Fannish question: "When did you become an author?" Crotchety author: "When I published my first story."
Sarah On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Eric Scoles <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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]<r-spec%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > -- 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.
