Imagination as the Sound of 'C'

Imagination as the Sound of “C”

Many marketing claims are made around the notion that a kind of computer code called “AI” in general, provides a way to better explore, extend and enhance our lived imagination than we can on our own.

However, these assertions are out of synch with the experience of science.?

Consider the following:

There exist massive bodies of evidence collected over hundreds and thousands of years in every science from neuro-based to physiology all the way to other ways of knowing through contemplative traditions such as mindfulness and other ancient understandings, that our direct experience, as lived through intuitive relationships with the natural world exercised under our own un-mediated power like movement such walking in a forest or dancing in silence or song, making music with instruments we handle and manipulate and even sometimes making contact with concepts such as infinity, showcases a most basic evolutionary enhancement, that of imagination.?As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens pointed out, it was the dawning of imagination that led to our ability to ‘strategize’ and solve problems in new ways.

For a potent and profound use case of how direct experience opens up into to our most piercing insights and intuitions that lead to new paradigms and radical discoveries in service of society,?let’s turn to the life of Albert Einstein.?

When Einstein’s life is described, biographers often focus on his passion for hiking in nature, his love for music; in particular the sound of the violin which he’d play for hours in a small apartment, long conversations with companions often coupled with hiking and many other combined connections to the unmediated world.

In fact it was through these direct relationships paired with his imagination which produced what are now famously known as thought experiments, conditions that can only exist as invisible imaginings, iterating in concert with his expertise in math and other logical argumentation, he came up with his major break-throughs in physics.

One of the most significant was the prediction of gravitational waves in 1916.?Gravitational waves are basically ripples in spacetime (like ripples in a pond) emanating from accelerating closeness and collision of massive celestial bodies like black holes and neutron stars.

At the time he started carefully curating his thoughts as ideas sprang froth from the sounds of his strings or the shapes and curves of flowers, there wasn’t a supercomputer in sight.

In fact, it took us 100 years to catch up to Einstein’s imagination.?

It wasn’t until 2015, when gravitational waves were directly detected by LIGO (Laser Interfermometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) whose multi-location sensors measure 2.5 miles in length shaped as the letter “L”.

But the waves weren’t only picked up through engineering feats which this writer claims no expertise, but as a sound as well.?

On February 11, 2016, the New Yort Times reported that researchers had also recorded the sound of gravitational waves they called a “Gravitational Wave Chirp” that “rises to the [musical] note of middle C before abruptly stopping”.

To hear it for yourself, the sound of two black holes more than 1.5 billion light years away from Earth, listen here.?

Just to get some idea of how far away that sound was, if we could travel at the speed of light - the fastest anything can travel measured in distance as 186,000 miles per second - it would take us 13 billion years to get to the two black holes coming together creating the sound of ‘C’.

So, the next time you assume that an AI app programmed by some other person(s) that also had to pass through many others before it got to you, is somehow more “powerful” than your own imagination; your mind in stillness and in concert with the natural world intuited by sight, sound and other relationships, you may want to think again.

For as Einstein himself said:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

This doesn’t mean we can’t use our technology in many meaningful computational ways of course.?However, our lived experience as sentient beings who are themselves a “whole of nature” existing as part of The whole of nature, can’t ever be as richly informed by our imaginations as we are when we’re directly connected to it.

Listen for the Sound of 'C'.