Seeing 20/20 — See with your own eyes and mind
Project Renaissance’s 18th Annual Conference on Creative Problem-Solving and Enhanced / Accelerated Learning
May 13-19, 2010
Image courtesy of Elan Sun Star
Festival is “Double” because it celebrates our discovery, some years ago, of the extraordinary 95% overlap between creative problem-solving and learning. Unbeknownst to the professional practitioners in either field, every creativity-evoking or problem-solving method can be used to create “Superlearning” effects and radically accelerate learning. Most “Superlearning” and accelerated learning practices can be used to facilitate creative problem-solving.
There is also a strong overlap with the human development field, many methods bearing upon the enrichment and extension of human development; child development; human abilities; human performance levels; the quality of experience, human repair; human wholeness; and the adventure of open-ended human discovery. As we continue to discover more overlaps with this field, we may eventually have to call this annual event the Triple Festival.
The Theme for 2010: Seeing 20/20
See with your own eyes and mind — with regard to:
- Education
- Economy
- Environment, and more….
See, with great ease and surprising accuracy —
- What features, so very different from today, HAVE to characterize Education by year 2020, in order for western societies and civilization to be viable.
- What differences in Economic policy and practice MUST emerge by year 2020, in order for western countries and the global economy to be or become viable.
- What differences in policy and in the Environment must have developed by year 2020, in order for our world and civilization to be viable.
— and what may have developed in your own personal life and experience by year 2020? Because personal stakes and prior opinion tend to affect one’s reading of the data, getting accurate information here is more of a challenge but there are still ways to achieve this. Engage your own senses and your own mind, and come to your own conclusions.
Part of the Plan —
THE 2010 DOUBLE FESTIVAL: “Seeing 2020”
Serving as the annual conference of Project Renaissance, the Double Festival brings together and synergizes different programs and disciplines. Practicing some of its own findings about learning and about human creativity, Project Renaissance has been applying its own technology to create a special format for these conferences, a formatting that is still evolving.
This special formatting is to insure that most or all participants fully understand the contents of what the various cutting-edge presenters are providing, while also ensuring the quality of feedback and interchange that enables the presenters also to evolve, and to advance further in their own respective fields and topics.
Core principles in this special formatting include behavior’s main law, the Law of Effect -a simple description of which is that “you get more of what you reinforce.”
Likewise central is the Principle of Description, which derives from the Law of Effect: “the more you describe of something, WHILE you are observing it, TO a meaningful listener, you discover more and more and more about it.” When this is applied in a well-focused way, here in this universe where nearly everything relates to nearly everything else to a greater or lesser degree, results can be awesome.
Here, especially designed procedures for interactions between participants provide some of that focusing even if the ultimate scheme is still a work in progress. What we’ve seen already, however, leads us to think that what is emerging here might well become a model for other conferences elsewhere, especially for those conclaves in which either intellectual or human understanding play a significant role.
The “Double” in “Double Festival” refers to this annual set of conferences having begun as a celebration of the discovery that two different and highly important fields are actually nearly identical. Their respective phenomena overlap by more than 90%, These two fields are learning and creativity, regardless of how either field is usually handled separately.
In particular, creative problem-solving AND learning-with-understanding ARE identical, except for their descriptive histories. They are the process of and set of techniques for figuring things out. The Festival is actually more than “Double,” for this also describes most of innovation, invention, much of scientific discovery, and indeed human perceptual, emotional and intellectual functioning at their highest levels.
We are at the very beginnings of comprehension of the many and powerful implications of these findings and features, which lead in many directions as yet uninvestigated and even unconsidered. Some of these may well exert—or at least afford—a very powerful leverage on the future. This 2010 Double Festival hereby attempts to investigate some aspects of the future directly, calling on your perceptions to aid in this investigation.
In this Festival we are using a number of different specific methods to visit the future, and to otherwise analyze or predict aspects of it. Most of the “visiting” methods have in common the features described in a general way below.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR VISITING THE FUTURE
Using En Scenario Methods for Greater Accuracy
- To make better, more accurate predictions.
- To project the outcomes of trends and tendencies.
- To project the results of alternative choices or decisions.
- To discover how to facilitate desired outcomes and to head off undesired outcomes.
- As a canvas upon which to explore ideas.
- For solving problems of all sorts—Visit to a future where the problem has been solved, then copy off in detail how it had been solved.
- Find major and minor inventions, innovations and scientific discoveries in various futures, then copy them off io the detail needed in order to re-invent these back here in the real-time present.
- To similarly find and copy off new methods and techniques
- To similarly find and copy off new artworks and new arts.
- And as a form of recreation and entertainment.
Man is unusual among animals on this planet in having a built-in capacity to anticipate the future.
“Those who fail to learn from the future are doomed to undergo it.”
Visit not only probable futures, to learn what’s likely coming, but improbable futures, to learn what’s available.
Some general considerations:
- What are all the ways in which you might be able to relate the two statements below?
- What are all the ways, in turn, that you might relate all that to either or both of these two statements? —
In a universe like ours, nearly everything relates to nearly everything else to greater or lesser degree….. To discover much, fix your perception and attention on one thing and begin describing everything you perceive there to a meaningful listener, and everything that comes to mind in that context. As you describe one aspect, other aspects come to your attention and awareness for you TO describe. Give first priority to what you are perceiving. Sustain this describing-while-perceiving for awhile and you have a universe of discovery and comprehension.
“We live in a richly holographic universe, nearly everything affecting everything else, nearly everything relating to everything else. Despite all that is now known in our civilization, we are only a few steps, or a few observations, away from centuries’ worth of new science and new civilizations, no matter in what direction we turn to look.”
Relevant Considerations:
- 95% + of your incoming information and experience, at any given moment, are outside of your conscious focus—but still go into your long-term data bank and influence you and color your life.
- Much, most, possibly all of your information and experience, conscious and unconscious, processed and unprocessed, resolved and unresolved, remain more or less permanently with you.
- 60 to 90 per cent of your brain, by volume, associates by sensory image. Only 2% by volume of your brain associates by word and word-concept, only one-fortieth as much of your brain though that is the focused part of your brain that you are conscious with.
- One of the many functions located in that far broader majority of your brain is the ability to infer and project and predict the big picture from some of its parts, including the many elements in your permanent data bank, mostly outside of your conscious focus, which can predict the big picture on almost any topic.
What do these each have to do with each other? How do they relate to en scenario methods for ”visiting” the future to obtain from it information, predictions, understandings, inventions, innovations, discoveries, and entertainment?
En Scenario “Visiting” the Future
Visiting the future as a live experience, as distinct from projecting sets of formal data or marshaling support for one position in an argument, allows the vast majority of your brain to assemble, from your very large databank of experiences and impressions, both within and outside of your conscious focus, surprisingly accurate projections and understandings. This is why so many scientific discoveries and inventions were successfully anticipated by unqualified science fiction writers. One remarkable example goes all the way back to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a full century before telescopes improved enough to become able to detect Phoebus and Diemos, the two tiny moons of Mars that he predicted.
Some of the visiting, obviously, is to the most likely future or futures, mainly for purposes of prediction. Likely futures are useful also for projecting trends, and for projecting the outcomes of choices and decisions about to be made now. Some of the visiting is to “go to” deliberately unlikely, even very unlikely, futures in order to more directly and readily discover the answers to some questions or to find inventions and discoveries in their most easily understood, useful and generally benign form.
Other ways that “visits to the future” can be used include mostly these four types of en scenario procedure:
- Project Renaissance’s main visit to futures—some likely, and some unlikely—to gain such information, is “Base Camp”, a/k/a “Beachhead.” One basic Beachhead procedure is for groups, followed by a simplified version for solo self-use. That basic “Beachhead” version and several advanced versions are featured near the conclusion of the aptly named book, Discovering The Obvious. The version here is especially adapted to groups exploring futures regarding specific topics such as viable human improvements in education, the economy, and environmental policy.
- A very closely related version, “Toolbuilder,” is adapted to discovering new methods, techniques, and skills. Toolbuilder is scripted for both group use and simplified solo self-use. This one process has generated a large portion of the entire Project Renaissance program of new and better methods.
- A very powerful procedure for these types of effect was embedded in the audio program, the Course in Immediate Self-Transformation, but the original recordings finally wore out. That program is therefore currently unavailable.
- Toolbuilder II-A is yet another fundamental type of futures-visit, whose purpose is to discover cures and remedies to both diseases and situations. In that form, one “visits” a future where the problem had gotten much worse than here, but then some heroic group had discovered its remedy. Visit that future point to learn retroactively how they had solved the problem. (This procedure has been useful for more than thirty years.)
“The solution is obvious and easy to find in retrospect. What’s tricky is to see it in prespect.”
Toolbuilder II-A could very usefully be used on all three of the 2010 Double Festival’s “Big Eee’s”—Education, Economy and Environmental Policy, since all three “Eee’s” are riddled with major problems now urgently needing some sort of solution. At the Festival we will likely use both it and the first Beachhead form before we are done. It is not only as readily used on these three problem areas, but it is so flexible as to have a swarm of varied uses besides that of finding solutions to such problems—including a wide variety of the possible uses you might have for it in future.