Fil wrote:
> I read this as suggesting that you think it is impossible that we will someday be able to, using only science, connect chemical and neuronal interactions directly to the actual feelings/emotions that we experience. Is that right?

Well, this is a big hole to fall into. It's hard to discuss "someday" in the context of that question. Maybe someday we'll find the end of the universe, after all. What I am suggesting, though, is that right now there are questions that philosophy is better suited to answer than science and that neither one is "better" than the other. It's about using the appropriate tool for the job. Science has a tendency to assert that anything that can't be analysed by its method isn't valid – see my previous post about that. 

In that interview with Peter Atkins, incidentally, he makes the rookie error of arguing with a philosopher about how philosophy hasn't matured in any way and then says that he hasn't bothered to read any (old or new) because it would be a "waste of time". Science could do with some humility (Robert Winston's book "Bad Ideas?" is a call for this).

> Does Johnson-Laird know of the work of Sawyer, who suggests that our apparent flashes of inspiration occur only because we are not conscious of the work our brain is doing to solve the problem?

My understanding is that Johnson-Laird suggests the same thing as Sawyer (and as I just saw, you also found the two appear in a lot of the same literature along with Csikszentmihalyi). When you ask, "does it solve the problem?" I'm not sure what problem you mean. My argument is mainly that it's not that designers lack a process or a method for synthesis, but that this process is usually poorly articulated, if it all. This has a lot of ramifications, not the least of which is the perception (from both designers and others) that this process is about flashes of creative insight. It makes it difficult for design to take a seat at the table when dealing with endeavors that are steeped in measurable rational decision-making. I'm arguing that we've hidden the mechanics of what we do in a black box labelled "creative flash" and that this has been unhelpful. Most of what I read about design processes skirt around this black box but rarely open it up and examine it.

Peter wrote:
> The intent of collaborative problem solving is not to enhance creative "outlier" formulations, which only help push one's personal creative genius to new insights, as if you were the only problem solver. Collective abduction requires that stakeholders co-create and test their understanding with one another. A kind of geometric relationship is expressed among problem-holders or co-designers when synthesizing collaboratively. So I wonder to what extent the individual abductive concepts hold in the collective deliberative situation? (My refs on this would include Beer's Syntegrity and Warfield's ISM).

I think this is a salient point. I'd like to investigate further before I comment much, but I wonder if Derek has some thoughts on this?

Cheers,

Andy

(p.s. I'd like to make another plea for list posters to trim back their trailing mail quotations. For those of us reading this in digest mode, there is a lot of cruft).