Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. (Albert Einstein) Do you agree?

Your imagination is like, computer’s “RAM” and knowledge is like the information inside the computer, “Ram”. RAM is Random Access Memory. One bit of information is information but a collection of bits of information, is what we call knowledge.

The location in the human mind where information and knowledge is kept is our imagination.

The human mind recreates everything, that is experiences inside of our imaginations and it does this most of the time with the accuracy to how the universe works but the human mind is not limited to what the natural laws of physics observe, we can see a person walking or a bird flying. We can then take this information and combine it in such a way that a person walking can be imagined as a person flying without observing such a condition in nature.

Likewise, I can never experience a bird flying but can have another person explain such a condition and my mind can create such an experience, despite my ever actually seeing with my own eyes a bird flying.

Metaphors are plenteous. Knowledge is a stepping stone to imagination; it stands to imagination as honeycomb does to honey, knowledge and imagination are enemies, or independent filaments in the web of our cerebral lives.

Until and unless the person doesn’t acquire or is hungry to acquire knowledge, he won’t be able to imagine because that is where the power to manifest in you lies. If we look at the scenario from the psychological point of view of the person’s developing stage then there we get to unfold the reality of the Albert’s statement.  When a baby comes out of the womb and steps into this world, he doesn’t know what clouds are, fruits are, colours are, plants are. He doesn’t know what this whole world is. He imagines his own world, full of fantasies. If we look at it from the perspective of Buddhism religion then the child imagines what he has been through in his last birth or I would say the journey he has travelled through to step on this creation. Gaining knowledge doesn’t mean that one has to read books, go deep into the resources, surf through Google.  It is never prescribed that one has to gain knowledge from certain resources. People do acquire knowledge from various senses, sense of feeling, sense of belonging, sense of humour, sense of love, loneliness, sense of affection, by meeting different people, reading different behaviours, listening to different people, observing things going around and above all knowing yourself. Now it depends upon us that how we put the knowledge inside our brains. As it is being said by Buddha that, “Peace comes from within, do not seek it without”. So I feel same is the case here with knowledge and imagination. Knowledge comes from within, do not seek it without. If knowledge will come then automatically a person would reach to a stage, where he enters into the world of imagination. So from this it can be concluded that imagination is followed by knowledge. When the baby reaches to a stage, where he starts looking into the play-way books, starts walking on his knees, starts uttering the words out then he learns and gains knowledge. That knowledge is of course not the whole but partial one. But that partial knowledge builds the further occurrences. There comes a stage when the child joins school, meet poles apart people, see the world, take the outcomes of life into a distinguishable way. The child reaches to a stage where he starts generating knowledge, embark on creating an identity. All this is what comes from the person’s background knowledge. The senses he has felt, the emotions he went through, the struggle he met. So there, imagination pokes into the scene and brings out what was gained and thought.

Personally I feel that there’s no dichotomy between knowledge and imagination. Imagination is needed to create new concepts (ideas) and knowledge, and new knowledge enables further discoveries, functioning as a springboard to imagination. So, whichever way we look or any situation we take into account, there’s always some basic thread, some or maybe very little knowledge, which is a “justified” “belief” and universally accepted so that turns out to be an important reason also to support, which then becomes root to imagine further and discover something new. So I say, you acquire, you imagine, you generate.

It’s not true that knowledge is limited to all we now know, because we can create new knowledge. Imagination is only one way of expanding our knowledge, but there are equally other “ways of knowing” that can help us with this.

“Language” can be one way, as it is rule governed, intended and creative and open-ended. The catchiest thing is that everyone agrees to given rules and so a new knowledge could be easily given born to. As the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that, language determines our experience of reality and we can see and think only what our language allows us to see and think. For example, the Inuit are said to have many different words for snow, and their sophisticated snow vocabulary helps them to make them finely grained snow discrimination. As a result, they see and experience snow-covered landscapes quite differently from the rest of us.

The same can be dealt through informal reasoning, on the basis of Post hoc ergo propter hoc, it means, ‘after this, therefore on account of this’. Knowledge can be generated on the basis of reasoning also, for example if a person has read in a magazine that stray dogs bite and we become victim of rabies disease. Now when that person saw a dog on street, he deduced that he should be aware of this knowledge, that if this dog bite me, I’ll get suffer with rabies. This is deduction of logic from a bigger group to a particular, hence is knowledge generated from reason.

If we look at the example of  The Revolutionary War. In the revolutionary war, the british redcoats by far outnumbered the revolutionary soldiers, the generals of the British army knew the number of troops the American had, however they did not know the conditions of America. The British were not aware of the abundant woodland in America, the Americans had a huge advantage over them because they were used to the woodland and they won the battle. If the British had known about the abundant woodland and had gotten used to it, they might have won the battle. 

So was Einstein right? Is imagination more important than knowledge? As our realities become more complex we seem increasingly to prefer imagination, but that preference is culture-dependent. Imagination blossoms when its products are highly valued. Producers of fantasies also operate within political constraints. Imagination can be highly political, as Orwell, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn demonstrated: too overt an attack on the status quo can bring retribution from the authorities, in totalitarian regimes especially. Industries of knowledge may be controlled for the same reason.

So the Knowledge and Imagination ratio keeps on changing, as the time passes.

From the above, it would seem that there are several considerations involved in deciding, which is dominant over other. Knowledge or Imagination. Personality, culture and other friendly aspects promote towards the convolution involved in Einstein’s statement. Is imagination more important than knowledge? In an utterly and thoroughly way it depends on whom you talk to, what you talk about, and at what time and space in.