Running Away With Imagination

 When I was in prison and thinking hard about fiction writing, imagination was something I thought about. Realism did not seem to have much play for imagination - journalism, just the facts, is the meat and potatoes of realism. But what are humans being if we exclude imagination? There is why I do not fear AI. Well, not until AI imagines.

Aeon today had a piece on imagination, In the architecture of the mind, where lies human imagination? 

Though there are many theories about the place of imagination in cognitive architecture, two are worth mentioning here, not least because all others can be traced to them. On the one hand, in their book Mindreading (2003), Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich argue that some components of our cognitive architecture are dedicated to imagination. For them, imagination is a distinct mental ability like belief and desire, and since those each have cognitive equipment dedicated to them in cognitive architecture, so too does imagination. With such dedicated equipment, we can explain how imagination is used for different ends. For instance, we can explain how imagination can be a source of knowledge, even though it is typically taken to be fantastical in nature. We can say that the imagination-equipment is connected to the belief-equipment such that, by leveraging that connection, imagination can be constrained, thereby leading us to knowledge. After all, being constrained is what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy. While you can fantasise about wildly improbable things, you can’t know wildly improbable things. Put simply, we can explain the epistemic uses of imagination.

On the other hand are the arguments of The Architecture of the Mind (2006) by Peter Carruthers. His main qualm with the view of Nichols and Stich is that it fails to align with the available evolutionary evidence. In Carruthers’s view, it was inevitable that we would become imaginative once we developed language, as imagination is a byproduct of language. In this way, evolution didn’t need to dedicate any cognitive equipment to imagination in cognitive architecture. Imagination is a cognitive spandrel (an evolutionary byproduct) that works by language’s exaptation (the use of an evolutionary adaptation for a new function). Evolution, Carruthers says, has a knack for repurposing pre-existing cognitive equipment rather than starting afresh. Imagination may be co-equal with belief and desire, but that does not mean evolution reserved some equipment in cognitive architecture for imagination.

Also, from Aeon was Meaning beyond definition, which I think also involves imagination.

 

In suggesting we look to poetry for a practice that is clear without defining its terms, I am not claiming that poetry is always and only concerned with clarity. Beauty (however that is defined) is arguably a goal. Truthfulness is another. Indeed, obscurity and clarity can both be tools for the poet, and so obscurity can even be fostered: the poet Carl Phillips argued that, in his Sonnet 129, William Shakespeare uses a 12-line convoluted sentence to create a fug that is dissipated by the epigrammatic sentence that finishes the poem. But this sort of obscurity is at the level of what the syntax and meaning of that long sentence is. As the literary critic Sven Birkerts writes, it ‘mimes the mental movement it characterises’. In other words, it is true to that mental movement, and so to that extent clearly represents that mental movement.

More generally, poets’ artistic material is not just the meanings of their words, but how the reader feels when reading them. Similarly, the poetic device of ambiguity might seem unclear to the scientifically trained, who will naturally want to know whether meaning A or meaning B is the intended meaning of an ambiguous word or sentence. But ideally, all meanings of an ambiguity will be intended – and this includes the higher-order meaning created by these meanings being simultaneous and ambiguous within a moment, rather than sequential. At this more abstract level, clarity is almost always an important aim. Even when the poet Paul Celan says that ‘lack of clarity … is something we aspire to,’ the aim is to truthfully – clearly – represent, through isomorphism of form, an obscurity in the world itself, or to acknowledge language’s inability to represent something as overwhelmingly monstrous as the Holocaust. Think here also of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939), an attempt to render the surreal, dream-like quality of night-time stream of consciousness; or the poet Marianne Moore’s claim that ‘feeling at its deepest … tends to be inarticulate.’

This is all to say that poetry does in fact aim for clarity, even when it does so via superficial obscurity. But poetry can also be clear in a much more clear (if you will) way. Take the opening stanza of ‘Dirge Without Music’ (1928) by Edna St Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

I can’t see how anything could be clearer than these sentences. They cut right through me: it feels more like an image or revelation that strikes me than sentences that I decode. But considered from the point of view of the practice of exhaustive definition, the poem falls short: ‘heart’, to raise just one point, can mean any number of things, and nowhere does Millay give it a definition. (Note, by the way, what an absurd gesture that would be.) So much the worse for the thought that we always need to define our terms to be clear – but what is it about this poetic context that makes this so, when it is not so in contexts such as maths and DIY?

Am I going too far, saying, it is our imagination - the ability to associate the unconnected into a whole - that makes poetry clear?

And about AI, The Guardian's It sounds like science fiction but it’s not: AI can financially destroy your business points out AI's lack of imagination.

Everyone seems to be worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Even technology leaders including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a public petition urging OpenAI, the makers of the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, to suspend development for six months so it can be “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.

Their concerns about the impact AI may have on humanity in the future are justified – we are talking some serious Terminator stuff, without a Schwarzenegger to save us. But that’s the future. Unfortunately, there’s AI that’s being used right now which is already starting to have a big impact – even financially destroy – businesses and individuals. So much so that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) felt the need to issue a warning about an AI scam which, according to this NPR report “sounds like a plot from a science fiction story”.

But this is not science fiction. Using deepfake AI technology, scammers last year stole approximately $11m from unsuspecting consumers by fabricating the voices of loved ones, doctors and attorneys requesting money from their relatives and friends.

 Or put another way:

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