Information technology helps people in many ways, but it doesn't help them answer important questions like: What do I do with my life? How should I act? How should I treat others? Perhaps IT can help ordinary people create and live a personal moral philosophy. This paper offers a framework for research on this possibility. Ethical choice is viewed as guided imagination, and moral development as...

The eminent mathematician Felix Klein wrote, in his intimate history of nineteenth-century mathematics, that “mathematics is not merely a matter of understanding but quite essentially a matter of imagination” (cf. Klein [1979], p. 207). Klein was responding to the turbulent trajectory of imagination’s role inmathematics during the nineteenth century, which beganwith Gaspard Monge teaching new w...

Thought experiments, modal judgment, counterfactual reasoning. All of these activities, so central to philosophical inquiry, involve the ‘propositional imagination’, the capacity we exploit when we imagine that there is an evil genius, that everyone is color-blind, or that Holmes had a bad habit. Philosophy would be unrecognizable if we extracted all the parts that depend on the imagination. So...

This article is an attempt to situate imagination within consciousness complete with its own pre-cognitive, cognitive, and meta-cognitive domains. In the first sections we briefly review traditional philosophical and psychological conceptions of the imagination. The majority have viewed perception and imagination as separate faculties, performing distinct functions. A return to a phenomenologic...

The study explored event-related perturbation in spectral power and in potentials during periodic fast and slow motor imagination of left and right index finger and right toe based on EEG. EEG signals were collected from 4 healthy volunteers during imagination of six tasks that involved three limbs (left and right index fingers and right toes ) and two speeds (fast and slow) and each task repea...

Thomas Beddoes's and Humphry Davy's accounts of the nitrous oxide experiments carried out at the Pneumatic Institution in 1799 include extravagant descriptions of its mind-altering effects. Many people, both at the time and subsequently, have considered these descriptions to be the product not of the gas but of its subjects' overheated imaginations. To what extent were these effects 'all in the...

Was America’s “new era” of faster productivity and profits growth a figment of fevered imaginations or a genuine advance? Our detailed examination gives grounds for cautious optimism about the longer term. Trend productivity growth could stay above 2% a year, as long as labour and product markets remain vigorously competitive. If so, trend company earnings could grow close to 3% a year in const...

in the history of philosophy, the basic role of imagination in human perception as an intermediary between sensation and intellect has been left unnoticed. imagination has often been regarded as subjective and illusory. although imagination is one of the initial faculties of the soul that has been known, its duty is described only as preservation and ideation of sensible objects in the time of ...

Complex human social cognition has evolved in concert with risks for psychiatric disorders. Recently, autism and psychotic-affective conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression) have been posited as psychological 'opposites' with regard to social-cognitive phenotypes. Imagination, considered as 'forming new ideas, mental images, or concepts', represents a central facet of...

In this article, we will show how imagination and time are two sides of the same coin. To explain this, we require that imagination posits countability of alternatives. A countable set of alternatives can be sequenced on a timeline, for example the thinking human’s past, or it can be expressed as a countably infinite set of cycles such as a Fourier transform gives us. At the heart of our discus...