Seven Perspectives on 'the Augmented Imagination Project'

6. Augmentation and Modest Transhumanism

According to the transhumanist FAQ (as quoted by Max More in The Transhumanist Reader) transhumanism is:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

One 'psychological capacity' whose capacity for enhancement or 'augmentation' has been significantly underexplored by transhumanists is the imagination. Indeed at first sight it might seem that the very idea is nonsensical: the imagination is often thought of as having a certain kind of infinite power, whereby anything and everything can be imagined - and it is hard to improve on infinity.

A little reflection, however, reveals that the human imagination is far from infinite. It is a staple of the psychology of imagination that our imaginations are limited by our own past experience: although our imaginations extend to implications or permutations of things we have experienced, there is a point beyond which an object, situation, or feeling is literally unimaginable (or at least not properly imaginable) for a given person.

Thus there is a straightforward sense in which a particular person's imagination can be augmented: by increasing the range of things that person is able to imagine (the word 'augment' derives from the latin augmentare 'to increase'). However, transhumanists may feel that this sense of augmentation is not really what they have in mind. After all, in this sense, people's imaginations are augmented on a daily basis, as they acquire new experiences.

However it would be incorrect to conclude that this is not an area where technology can play a significant role. Arguably, it has always been part of the value of art in general, and literature and poetry in particular, that they serve as an efficient means of augmenting the imagination in this sense: reading a novel about a life of poverty, for instance, could be seen as a kind of surrogate experience of such poverty, enabling the reader to imagine more fully something they would not otherwise be able to imagine, without the disadvantages of actually living in poverty.

Primitive forms of art and literature are among the earliest of mankind's technological developments, and the technology of art has continued to advance through the centuries, with the development of different forms of writing, and in the visual arts new media such as oil paint, or film. The latter technology has arguably had an important impact on our ability to visually imagine things, enabling us to visualise for example, gunfights and bodily injuries where lack of personal experience would otherwise have held our imaginations back. As virtual reality technologies develop over the next century, we can expect further augmentations of this sort in our perceptual imaginations.

So far this discussion has gravitated, as discussions of imagination often do, to what is perhaps the most obvious and visceral aspect of the imagination: the ability to imagine visual or other sensory experiences, or more broadly what it is like perceptually and emotionally, to be in certain situations. However another important aspect of the imagination is the power of linguistic invention and innovation involved in the composition of poetry, and arguably in thinking more generally. Is there any sense in which this aspect of the imagination is susceptible to technological augmentation?

One thing we can say with reasonable safety is that it would be fair to call anything that improved a person's ability to write good poetry an augmentation (there is apparently a conceptual connection between linguistic imagination and poetry). This returns us to a similar situation to that encountered earlier in the case of the perceptual imagination, for there are any number of ways of improving one's ability to write good poetry that do not appear to involve technology: going to poetry classes, improving one's vocabulary, and above all reading and writing poetry. And as before, it is not as straightforward as it might seem to write off some of these methods as non-technological. For a start the very possibility of reading and writing poems can be seen as dependent on the technology of writing. And there has been much discussion among poets of the impact on the quality of poetry of technologes such as the typewriter (which supposedly shaped the poetry of modernist writers such as William Carlos Wiliams) and more recently the word processor and the world wide web.

Another interesting technological development to consider in this context is that of the dictionary and the thesaurus. In the case of the thesaurus in particular, we have an example of an external database of words (produced using significant modern technologies such as book production or the world wide web) being used to help the poet arrive at the most appropriate word for a line of poetry, and thus augmenting an ability - that of choosing one's words - which might be seen as fundamental to the exercise of the poetic imagination.  Though some poets would deny using these technologies during the process the poetic composition, almost all poet would accept the use of such tools as essential to developing one's skills as a poet.

The Augmented Imagination Project can be seen as an augmentation of the same realistic and incremental kind. It arguably offers a sort of complementary augmentation to the thesaurus, one not realisable prior to the development of computers. Instead of providing words with closely related meanings, it uses random number generators to provide groups of words with minimal semantic connections. Instead of providing possible replacements for a given word, it can be used to provide an unexpected complement, with hitherto unnoticed metaphorical connections and affinities. Both technologies disrupt the natural flow of the association of ideas, redirecting the flow towards the best, the most appropriate, the most poetic word. In some cases this word will be one that the poet could have come up with anyway, given enough time; in many cases it is one the poet would never have arrived at unassisted. In the second case we can justly say that the technology has increased the scope of - or augmented - the poet's linguistic imagination.

Some transhumanist readers may be unimpressed: anything on a par with the humble thesaurus, they might think, can hardly be considered in the spirit of the grand transhumanist vision of a world transformed by the likes of quantum computing and nanotechnology. But perhaps what is needed is precisely such relatively uninspiring, and correspondingly solid, examples of technological augmentation, to bring the otherwise worryingly ambitious transhumanist ideal down to earth.

The Augmented Imagination Project is thus perhaps in the spirit of the kind of transhumanism expressed by Andy Clark in his contribution to The Transhumanist Reader:

There is simply nothing new about human enhancement. Ever since the dawn of language and self-conscious thought, the human species has been engaged in a unique "natural experiment" in progressive niche construction (see Sterelny 2003). We engineer our own learning environments so as to create artificial developmental cocoons that impact our acquired capacities of thought and reason. Those enhanced minds then design new cognitive niches that train new generations of minds, and so on, in an empowering spiral of co-evolving complexity. The result is that, as Herbert Simon is reputed to have said, "most human intelligence is artificial intelligence anyway." Technologies of human cognitive enhancement are just one more step along this ancient path.