ABSTRACT
Locke (1690) maintained that the source of all ideas is human experience and understanding. Ideas, as he saw them, sprang from knowledge, which in turn is derived from observation of the external world as well as awareness of our own internal ruminations on these observations. ‘Knowledge’ remains a somewhat vague notion, but implies more than remembered observations and includes some form of interpretation of these observations. Ideas may not merely come into and go out of our awareness like randomly displayed data elements, but instead can be consciously related to each other in ways that we begin to find useful, interesting, satisfying or even entertaining. Idea processing takes individual ideas and manipulates, synthesises and associates them with one another until they form a larger contextual pattern that we can consciously relate to some human concern or problem.
