Topics in Cognitive Science and Philosophy

The imagination in the context of philosophy and cognitive science has been extensively tied to competing and complementary notions of human nature. As such, the literature points to two cases in which the imagination is empirically and theoretically examined: humans and machines. Artificial intelligence recombines vast datasets to generate outputs, while humans draw on sensory input and memory to perform similar tasks. These parallels raise philosophical questions about the uniqueness and mechanism of imagination. The present podcast episode seeks to ground these questions in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, examining how his account of the imagination interacts with contemporary debates and determining if imagination can be understood as a distinctly human faculty.Key Takeaways:Our guest speaker, Seth Goldwasser, a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami, defines imagination as a “skillful act” of constructing representations where the agent selects the content. He emphasizes th role of these cognitive processes as active and versatile such as with counterfactual reasoning, “mind reading,” and engagement with fiction.Imagination plays a more significant role in our cognitive lives than often recognized, proposing it should be considered a source of knowledge alongside perception, memory, inference, and testimony.The implications of this understanding of imagination for artificial intelligence and creativity, suggesting that current AI models lack the agency and environmental interaction necessary for true imagination.