Ask HN: Have you met Emeri Gent?
A fairly regular commenter on my blog, has dropped serious philosophical flow comments on some of my simple posts. I really appreciate his stuff and thought some of you may as well. Many of his comments are far more interesting than my original posts. Here's one of his latest comments:

One of the reasons "Viktor Ovurmind" works for me is imagination and exploration. Today I added "Rupy Yuan" into that future mix of my personal explorations, because it is good to try things and see where they fall, but this would be anarchy if it was simply a random event. So our imagination has to find the poetic and whatever that poetic is how we learn to escape structure and yet at the same time find new structure in the escape.

Many major innovations occur when people have gone outside their field of expertise and therefore appreciated a different way of doing things. An example of that would be Toyota creating a part of its core philosophy from watching how supermarket is run. Then there is simply stuff which is just off left field such as Einstein imagining himself following a beam of light.

Where I come often unstuck is premature conclusion and in arriving at a conclusion, I have killed off any possibility for imagination and exploration to work on me. Sometimes "that working on me" can be a painful process and sometimes blind chance of serendipity. However it works is not for me to conclude but the moment I have arrived at a conclusion, I am working from that point onwards with dead ideas, or even ideas that might have found their way into my life simply through recency or exposure.

I look at music as a great example of a form of imagination that is based on a core of basic notes but which can proliferate into so many forms and different ways. That is why some people liken the move into the information space as the new punk rock or rock'n'roll of our time. It is then whatever way we put it together.

I think a reason why premature conclusion is more common rather than the birth of something new, is perhaps attributable to the way we preconceive what innovation should be. Indeed our society is obsessed with innovation to the point we probably kill the goose that lays the innovative golden egg. In my own pursuits I am apt to utilize different exposures to music as means of surrendering the logical and structures of reason, without expectation of a pay-off or a discovery. By not wanting something to happen, the opposite seems to occur.

Linkin Park is a good example of musical form which can stir my mind to take me away from the literate forms or any professional habit I have acquired that subjects me to a more fixed way of looking at things:

In Between
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMiUrjdOdYE

What I've Done
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzuo_UObpuA

Somewhere I Belong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iCtpuQvydk

When I lay out this music in this way, I am simply appealing to the poetic within me. If there is nothing poetic within to resonate beyond regular behaviour, then I am wasting time and I should really apply to Walmart and live the rest of my days stocking shelves, but if there is an even a hint of the poetic to fuel exploration, then the output is pure imagination. When we try to forcefit someone else's formula or ideology or theory into something that we have not found within ourselves, then we are clones and imitators and there is no difference to this way of being than applying for a dead-end job.

Ultimately, the way we organize work, whether it applies due process such as agile or feature creep as described above, a new way of working is often just on the other side of the fence. One way of looking at work is how film is made. I am often left in wonder how a Hollywood film project costing millions of dollars can assemble a wide diversity of talent, find a common moment on their schedule, deliver a self-contained project and at the end of it, go off in their different merry ways.

Whether it is the infinite possibilities in music or the creative chaos of making a blockbuster movie, everything begins with imagination and exploration that is not simply a bus load of blog comments all tripping off a linear reaction of awareness. That is why my most stark suggestion is to ignore what it is I say but decide yourself what the fruits of your imagination will be.

That our thinking becomes relative is simply a courtesy, an etiquette and a respect which is an important dynamic of how we co-exist together, yet our imaginations are only limited to the extent we are able to handle the liquor of our own imagination and how we turn that fuel into a life worth living. If we cannot make that form of life for own given selves, we cannot do it for another - we can only give as much as we gain, and in imagination, it is how we approach this because it is central to our own DNA, rather than simply what it means or what its worth as an investment in drawing a premature conclusion.

One of the things I love about coming to Victus Spiritus is it provides a lot of white space that seeds my own imagination. I much prefer to observe my "Emeri Gent" emergent form of writing as akin to a Mission Impossible tape. Having thought this, hopefully these ideas will self-destruct, but the residue of that is an intelligence called my own learning and personal discovery. Imagination therefore isn't something one can program, it is merely something one can develop by learning how to be generous in its movement and application.

[Em]

The comment link: http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/07/22/great-software-is-measured-by-how-little-it-constrains-human-imagination/#comment-64100570

more of Emeri on disqus: http://www.disqus.com/emerigent/