I think you are probably on the right track. The extent to which our media saturation has enriched our ability to imagine versus taken the place of our imagination and left our imaginative capacities atrophied is probably an area to explore.
I know many younger people who engage in a neurotic ambivalence toward their own lives and futures because they don’t know to begin to decide what they want and they can’t bear to actually limit their horizons by choosing something for the thought that they may be wrong.
They oscillate between various authorities who they think give them an answer, but it never “takes” and they move on to the next one, always unable to initiate action which could be the beginning of forward motion for them. Any time which they would have used to build their ability to imagine themselves as something and how to become that something became time for doing what other people told them to do and listening to people tell them what they should want and be.
You could easily predict how these people will make use of LLMs and be correct. They have constant ephemeral brushes with things they think can tell them the right answer and never with the actual process of cultivating the inner resources for deciding for themselves.
A couple of things have happened to me since April. First, I came across Meg Wheatley and her writing about leadership. Although my British scepticism kicks in at certain points when reading her work, I do respond to certain perceptions and stances she presents, e.g. the need for leaders to focus on creating islands of sanity, where creativity, generosity of spirit and curiosity are fostered. I work in education and this appeals to me strongly because I think these qualities are the ones that will provide succour not just to the individual but also to society more widely.
The other thing that I’ve begun to do is use Claude, and in particular, use it to bounce ideas around. I am using Claude increasingly to do private thinking, testing of ideas, testing of theories, testing of trajectories and possibilities, because it helps me prepare for conversations and discussions that are likely to be fraught, and I want to test and check that I’ve really considered all the angles. And in doing this, I’ve also found that I am doing more experimenting and exploration in my own private writing.
I was interested to see how using another LLM to explore some technical details for a piece of historical fiction, the AI was very keen to move beyond the nuts and bolts of my questions (how long would it take to travel XX km by sleigh, was there already snow lying in a particular place in Europe by mid-November) to move into the imaginative aspects of the story and almost try to take over the plotting and setting. I had a moment where I had a genuine sense of invasion, as though the model was trying to access my imagination. I think this means that I will almost certainly move away from writing personal or private things on the computer, and return to writing by hand.
'An individual is an imagined person: we are imagined by ourselves and by others and the gap between those two is often formative.' - This is such a great way of articulating it. We often imagine ourselves so differently to how other's imagine us, but we rarely inhabit both imaginings at the same time, and to do so is the space where we grow. I'm really worried about how AI is going to change human cognition, and what imagination and creativity may look like in the future, but I'm glad there still seem to be enough people willing to reach into that space between imaginings and build a better version of themselves.
Of course the future belongs to those who can imagine it. It always has. It's why the slow denigration and marginalization of the humanities, especially the arts, is proving so destructive. All those bright young people persuaded they HAD to study computer sciences, that engineering was the only security, have been hideously betrayed. Humanities falling off a cliff at US and UK universities turned them into anachronistic credentializing factories that have failed a whole generation. We are all born creative but industrialized education, together with a society increasingly convinced that economics can measure every aspect of success, has been a disaster.
Surely it will naturally come back for them? As AI becomes ‘better’ at producing answers, maybe competitive advantage shifts towards those able to ask better questions, something many organisations have been too busy trying to train out of their people.
I’m reminded of Bloom’s definition of Romanticism as the internalisation of quest-romance. Perhaps the danger for Brooks’s hypothetical ‘mental underclass’ is that they get all of the internalisation but none of the quest.
Between how we imagine ourselves and how others imagine us may be exactly what separates a novel from a model. A great book imagines you from the outside, the way a friend does, sometimes more accurately than you can manage yourself. Darwin got a self from Milton he could not have built alone. The machine runs the other direction, it takes what you hand it and returns it enlarged. If that's right, readers keep an advantage nobody lists, ongoing access to imaginations that are not their own.
A thought-provoking piece, and I wholeheartedly agree with your point. Imagination is critical to what it means to be human, for AI can't imagine but must be told. It would have been interesting to hear your thoughts on how people are afraid to imagine, perhaps because imagination requires a sense of hope and bravery. There is an element of risk to imagining a better life. Then your imagination starts nudging you to do better and be better. Maybe that scares people. Wondered, as well, if you could provide clarity on the sentence ' the rise of the novel was the rise of [...] the adaptation of the old romance to the new idea of individualism'. I'm trying to conceptualise what you mean and its relevance. Looking forward to reading more of your essays!
In some ways, this division has already happened. Many social, sports and hobby clubs suffer reduced numbers and are aging for example. Our government and the BBC have yet to formalise the inactive class nouns, but use emollient words to indicate that it is all the fault of the active (usually described in the pejorative form).
I choked on that second paragraph also, but Henry is QUOTING David Brooks. Whose mental perambulations struck me as a sort of next-level white man’s burden.
Could we have a healthy culture, good libraries, and good schools? A lot of this “burden“ of whatever color or race always falls on parents, and these goals should be available if not universally shared.
Thank goodness for Substack, where human beings listen to each other's imaginings.
I think you are probably on the right track. The extent to which our media saturation has enriched our ability to imagine versus taken the place of our imagination and left our imaginative capacities atrophied is probably an area to explore.
I know many younger people who engage in a neurotic ambivalence toward their own lives and futures because they don’t know to begin to decide what they want and they can’t bear to actually limit their horizons by choosing something for the thought that they may be wrong.
They oscillate between various authorities who they think give them an answer, but it never “takes” and they move on to the next one, always unable to initiate action which could be the beginning of forward motion for them. Any time which they would have used to build their ability to imagine themselves as something and how to become that something became time for doing what other people told them to do and listening to people tell them what they should want and be.
You could easily predict how these people will make use of LLMs and be correct. They have constant ephemeral brushes with things they think can tell them the right answer and never with the actual process of cultivating the inner resources for deciding for themselves.
A couple of things have happened to me since April. First, I came across Meg Wheatley and her writing about leadership. Although my British scepticism kicks in at certain points when reading her work, I do respond to certain perceptions and stances she presents, e.g. the need for leaders to focus on creating islands of sanity, where creativity, generosity of spirit and curiosity are fostered. I work in education and this appeals to me strongly because I think these qualities are the ones that will provide succour not just to the individual but also to society more widely.
The other thing that I’ve begun to do is use Claude, and in particular, use it to bounce ideas around. I am using Claude increasingly to do private thinking, testing of ideas, testing of theories, testing of trajectories and possibilities, because it helps me prepare for conversations and discussions that are likely to be fraught, and I want to test and check that I’ve really considered all the angles. And in doing this, I’ve also found that I am doing more experimenting and exploration in my own private writing.
I was interested to see how using another LLM to explore some technical details for a piece of historical fiction, the AI was very keen to move beyond the nuts and bolts of my questions (how long would it take to travel XX km by sleigh, was there already snow lying in a particular place in Europe by mid-November) to move into the imaginative aspects of the story and almost try to take over the plotting and setting. I had a moment where I had a genuine sense of invasion, as though the model was trying to access my imagination. I think this means that I will almost certainly move away from writing personal or private things on the computer, and return to writing by hand.
'An individual is an imagined person: we are imagined by ourselves and by others and the gap between those two is often formative.' - This is such a great way of articulating it. We often imagine ourselves so differently to how other's imagine us, but we rarely inhabit both imaginings at the same time, and to do so is the space where we grow. I'm really worried about how AI is going to change human cognition, and what imagination and creativity may look like in the future, but I'm glad there still seem to be enough people willing to reach into that space between imaginings and build a better version of themselves.
Another insightful post. Thank you.
I wrote something similar many months ago: https://amardashehu.substack.com/p/tell-me-your-story-representation
thanks very interesting
Of course the future belongs to those who can imagine it. It always has. It's why the slow denigration and marginalization of the humanities, especially the arts, is proving so destructive. All those bright young people persuaded they HAD to study computer sciences, that engineering was the only security, have been hideously betrayed. Humanities falling off a cliff at US and UK universities turned them into anachronistic credentializing factories that have failed a whole generation. We are all born creative but industrialized education, together with a society increasingly convinced that economics can measure every aspect of success, has been a disaster.
Surely it will naturally come back for them? As AI becomes ‘better’ at producing answers, maybe competitive advantage shifts towards those able to ask better questions, something many organisations have been too busy trying to train out of their people.
The Never-ending David Pangloss Brooks....
I’m reminded of Bloom’s definition of Romanticism as the internalisation of quest-romance. Perhaps the danger for Brooks’s hypothetical ‘mental underclass’ is that they get all of the internalisation but none of the quest.
Between how we imagine ourselves and how others imagine us may be exactly what separates a novel from a model. A great book imagines you from the outside, the way a friend does, sometimes more accurately than you can manage yourself. Darwin got a self from Milton he could not have built alone. The machine runs the other direction, it takes what you hand it and returns it enlarged. If that's right, readers keep an advantage nobody lists, ongoing access to imaginations that are not their own.
A thought-provoking piece, and I wholeheartedly agree with your point. Imagination is critical to what it means to be human, for AI can't imagine but must be told. It would have been interesting to hear your thoughts on how people are afraid to imagine, perhaps because imagination requires a sense of hope and bravery. There is an element of risk to imagining a better life. Then your imagination starts nudging you to do better and be better. Maybe that scares people. Wondered, as well, if you could provide clarity on the sentence ' the rise of the novel was the rise of [...] the adaptation of the old romance to the new idea of individualism'. I'm trying to conceptualise what you mean and its relevance. Looking forward to reading more of your essays!
In some ways, this division has already happened. Many social, sports and hobby clubs suffer reduced numbers and are aging for example. Our government and the BBC have yet to formalise the inactive class nouns, but use emollient words to indicate that it is all the fault of the active (usually described in the pejorative form).
Who said trained? I don’t think I did
yeah, I didn't say that!
I choked on that second paragraph also, but Henry is QUOTING David Brooks. Whose mental perambulations struck me as a sort of next-level white man’s burden.
Could we have a healthy culture, good libraries, and good schools? A lot of this “burden“ of whatever color or race always falls on parents, and these goals should be available if not universally shared.
Yeah if anything I am offering quite another way of thinking about it!
Still very problematic. The person offering the citation still has the responsibility otherwise don’t.
Mr Heape??‽!!
Responsibility for what‽ It's an indented offset QUOTE BLOCK following this sentence: "David Brooks writes about AI and cognitive polarisation."
lol ok