A post by Joseph G. Moore
I find myself in a Vermont snowstorm surrounded by a massive crowd of rowdy fans at a World Cup alpine ski race. The cheering is loud—very loud. So is the rock music, the excited public announcer, and the cowbells. Mikaela Shiffrin, the hometown favorite, is the very last competitor to come down the steep and icy slalom course. Mikaela skis beautifully—an amazing balance of daring, aggression and control. At the line, she beats the field by over a second, which is an eternity in alpine racing. Screeching stop, quick glimpse at her result on the big screen, and Mikaela throws her poles triumphantly in the air. The crowd is ecstatic and deafening. As am I: my eyes well up, a tingling “chills response” courses up the back of my neck, and I bellow inarticulately along with my new-found friends. As I watch teammates and coaches mob Mikaela, I’m overwhelmed with what can only be described as, well, euphoria.
Euphoria? Really? I’m mildly pleased, of course, that a local skier has brought notoriety to the hill. I suppose this matters a bit. The fact is, though, that I didn’t know Mikaela Shiffrin from Adam until I read about her in the race-day program. In fact, I don’t really understand, or care to understand alpine racing. I was there only to take in the local spectacle. Moreover, my “euphoria” lasts all of fifteen seconds, as my attention quickly shifts to beating the freezing crowd to the warm shuttle-bus that will take me back to my car. Not only is my euphoria strangely ephemeral, but I have no inclination to act on it by, say, trying to congratulate Mikaela or seek her autograph. I’d rather get to the bus.
Read MoreA post by Yunqing/Isaac Han
In this post, I discuss how we might use our social imaginings to advance social equality. Social imaginings are representations or reconstructions of an aspect of a society’s past, present, or future, e.g., class relations, inclusivity, event, an individual’s feelings and motivations (adapted from Medina 252). I focus here on social imaginings of the past that aim at past realities.[1] For example, when one imagines that there was actually no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. as part of a process of historical reconstruction one aims at reality (even if, in this case, one misses one’s aim), whereas when one entertains counterfactually the idea that there was no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. and then imagines how one might act in that alternate past, one is not aiming at reality. I focus on the former, reality-aiming imaginings (hereon just “social imaginings”) and discuss whether any such imaginings should be discouraged in social discourse.
Read MoreA post by Alex Fisher
Much recent work has explored how we learn through imagination, acquiring new attitudes in an epistemically justified manner. In other cases, however, imagination seems to infect our mental lives in a far less rational way.
Theatrical actors often describe how aspects of their character start to seep into their own personality as they get “stuck” in a role, experiencing “boundary blurring” or “character bleed”. Allen, a junior theatre major, admits:
You forget who you are sometimes. You start intermingling with this character and you lose yourself and you start doing things. […] I played a character who had a certain walk [and] I would walk around [that way] onstage. And I would be walking around [campus] and be doing the same thing. I would realize I'm doing that and having this bad attitude that this character has about everything I'm seeing. I think, “Whoa, I don't know if this has gone too far or not.” (Burgoyne, Poulin, and Rearden 1999, 162)
Isaac Butler reports experiencing similar as a budding actor in New York:
After performances, I would stare at a wall in my dorm room for hours trying to come back to normal. […] I hated the person I became during rehearsal as the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality, and I was not tough enough to manage the emotions my performance dug into. (Butler 2022, 15)
A similar phenomenon has been observed amongst virtual reality users. The “Proteus Effect” describes how individuals’ behaviour and attitudes conform to those of the avatar they play as (Yee and Bailenson 2007; 2009). Participants who controlled taller avatars in a virtual space behaved more confidently in a subsequent non-virtual negotiation task than those assigned shorter avatars, in line with the general behaviour of taller individuals. Participants who played an attractive avatar exhibited higher self-disclosure than those who played an unattractive avatar, just as attractive individuals tend to be more extroverted. Imaginatively adopting an identity in virtual reality influenced users’ actions even after it had been relinquished.
Read MoreA post by Nele Van de Mosselaer
Imagine the following situation: you open a door in a videogame. An in-game alert pops up with the message “Congratulations, you opened the door!” Immediately afterwards, the game – being apparently philosophically inclined – puts that message into question. A new pop-up alert clarifies that it is not really you, the player, who opened the door, but rather the player-character. Moreover, no door was opened. Rather, the action that took place was an input of a certain command on a controlling device. Someone moved the mouse around and clicked a button. Lastly, there was not even an actual door involved in this interaction, but merely a group of pixels, a computer-generated digital entity that is meant to evoke a door in your imagination. So, the game argues, you did not really open a door, did you? Would it not be more precise to say that you, taking on the role of the protagonist of this game, used your cursor to interact with a virtual model and thus fictionally opened a door that is represented to exist in the gameworld?
Read MoreA post by Nathanael Stein
This post is about a puzzle, a suspicion, and a cry for help. I need to make two points before I can raise the puzzle.
First, imagining a utopia is one of the most ambitious things you can do with the imagination, but it’s also a natural and maybe inevitable feature of our lives. (By ‘utopia’ I just mean a reasonably complete alternative form of social arrangement that is meant to be better than the present one in one or more aspects.) We spend a good amount of time imagining, or being caused to imagine, not just our own individual futures, but also a whole future way of life. These are hard to separate. Indeed, a lot of political discourse and manipulation depends on our tendency to have a vague but powerful imaginative picture of what the world might look like in 5, 10, 20 years. And such imaginings have had, to put it mildly, important real world consequences. Finally, if being able to imagine things’ being otherwise is a requirement of human freedom, to paraphrase Sartre, then imagining utopia is a non-negligible part of that activity. For a variety of reasons, then, utopian imagination deserves attention as a persistent feature of human life and world history.
Second, some utopian imaginings are better than others. In recent years philosophers have spent a fair amount of time examining the epistemic qualities of imagination for small scale matters, including under the heading of instructive vs. transcendent imagining. But there seem to be similar distinctions at the large scale as well: some utopian imaginings are more plausible than others, and some are more accurate than others about whether the alternative arrangements would indeed be better.
So this is the basis for my puzzle: utopian imagining is, I suggest, simply an extension of an exercise that we do all the time, and that Plato introduced into philosophy: imagining human social life under better or even ideal conditions. And this isn’t an exercise we need abandon on the grounds that there’s no difference between doing it well and doing it badly—even if it were possible to do so, which I doubt.
Read MoreA post by Sara Arjomand
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem. Carroll begins:
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe” (Carroll 1900).
Half of the words in the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” are made–up. None of us can say what “slithy toves” refers to, or what it means for these “slithy toves” to “gyre” and “gimble.” Despite Carroll’s use of gibberish, though, it seems that we’re able to imagine what’s happening. That’s strange. How are we able to imagine what we can’t understand? That’s the puzzle I’ll be interested in, here—the puzzle of the apparent imaginability of nonsense. Let’s try to solve it.
Read MoreA post by Megha Devraj
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault, descriptions of violence, mention of a gendered slur.
In 2004, in the Northeast Indian border state of Manipur, a group of middle-aged women collected to express their outrage at a gruesome incident of murder and sexual assault by members of an Indian paramilitary unit. They stripped all their clothing off their bodies and began to weep. A now famous photograph of the event shows them standing together in a row, completely nude, their bodies obscured by a large banner written in lettering designed to look like it was dripping blood: ‘Indian Army Rape Us’.
What made these women choose to speak against sexual violence by putting their own naked bodies on public display? Why not use a more comfortable means to voice dissent? It seems that there was something about their spectacular display of vulnerability that was able to jolt its audience into experiencing the oppressive force of the violence that Manipuri women are subject to. The scene of the protest was a profoundly moving one. Many of those present, including police personnel, cried upon looking at the women’s lament. Sentries who had initially pointed guns at the women withdrew their weapons, presumably because they too felt sorrowful or ashamed. Baring themselves allowed the women to convey their feelings of being violated in a way that descriptive speech likely could not. Their protest asked the Indian public to reimagine violence against women not as a regrettable consequence of national security, but as a cause of irreconcilable grief and anger.
My work focusses on a communicative device with special connections to imagination and creativity: spectacle. I think of a spectacle roughly as a communicative act that involves intentionally using the social significance of objects and spaces to a striking effect. Spectacles are present in protests and performance art, in parades and pageants, in public displays of national or military glory, and even in some cases of interpersonal communication. Here, I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them as a response to sexual violence.
Read MoreThe Junkyard will take its usual summer break. We will return with regular posts in late August. Feel free to reach out with ideas for future posts. We wish you all a refreshing and productive summer. Happy Summering and Happy Imagining!
Read MoreA post by Michael T. Stuart
Yes, obviously. Some algorithms already do, or soon will. No, of course it can’t, don’t be silly, though it might be good to pretend it does. Who cares?
Let’s go through these different attitudes to the question one by one. In the end, I’ll suggest what I think is a better attitude.
Read MoreA post by Julia Langkau
We all seem to agree that intuitively, there is a strong link between fiction and imagination. Beginning with Walton's influential account of make-believe, imagining has been seen as the operative attitude when it comes to fiction as opposed to believing: "Imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true." (Walton 1990: 41). This mutually exclusive distinction between imagining and believing has shaped much of the discussion about our engagement with fiction, such as the definition of the relevant kind of imagination, patchwork puzzles, etc. The claim, as I understand it, has been a normative one (see Balcerak Jackson & Langkau 2022) — after all, Walton talks in terms of what fiction prescribes. Even if it turned out that most people actually believed most fictions while reading – perhaps before realizing they were fictions and then disbelieving them – they would all be making a mistake: they should have imagined instead.
Read MoreA post by Claire Anscomb
Recent advances in AI image generation have been said to assist the imaginative and creative powers of human users. As artist Sarah Meyohas has enthused, algorithmic models, like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), can generate “images one couldn’t have imagined” (quoted in Ploin et al. 2022, 42). Broadly speaking, GAN-style models, which date back to 2014, are trained on images, which may be pre-curated or assembled by the user themselves, to generate visual outputs that come from the same distribution as the training set (Elgammal et al. 2017, 5). Since the early 2020s, with the development of Text-to-Image (TTI) systems such as DALL-E and Midjourney, users can generate images to visualise their ideas based on just a text prompt. Although this may aid a user who is unable to imagine how an image corresponding to their prompt could look, this doesn’t necessarily implicate or facilitate their creativity to produce novel and valuable work.
Some users may, without much thought for which TTI system they are using, supply a simple prompt and, due to the sophistication of these systems, generate impressively realistic or stylistic images. However, in such cases, the user has likely not contributed very much to shaping the features of the images. Moreover, the results of TTI systems can be quite repetitive, which is an inherent part of the design – they have been created so that they produce new images in the likeness of those that already exist. But these are not all images, they are just the images that are in the training data. Notably, this training data typically consists of billions of pairings of text and images scraped from the internet (Heaven 2022). Although generative AI systems can represent non-existent and existing subjects alike, they struggle if something is rare or missing from the training data. The biases and noise of these systems may then “dominate our own imagination” (Manovich 2023, 17). So, what prospects are there for using generative AI systems as imaginative aids in creative undertakings?
Read MoreA post by Giulia Lorenzi
What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a certain way, implying (often) specific types of sounds, and motivated by artistic and intellectual expressive reasons. So, it may seem that not much is left to imagining once perceptual entities, structure, intentions, and goals of an artistic expression are set. The creator (whether a composer or a performer-composer) can appear prima facie to have decided everything that could appear in a piece leaving no room for anything else.
In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.
Read MoreA post by Margrethe Bruun Vaage
Trigger warning: rape in the context of rape-revenge films
I keep thinking that my next project should surely be about something nice. But in my research I keep being drawn to some of the darkest corners of film and television fiction. In philosophy there have been discussions about imaginative resistance, and how there are limits to what we are willing or able to imagine (see e.g., Gendler and Liao 2016 for an overview). It is not my aim here to revisit these debates, but rather to report from what is going on at the other side of town, so to say: as a film theorist it seems to me that there are many ways that fiction can and does invite engagement that breaks with our moral principles.
One such example is found in the antihero, who for some time has prevailed in television series, particularly in the US, but also in many other national contexts following the huge success of series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The most typical spectator response seems to have been to root for main characters such as Tony Soprano and Walter White, but they are in fact people we would be loathe to support in reality.
Another example of engagement that we might not fully condone is found in the central role played by harsh punishment in fiction. Media psychologist Arthur Raney points out that spectators of crime fiction, for example, “might tend to expect and demand (for the sake of enjoyment) a punishment that is greater than what is morally acceptable in reality; only such over-punishment will lead to enjoyment” (Raney 2005: 151). The proper villains getting their just desert at the end of a suspenseful story is a mainstay in fiction, sometimes sidestepping the law in vigilante stories such as the Dirty Harry films, for example. And it can be remarkably pleasurable to watch punishment in fiction, even for those among us who are decidedly against harsh punishment in real life: I for one am against any kind of capital punishment, and firmly believe in reform rather than prison as punishment. However, put on a Dirty Harry film, and I’ll gleefully enjoy watching those punks get lectured on the .44 Magnum.
Read MoreA post by Zorana Ivcevic Pringle
I do not remember when the word “creativity” entered my vocabulary. Growing up in 1980s Eastern Europe, it was not at the forefront of discussions in education or culture beyond the world of art. But my favorite cartoon was about Professor Balthazar, an inventor who creates whimsical solutions to problems brought to him by the citizens of his town. He would listen to their stories, learn about trouble they were facing, and start to think. Professor Balthazar would pace up and down, looking serious. Then, all at once, he would jump with joy of discovery, run into a room with a giant colorful contraption, turn on a faucet, and out of a drop, a fully-formed invention would materialize. My question kept being – But how?
Read MoreA post by Kevin Lande
Images occupy a peculiar position in our understanding of representation—the capacity of one thing to be about another. On the one hand, the image is the paragon of representation. An image of a hand re-presents its subject matter, whereas the linguistic phrase “right hand” bears a more abstract, arbitrary relation to what it signifies. Images can teem with seemingly inexhaustible significance—depicting, for example, not just a hand, but a certain number of figures in a certain arrangement—while symbols of language tend to have a lean, almost brutal semantic economy.
On the other hand, images are commonly also taken to be rudimentary and lacking for any definite structure or meaning. Language, by contrast, is the “infinite gift” (Yang, 2006), allowing for unbounded creativity in thought and communication. That gift is fueled by a lexicon of basic words or symbols. The lexicon feeds a grammatical engine, comprising rules for how those words can be combined to generate novel meaningful phrases. Looking beyond language, Roland Barthes (1977) asked: “can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols?” Barthes observed that the image, in contrast to language, “is felt to be weak.” “Pictures… have no grammatical rules,” writes Flint Schier (1986). Even the book Visual Grammar (Leborg, 2006) begins by noting that “Visual language has no formal syntax or semantics.” The grammar of a language explains its expressive power. The object of Leborg’s “grammar” is not to explain, but to describe, to classify, and to recommend (see also Hopkins, 2023). Language has an engine; images have only a dashboard.
Read MoreA post by Stephen Asma
Imagination is finally getting some love from philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
My own work has been a tiny contribution to the resurgence of imagination studies, especially in the interface between neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and evolution (Asma, 2017). This essay, however, is not about respectable imagination studies. No, this is about the weird stuff –the eccentric history and philosophy of imagination.
None of what follows will get you tenure, or an invitation to speak somewhere prestigious. It will not gain you influential friends, and it might even prevent you from getting a date. But it needs to be aired, contemplated, and even celebrated. As cognitively fluid systems (like imagination, or language) expand into ecological niches, they themselves “play” and “experiment” and sometimes become adaptations, or exaptations, or spandrels, or deleterious dead ends. Theories are like this too. To my mind, not all the weird theories of imagination presented below are dead ends, and some may yet prove valuable –even if we’re not sure how.
Read MoreA post by Corey S. Pressman
How might we arrive at a distinctive definition of the human animal? Taxonomy leaves little on the table. Clearly, it is not our spines, hands, bipedalism, or brainstems that define us. In the end, what puts the sapiens in Homo sapiens is essentially cortical. Our species benefits from a variety of neurological novelties such as phonemic speech, self awareness, and neuroplasticity.
And also this about the human brain: imagination lives here. Like so many other taxonomic gifts, imagination itself is ancient. But while other species may have rudimentary forms of imagination, human imagination gets up to all kinds of species-specific shenanigans. Culture, science, art, stories, selves: all of these belong to the human imagination, as does anxiety, society, and the cultural habits that contribute to climatic and economic dissonance.
However, the soaring possibilities offered by human imagination are balanced by another amazing neurological feature: automaticity. Automaticity refers to the process by which certain tasks or behaviors become so well-learned and practiced that they can be performed without conscious effort or attention. In the context of the brain and behavior, automaticity refers to the ability to carry out tasks efficiently and effectively with minimal conscious awareness or cognitive resources. When a behavior becomes automatic, it is executed quickly and effortlessly, often without the need for deliberate decision-making or conscious monitoring. This phenomenon is facilitated by the brain's ability to form neural pathways and consolidate learning through repetition and practice.
Read MoreA post by Peter Kung and Shawn Klein
Peter is a lifelong Eagles fan. Shawn is a diehard Patriots fan. We separately watched Super Bowl LII and, to put it mildly, felt wild swings of emotion. But…why? It was only a game. Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards go about their day as if nothing much happened. If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger?
Walton (2015) thinks this puzzle of sports fandom parallels the paradox of fiction.
“The fan imagines that the outcome matters immensely and imagines caring immensely—while (in many cases) realizing that it doesn’t actually matter much, if at all. She is caught up in the world of the game, as the spectator at the theater is caught up in the story. Afterwards, like the playgoer, she steps outside of the make-believe and goes back to living her life as though nothing much had happened—even if the home team suffered a devastating and humiliating defeat. It’s just a story; it’s just a game” (p. 77).
Walton himself and other authors (Wildman 2019, Moore 2019) who have tried to explain this aspect of sports fandom have applied Walton’s theory in a quite limited way. These three Waltonians have an impoverished view of sports make-believe and sports fandom. There’s a better way to apply the Waltonian theory to sports.
Read MoreA post by Anatolii Kozlov
“There is something hinky in the local junkyard.” – What is it? What? A strange phrase evokes a sense of intrigue and anticipation. As if indeed there’s a fuzzy pile of rusty junk at a distance, and something – or someone – is about to spring out from the side of it. Will it? I scroll further through the list of writing prompts:
“Someone has a much-needed conversation with an A.I.”
“A garden statue comes to life.”
“An artist cannot finish their masterpiece.”
“A pet whose owner treats them like a human child.”
These are startling, amusing, evocative prompts, very different from the ones found in a philosopher’s paper on imagination. “Imagine there is a horse”. “Imagine a flying horse”. “Imagine a purple horse”. Suppose I did. So what? What did I learn in this less-than-miniscule moment of imagining? At the same time, what hides behind the other strings of words that makes them so appealing to engage with and start imagining? This is not to say that the classification of imagination through ordinary language is somehow philosophically idle. Still, something valuable seems to be lost if a philosopher’s exercise in imagination ends right there.
Read MoreA post by Christopher Bartel
When children play with toys, imagination is put to a distinctive and familiar use, which we might call projective imagining. This is a use of imagination that adults don’t have many opportunities to employ. However, a recent trend in video gaming offers one. Here is an example.
Stardew Valley is a video game released in 2016. Gamers describe it as a farming simulator. In the game, the player inherits an old farm from their grandfather. The farm has fallen into poor shape. The player’s job is to make the farm profitable again, which would make the ghost of their grandfather very proud. The player can also explore the nearby village, interact with the villagers, and develop relationships with the villagers by giving them gifts and doing favors for them. While the primary activity of the game is caring for the farm—tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them—a significant portion of the player’s time can be taken up by developing relationships with the villagers. Players can date some characters, marry them, and have children. The game is as much a soap opera as it is a farming simulator.
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