Abstract
Computational imagination (CI) conceives imagination as an agent’s simulated sensorimotor interaction with the environment in the absence of sensory feedback, predicting consequences based on this interaction (Marques and Holland in Neurocomputing 72:743–759, 2009). Its bedrock is the simulation hypothesis whereby imagination resembles seeing or doing something in reality as both involve similar neural structures in the brain (Hesslow in Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):242–247, 2002). This paper raises two-forked doubts: (1) neural-level equivalence is escalated to make phenomenological equivalence. Even at an abstract level, many imagined and real actions turn out to be dissimilar. More so, some imagined actions have no corresponding real actions and vice versa, even though neural regions involved in imaginings and real action-perception are the same (Sect. 1). (2) At the implementation level, the hypothesis presents a mutually exclusive view of imagination and perception whereby imagination functions in the absence of the sensory feedback and is action based. Both these issues are contested here: Neither imagination functions in the absence of perception nor all forms of imaginings are action based; it is, rather, about conceiving possibilities which emerge during the perceptual stage itself (Sect. 2). For the modal aspect to arise, it is submitted that an integrative framework is required which Kant can provide for whom imagination is an indispensable part of perception. Kant’s views on concept-formation are presented here to illustrate this aspect (Sect. 3). The Paper is concluded with emphasizing the relevance of Kant’s views to the problems identified in the two sections.
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Notes
Kant gives a similar hint at A6/B3: ‘certain cognitions even abandon the field of all possible experience… beyond all bounds of experience through concepts to which no corresponding object at all can be given in experience’ Kant, however, considered these cognitions to be a priori. For our purposes, it is the inclusion of concepts in these cognitions that allow them to move beyond experience. We would see in Sect. 3, how in acquiring empirical concepts Kant includes the modal aspect of imagination.
Kant’s refers to ‘psychologists’ as practitioners of empirical psychology. Psychology as a science is held to be in making during Kant’s days as he and his contemporaries speculated over future prospects of empirical and rational psychology (Hatfield 1992). I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer for raising this question. All references in standard [A/B] format from Critique of Pure Reason translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. See Kant (1781).
Manifold is meaningless flux of sensible representations in space-time form given by intuition: messy and unsystematic requiring order. This ordering is done by imagination when it organizes that manifold and brings it under the rules laid down by the understanding—a function called synthesis, categories being those rules.
Of late, Nanay (2010) emphasized imagination’s reproductive role, in terms of imaging, in amodal completion. Non-visible features of objects are visualized by us during perception.
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Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to Prof. Siby George, IIT Bombay, for devoting his time to the painstaking proofreading of this paper. I am also indebted to the editorial team of the Journal AI and Society for the same.
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Kaur, G.D. Kant and the simulation hypothesis. AI & Soc 30, 183–192 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-013-0495-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-013-0495-6