Does imagination separate us from AI?

 I think this is a very good question, but it depends on how one defines ‘imagination’. I remember having a conversation (via email) with Peter Watson, who wrote an excellent book, A Terrible Beauty (about the minds and ideas of the 20^th Century) which covered the arts and sciences with equal erudition, and very little of the politics and conflicts that we tend to associate with that century. In reference to the topic, he argued that imagination was a word past its use-by date, just like introspection and any other term that referred to an inner world. Effectively, he argued that because our inner world is completely dependent on our outer world, it’s misleading to use terms that suggest otherwise.

It’s an interesting perspective, not without merit, when you consider that we all speak and think in a language that is totally dependent on an external environment from our earliest years. 

 

But memory for us is not at all like memory in a computer, which provides a literal record of whatever it stores, including images, words and sounds. On the contrary, our memories of events are ‘reconstructions’, which tend to become less reliable over time. Curiously, the imagination apparently uses the same part of the brain as memory. I’m talking semantic memory, not muscle memory, which is completely different, physiologically. So the imagination, from the brain’s perspective is like a memory of the future. In other words, it’s a projection into the future of something we might desire or fear or just expect to happen. I believe that many animals have this same facility, which they demonstrate when they hunt or, alternatively, evade being hunted.

 

Raymond Tallis, who has a background in neuroscience and writes books as well as a regular column in Philosophy Now, had this to say, when talking about free will:

 

Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.

 

I find a correspondence here with Richard Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). There are, in fact, an infinite number of possible paths in the future, but only one is ‘actualised’ in the past.

 

But the key here is imagination. It is because we can imagine a future that we attempt to bring it about - that's free will. And what we imagine is affected by our past, our emotions and our intellectual considerations, but that doesn't make it predetermined.

 

Now, recent advances in AI would appear to do something similar in the form of making predictions based on recordings of past events. So what’s the difference? Well, if we’re playing a game of chess, there might not be a lot of difference, and AI has reached the stage where it can do it even better than humans. There are even computer programmes available now that try and predict what I’m going to write next, based on what I’ve already written. How do you know this hasn’t been written by a machine?

 

Computers use data – lots of it – and use it mindlessly, which means the computer really doesn’t know what it means in the same way we do. A computer can win a game of chess, but it requires a human watching the game to appreciate what it actually did. In the same way that a computer can distinguish one colour from another, including different shades of a single colour, but without ever ‘seeing’ a colour the way we do.

 

So, when we ‘imagine’, we fabricate a mindscape that affects us emotionally. The most obvious examples are in art, including music and stories. We now have computers also creating works of art, including music and stories. But here’s the thing: the computer cannot respond to these works of art the way we do.

 

Imagination is one of the fundamental attributes that makes us humans. An AI can and will (in the future) generate scenarios and select the one that produces the best outcome, given specific criteria. But, even in these situations, it is a tool that a human will use to analyse enormous amounts of data that would be beyond our capabilities. But I wouldn’t call it imagination any more than I would say an AI could see colour.

Some (personal) Notes on Writing

 This post is more personal, so don’t necessarily do what I’ve done. I struggled to find my way as a writer, and this might help to explain why. Someone recently asked me how to become a writer, and I said, ‘It helps, if you start early.’ I started pre-high school, about age 8-9. I can remember writing my own Tarzan scripts and drawing my own superheroes. 

 

Composition, as it was called then, was one of my favourite activities. At age 12 (first year high school), when asked to write about what we wanted to do as adults, I wrote that I wanted to write fiction. I used to draw a lot as a kid, as well. But, as I progressed through high school, I stopped drawing altogether and my writing deteriorated to the point that, by the time I left school, I couldn’t write an essay to save my life; I had constant writer’s block.

 

I was in my 30s before I started writing again and, when I started, I knew it was awful, so I didn’t show it to anyone. A couple of screenwriting courses (in my late 30s) was the best thing I ever did. With screenwriting, the character is all in what they say and what they do, not in what they look like. However, in my fiction, I describe mannerisms and body language as part of a character’s demeanour, in conjunction with their dialogue. Also, screenwriting taught me to be lean and economical – you don’t write anything that can’t be seen or heard on the screen. The main difference in writing prose is that you do all your writing from inside a character’s head; in effect, you turn the reader into an actor, subconsciously. Also, you write in real time so it unfolds like a movie in the reader’s imagination.

 

I break rules, but only because the rules didn’t work for me, and I learned that the hard way. So I don’t recommend that you do what I do, because, from what I’ve heard and read, most writers don’t. I don’t write every day and I don’t do multiple drafts. It took me a long time to accept this, but it was only after I became happy and confident with what I produced. In fact, I can go weeks, even months, without writing anything at all and then pick it up from where I left off.

 

I don’t do rewrites because I learned the hard way that, for me, they are a waste of time. I do revisions and you can edit something forever without changing the story or its characters in any substantial way. I correct for inconsistencies and possible plot holes, but if you’re going to do a rewrite, you might as well write something completely different – that’s how I feel about it. 

 

I recently saw a YouTube discussion between someone and a writer where they talked about the writer’s method. He said he did a lot of drafts, and there are a lot of highly successful writers who do (I’m not highly successful, yet I don’t think that’s the reason why). However, he said that if you pick something up you wrote some time ago, you can usually tell if it’s any good or not. Well, my writing passes that test for me.

 

I’m happiest when my characters surprise me, and, if they don’t, I know I’m wasting my time. I treat it like it’s their story, not mine; that’s the best advice I can give.

 

How to keep the reader engaged? I once wrote in another post that creating narrative tension is an essential writing skill, and there are a number of ways to do this. Even a slow-moving story can keep a reader engaged, if every scene moves the story forward. I found that keeping scenes short, like in a movie, and using logical sequencing so that one scene sets up the next, keeps readers turning the page. Narrative tension can be subliminally created by revealing information to the reader that the characters don’t know themselves; it’s a subtle form of suspense. Also, narrative tension is often manifest in the relationships between characters. I’ve always liked moral dilemmas, both in what I read (or watch) and what I write.

 

Finally, when I start off a new work, it will often take me into territory I didn’t anticipate; I mean psychological territory, as opposed to contextual territory or physical territory. 

 

A story has all these strands, and when you start out, you don’t necessarily know how they are going to come together – in fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. That way, when they do, it’s very satisfying and there is a sense that the story already existed before you wrote it. It’s like you’re the first to read it, not create it, which I think is a requisite perception.