THE AS-IF CAPABILITY: A BLESSING AND A CURSE

Back during the administration of George W. Bush, I liked to say that “Reality is all we’ve got.” That connected with that administration’s famous declaration that they create reality, combined with its apparent dishonesty with itself and the nation. It is not coincidence that the same administration with that relationship to reality also ended up leaving the country in shambles, on various dimensions in much worse shape than they found it. People might forget about reality, but the damned thing doesn’t go away.

But of course, reality isn’t the only thing we’ve got. We’ve also got imagination. So, while we ignore reality at our peril, it is an essential part of our humanity that we are not confined to it. The phrase I use to capture what it is that has made our species exceptional among the earth’s life-forms is creative intelligence. One does not become a cultural animal without the capacity to envision what does not (yet) exist.

The genius of Steve Jobs to envision how the world could be changed by a phone that’s a computer one can put in one’s pocket, or the genius of Shakespeare to conjure up the rich and coherent world of Hamlet, are exceptional in how far they take an ability that humans use all the time. Even envisioning where one will park the car when one gets to one’s destination, or planning what one will say to a member of one’s family to confront an issue, or daydreaming about how the crowd roars when one hits the game-winning home run—all are examples of the capacity to envision what does not exist.

Envisioning might be defined, for present purposes, as the ability to see as real what one is only imagining. (Or what someone has imagined for us, like when one reads a novel and envisions the characters and action laid out by the novelist who envisioned the story and gave it to us to regard as real, even though we know it is not.)

It might not be too much to say that our ability to experience a movie as something real enough to matter while we watch it is part of the same human capacity that led some hunting-gathering genius to envision how the seeds of plants they were gathering might be planted to grow under one’s own supervision.

“As if it were real”—that points to a widespread as-if dimension to the human world:

• where we give stories a central place in our lives, including the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves whose relation to reality isn’t automatic;
• where we get greatly invested in our favorite team as if it were really an extension of ourselves, and as if whether it wins or loses really warrants our feeling inflated or deflated;
• where we perceive the world in terms of what we’re told, which sometimes means believing lies.

It even seems that we are capable of using the as-if capability to mistake the not-real for the real when we know it is not real. Rarely does one get so engrossed in a movie that one doesn’t know one is watching a movie and that the action on the screen isn’t really happening. Similarly, even when people know a treatment is a placebo, they respond as if it were genuine medicine—the “placebo effect” still operating through the power of our envisioning imagination.

Which bears on an issue concerning AI that has come up—namely, whether AI is capable of being a good psychotherapist to a human user. It has been argued that AI will fall short as a therapist because AI is only a machine and so it doesn’t actually have empathy. It will not be able to meet the emotional needs of the human client like a human therapist who actually feels empathy. Against that argument, one can cite the as-if phenomenon: because AI is clearly able to convey empathy, people who know that it is only a machine will nonetheless respond to the AI’s expressions of empathy as if they were real in every relevant respect.

We can see that the ability to treat the unreal as real has been a major factor in human lives from the beginnings of culture. The average dog (I imagine) has little or nothing in its view of the world that is not real, only imaginary. The average person, however, might very well have important beliefs that don’t correspond to reality.

Logic tells us that of the myriad beliefs about the supernatural that humans have held in our many religions, at most one of them does not contain major disconnections from reality. (They can’t all be valid.) All those human lives have been greatly shaped by the imagination holding something as real and important that is at best a distortion of what’s real.

Because reality is far larger than we can grasp, human orientation toward it inevitably involves holding as real many things that a perfect understanding would reveal to be false or distorted. Before medical science discovered the germ theory, cultures around the world taught their members to regard as real a wide range of invalid models of the causes of disease—humours, witchcraft, “bad air.”

Breakthroughs are both blessings and curses. What’s new opens doors, and what lies beyond can be for better or for worse—or, in the case of our as-if capacities, for both. The ability to treat the unreal as real has enabled people to advance the human good. But it has handed evil forces the powerful tool of the Lie.

It has made us Lords of Earth—having enabled us to develop systems that sustain billions of lives, some in societies where many human needs can be met.

The creature who can watch Hamlet and be moved by what’s enacted on stage is also vulnerable to being deceived by those who wield lies to manipulate people into acting against their own real needs.

Politics has always involved persuasion, and persuasion always involves an at-best partial rendition of reality. We even sanction it in our courtrooms, where the prosecution presents only the parts of reality that point toward guilt, while the defense highlights the parts that favor acquittal. Likewise in politics, we expect the two sides—locked in their zero-sum struggle for votes—to present a picture of the reality facing voters that is distorted because partial. But there’s a limit. It is one thing to present the truth selectively; it is another to present falsehood to make people mistake the Lie for the Truth.

America is in crisis now because—between the Reagan-Bush years and the Gingrich-Limbaugh years—a fundamental transformation of the dominant spirit of the Republican Party made the Lie the basic currency of that political force. And because the other political side in America was blind to what was happening, it forfeited the battle to the Lie.

Tens of millions of people were persuaded to relate to things in a way quite detached from reality. This as-if deception is displayed with especial vividness through the workings of demonization. The Good get mischaracterized as Evil, and so we get tens of millions of people who are so confused that they see the best as the worst—like seeing Anthony Fauci, a national treasure in a sane society, as a “mass-murdering villain” or “Dr. Evil”; like seeing George Soros, a billionaire who made it his mission to advance basic democratic values, as the mythic Evil Jew; like seeing the feckless but well-meaning Democrats as people who hate America; like seeing, in particular, Barack Obama—exemplary in his fecklessness but maybe the most decent person ever to serve as President—as evil, maybe even the anti-Christ.

The Lie—the exploitation of the as-if—has delivered abundantly for the Force of Destruction that wields the Lie in its battle for power. Enough people were led into a false as-if perception of the world that a presidency that, a year in, has been almost unimaginably destructive of the American and wider worlds became possible. Because people couldn’t see Donald Trump for who and what he is, and had distorted pictures of the issues, and voted on the basis of Lies, the Force of Destruction has reaped a bonanza in the damage of things from the constitutional order to the world trading system.

Humans’ ability to understand also comes with the capacity to misunderstand, because the same people who experience the action on the movie screen as real can also be misled, by their real enemies, to see those who are not their enemies through the lens of demonizing lies.