On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 8:44 AM, Jason Olshefsky <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Oct 25, 2010, at 1:46 AM, Sal Armoniac wrote: > > http://thefutureofthings.com/column/1003/creativity-the-last-human-stronghold.html > > > In the "Pay Attention to the Machine inside the Man" heading, Israel > Beniaminy writes: > > For some people, the fact that the creative spark vanishes when we examine > the machine more closely serves as the conclusive proof that the spark was > never really there. [Advocates of “strong AI” believe that] if we could > expose what happens in the mind while we’re being creative, we will again > fail to find the creative core, the place and time where the magic happens. > > > I think finding the "creative spark" is the wrong path because there is > none. It's a similar question to when someone asks, "how did you get > started being an author?" They are asking, "at one point you were not an > author and at a later point you were: what was the magical event that > happened between?" As such, the apparent creativity of a mechanism, or the > creativity of a person can be traced back literally ad infinitum with no > hope of finding anything remotely similar to an answer to the question. > I think I agree with you, but I think a lot of people hear this kind of thing and they parse it as meaning "there's no such thing as a soul." Well, it might mean that, but I think the *primary* meaning is more basic: If you are "a writer" at point N but not at point A, then somewhere along that way you passed a threshold where you acquired a sufficient number of writerly qualities in a sufficient quantity or measure that the external term "writer" could be fairly applied and agreed upon by a fair number of observers. I.e., "writer" (or "blue" or "wet") is a subjective term -- it needs a definition and a definer to be meaningful. All that might or might not have anything to do with souls or creativity or sparks, depending on how one defines those things. > .... > > But that leads to an interesting note that the goal of AI should be less > about making a creative spark generator and more about making something that > can aggregate a set of disparate, "smaller" ideas into a cohesive whole. > Recurse this from tiny ideas to bigger and bigger ones and it might just > work. It appears this is what mathematical proof algorithms do, albeit the > aggregation process can also be represented algorithmically. > It's been a long time since I read it, but as I recall this is similar to the view Minsky was putting forth in *Society of Mind*. He had some very specific ideas which I believe have not since been supported experimentally (and I doubt that would upset him very much, FWIW), but the general idea was that Mind was no one big magic thing, it was rather the result of a lot of smaller and more mundane things happening continually. -- -- eric scoles | [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
