Crystallized inagination: Page 65-71:
We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. we wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it in the pool of human experience and knowledge.
—STEVE JOBS
In my talks, I often ask the attendees to raise their hands if they have used toothpaste that morning. I find this to be a good way to get audience participation, since the embarassment of not having used toothpaste encourages even the shyest attendee to raise her hand. After almost everyone has raised a hand and I crack a joke about those who didn't, I ask audience members to keep their hands up only if they know how to synthesize sodium fluoride. As you can imagine, all hands go down. This shows that products give us access to embodied information but also to the practical uses of the knowledge that is required to make them. That is, products give us access to the knowledge and knowhow residing in the nervous system of other people.
In this chapter I will discuss the practical applications of our ability to crystallize imagination. These include the ability of products to distribute the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow used in their production, but also products as means of creative expression, human augmentation, and combinatorial creativity.
Going back to the toothpaste example, we can note that when we are buying toothpaste we are not simply buying paste in a tube. Instead, we are buying access to the practical uses of the creativity of the person who invented the toothpaste, the scientific knowledge informing the chemical synthesis that is required to synthesize sodium fluorid, put it inside a tube, and make it available across the planet, and the knowledge that fluoride makes our teeth stronger and has beneficial effects on our health. Something as simple as toothpaste gives us indirect access to the practical use of the imagination, knowledge and knowhow that exist, or existed, in the nervous system of people we have probably never met.
The ability of toothpaste to provide us with access to practical uses of knowledge and knowhow embodied in a stranger's nervous system is quite magical. Yet the magic of toothpaste. like that of any product, does reside solely in this ability. Products are magical because they endow us with capacities that trancend our natural limits. Products augment us, and this is a great reason why we want them.
Think of a guitar. Guitars allow us to "sing" with our hands by combining knowledge of the Pythagorean scale with expertise about the right wood for building a guitar and how to shape it. If the guitar is electric, it will also embody the knowledge of how the music's sound waves can be captured by a transducer and how these sound waves can be amplified for many of us to enjoy. All of these are capacities that are needed to make music, at least the kind of music that requires a loud electric guitar. Yet those do not need to be capacities of the musician. The musician accesses the practical uses of the knowledge through the guitar, and by doing so, he is augmented by being endowed wth the capacity to sing with his hands.Products are magical largely because they augment our capacities. Planes endow us with the abolity to fly, ovens with the ability to cook, and toothpaste to keep our teeth until old age. So a good reason for humans to desire products is that products augment our capacitiesproviding us with access to the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow that is embodied in the nervous system of other people. Yet our need to create complex products is not only practical. We also shoul consider the expressive component in the creation of products (even though this expressive component is, ironically, repressed in many people). Wealso crystallize imagination because this allows us to transform our ideas into a shareable reality. It is not only through the consumption that we satisfy our hedonism. We want others to like us, to want us, and to feel the way that we do. We want others to know what it feels like to see the world from our perspective. reembodyingour thoughts into objects is a great way of achieving exactly that, as anyone who takes the word inspiration seriously has found.
"Knowledge, knowhow, ++...
Are "knowledge" and "knowhow" different categories?
Isn't "practical uses of..." just skills?
Is "knowledge" different from JTB?
I prefer know what, know how, but most of all know WHY (i.e. understanding).
I prefer Competence=Knowledge+Skills+Attitudes
"Embodied knowledge"
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
― Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
Crystallizing our thoughts into tangible and digital objects is what allows us to share our thoughts with others. Otherwise, our thoughts are trapped in the prison of our minds. A musician records her music as a perfect way to perfect her art, but also as a way of creating copies of her mind that can be shared with others and that can survive her. Without these copies her talent would be trapped in her body, inaccessible to others. We crystallize imagination to make copies of our thoughts and share them with others. this makes crystallizing imagination the essence of creative expression.
But does this mean that products are simply a form of communication? Not so fast. Our ability to crystallize imagination into products, also expressive, is different from our ability to verbally articulate ideas. An important difference is that products can augment our capacitiesin ways that narrative descritions cannot. Talking about toothpaste does not help you clean your teeth, just as talking about gasoline will not fill up your car with gas. It is the toothpaste's embodiment of the practical uses of knowledge, knowhow, and imagination, not a narrative description of them, that endows other people with those praxtical uses. Without the practical embodiment the practical uses of knowledge and knowhow cannot be transmitted. crystallizing imagination is therefore essential for sharing the practical uses of knowledge we accumulate in our mind. Without our ability to crystallize imagination, the practical uses of knowledge would not exist, because that practicality does not reside solely in the idea but hinges on the tangibility of the implementation. Once again, the physicality of products—whether tangible or digital—augments us. And it is through this augmentation that products help us communicate what words cannot: the practical uses of knowhow, imagination and knowledge.
Emphasizing the ability of products to augment human capacities can help us refine what we understand as the economy. It helps us to see the economy not as careful management as resources, the wealth of a nation, or a network of financial transactions, but as a system that amplifies the practical use of knowledge and knowhow through the physical embodiment of information and the context-specific properties of this information helps carry. This is an interpretation of the economy as a knowledge and knowhow amplifier, or a knowledge and knowhow amplification engine: a complex sociotechnical system able to produce physical packages containing the information needed to augment the humans who participate in it. Ultimately, the economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.Emphasizing the ability of products to augment human capacities can also help us refine our understanding of wealth. The augmentation that is provided by our ability to pack the practical uses of knowledge as information is what allows people to live at comfort levels that are much higher than they would be able to sustain in isolation. This provides an important connection between the comforts that we associate with wealth and our species' ability to augment its capacities. Without the ability of the economy to amplify knowledge and imagination, our lives would be no different from those of other animals, or that of a castaway on a deserted island. Our ability to crystallize imagination teaches us an important lesson about the complexity of economies: markets do not make us richer but wiser, since they produce wealth as long as they give us access to the practical uses of the knowledge and imagination that our apecies has been able to produce.
To illustrate the knowledge amplification powers of the economy, consider the nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday. Among other things, Faraday developed (discovered?) the laws of induction that are central to the generation of electricity. Yet Faraday also got his hands dirty and crystallized his ideas embodying them in practical objects. Faraday is credited with the invention of the electric motor, which was later perfected by Tesla. So when we blow-dry our hair, vacuum our floors, or make a daiquiri in a blender, we are receiving a favor from none other than Michael faraday, someone whom we, our parents, and even our grandparents are unlikely to have met.
The economy is the system that amplified the practical uses of the knoeledge that was developed and accumulated in Faraday's brain—and which was inspired in part by Ada Lovelace. Faraday's ghost, therefore, lives in all electrical products, together with those of Lovelace, Tesla, Edison, Maxwell, and many other great scientists whom we only know through their work. Ultimately, the world of products is more social than what we would naively imagine, and in a deep metaphorical sense it is a world that is populated densely by ghosts. these ghosts are the information begotten by other that survives embodied in objects, and also in us.
So our ability to crystallize imagination benefits our species for three main reasons. First, it helps us create a society of "phony geniuses," a society in which the capacities of individuals greatly surpass their individual knowledge. this is the direct result of the augmentation that is enabled by our ability to embody knowledge in tangible and digital gadgets. Second, crystallizing imagination isessential if we are to share the practical uses of our knowledge with others. Without our ability to crystallize imagination, there would be almost no creative outlets, and the practical uses of our knowledge would be trapped in the prison of our minds. Finally, the augmentation provided by products helps liberate people's search for new forms of expression and gives rise to new capacities. this is the combinatorial creativity that emerges from our species' ability to crystallize information. if Jimmy Page had to mine metals and build his own guitars, we would probably have not been able to enjoy "Stairway to Heaven". If Ernest Hemingway had to construct his own pens, manufacture paper, and invent the printing press, he would probably not have been able to write The Old Man and the Sea. By the same token, if I had to build my own laptop, you would not be reading this book. So the knowledge amplification powers of the economy are essential to liberate the creative capacities that allow our species to create ne products—which continue to augment us—and endow us with new forms of artistic expression.
Our capacity to createproducts that augment us also helps define the overall complexity of our society. To illustrate this seemingly far-fetched connection, I will move our gaze away from humans and consider instead ant colonies, an example suggested by Norbert Wiener in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings.
Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, understood that the ability to embody information outside our bodies is not unique to our species. In fact, our ability to print information in our environment makes us similar to other eusocial species, such as ants. Single ants are not very clever, but their ability to deposit information in the form of pheromones can make ant colonies extremely savvy. thanks to their ability to deposit information in their physical environment, ants can solve difficult problems of transportation,construction, ventilation and routing. humans have a similar capacity. Yet instead of leaving behind pheromones, we leave behind physical instantiations of imaginary objects, such as wrences, screwdrivers, dishwashers, pyramids, chairs, and beer bottles. the ability to deposit imaginary information in our environment is key for our species' ability to create societies and economies that are significantly more complex than those of ants. Unlike ants, we embody information not just to communicate but also to augment one another's capacities by making available—through objects—the practical use of knowledge, knowhow, and imagination
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Now that we have described products as physical embodiments of information, carrying the practical use of knowledge, knowhow, and imagination, we will move on to explore the factors that limit people's ability to make products. As we will see, the constraints limiting people's ability to accumulate the knowledge and knowhow necessary to make products are what makes the growth of information in the economy both unequal and challenging.
Economy
economy (n.)
1530s, "household management," from Latin oeconomia (source of French économie, Spanish economia, German Ökonomie, etc.), from Greek oikonomia "household management, thrift," from oikonomos "manager, steward," from oikos "house, abode, dwelling" (cognate with Latin vicus "district," vicinus "near;" Old English wic "dwelling, village;" see villa) + nomos "managing," from nemein "manage" (see numismatic). Meaning "frugality, judicious use of resources" is from 1660s. The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is from 1650s.