Catching bigger fish

Imagination in the age of AI

“A wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect.”
— George MacDonald, The Imagination, and Other Essays.

“If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper … The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”
— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish.

We see Brad Pitt’s pixellated form in a high-energy kung fu fight with a simulated Tom Cruise, and both of them, excommunicated from those images of themselves, move like much younger men now that they’ve been squeezed through a digital pattern-recognition system. This sorcery is the result of a simple prompt and machine-driven plagiarism, not months of planning, careful choreography, lighting, filming, editing, and the like.

Another prompt has DC and Marvel characters fighting each other, and another creates the impression that an unusually large flock of white doves has exploded like a bomb into a supermarket, wreaking havoc on the shelves. A chaos dragon rips up some non-place that could be Tokyo or Manhattan, but isn’t. A giant, cracked, porcelain dolphin floats through a ruined city that could be Boston or London, but isn’t. Roman soldiers wage war against an alien starship. A man holds a bouquet of flaming flowers out for a woman who looks dead inside. Unfortunately, there’s always more where these pixellated nothings came from.

I saw an artist post online this week about how fear alone keeps creative people from using these new tools — a very silly thing to say. There are myriad reasons for not jumping onto this particular technological bandwagon. Many artists and creatives sense the trouble with entering Promptville, and they do resist, but few will take the time to say why. One obvious reason is the sheer volume of kitsch nonsense being pumped into the digisphere and our eyeballs. Do we really need more of that? Even at its most technically sophisticated, it’s still slop.

Any of us might have guessed a few years ago that seeing these snippet-ideas would be fun or at least mildly interesting, but it’s like watching paint dry because the novelty wears off so quickly. When you look deeper, it becomes evident that AI encourages only one type or level of imaginative thinking, and this, largely at the expense of deep imagining. The imagination is often reduced to throwing things haphazardly together to make something that’ll tickle the mind for a moment. It’s too easily equated with the mere act of generating an odd combination, and this is by no means the whole story.

Allow me to distinguish three kinds of imagination. Here, I’m drawing mainly from two thinkers, namely Johann Nicolaus Tetens, who wrote about the imagination (and other things) in his 1777 book, which in English has the title Philosophical Essays on Human Nature and Its Development, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote about the imagination (and other things) in his 1817 book Biographia Literaria. The final synthesis is not meant to be entirely exact or scholarly. Still, I hope it’ll be useful for showing how AI tends to work against the really meaningful imaginative possibilities, despite appearances to the contrary.

1. Primary imagination.

The first level of imagination, called primary imagination by Coleridge, is the power of perception and of repeating perception. Our apprehension or grasping power involves experiencing sensations, retaining their traces, and forming basic images in the mind. It would be a sin, however, to reduce imagination to the mere replication of sensory surfaces. Sensory processes are the windows into the self, not the house.

When you see the face of someone you love, what goes on in your head is far richer and deeper than just mere surface recognition and representation. You’re not merely identifying them but participating in their real, embodied-yet-spiritual identity. Your perception grasps a moment of apprehension as one of many unfolding manifolds of manifestation. The person before you is, I need hardly say, quite miraculous: a real presence in this world, with amazing hidden and revealed dimensions. Perception tends to linger between memory and anticipation, and, because of this, it does not just give you a mere abstract map; rather, it places you into contact with reality.

It is undeniably astonishing that we can translate the given well into a representational form, and I’ll say more on this in a moment, but this is a delicate operation. Perception is not just given but trained. You could even say it is earned. We’re all prone to letting our judgments and preconceptions distance us from the perceptual world. But it seems fairly straightforward to suggest that we should not downplay this profound capacity we have to receive the world through our senses and to embrace the unfolding of being before and within and through us.

Coleridge suggests that primary imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” This theological twist in the usual way of understanding our perceptual ability is wondrous: a reminder that imagination ought to remain bound up in metaphysical and ethical reality. To perceive rightly, which involves a range of mental activities like synthesising and mirroring, is to participate in God. This doesn’t mean we ever have a complete picture. Nevertheless, by mindfully engaging with the world, we are capable of adopting various perceptual standpoints, as we allow what is beyond us to become part of us, even as we become a part of it. And yes, allowing is fundamental to imagining as an active receptivity, or active passivity. It is non-action, in Daoist-speak. It’s not misleading to say that this primary imagination, at its best, is contemplation. It receives being as a gift.

Before moving on, let me just add this: primary imagination, this real contact with and mediation of the real, ought to be served by all other kinds of imagining. If all other kinds of imagining are merely forms of escape, we’re encouraging a loss of contact with reality. In fact, this is primarily why I find the mode of imagining encouraged by AI-prompting bothersome. It’s not about deepening us or improving our capacity to perceive rightly by drawing us into a richer connection with the perceptual realm. Rather, it’s throwing us into a state of perpetual reality-denial, moving us further into the simulacral order.

2. Secondary imagination.

The second order of imagination is an echo of the first. Even supposedly creative people tend not to bother as much as they should with this level of imagination, although it is as vital and as important as the first. Secondary imagination works in concert with conscious will, even if will is not entirely in charge (if you add too much will to the mix, creativity will suffer, as I get to below). Secondary imagination has agency in the sense that it submits to the will’s desire to pay sufficient attention to allow the imagination to do its thing. How does it work?

Coleridge explains as follows: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” There’s a lot I could unpack even in this brief quotation, but the basic idea is that the secondary imagination, being very lively in character, will take apart what’s been gathered from perceptual givens to refashion things into a new whole. This is never at the expense of the imaginative whole but contributes to it. There is a definite ‘representational’ dimension to this, as an echo of primary imagination’s ‘repetitions’, but this is never divorced from the deeper sense of the whole.

This level of imagination is profoundly interpretive. Without it, the world would make less sense. And, in fact, people whose secondary imagination is underdeveloped seem to be perpetually confused by the world around them. Their meaning-finding and meaning-making capacities are stunted or malformed. They slip and slide like rookie roller-skaters along the far-too-slippery surface of things, unable to get a grip on things. In contrast, those with a fairly well-developed secondary imagination are most capable of building interpretive connections and of generating new insights. When CS Lewis refers to imagination as the “organ of meaning,” he’s emphasising secondary imagination, although as always intertwined with primary imagination.

The experience of secondary imagination is pretty interesting. It can take a long time contemplating things before an insight strikes. It can take years of wrestling with texts and contexts and problems and other existential perplexities before secondary imagination spits out some novel profundity, an insight that grasps the meaning of things in a way that surprises and deepens our sense of the world. I know this to be true even with my academic work: it took me nearly five years after writing my first book on Chesterton, based on a new insight, to come up with another decent insight to base a second book on. And, as this example suggests, what is ‘novel’ here is not a mere novelty but something that renews and restores to us a sense of primary contact and primary imagination, and, ultimately, contact with reality.

There’s a tendency out there to attribute secondary imagination only to people in the creative arts: poets, writers, musicians, and the like. But many people are masters of secondary imagination in other domains. In fact, this level of imagination, which gives rise to a coherent synthesis, is really brilliant for so much that happens in life. I mention this because people tend to assume that the imagination is reserved only for the wacky, weird, and outlandish. When someone types a prompt into an AI asking for a video of a frog that gradually inflates until it bursts to unleash an unwelcome cloud of glitter into the air, they might think they are being very creative. But there is no real meaning in such an image, and no real insight. Jane Austen’s more realistic fiction is far more creative than any fantastical Tim Burton film, despite the latter’s apparent appeals to the usual way the imagination is understood. I say this not to disparage the fantastical, per se. Tolkien is, to my mind, equal to Austen in terms of imaginative power and rightly remains the gold standard for fantasy fiction. Still, the clichéd view is that the fantastical is more imaginative than the realistic. This is something that may well be attributable to the current reign, in our time, of the third and weakest and worst kind of imagination.

3. Fancy.

For Coleridge, fancy is the lowest form of the imagination. Fancy does not play with the depths and intricacies, nuances and perplexities of first and secondary imagination. It deals instead, via the overreach of the will, in “fixites and definites”. “The Fancy,” writes Coleridge, “is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” This is a profound observation. While imagination, in its first and second modes, is intertwined with a whole world of meaning, fancy is unworlded and often contributes to further unworlding. It is divorced from contextual reality and removed from personal experience. It may well be removed from any personal insight, although insights gathered through secondary imagination may sometimes inspire what fancy conjures.

I remember a little book I had as a kid that kept me entertained for at least a few minutes. It was a flip-book you used to mix and match the head, body, and feet (or tail) of different animals. Through endless combinations, you could come up with a creature with one head, a different body, and different legs (or tail). A recent equivalent of this (because I can’t find that original book) is Tony Meeuwissen’s Remarkable Animals: Mix & Match to Create 1000 Crazy Creatures. This is ‘Lego-like’ creativity. Fancy receives all its materials in ready-made form, and mere combination or association is good enough to generate something ‘creative.’ Iain McGilchrist says this is the kind of ‘creativity’ or imagining the left-hemisphere of the brain generates (and that’s not a compliment): fun, diverting, perhaps, but, in the long run, not especially meaningful.

For Coleridge, fancy is mechanical. Bits and pieces get rearranged and repositioned, and no contact with reality, and also no contact with God, is possible through it. Here, imagination is a conscious and conspicuous act of drawing together different things in new ways. Tetens uses the image of Pegasus as an example of this kind of imagination. The mind provides the image of a horse with wings, even without ever having seen a real horse with wings. What is significant here is that it’s pretty easy to spot the ‘stitching’ together of wings and horse that makes the imaginative figure of Pegasus possible. We can, in a sense, see the seams. Coleridge says fancy is the “ape” of creativity and imagination, “and too often the counterfeit and adulterer of our memory.” He has a point. Now, as we see one pointless novelty image after another, his critique is more relevant than ever.

But, look, I don’t want to be cruel or unrealistic. I know what kind of world we live in. Not everyone can operate at full imaginative force all the time. Everyone, including every creative person at the height of his or her powers, is going to need to rely on fancy from time to time. Creative people have deadlines like everyone else. What I see, however, in movie sequel upon formulaic sequel, in heroes-journey-replication, in story-telling-by-numbers, in pastiche upon collage upon AI-prompt-formulas based on the most average stuff, is an absolute onslaught of fancy — a veritable flood of the most meaningless kind of imagining. And so much of it is unnecessary — just so much bad packaging for the simulacrum, destined for no place and no time and no real meaning. It’s fine to have something whimsical and diverting to play with now and then. A little bit of surface is fine. But man does not live by surface alone, and we’re already, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, drowning in surfaces. My hunch is, this is likely to worsen the current crisis of meaning. Fancy de-means.

Conclusion.

So how do we recover the depths? In a word, the answer is contemplation. But there is more to be said. “For creativity to succeed,” writes McGilchrist in his magnificent book The Matter With Things, “there needs to be a breadth of vision; the capacity to forge distant links; flexibility rather than rigidity; a willingness to respond to a changed or changing context; as well as tolerance of ambiguity and of knowledge that is, at least at the outset, inherently imprecise.” Deep creativity makes use of the full breadth of our perceptual and imaginative powers, allowing for a certain porosity between the various rooms of the mind while seeking an answer to a question, or while questioning so many incomplete answers. Deep imagining happens when we take the time to let the deeper parts of ourselves speak, when we listen, really listen. Time. Listening. Again: contemplation.

Passivity and activity work together, in the between of being, to look for ways to unify what seems disparate, to generate tensions that inspire further mindfulness and to deeper perceptual engagement. Creativity is metaxic or betweenish, and it engages with the imagination to encourage a rich relational dynamism between people and meaning while remaining true to the tensions of life. Imagination is not removed from real life; it is, rather, a kind of wondrous and wounded wakefulness to it.

Without imagination, in fact, truth is inaccessible to us. In other words, imagination is at the heart of all approaches to truth. This much should be clear from the way I’ve articulated the first two types of imagination above: primary and secondary. These modes of imagining require what in creativity studies has often been referred to as a process of preparation, incubation, and illumination, although in practice it is hardly ever linear and tends to be far from neat. In The Prelude (1850), the poet Wordsworth — what a name for a poet! — describes how the mind “aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves” and then waits to receive the necessary insight to proceed to articulate what has been discovered. Creative people know that every imaginative effort requires exploring, trying, waiting, relaxing, failing, and repeating this process until it is met with success.

Success is not, as this suggests, the most immediate and seemingly impressive calculation of a result by an AI based on a prompt. Success is not kitsch instant gratification. Success means making meaningful connections and arriving at insight, whether humourous or serious. Success means a deeper relational connection. It is an experience of meaning and not a mere dopamine kick from having had something in the world respond to an input. The very opposite of meaningful imagining, which is evident as fancy starts to rule out the possibility of primary and secondary imagining, is utter randomness. Fancy, taken alone, belittles our imaginative powers by reducing them to the thoughtless process of generating a mere torrent of trivialities and banalities. Fancy is for mindless consumption.

Anyone can come up with random ideas devoid of meaning; now, many have permission to do just that, without ever having to contend with what genuine creativity demands of them. I can only hope that this tiny taste of shallow imaginings might inspire people to want to go deeper, although I’m doubtful it will. What’s deeper, however, and by this I mean the arrival at concealed connexions or the discovery of prophetic wisdom, is more elusive, more time-consuming, and, I would say, more human, more incarnate. What’s better, imaginatively speaking, is not the surface of things, but the heart — the centrepoint of the mediation of contact with reality. What’s needed is being reconciled through the intimate to the Ultimate, even in the midst of this often wild and messy life. And imagination, operating at its thoughtful best in us and in others, helps to point the way.