Some of the secret of creativity lies in finding new ways to look at things. Minsky suggests that this can involve imagining boundaries that do not really exist, and treating real boundaires as though they do not exist. "We're always chaning boundaires! Where does an elbow start or end? When does a youth become an adult? Where does an ocean change into a sea? Why must our minds keep drawing lines to structure our reality? The answer is that unless we made those mind-constructured boundaries, we'd never see any `thing' at all! This is because we rearely see anything twice as exactly the same."
"Making sense" requires finding permanence, which in turn requires us to abandon much of what we see.
(NB: Two points: First, much of this reminds me of Gordon's Synectics program for creative thinking, which was very "metaphoric" in nature, and asked practitioners to make the unfamiliar familiar, and the familiar unfamiliar. Second, the importance of imaginary boundaries, and unimportance of real boundaries, can't help but make one think of Grossberg's THEORY of everything -- even though Grossberg and Minsky are talking about very different kinds of things!)
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