes use of this path of creativity. The point is here to look at a given situation in society or in any kind of micro-cosmos within society. Within this given situation you ask yourself what would happen if a given constraint is removed – what kinds of forces and dynamics might be released from this change in circumstances.
This is something often observed in market analysis, when a shift in market situation takes place – for instance as a result of a sudden disruption in supply of a given good (drought or flood in agriculture). However, this type of thinking is applicable to all types of dynamics in society. Science fiction uses it in the area of technology.
Point - Counter-point
Hegel’s dialectics, which both he and Karl Marx applied to analyze the evolutionary process of history, is a fruitful method of thinking when setting up alternatives in the process of analysis. Its division of thought into thesis – antithesis – synthesis facilitates the search for alternatives which contain the best elements of opposing contentions.
As a method of discussion, dialectics has been central to European and Indian philosophy since antiquity. It has, for instance, been central to Plato in his Socratic dialogues. In broader terms, the idea of using dialogue in the search for truth underlies the thinking of Socrates as presented by Plato in the dialogues. A good dialogue necessarily needs competent opponents with strongly differing views at the outset. If everybody in a party agrees on the answer to a question posed, there will of course be no dialogue in its follow up.
Most of our thoughts contain several assumptions that we take for granted. We seldom reflect on whether these assumptions are, indeed, correct. We follow our thoughts through and arrive at conclusions which may seem reasonable to us, without thinking that they may be wrong because our hidden assumptions are wrong. What may have been true before, may no longer be true today.
Our thoughts are constructions with foundations and several levels of assumptions and deductions, which, taken together, amount to our ideas of what the world is like. With these ideas we meet other people who carry other types of constructions around, and communication is complicated because they may not have the same foundations, assumptions and deductions than we have.
If we are to arrive at a meeting of minds, we need to deconstruct our constructions and examine our respective foundations, assumptions and deductions and put them to the test of dialogue.
In a more philosophical context, from which the term deconstruction has been taken, the term goes deeper into the analysis of language and texts - launched by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Permutations
Creativity is generally associated with the capacity to combine new elements and ideas with older, established elements or ideas. In music this is done all the time, and musicians are called creative when they combine music styles that have not been combined before. In all areas of culture and thought, this kind of activity will very often give interesting results – and sometimes important insights and openings to whole new areas of research and thinking.
The term permutation comes from mathematics, where it refers to the act of combining elements and values in different ways. In the same way you can combine figures, you can combine ideas and elements in innumerable ways – and see what comes out of it. You can do it as an intellectual game, without any particular plan, or you can do it methodically in a context of systematic research. If you want to know more about this notion, you can look here.
Constraints
Another form of creativity is obtained when you deal with the analysis of constraints surrounding a given area of analysis. Science fiction literature very often makes use of this path of creativity. The point is here to look at a given situation in society or in any kind of micro-cosmos within society. Within this given situation you ask yourself what would happen if a given constraint is removed – what kinds of forces and dynamics might be released from this change in circumstances.
This is something often observed in market analysis, when a shift in market situation takes place – for instance as a result of a sudden disruption in supply of a given good (drought or flood in agriculture). However, this type of thinking is applicable to all types of dynamics in society. Science fiction uses it in the area of technology.
Point - Counter-point
Hegel’s dialectics, which both he and Karl Marx applied to analyze the evolutionary process of history, is a fruitful method of thinking when setting up alternatives in the process of analysis. Its division of thought into thesis – antithesis – synthesis facilitates the search for alternatives which contain the best elements of opposing contentions.
As a method of discussion, dialectics has been central to European and Indian philosophy since antiquity. It has, for instance, been central to Plato in his Socratic dialogues. In broader terms, the idea of using dialogue in the search for truth underlies the thinking of Socrates as presented by Plato in the dialogues. A good dialogue necessarily needs competent opponents with strongly differing views at the outset. If everybody in a party agrees on the answer to a question posed, there will of course be no dialogue in its follow up.