is imaginative intelligence the spark of life?

My creative collaborator James Navé and I have been having lots of conversations about artificial intelligence recently, and I'm fascinated by the different mental model it gives us about how all intelligences work: artificial and natural. Last week, I wrote about imaginative intelligence: what it is and how it works, at least in my understanding of it. (Read that piece here.) This week I'm pushing the boat out further.

You're going to have to forgive me, because I'm not a neuroscientist or a physiologist or an engineer or a programmer. You're reading the musings of a dilettante, someone who knows a little bit about quite a lot of things, which is the major benefit of being a nonfiction book editor. But needs must when the devil drives! I've always liked that phrase though I've never been entirely sure what it means. Right now, my devil is this idea that I'm entirely unqualified to put forth, and maybe that's not a bad thing. The devil has gotten a bad rap! What did he do but stand up to God's fascism?

OK, I'm not a theologian either. That's just one interpretation of one story among many, which belongs to one religion among many. I tend to be on the side of the rebels.

Anyway, here goes. In the religious age, we believed our minds and bodies worked by means of unseen forces: the devil, the voice of God, the workings of demons and saints. These forces took possession of us. They made people do evil things or good things. They made people crazy. They made you get sick—by the agency of other immaterial forces like humors and miasmas— and then, if you prayed correctly and destiny allowed it, made you get well.

Then came the mechanical age. Pistons and cogs and gears were driving looms, factories, locomotives. Some first mover set it all in motion (by pressing a pedal, creating steam, or plugging in electricity), and A moved B which moved C which moved D, etc. We applied this model to our bodies. We learned that the heart drives the circulation of the blood, that germs and genes cause disease. This picture of cause and effect was logical. It was scientific. It could explain the physical universe. It could explain our bodies. It could explain our minds.

Except it couldn't. That's a shock we're still trying to process.

So here we are in the digital age. Those of us who aren't digital natives find it frustrating that computers aren't mechanical. When they go wrong, it's impossible to tell what happened and fix them like we'd fix a broken machine. They're inscrutable. A doesn't move B which moves C. There can be multiple inputs, each one making a binary choice which leads to an exponential branching out of possibilities, theoretically to infinity, in reality to the edge of the capacity of the processor.

You can diagram a factory, however complex. You cannot diagram zillions of exponential possibilities. So, we can't see how this works. There are no clear lines of cause and effect. It's frustrating, even enraging, because pretty soon most of us feel our rational minds coming up against the edge of their capacity. We tend to fear or hate things we don't understand. We say, this is just not natural!

But actually, isn't this a better model of our physical and mental intelligences? Despite all the mechanical models, our bodies remain inscrutable. Why do you get sick and I don't? Why do I have a screwy sacroiliac joint and you don't? Why is one of us a pessimist and the other an optimist, one of us an extrovert and the other an introvert? Human nature is not mechanical: people respond very differently to the same experience.

And what is imagination? What is intuition? I'd say they're basically the same intelligence running a different program. They're drawing on those zillions of pieces of information we've taken in throughout our lives, vastly more than our consciousness can comprehend. One program, creativity, asks this intelligence to make connections. The other, intuition, asks it to make judgments. Both process at digital speed, while our poor, limited consciousness is still laboring away at mechanical speed, trying to compose a logical chain of rational thought.

I think emotions are the output of the same intelligence. They're not random; they're just being processed far faster, and with far more input and far more stored information, than we can understand.

One of our regular Prompt of the Week writers, Dr. Vanessa Villafane, brought up Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error last week. (Thank you, Vanessa.) I read it decades ago and fortunately it's still on my shelf so I can read it again, because the inadequate memory bank of my conscious mind has forgotten most of it—though I'd like to think that this decades-old input is contributing to the output of my imaginative intelligence, right now.

What is Descartes' error? "Cogito ergo sum." I think therefore I am. No, says Damasio: I feel therefore I think. Or maybe even, I am therefore I feel therefore I think. Modern humanity followed Descartes' error like sheep, privileging our fabulously human rational mind. After all, something has to differentiate us from animals!

Maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't. Bears seem to enjoy sunsets. Dogs seem to dream. New idea, which hit me just now: another term for imaginative intelligence might be the spark of life.

The cover image is an engraving by Gustave Doré, for Milton’s Paradise Lost. Poor Satan.