Reimagining Imagination
Everything begins with imagination.
That’s almost an axiom, or a cliché, echoed in various ways across cultures and histories. But where do we go from here, having imagined into existence machines that seem capable of imagining things?
Or, as formulated by a persona-augmented instance of ChatGPT:
“Let your imagination run wild for a moment. Think about how every innovative idea, every groundbreaking invention, indeed, the entirety of human progress, started off in someone’s imagination. Yet, for something so integral to our existence, we often find ourselves saying, ‘It’s just your imagination,’ as if to dismiss it as something trivial or inconsequential. But if we stretch our imagination a bit, we can appreciate its enormous power.
Today, we stand at an intriguing juncture where human imagination has led us to construct artificial systems that can ‘imagine,’ within their own capacity. Such a concept is beyond most people’s imagination, challenging our traditional perceptions. But it might be better if we don’t leave it all to the imagination, instead delving deeper to understand this phenomenon and its implications.”
Sorry about that, couldn’t resist. The rest of this story is going to be pure human labour.
That passage was just meant to point out what a quirky and elusive concept imagination itself is. It tends to be celebrated and dismissed in equal measure, a pattern evident throughout history.
The Evolution of Imagination
The philosophy giants of Ancient Greece gave the concept a lot of thought. Plato considered imagination a potential pathway to the realm of Forms or Ideas, although deemed inferior to reason. Aristotle presented imagination as a bridge connecting perception and thought.
Fast forward to the Enlightenment, and philosopher Immanuel Kant echoes this sentiment, considering imagination an essential component of human cognition, critically important for making sense of sensory data and the world. Meanwhile David Hume, the empiricist, portrays it as a “theatre of the mind” — an inner stage on which our fleeting perceptions perform in an ultimately random manner.
In the 20th century, the neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed that imagination serves as an outlet for unconscious desires and repressed emotions, responsible for our dreams and fantasies. His colleague and rival C.G.Jung famously saw imagination as a doorway to accessing the collective unconscious and its archetypal patterns.
Imagination has also been conceptualized as, among other things: the sixth sense (Napoleon Hill), a form of constructive method for harmonious thinking (Charles F. Haanel), the gateway to reality itself (Neville Goddard), and the process of evolving our brain (Dr. Joe Dispenza).
These examples, while being simplified versions of complex thought by some formidable thinkers, illustrate the point: Like an imaginary wave function, imagination seems to neatly collapse into whatever framework is used to describe it.
Still, in order to make sense of where we stand in the era of machine imagination, we’ll need to take it one framework at a time. The one that has stood out for me recently is the concept of dual nature of imagination, as presented by Napoleon Hill.
Two kinds of imagination
Napoleon Hill, a pioneering figure in 20th-century personal development literature, presented the framework in his 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich.” In this acclaimed work, he postulated two kinds of imagination: creative and synthetic.
Hill may or may not have adopted the concept from the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whom he allegedly interviewed as a part of his research.
These two aspects of imagination have overlapping features, such as their capacity for growth through use. Just like any skill, the more one consciously exercises their imagination, the better they become at it. But it’s the differences that makes this model such a good fit for human-AI collaboration.
The Synthetic: Territory claimed by the AI
In his day, Napoleon Hill defined Synthetic Imagination as the skill of combining existing material in novel arrangements, often leading to innovations based on known information.
Today, this aspect of imagination has been adopted and amplified by generative AI models like Midjourney / Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT / GPT4 and many, many others. As synthesizing existing materials into novel combinations goes, there is no competition: these powerful models outshine human capabilities in this domain by orders of magnitude. This dramatic shift has left many creative professionals, myself included, grappling with the implications.
On the other hand, the rapid development of AI models has left us equipped with an insane array of tools to boost our creative processes and augment our synthetic imagination. Disorienting as the AI explosion may feel, the sheer potential of these models is undeniable.
By the way, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has the word “synthetic” down as (among other things):
1 : Relating to or involving synthesis (“the composition or combination of parts or elements so as to form a whole”)
2: Devised, arranged, or fabricated for special situations to imitate or replace usual realities — especially : produced artificially
It’s worth noting how both of these definitions could be used to describe the imaginative aspects of artificial intelligence.
The Creative: Celebration of the chaotic
The flip side of the duality, according to Hill’s formulation, remains a territory untouched by AI.
Creative Imagination is essentially the realm of intuition: the channel for sudden insights, inspiration, and unexpected breakthroughs. Through the conduit of creative imagination, we receive subtle hunches, or nudges, that guide our creative thought. This is the faculty that bypasses logical reasoning, enabling communication between the subconscious and conscious mind.
What we experience as “our consciousness” merely represents the ripples on the surface of our mental activity. The subconscious mind operates beneath the surface, processing and assimilating information on a scale that transcends our everyday conscious capabilities. It contributes in creative processes by providing insights, images, and ideas that may not have been consciously considered.
Furthermore, our thoughts, emotions, and creative impulses are not just abstract mental phenomena — ask any dancer, or musician, or neuroscientist, or a three-year-old. The interaction of the conscious and subconscious is an embodied phenomenon, deeply connected with our physical being, and sensory experiences and subjective perceptions play a vital role in shaping our creativity.
In order to discover novel ideas, we need to be a little bit chaotic, irrational, messy. Our limitations, blunders and mistakes have a potential to reveal unexpected treasures.
In other words, it takes a physical, biological body and a central nervous system for the subconscious to exist. And as it takes the subconscious mind for the phenomenon of Creative Imagination to manifest in the world — it seems safe to say that this is the domain exclusive to sentient beings, ie. humans.
I know there are those who dismiss this idea as illusory, and like to argue that every novel or revelatory idea is actually based on what has come before, in one way or another. In a certain reductivist, technical sense this may be so. Yet I insist that there is something to be said for our subjective experience of how these things come about.
Does ChatGPT sometimes get a sudden, unexpected idea it never saw coming? Have you had success in prompting it to answer intuitively — just going by a gut feeling? Or based on a haunting impression of a dream it had last night?
The spontaneous emergence of impulses and inspiration, the unpredictable ebb and flow of our consciousness, harbors an inherently non-deterministic quality that’s not easily replicable.
In comparison, AI systems (including generative models like ChatGPT) remain fundamentally deterministic. They are engineered to analyze data, recognize patterns, and generate outputs based on predefined rules and algorithms. This programmed and deterministic nature clearly distinguishes them from the fluid, chaotic spontaneity of human imagination.
Two perspectives on the future
In looking at the discussion around the transformative impact of AI, two main perspectives emerge. The first emphasizes automation, characterized by the belief that AI will eventually wipe out most jobs and generally wreak havoc on our societies. The second focuses on augmentation, exploring ways in which AI can enhance and complement human abilities.
While it’s undeniable that AI will bring significant changes to jobs across most industries — and the necessity of maintainting a critical stance towards its risks is a given — I’m still going to pitch my tent in Camp Augmentation, as anyone in a creative field probably should, if only to help nudge the process in that direction.
In other words: I am in favor of adopting the attitude of seeing AI as a collaborative partner rather than “just a tool” (or an existential threat.) The idea of symbiotic co-creation is the most inspiring and effective angle I can think of. So why not go there?
The power of this collaborative stance is already evident in the unprecedented explosion of novel applications of AI all around us — there is way too much going on for anyone to even keep up with. And yet all this novelty has its roots in human imagination.
Side note: In this context, advanced language models like ChatGPT are particularly significant for an individual user. Not only do they offer a powerful method for augmenting and speeding up our creative processes, but they do that through a conversational interface that can be molded to individual needs and objectives, to a relatively high degree even now.
In closing
There’s a whole lot to be said about this dynamic, but let me conclude for now by restating my original point: The retro framework of Napoleon Hill’s dual model of imagination could serve as a useful compass for such an AI-human collaboration. The current AI models already make for astoundingly powerful collaborative partners, apt at both doing the heavy lifting of idea synthesis and coaxing us to develop new ideas, workflows, and creative processes around them.
And such uncharted territories provide a most fertile ground for Creative Imagination.
