by John Hartley
With CAPTHCHA the latest stronghold to be breeched, following the heralded sacking of Turing’s temple, I propose a new standard for AI: The Tolkien test.
In this proposed schema, AI capability would be tested against what Andrew Pinsent terms ‘the puzzle of useless creation’. Pinsent, a leading authority on science and religion asks, concerning Tolkien: “What is the justification for spending so much time creating an entire family of imaginary languages for imaginary peoples in an imaginary world?”
Tolkien’s view of sub-creation framed human creativity as an act of co-creation with God. Just as the divine imagination shaped the world, so too does human imagination—though on a lesser scale—shape its own worlds. This, for Tolkien, was not mere artistic play but a serious, borderline sacred act. Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth in particular, were not an escape from reality, but a way of penetrating reality in the most acute sense.
For Tolkien, fantasia illuminated reality insofar is it tapped into the metaphysical core of things. The the artistic creation predicated on the creative imagination opened the individual to an alternate mode of knowledge, deeply intuitive and discursive in nature. Tolkien saw this creative act as deeply rational, not a fanciful indulgence. Echoing the Thomist tradition, he viewed fantasy as a way of refashioning the world that the divine had made, for only through the imagination is the human mind capable of reaching beyond itself.
The role of the creative imagination, then, is not to offer a mere replication of life but to transcend it. Here is the major test for AI, for in doing so, it accesses what Tolkien called the “real world”—the world beneath the surface of things. As faith seeks enchantment, so too does art seek a kind of conversion of the imagination, guiding it towards the consolation of eternal memory, what Plato termed ‘anamnesis’. Read more »
Mother’s friend departed after their weekly get-together for tea, cakes and gossip, but she forgot to take her book. It was a slim hardback with the blue and yellow banded cover of a subscription book club. It lay on the arm of the sofa for ten minutes and then, before anybody noticed, it vanished – relocated to my bedroom. I was fifteen, and this would be the first adult novel I had ever read. Its title was Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Iris was my “first” – first adult novelist and first woman writer, and she has remained fixed in my affections over the decades. Under the Net was also Murdoch’s first novel, published in 1954. I was so naively charmed that I made a precocious promise to myself to reread it fifteen years later to see if its appeal lasted. I already knew that in the coming years I would not be rereading my previous favourites, my childhood book collections of Just William, Biggles, Billy Bunter and John Carter’s adventures on Mars. Unlike them, Under the Net had mysteries and ideas I did not yet fathom, but would need to discover.
