In my chosen hometown of Victoria BC, there is a Philosophy Salon that regularly meets at my local Pub (the Bent Mast). The topic for a recent meet-up was "Imagination Versus Wisdom." It struck me as an odd topic but I threw myself into some preparations anyway. This in turn led me back to my past inquiries into what I have dubbed "the knowledge dynamic" (see The Anatomy of Knowledge and more recently Human Knowledge, Responsibility, and Wisdom).

One consequence of preparing for, and participating in, this meeting was that I realized that I could, and indeed should, have a simplified version of my Knowledge Dynamic diagram - one that did not feature a curious array of interconnecting arrows. As one of my close colleagues in Japan has recently pointed out - every arrow, every shape, every word, and every formatting affordance in one of my diagrams means something. So my more complicated version of the diagram simply stirred up too many questions. Above we see the bare-bones version.

Elsewhere (for example in the references above) I have elaborated on what drove me to produce this diagram in the first place and what pushed me to reintroduce "wisdom" into the picture. This meet-up however challenged me to think about the knowledge dynamic in a new way, to approach it with the question of "where does imagination fit?" 

This turns out to be a more interesting question than I expected. Part of what makes it interesting is my embarrassingly long-running engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the explosion in general interest in AI that is so hard to ignore today. Here I will reference a relatively recent, and really quite good, book titled A Brief History of Intelligence (Max Bennett, 2023).

One of my takeaways from this book, and yes it might be partially a projection on my part, is that simulation is a core element of intelligence. And I am inclined to use simulation interchangeably with imagination. As this book usefully documents, simulation operates at many levels of intelligence, and indeed at all of them. It applies to how we see, or hear, how we navigate, how we act, and how we learn. This resonates with my experience and my unhealthy pursuit of academic studies. I see direct and useful connections from the role assigned in this book to simulation in consciousness and behaviour with works as diverse as that of Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Dennett, and even my more recent philosophic crush Hans-Georg Gadamer who I actually met once. It is interesting, I think, that it has been the advent of Generative AI (GenAI) that has placed a spotlight on what many would take to be a quintessential feature that makes humans human, that is imagination.

Back to my knowledge dynamic diagram. Where does imagination fit in this picture? Or does grappling with imagination force me back to square one? Perhaps to save my own skin, I created a quick variation on my diagram and brought it to the Philosophy Salon. Here is the result. 

One of the questions I had been wrestling with in my initial knowledge dynamic diagram - and when you introduce a system you are then condemned to work through its implications - was how does the domain of knowledge (knowledge, information, data) act upon the domain of judgment (judgment, action, experience) and vice versa. It is not unlike, although on an obviously smaller scale, to what Descartes, and others in his day and since, had to wrestle with once mind and body were separated - how does the mind affect the body and conversely how does the mind learn from the body? Leaping at what I imagined (grin) was a possible lifeline, I saw that imagination, or what I might phrase imaginative simulation, plays a role in the interface between the two posited domains. This is more than a little obscure but it also carries some weight. Perhaps this is how knowledge becomes a judgment, a decision; how it is absorbed into a belief, a simulation upon which you are willing to act. This is perhaps how the material reality behind an experience becomes phenomena that can be recognized and processed, in due course being registered and represented as data. Pushing in any number of directions, including into philosophy and into neuroscience, these are non-crazy contentions. They can be debated, of course, and explored. But they cannot be waved off without justification. 

All this to say, my experience with this particular meeting of the Victoria Philosophy Salon proved hugely valuable to me and it pushed my thinking in a new direction. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it brought into focus questions that had been plaguing me for some time. As we consider the nature of AI, and its impact in our world, these questions turn out to be timely. What is it that Generative (Simulative) AI has tapped into that suddenly put it on its meteoric trajectory? The GenAI services that have garnered so much attention tap into what people have published online, wittingly or not, and this ultimately means that AI is performing statistical projections (similations) based on people's narrative simulations, on how people all over the world have framed their understanding and the beliefs upon which they are willing to act (with communication being one form of action). I would suggest that is one of the things that makes AI interesting right now. 

I literally printed copies of my diagram and shared them around the table at the Philosophy Salon. Naturally I elaborated upon my diagram just enough to annoy people. But interestingly, when the Philosophy Salon wrapped up, several young people stayed behind and clustered around my end of the table. They had questions. And good ones. I sometimes wonder whether there is merit in my explorations and I question the wisdom of maintaining my small homestead blog. Indeed I wonder about this a lot. But when I encounter people who also have questions and who want to dig into them, I am inclined to carry on in my own silly way.