Fantasy

Or Let’s spend some time together. No fantasy is needed for this. There is even a condition of lack of imagination that has been medically recorded and described in recent decades. APHANTASIA is the affliction of people who, due to a psychological and perhaps also physical defect, are not able to develop an imagination at all. Is that bad? With his famous personality model in Thrills and Regressions, the late Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint also founded a theory of fantasy that is still convincing today. For this, Balint put himself in the primal scene of infant and mother. The infant lies at the mother’s breast and enjoys the body heat of the stream of milk. At some point, this breaks off and ceases. The infant, in the pre-linguistic stage of its consciousness development, has no explanation for what it sees as the abrupt end of this pleasant situation. Just a moment ago, everything was wonderful, harmonious, an ideal of merging. Suddenly, everything is over. Separation. Aloneness. Unpleasant. The gap of the explicable is bridged with a fantasy. The infant imagines something. A reason why the breast, the mother, withdraws from him. The reason he fantasizes can be essential for the formation of his personality. Since we are only interested in the aspect of fantasy here, we leave this scene, we also leave Balint and his theory, we take with us only our fantasy theorem that originated there. Fantasy is thus called for wherever our rational explanations lead no further. This sentence immediately conjures up the moment in countless animated films in which one of the figures has run off the edge of a cliff into the void – only to then, as soon as it realizes that it is suspended in the air contrary to the laws of gravity, either grab onto something out of thin air or lay a path for itself in mid air in order not to fall, or else to do just that: hurtle straight down into the depths. But, without crashing, of course. Because animation is a work of the imagination. Because what appears to us as continuous movement when we watch the film, as the action of the figures, is actually the composite of many still frames flashing by in succession. There are 24 per second, which is how sluggishly our brain processes what it sees.

And, since the debate about the pros and cons of so-called artificial intelligence, which is sometimes a little too fanciful, the question of whether it will be possible for a thinking machine to develop fantasies must of course also be discussed. I dictated the first two paragraphs of this text to an app called Aiko, which I use to record ideas. The dictation program, which can also convert entire conversations into written form, analyzes the sounds of a voice recording on my phone and compares them with a gigantic database of human vocalizations in all the languages on Earth. This works very well, almost always without errors, and makes my work a lot easier. However, and this was once again the case with the text module I used above, the program garnishes a completed transcription at the end with a sentence, sometimes just half a sentence, that was not said by me at all. Where it comes from is a complete mystery. The problem is well known among researchers and programmers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We just don’t know why the programs do it. How is this possible? How can a processor – an interconnection of transistors, basically, which themselves cannot do anything other than switch to one or zero, on or off – how can such an arrangement of cages that direct the flow of electrical currents produce anything on its own? To output more than one has put into this system?