Don't Forget Imagination!

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vityaev, Evgenii E., Mantsivoda, Andrei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916887474995200
author Vityaev, Evgenii E.
Mantsivoda, Andrei
author_facet Vityaev, Evgenii E.
Mantsivoda, Andrei
contents Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that serve as semantic contexts for reasoning, decision making and prediction. Our position is that the role of cognitive imagination is still greatly underestimated, and this creates numerous problems and diminishes the current capabilities of AI. For instance, when reasoning, humans rely on imaginary contexts to retrieve background info. They also constantly return to the context for semantic verification that their reasoning is still reasonable. Thus, reasoning without imagination is blind. This paper is a call for greater attention to cognitive imagination as the next promising breakthrough in artificial intelligence. As an instrument for simulating cognitive imagination, we propose semantic models -- a new approach to mathematical models that can learn, like neural networks, and are based on probabilistic causal relationships. Semantic models can simulate cognitive imagination because they ensure the consistency of imaginary contexts and implement a glass-box approach that allows the context to be manipulated as a holistic and coherent system of interrelated facts glued together with causal relations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06062
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Don't Forget Imagination!
Vityaev, Evgenii E.
Mantsivoda, Andrei
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T27, 68T30
Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that serve as semantic contexts for reasoning, decision making and prediction. Our position is that the role of cognitive imagination is still greatly underestimated, and this creates numerous problems and diminishes the current capabilities of AI. For instance, when reasoning, humans rely on imaginary contexts to retrieve background info. They also constantly return to the context for semantic verification that their reasoning is still reasonable. Thus, reasoning without imagination is blind. This paper is a call for greater attention to cognitive imagination as the next promising breakthrough in artificial intelligence. As an instrument for simulating cognitive imagination, we propose semantic models -- a new approach to mathematical models that can learn, like neural networks, and are based on probabilistic causal relationships. Semantic models can simulate cognitive imagination because they ensure the consistency of imaginary contexts and implement a glass-box approach that allows the context to be manipulated as a holistic and coherent system of interrelated facts glued together with causal relations.
title Don't Forget Imagination!
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T27, 68T30
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06062