
Alison Gopnik on the Imagination
Philosophy Bites
00:00
The Paradox of Childhood
Evolution has designed children to be the research and development division of the human species. And we adults are production and marketing, he says. The process of imagining something and bringing it into reality assumes that the hypothesis or the imaginary situation has got something in it, which makes it possible to bring into reality. But lots of imaginary situations will be wasted as it were because they're just unrealizable in reality.
Transcript
Play full episode