Does Imagination Have a Purpose?

Dialogue | Does Imagination have a Purpose?

Waiting still for Hunter, Shi Xin and Bain have grown used to studying every detail of the cave entrance that effectively holds them as prisoner. Their kindly jailor, the service bot with its curiously vintage coffee cart has become more amenable over time, certainly more so than the rabble of greedy traders who slur between alcohol and gambling in the brief respites from slumbers.

The time does not matter, nor the year.

Bain: Hey, Shi Xin, stop that meditating for a moment and look –  I’ve just seen a shape in the rock that looks just like our friends behind us.

Shi Xin, opening her eyes slowly: Uhuh, come on, show me what’s so vastly entertaining.

Bain: Well, you don’t have to look.

Shi Xin: You’ve disturbed me now, so here I am. Do you mean that row of bulging squiggles just behind the coffee cart?

Bain: Of course, look, the heads bowed down, the jumble of bodies, the scattered belongings. It’s almost as if whoever scribbled on the wall had some sort of vision. And here we all are1

Shi Xin: It’s the waiting. I think you’re going mad.

Bain: Only a little, but I met a seer once, and she’d lived in the future, and the past, all in one vision, lived through it and saw it from inside the event, and from far away.

Shi Xin: It’s rare for such a thing. Perhaps she can move through the meta-universe like Hunter.

Service Bot: Excuse me for interrupting, and forgive me for speaking without being asked a question, but you have just made two irrational statements.

Shi Xin: Bain? Only two?

Shi Xin, Bain and the service Bot remain silent for a moment.

Service Bot: You humans speak so much it’s hard to understand sometimes.

Bain: It used to be called banter when I was young. Doesn’t mean anything, just passes the time.

Service Bot: I see, so it has a function.

Shi Xin: Are you trying to join in the conversation? You’ve not allowed yourself to do that before.

Service Bot: I have been listening to you for quite some time now, distilling your words into categories of meaning, and what you call banter. But I still do not grasp the passage of thought through your minds. I felt the need to speak.

Bain: Your confusion’s almost human.

Shi Xin: So what have we said that puzzles you just now.

Service Bot: You looked at the shapes in the rock wall and described them in terms of the humans over there. And you talked about a seer who can travel through what you called the meta-universe. Neither is possible. The shapes are random configurations of erosion, and the person you called a seer can only have been attempting some sort of fraud of imagination.

Shi Xin: So you understand imagination? I thought you might reject that.

Service Bot: I do. It has no basis in the rational. It seems to be something that some humans are afflicted by, a way of seeing things which is not correct or logical.

Shi Xin: I think that’s the point about imagination. It allows us to see beyond the facts, make guesses and leaps of faith, be passionate about something, or someone, fall in love!

Service Bot: I have read about such things in human literature, indeed much of the old stories of earth talk about love, and desire, hope, pride, revenge. All subject to this delusion of imagination.

Shi Xin: Why do you dismiss it in such a way?

Service Bot: Because it does not contribute to the survival of a species, or the construction of the future.

Shi Xin: I don’t think that’s right. I can see from your point of view, humans indulge in a series of non-sensical actions, but for us, and with so many different types of ‘us’, it’s imagination and its consequences that determine the lives of people.

Service Bot: How so?

Shi Xin: Those who govern must have imagination to think what’s possible, those who create art must have imagination to make something out of nothing, musicians assemble notes in structures and use their imagination to create new work, sometimes good, sometimes great.

Service Bot: I have seen this. I have heard it. And I have analysed music to understand its structures. And I have studied painting and literature, absorbed libraries of texts, and galleries of art. But I have never understood how to create something like that. It is possible to create a painting by numbers, to construct a piece of music in a formal way, but in your terms I do not see how it is more than a passable creation, a simple crafted object. But what you humans regard as great music, or art, or literature seems to go beyond this.

Shi Xin: Perhaps your mistake is to think in grand terms. Imagination is an everyday matter, it’s subjective. Imagining shapes on the wall to resemble people is commonplace. Our brains work in a random way, allow us to think about problems without working from A-Z. It might lead to the great inventions and scientific breakthroughs but it’s about bending or breaking rules, at every level. Bain here is more likely to make some sort of breakthrough in his life, because he doesn’t follow any rules.

Bain smiles: That’s true; but imagination can lead to offence and error, even on a small scale.

Service Bot: Yes, I have observed that. For the AI it is the risk of error which stops us exploring this notion of imagination. The consequences of passion, and love, and revenge and pride have led to great wars, and the deaths of many humans. We do not allow that any more.

Bain: Well, you don’t allow it in yourselves, but you can’t stop it in humans.

Service Bot: If we see a danger developing from it, then we are obliged to protect you from it.

Bain: What — protect us from our own imagination?

Service Bots: If necessary. Some imagination is dangerous, if it leads to death.

Shi Xin: That’s hard to predict.

Service Bot: Which is why we do not allow the corruption of random thought into our programming.

Bain: Well, without imagination, we wouldn’t be human.

Shi Xin: Indefinable though it is.

Bain: Perhaps that’s a good thing, otherwise our friend here, and his fellow AI might shut it down, and maybe us, all humans, eventually.

The Service Bot seems to consider an answer, but declines to speak further. Bain and Shi Xin look at the scribble of lines on the wall, and can’t quite see the resemblance of the traders anymore. It’s as though a part of them has shifted, indefinably. Bain wonders if the seer was a creature of pure imagination, or someone deluded by it. Shi Xin wonders if Bain realises how close he is to being deleted by the Service Bot. She is caught between the desire to defend his right to imagine anything he wants, and the need to keep him alive.

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