I agree almost completely. Where I may disagree goes back to a conversation we (I've forgotten who was
"there", though) had on vFriAM awhile back. There is something to uniqueness. An expression from
the Very Weird is different from expressions from the less weird. I tend to think of it in terms of
non-convex space and strictures in the manifold. If you've got a pathologically malformed space and
"we" are all meandering around in that space, then some proportion of us will end up in little
niches with few (or zero) neighbors. The puffs of "content" expressed by those weirdos will be more
unique than the puffs from those with many neighbors.
Of course, if you have zero neighbors, then your puffs may not be "remembered" at all by anyone. (I
prefer "recognized" to "remembered". But to each her own.) So, there's some λ parameter
for weirdness. Personally, although I appreciate, say, Frank Zappa's expressions, I don't enjoy many of them.
Similarly, I don't appreciate or enjoy the expressions of Taylor Swift. But without such large pockets of
convex space, where would our little white holes of weirdness be? We'd have no safe harbor at all.
On 1/9/24 08:47, Prof David West wrote:
Ancient Greek notions of "creativity" lacked any sense of egocentric novelty. To 'create'
was to 'remember'. This was grounded in the more general philosophy that denied the possibility of
"something-from-nothing."
In my Design Thinking book, there is a large section about this and about who
"creation" is akin to midwifery, assisting something to express itself.
Just as a midwife lacks "authorship" of a baby, so too do all "intellectuals"
lack authorship of novel, innovative, or creative work— despite the boilerplate prefacing every
Ph.D. thesis.
davew
On Tue, Jan 9, 2024, at 10:28 AM, glen wrote:
https://www.science.org/content/article/billionaire-launches-plagiarism-detection-effort-against-mit-president-and-all-its
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4392624-new-york-times-chatgpt-lawsuit-poses-new-legal-threats-to-artificial-intelligence/
I just can't help but analogize between Intelligent Design and these
arguments of ownership/novelty of [ahem] "content". It all feels like
the argument from design to me. For a paywalled for-profit like the NYT
to go after a for-profit like OpenAI and a rapacious
<https://www.thenation.com/article/society/william-ackman-harvard-donor/>
billionaire to go after prestige-mongering elite institutions seems
like a clear instance of elite overproduction
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction>. And to have it
all leveraged on the fantasy fulcrum of novelty and ownership is making
my head spin.
But deep down, there's something to be said about intuitionism. At our
last salon, someone asked how much ontological status we might give to
stories about the Astral Plane. My answer derives entirely from what
little I know about intersubjectivity and cross-species mind reading.
If there is a commonality to nootropic or psychonaut experience, it
derives from our common *structure*, including whatever deeply
historical things like genetic memory that may (not) exist.
It's fine to give lip service to intellectual humility. But such
rhetoric can't persuade ... uh ... "people" like Ackman. Surely ...
surely people like that are smart enough to grok things like gen-phen
maps, robustness and polyphenism, etc. Right? And if they do get it,
then we grass tufts can go on about our work, trying to be open, accept
and apply credit and blame to the best of our abilities and ignore
these fighting elephants. Right?
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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