Opinion

"Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."

-C.S. Lewis

Do you remember your imagination as a kid? I sure do, I remember playing as a dragon and I had the power of beauty, invisibility and most importantly breath of fire! Imagination is an amazing thing to have. It is making up a situation only when you're 4-8 or 9!

  Do you ever dream off into La-la land? Well, that is imagination. You might not know it, but every day, you might get a dose of imagination. Dreams are imagination! I remember this one friend when I was in 1st and 2nd grade. Every time I played with her (which was a lot), we would play a magical game: fairies, dragons, old-fashioned time travel, and more. So, I would love, and I mean love to play with her. She was always so creative.  As we grew up (meaning 4th, 5th, 6th grade, she still had that creative boost. We would put on the Nutcracker, a talent show, and more! Imagination is an amazing thing, and it is so important to let your mind run free. I am in 6th grade and still join in (not willingly, but do it for my friend) when my neighbors play some imaginary game.   

      Imagination is everywhere in our life.  As we know, it is in the arts when we see painters' paintings, half of the time, it is from their imagination. Artist Pablo Picasso said, ""Everything you can imagine is real." Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

However, imagination is not only in artsy form.  Imagination is even involved with science.  The famous scientist Albert Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge! In a 1929 interview with the Saturday Evening Post, titled," "What Life Means to Einstein",  he said, "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world." -Albert Einstein As quoted in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" 

in The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929)

Imagination is meaningful to people for various reasons. But for philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, imagination is "a storehouse of forms received through the senses." But for writer C.S. Lewis, "Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning." 

At most schools, it’s always, “What is in the meatloaf for the school lunches? Does the lunch lady go dumpster diving or something?” But at our school, it’s like, “What was the 5-star restaurant our school chefs used to work at?” It’s hard to say. The lunches at our schools are like Heaven on a spoon. Well, more like a fork. 

And unlike most schools, we have a variety of options to choose from, like on Wednesdays, there is pasta with or without sauce (that is personally my favorite school lunch), the special, and a soy butter and jelly sandwich. Of course, you can’t get all of those options, but it just goes to show that our school has so many options to choose from. 

And then there is a sidebar that serves all sorts of delicately made snacks and sides if you are feeling really hungry. But sometimes it is just necessary to have. For instance, if you are getting tacos, sometimes you just need to have the signature sour cream and shredded cheese. 

If you like pizza, get a slice or two! The Sicilian pizza here is awesome! A few people in my class like to get their whole tray full of food. It proves that they really love school lunches! So, let’s see how much they really like it. “So, Paul, how do you feel about the school lunches?” I ask. Paul replies, “The meat is tender, not chewy. Side dishes are crunchy, not salty.” Paul really likes his school lunches. 

Lunch is a big part of the day, too. It energizes you for the next few hours. I know my parents are always starving if they don’t have lunch. It gives you all the nutrients and calories you need for the afternoon. Food is one of the most important sources in our lives. Without food, we’d be…well…toast. So, be sure to eat your lunches—especially if you like the ones at Saint Peter School!

School is important because it helps us become educated. Socially, education helps us become better citizens and get better-paid jobs. Education also shows us the importance of hard work and, at the same time, helps us grow and develop. When we develop new skills, our brain gets stronger and stronger. But is that all that education can offer us?

To understand what education can be if offered well, it's best to look to an expert. C.S. Lewis wrote many books that were used in education, and a highly regarded book called “Mere Education.” According to Lewis, a good  education helps students to “like and dislike what [they] ought.”  He also writes about the importance of imagination in education. He says: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibilities of our pupils, we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."  Lewis thinks that good schools educate the mind, heart, and soul. This is because we are made of body and soul. Lewis believes that ignoring the spiritual side of education is ignoring the full truth about things. And finding the truth about things is at the center of education itself.

If finding truth is central to education, it is important to define truth. A good source for this would be from St. Thomas Aquinas. In his great work The Summa Theologiae, he writes this about truth: “I answer that, As the good denotes that towards which the appetite tends, so the true denotes that towards which the intellect tends. Now there is this difference between the appetite and the intellect, or any knowledge whatsoever, that knowledge is according as the thing known is in the knower, whilst appetite is according as the desirer tends towards the thing desired. Thus the term of the appetite, namely good, is in the object desirable, and the term of the intellect, namely true, is in the intellect itself. Now as good exists in a thing so far as that thing is related to the appetite-and hence the aspect of goodness passes on from the desirable thing to the appetite, in so far as the appetite is called good if its object is good; so, since the true is in the intellect in so far as it is conformed to the object understood, the aspect of the true must needs pass from the intellect to the object understood so that also the thing understood is said to be true in so far as it has some relation to the intellect. Now a thing understood may be in relation to an intellect either essentially or accidentally. It is related essentially to an intellect on which it depends as regards its essence but accidentally to an intellect by which it is knowable, even as we may say that a house is related essentially to the intellect of the architect but accidentally to the intellect upon which it does not depend.”

Truth is a factor of Knowledge. Knowledge is a factor of Wisdom. Wisdom is God’s, and God’s only. However, if humans attained wisdom, we would know what is good for us, and that is knowledge, so at the same time, we would still only have a factor of Wisdom and so forth. We have temptation. We are imperfect, however perfect is not the goal. To be honorable is the goal humans have struggled to attain for years. Therefore, there is pain and suffering from your spiritual and physical self. Your soul must be fed but not at risk of temptation. Desire is given but used at the risk of the user. However, to be Godlike is not to be better but to be disappointed at the fact you did not follow but led a rebellion against God.

This is Education.

AI is all around us, and that’s not a bad thing. It is not the greatest thing,  but it is not the worst thing that exists either.

       The Inner Workings of AI

AI works in three main ways:

1) AI is taught how humans act and use slang and is given specific apps to learn how to work and how to respond to language.

2) AI assumes that the most popular things going on in the media are most likely what it's subject is in to.

3) AI is able to classify objects by looking for patterns. (Like if you showed it a pit bull, said it was a pit bull, and then showed it cat images while saying it's a cat, over time, it would understand the difference between the looks of pit bulls and cats)

Misconceptions

Some people will say things like “Robots are bad. They're getting too smart so they're going to take over.” But AI is a product we made so that robots are only what we programmed them to be. For example, if it's a street crossing robot, it will be a street crossing robot. An ATM is not going to attack us because it's just a machine for circulating money; we humans have nothing to worry about. Movies like I Robot, and Terminator make things more complicated by presenting robots as monsters who are made to attack us. Our robotic future will be most likely similar to the Jet-sons, a cartoon showing a great futuristic world full of technological advancements like robot maids, space pods, and chats across the multiverse.
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Homo siliceous

Homo siliceous is a certain type of AI.  My dad, Dr. John J Horton, who is an economics professor at MIT, wrote a paper on homo siliceous. Homo siliceous can be summed up as the process of teaching an AI to pretend to be human. In a paper my dad created in April, 2023, he said “newly developed large language models (L.L.M) are made because of how they are taught”. This news could be big in the world of economics, because it enables people to run surveys on upcoming years in profits just by giving little to no information. 

Pros of AI

 Here are some examples of great feats from AI: it has enabled us to instantly find information, get people interested in reading the information, as well as coding, and can help failing businesses figure out sales strategies.

Cons of AI

 AI is certainly not perfect, which is why I wrote this article. then While AI can see actions and faces, hear voices, and create videos that could misjudge what a person said or did., and can create anything at the blink of an eye,  this could create direct targeting by unwanted advertisements. It could also create insane amounts of click baiting scams, helping annoying hackers to effortlessly scam entire people with realistic ads or fool large amounts of people.

In conclusion, AI can’t be classified as all good or all bad.; it can be either according to the motivations of AI's creator.