TEDxCarletonU 2010 - Jim Davies - The Science of Imagination

[@Mavandor]

It seems to me that Dr Davies is presenting a constricted concept of imagination which can be taught to computers. Fundamentally, this entire model discounts the fact that humans are able to go past the aggregation of what past perspectives have to offer. In fact, Dr Davies' "sky vs. sky on a computer screen" is a perfect example of how the model completely ignores the boundary-pressing nature of imaginative novelty. What if that sky is on a computer screen, and the sky IS the computer screen?

[@ytjimmyd]

Certainly the model being described in this talk cannot do justice to the full capacities of human imagination! However, the imagination can only generate things from memory, or recombinations of them. That is not to say that imagination cannot come up with astounding new things, only that these new things are, in some sense, collages of previous concepts and memories. Thanks for watching!

[@quendelf]

Has there been any specific study on how specific prompts impact imagination? For example how writing style impacts imagined imagery? I suspect not, as we are still so limited in studying imagination. But perhaps if people with similar intelligence and similar backgrounds were asked to read text, then describe what they saw in their minds?

[@giovanni02]

hey, this is interesting :) are you still interested in talking about that?

[@Cakatarn1]

interesting....i wonder what the study of imagination is called. Imaginology? you can't really make laws to govern imagination as they would be different for everyone. you can only make models the people fit into.

[@TheBaba1920]

it's crazy cause the iPhone now can pinpoint categories of photos based on objects the owner wishes to identify. like you can search furniture or hat

[@bruidbarrett]

This brother would lose it if he saw Midjourney today

[@eeMJaii]

INteresting.

[@RaymondAubin]

“We imagine good motion to be left to right in our visual field. That’s actually in our culture and in cultures where people write in the other direction, it’s the opposite.” This is a widespread view, but I’m sceptical about it as seen from the point of view of art. As an artist, I see no difference in the composition of works created by people writing from left to right and from right to left. Let’s go back to embodied cognition. Here is a hypothesis. In a 2D artwork, the plane acts as a field (a concept borrowed from physics). On the vertical axis, because of the sense of gravity within our body, shapes at the top appear to carry more “potential energy.” On the horizontal axis, It’s the shapes on the left which appear to carry more energy. Why? Because shapes on the left of the visual field are primarily decoded by our right brain which specializes in such tasks (nothing to do with culture). So, in a 2D artwork, shapes seem to “fall” toward the bottom right corner of the plane. Any artist will tell you that. This is also described in “Visual Thinking” by Rudolf Arnheim.

[@oruga101]

I wonder if the robots will imagine a world without humans...

[@zaveli3226]

But how do you make your imagination to work immediately we want what we want right now tomorrow can be too late?

[@Zoza15]

A robot cannot imagine pictures or visual.. Cause it has no brain to process information naturally to generate any imagination.. A Robot is merely a responding A.I constandly gifted in programming..

[@ytjimmyd]

There are many AI programs that imagine pictures and visual scenes. My lab's software makes just one of them.

[@serioush]

wtf are you on mslaboda? its a basic breakdown of the human mind to fit a model used for AI.

[@terracraft2564]

Met him irl

[@brunoconte406]

Why do we need computers to imagine things we humans already do?

[@ytjimmyd]

To understand how humans do it. Why do scientists make hurricane simulations when we already have hurricanes? Or any computer simulations at all? By computer modeling them, and testing their behavior against what we see in reality, we refine our theories.