The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

Throughout these notes, I have placed much emphasis on matters of definition. Time, as a coordinate of space, has been defined with some degree of precision, mathematically, but time, as we ordinarily use the word, a subjective measurement of awareness, is even more difficult to pin down than, for instance, subjective or awareness.

In the Playboy symposium, William Tenn mentioned “intelligence of some sort” as a prerequisite for civilization, and added that the factor we were most likely to share with an alien civilization would be “imagination, the essential ingredient of our culture.”

All right. But what is imagination? What is the relationship between intelligence and imagination? What is intelligence?

And these are all “easy” words; we can usually understand each other when we use them in ordinary conversation, even without clear definitions. But what about intuition, neurotic, creative, secure, art?

Or how about curiosity, wonder, humor, communication? Writers and philosophers have repeatedly pointed to one or another of these qualities as setting mankind apart from other Earth animals. But what— exactly—do we mean when we say them?

The search for practical, working definitions is going on in many fields of sociological and psychological study today. A new kind of science is being born in the process.

When we understand, in the way that we now understand the word atmosphere (composition, behavior, etc.), what we mean by subjectivity, we will be able to make the same allowance for it, in our study of “humanics,” that the spectrographer now can make for the content of Earth’s atmosphere.

We may then come to a further, understanding of the true and complete potential of the (subjective) human mind.