The translation of the text in French at the bottom of the painting reads \u201cThis is not a pipe.\u201d\u00a0 Magritte\u2019s point is\u00a0that the image of the pipe is a representation of the idea of a pipe but is not a pipe itself; hence his choice of the word \u2018treachery\u2019 in the title of his painting.<\/p>\n Of course, this is exactly the point I was making in my earlier post, but a complication in my thinking arose that sheds a great deal of light on the human condition and has implications for true machine sentience.<\/p>\n I was reading Scott McCloud\u2019s book Understanding Comics<\/em>, when he presented a section on what makes sequential art so compelling.\u00a0 In that section, McCloud talks about the inherent mystery that allows a human, virtually any human old enough to read, to imagine many things while reading a comic.\u00a0 Some of the things that the reader imagines include:<\/p>\n You, dear reader, are also engaging in this kind of imagining.\u00a0 The words you are reading \u2013 words that I once typed \u2013 are not even pen and pencil strokes on a page.\u00a0 The whole concept of page and stroke is, of course, virtual: tracings of different flows of current and voltage humming through micro-circuitry in your computer.<\/p>\n Not only is that painting of Magritte\u2019s shown above not a pipe, it\u2019s not a painting.\u00a0 It is simply a play of electronic signals on a computer monitor and a physiological response in the eye.\u00a0 And yet, how is it that it is so compelling?<\/p>\n What is the innate capacity of the human mind and the human soul to be moved by arrangements of ink on a page, by the juxtaposition of glyphs next to each other, by movement of light and color on a movie screen, by the modulated frequencies that come out of speakers and headphones?\u00a0 In other words, what is the human capacity that breathes life into the signs and signals that surrounds us?<\/p>\n Surely someone will rejoin \u201cit\u2019s a by-product of evolution\u201d or \u201cit\u2019s just the way we are made\u201d.\u00a0 But these types of responses, as reasonable as they may be, do nothing to address the root faculty of imagination.\u00a0 They do nothing to address the creativity and the connectivity of the human mind.<\/p>\n As a whimsical example, consider this take on Magritte\u2019s famous painting, inspired by the world of videogames.<\/p>\n Humans have that amazing ability to connect to different ideas by some tenuous association to find a marvelous (or at least funny) new thing.\u00a0 The connections that lead from the \u2018pipe\u2019 you smoke to the virtual \u2018pipe\u2019 in Mario Brothers are obvious to anyone who has been exposed to both of them in context. \u00a0And yet, how do you explain them to someone who hasn’t? \u00a0Even more interesting: \u00a0how do you enable a machine to make the same connection, to find the imagery funny? \u00a0In short, how can we come to understand imagination and, perhaps, imitate it?<\/p>\n Maybe we really don\u2019t want machines that actually emulate human creativity, but we won\u2019t know or understand the limitations of machine intelligence without more fully exploring our own.\u00a0 And surely one vital component of human intelligence is the ability to flow through the treachery of images into the power of imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the subtle difficulties surrounding the mathematics and programming of vectors.\u00a0 The representation of a generic vector by a column array made the… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Magritte_pipe\"](\"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Magritte_pipe.jpg\")
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