Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.
Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.
But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.
And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?
This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.
I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.
How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?
