Foresight or Imagination?

Some musings

If you have a LinkedIn account, you might have noticed a conversation I had with several people a little while ag about whether foresight is a cognitive process (Go to LinkedIn). I did it with a little bit of provocation to see the reactions - and there were a few. Few agreed, a lot argued, some found it interesting. I was challenged by Riel Miller though when he, more or less, argued that foresight has lost its meaning and so it is a waste of time (my words) focusing on that and instead, I should focus on imagination.

I have been thinking about this for some time now, and I’m still a tad confused. Riel is right in one way because the term foresight has been co-opted in so many ways by so many people that it has lost it primary meaning. Has the horse bolted from the stable already? I’m asking myself should I let my pre-occupation with foresight as a cognitive capacity go?

Are foresight and imagination competing capacities? Or they dual in nature or interdependent or are they derivative of each other? I’m wondering if people who have conscious foresight are better able to imagine new futures in the present that people who haven’t? Not sure the answer to that is yes. Do creative people have more expansive imaginations even without conscious foresight?

I think that our neurological capacity for imagining futures - episodic foresight - is where we should start. We are hardwired to imagine futures with this capacity, but mental time travel begins with the past being restructured into those imagined futures, and so can be constrained. Futures processes can intervene and build new pathways of sorts (I have no evidence for this statement by the way, but it’s how I feel) that allow us to imagine new futures in the present, not constrained by only our past memories. Even when asked to imagine something totally different to today though, my experience tells me that some people love this exercise, others want to love it but can’t get out of the present, and others reject the task. So, the constraints to finding new futures are real.

I recently came across this paper in my research which explores metaforesight as a form of meta cognition:

The future-directed functions of the imagination: From prediction to metaforesight
Adam Bulley, Jonathan Redshaw and Thomas Suddendorf.

It is helping me answer some of the questions I have. They write (bold added, page 11):

Humans, perhaps uniquely, are capable of meta-representational insight into the relationship between their imagination and reality. In other words, people can evaluate how imagined scenarios link in with the external world, and thus assess whether what is imagined is likely to actually occur in the future, and whether it is biased, pessimistic, or hopeful and so forth. In the broad sense, meta-representation involves representing the relation between (i) a representation and (ii) what that representation is about … In the domain of foresight, this form of metacognition has long been given a central role … Once one appreciates that one’s thoughts about the future are just representations, one is in a position to evaluate them, to modify them, to discount them, to discuss them, and to try to compensate for their shortcomings.

In my head, I’m thinking that these things - evaluate, modify, discount, discuss and compensate - are familiar but do we spend equal time on each of them? Do we evaluate by challenging our unconscious assumptions with open minds? Do we use our metaforesight? Are we doing it consciously? Do we open any new doors, or cracks in our thinking? I’m recalling the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ issue in futures work here.

I have no answers except to say that I think the ‘representations’, the scenarios and artefacts we produce should not be taken at face value. More to come.