The importance of imagination (or lack thereof) in artificial, human and quantum decision making

Abstract

Enlarging upon experiments and analysis that I did jointly some years ago, in which artificial (symbolic, neural-net and pattern) learning and generalization were compared with that of humans, I will emphasize the role of imagination (or lack thereof) in artificial, human and quantum cognition and decision-making processes. Then I will look in more detail at some of the 'engineering details' of its implementation (or lack thereof) in each of these settings. In other words, the question posed is: What is actually happening? For example, we previously found that humans overwhelmingly seek, create or imagine context in order to provide meaning when presented with abstract, apparently incomplete, contradictory or otherwise untenable decision-making situations. Humans are intolerant of contradiction and will greatly simplify to avoid it. They can partially correlate but do not average. Human learning is not Boolean. These and other human reasoning properties will then be taken to critique how well artificial intelligence methods and quantum mechanical modelling might compete with them in decision-making tasks within psychology and economics.