Kingsley,
Your example shows that GPT can do some really deep searching. As another
challenge, I'll suggest another case that some friends of mine at MIT
encountered. I had met the person in this case, but I don't remember his name.
However, I'm fairly sure that I would recognize the name if I saw or heard it.
This person was a musician and composer from Massachusetts. who had been
teaching those subjects at some school in the 1950s. Those were the days of
the McCarthy hearings about Communism in government, schools, etc. His school,
like most in the US, was required to ask all employees to sign a document that
he was not and never had been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to
sign and lost his teaching job.
At MIT, some friends of mine decided to take his course in music composition.
That's about all I know about him. I don't remember his name, but I would
recognize it if I saw it.
Since the names of the people who had been investigated by McCarthy are a
matter of public record, this information is probably buried in some public
records somewhere. Could GPT dig it out? And I would be curious to know what
eventually happened to him.
John
From: "Kingsley Idehen' via ontolog-forum"
Sent: 5/20/23 1:20 PM
To: ontolog-fo...@googlegroups.com, John F Sowa
Cc: Peirce List
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Little Known Facts (was Geometry language
On 5/20/23 10:02 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
Anatoly,
Thanks for finding those articles. Vissarion Shebalin was the composer I was
thinking of. I remembered the letter V in his name, but I didn't remember
whether it was his first or last name. But as soon as I saw the name in the
article by Yuri Vagzadin, it rang a bell (in my brain, not on the computer).
The article I read was primarily about Shebalin. I had thought he was a 19th c
composer, but he was born in 1902.
>From the Wikipedia article about Shebalin: In 1953, Shebalin suffered a
>stroke, followed by another stroke in 1959, which impaired most of his
>language capabilities.[5] Despite that, just a few months before his death
>from a third stroke in 1963, he completed his fifth symphony, described by
>Shostakovich as "a brilliant creative work, filled with highest emotions,
>optimistic and full of life."
That reference [5] is to a book. I read an article that was primarily about
the neural issues, but the quotation is very close to what I remembered.
Timna Mayer's article is written by a musician who has a deep understanding of
music and a minimal understanding of the neural issues. Since GPT is a purely
verbal system, it puts a high priority on left brain functions, and it's
important to understand what GPT is missing. I recommend it.
John
From: "Anatoly Levenchuk"
Google has answers in two encyclopedia-level sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Schnittke -- "In 1985 Schnittke
suffered the first of two severe strokes. Upon recovery, he continued to
compose. In 1992 he was a winner of the Praemium Imperiale, awarded by the
Japan Art Association for lifetime achievement in the arts. In 1994, in New
York City, he attended the National Symphony Orchestra’s world premiere of his
spectral Symphony No. 6 (1993), dedicated to and conducted by Rostropovich".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Schnittke -- has a mention of significance
of his after-stroke outputs.
"July 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke that left him in a coma. He was
declared clinically dead on several occasions, but recovered and continued to
compose".
"As his health deteriorated from the late 1980s, Schnittke started to abandon
much of the extroversion of his earlier polystylism and retreated into a more
withdrawn, bleak style, quite accessible to the lay listener. The Fourth
Quartet (1989) and Sixth (1992), Seventh (1993) and Eighth (1994) symphonies
are good examples of this. Some Schnittke scholars, such as Gerard McBurney,
have argued that it is the late works that will ultimately be the most
influential parts of Schnittke's output".
And about his Russian origin: "Schnittke is referred variously as a "Russian
composer", a "composer of Jewish-German ancestry born in Russia", and "of part
German descent, the Russian composer". On the complications of his nationality
and ancestry, the musicologist Alexander Ivashkin reflected that he was "a
Russian composer with a typically German name, born in Russia without a drop of
Russian blood, in the town of Engels – once the capital of a German republic in
the Soviet Union – of a Jewish (but German-speaking) father and German mother;
a composer who has no home country, who is a foreigner everywhere".
And then: "Sudden Changes in the Musical Brain Indicated by Left Hemispheric
Strokes: How Left Brain
Damage Changed Alfred Schnittke's Compositional Style" by Timna Mayer --
