Imagination, Not Hallucination in LLMs
Mary Warnock, in two essays in The Uses Of Philosophy[0], makes the case that imagination is fundamental to human versus animal.
From the essay "Religious Imagination" [p176] I quote:
"Kant, I believe, has the truth about imagination in his view, or at least a great deal of the truth about the acquisition of knowledge. For it must be the case that, if we are to claim knowledge and understanding of the phenomena of the world, whether scientific or 'common-sense' knowledge, we must be able to bundle these phenomena together under general concepts in order to frame laws about them (not necessarily the refined laws of science, but, just as much, the basic, assumed laws of the practical life). Neither words nor ideas on their own, nor mere perception (sensory experience by itself, if we can conceive of such a thing), would be enough to enable us to see in what is in front of our eyes the exemplification of something common to that thing and others. It is this function, to relate sensory experience to concepts, that Kant describes as imagination.
Whether we give a name to the power to go beyond our experience or not, we are bound to recognize that this is something we can do; and that if we could not, we could neither understand nor describe the world about us, or understand or describe ourselves. To say this is as much as to say that it is nearly impossible to separate from one another the various factors that go to make up our perception and interpretation of the world; sensory experience, sorting into kinds, projecting into past and future, reacting with pleasure or pain to what we perceive."
From the essay "Personal Continuity" [p204]
"For, in reflecting on his own life, a man ... may perceive his life, or try to do so, as a whole, as a plot with himself as the central character. And it is at this point that memory and imagination overlap and intertwine. For imagination must not be thought of as the faculty that gives rise merely to fiction or fancy, though it may do that. Its central function, as both Hume and Kant understood, is to bring coherence and universality to what would otherwise be a random and unintelligible sequence of impressions appearing before the mind like the shadow puppets in Plato's cave. It is the primary function of the imagination to find the general and universal in the particular, to find significance in an otherwise incoherent world."
[0] Mary Warnock "The Uses Of Philosophy" (1992) ISBN 978-0631185833