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raccoon8182 t1_isrztl2 wrote

Reply to comment by Future_Believer in Is this imagination? by Background-Loan681

I think we have two different concepts of imagination. Yours is rooted in logic "I can't imagine the chemical structure" I can, it's purple with green balls, that turn into Orange brilings. What's a briling? Use your imagination. When a kid draws a machine that's never been invented in physics that don't work, out when authors dream of impossible worlds, none of that needs reference, it just needs lots of explanation.

You're right though, imagination is good evidence for conscience. I'd go as far as to say only humans have imagination. So it's certainly not a trivial topic.

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Future_Believer t1_istpgtl wrote

Not to be argumentative for the sake of being argumentative but, my mere inability to state specifically where I saw or experienced something, or even just the seed of something, doesn't mean I absolutely never saw or experienced it.

Let's say you are hiking in the wilds and you come upon an actual version of the old movie trope - a human child raised by wolves with no other human contact from early on in its infancy. As an experiment you ask that child and 100 others of the same age but that had been raised in any of the global cultures with access to internet and movies, to imagine something that in theory, none of them had ever seen or experienced. I would expect the wolf-child to present significantly different answers than the more traditionally raised children. I would expect there to be some level of similarity - however faint - amongst the answers from the traditionally raised children.

It sounds to me like you are saying that my expectations would not be met. That all of the children would come up with equally irrelevant and inexplicable concepts. If so, that would change my thinking. OTOH, if there was an element of similarity, however slight, among the traditionally raised children but not the wolf-child, would that not suggest at least a common seed of an experience or exposure?

I don't think imagination lives in a vacuum. The connections may be tenuous but I suspect there are some there. I have no idea how one might practicably test my theory.

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raccoon8182 t1_isuegoy wrote

Totally hear you and agree, however the question arises as to what is imagination. Is it random memory fused together to create something new, or some sort of emotion/ego algorithm. In any event, why do the synapses fire in such a way to use those 'specific' memories. Is imagination a choice? And if it is, what is it governed by. In a computer there is no imagination, because there is no algorithm. There is data. If I made a simple query to grab random data and present it to you, would that be imagination?

It's out of my scope on either front, but it feels like the machine needs more self-awareness to truthfully present imagination.

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