Schopenhauer was a hard determinist. He said this was a source of solace. Whatever the human race is, it was bound to be, since the beginning of time.

:up:

So maybe the way I phrased the question gave me the answer I agree with? Sam asked it if AI art can be meaningful with meaninglessness input. If he'd asked why it can't be meaningful, it would have answered that?

But the patterns that underlie the generation of its answers are very abstract and are able to capture the meaning of your query together with the logical, semantic, pragmatic and even rational structure of the texts that it had been trained on, and reproduce those "patterns" in the response that it constructs. This isn't much different from the way the human mind works. — Pierre-Normand

I think the human mind is usually a tool of the emotions. This forum shows how people generally start with the answers they're invested emotionally in, and they only use their intellects as weapons for defense. An open minded philosopher is pretty rare. So the AI is mimicking those defensive constructions?

Are you asking how LLM-based chatbots work? — Pierre-Normand

I guess I am? How does it create such a detailed answer? Is it quoting someone in particular?

The AI generated the answer. — Sam26

I know, but how?

That's freaking bizarre. Who's viewpoint is that?

Such exploration through random choices is still guidance. And we've seen that in traditional art as well, especially abstract art. — Christoffer

That's true. So AI becomes another tool, not a competing intellect.

Art is the interplay between the artist and the audience, the invisible communication through creation, about anything from abstract emotions to specific messages. The purpose of a created artwork is the narrative defining the value of it. If all you do is generating images through randomization, then what is the purpose you're trying to convey? — Christoffer

My view is based on people seeing my work and reading complex messages into it. And this is painting, not ai art. I'm interested in their interpretations. My own intentions are fairly nebulous. Does that mean I'm not doing art? I guess that's possible. Or what if communications isn't really the point of art? What if it's about a certain kind of life? A work comes alive in the mind of the viewer. In a way, Hamlet is alive because you're alive and he's part of you. I'm saying what if the artist isn't creating an inanimate message, but rather a living being?

If someone wanted to, they could use their knowledge to gain money, just remember where the power came from. — chiknsld

True, I just meant that money is power during our time. In a feudal society, military prowess was power. Knowledge can be power in a theocracy or where statesmen rule. The character of the society dictates where the power-hungry put their energy.

I think it's a pretty good answer, what do you think, and what other questions would you like it to answer? — Sam26

Ask it if AI generated art can be meaningful if the input is meaningless.

The more I "input", the more of my subjective intention I bring into the system as guiding principles for its generation. — Christoffer

This can be true, but not necessarily. Look at this image:



All sorts of meaning could be projected onto it, but my intention probably wouldn't show up anywhere because of the way I made it. The words I entered had nothing to do with this content. It's a result of using one image as a template and putting obscure, meaningless phrases in as prompts. What you get is a never ending play on the colors and shapes in the template image, most of which surprise me. My only role is picking what gets saved and what doesn't. This is a technique I used with Photoshop, but the possibilities just explode with AI. And you can put the ai images into Photoshop and then back into ai. It goes on forever

I think the real reason art loses value with AI is the raw magnitude of output it's capable of.

New technologies spur growth seemingly in minutes. — BC

I know, and it seems exponential. HG Wells thought the species might split, between those who keep technology and those who retrogress. I think that's possible. Maybe those who keep technology can form a no-growth culture.

Intention is more than just will, intention drives creation in a fluid constant manner, not just a will to paint a park, but every detail of that park and the interpretation of it into reworks and changes.

But it's important to know the depths of all of this, because that's what's part of defining the foundation for laws and regulations. — Christoffer

I was thinking of intention as in a desire to create something meaningful. An artist might not have any particular meaning in mind, or even if they do, it's somewhat irrelevant to the meaning the audience finds. So it's obvious that AI can kick ass creatively. In this case, all the meaning is produced by the audience, right?

And this is also why I say that artists won't disappear. Because even an AI that is a superintelligence and has the capacity to create art on its own because they're essentially sentient, would still just constitute a single subjective perspective. Becoming a single "artist" among others. Maybe more able to produce art quicker and int more quantities, but still, people might like its art, but will want to see other perspectives from other artists and that requires a quantity of individual artists, AIs included. — Christoffer

Yea, an AI artist could create a century's worth of art in one day. I don't really know what to make of that.

Is such a thing as wage and price stability (no growth, no shrinkage) possible? — BC

Bronze age cultures were no-growth. They remained stagnant for centuries. One assumes new ideas appeared from time to time, but died, possibly because life was precarious and holding to tradition was viewed as a matter of survival. Our own high-growth is made possible by technology, which was made possible by high-growth, so it's a cycle.

So, it's essentially exactly the same as how our brain structure works when it uses our memory that is essentially a neural network formed by raw input data; and through emotional biases and functions synthesize those memories into new forms of ideas and hallucinations. Only through intention do we direct this into forming an intentional creative output, essentially forming something outside of us that we call art. — Christoffer

I agree with your point, but might disagree with this detail. I don't think intention is a requirement of artistic output. An artist may not have anything to say about what a particular work means. It just flows out the same way dreams do. Art comes alive in the viewer. The viewer provides meaning by the way they're uniquely touched.

AI doesn't have a dreamworld or collective unconscious from which things flow, which is why AI generators have to be censored. The potential for new art is clearly enormous. The artists who are offended by it are just upset that their skills have become superfluous.

Bye the way, my outlook owes much to John Haugeland, Hubert Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who themselves owe much to Heidegger. — Pierre-Normand

I think I'm starting to understand what you're saying.

It's a big one. But I'll have a look at it for sure! — Pierre-Normand

Cool. If you're cut for time, 2.4 and 2.5 are the sections where subjectivism is discussed: that tendency to oppose the subject and object.

If you get a few minutes I wonder if you could give this article a read and tell me what you think?

To me, it's just obvious that the brain is creating a unified experience out of a flood of discrete sensory input. I think for some, that's direct realism. I don't see how, but ok?

Yep. You're not less than normal, there is no normal.

I understand what you mean. Elon Musk has Asperger's. He's been my hero ever since I learned that, because I do too.

I've never seen a case of schizophrenia that wasn't heart breaking in some way. It's a terrible disease.

There's a great YouTube channel where this woman talks to her audience while she's in the hospital, having a psychotic episode. You can tell when she looks to the side that she's listening to the voices. According to her it's horrible.

The point is: she hears voices that aren't coming from an external source.

Eh, not other dimensions, no. Just the mind interacting with itself -- something the mind is trained to ignore to pay attention to the important things. (EDIT: Or, even more abstractly, it's really just a local, ontic interpretation of experience, which we have been taught to treat in a certain manner in an industrial society with a division of labor, etc.) — Moliere

We're kind of stuck with our own worldview though. They used to think it was demonic possession, our poor capitalist selves call it schizophrenia.

It's a malfunction where a person hears voices that aren't coming from an external source. It's the mind creating the experience of an audible voice.

In the case of starvation, for instance, sometimes people's experiences have been interpreted as religious visions of a truth beyond the everyday -- what is colloquially called "hallucination" can be interpreted as another layer of reality which our normal functioning has been trained to ignore (and which is why the disruption of normal functioning turns the mind on itself -- which is what I'd say hallucinations are. — Moliere

Direct realism means hallucinators are peeping into other dimensions?

For hallucinations I simply note that in every case we can find some physiological reason why they are hallucinating -- — Moliere

I don't think that undermines the point, though. Hallucinations show that the mind can create experience. Once you notice that, reality will always be taken with a grain of salt.

Is it rational to hold an incorrect belief that helps you cope with pain and suffering? — Scarecow

Rationality isn't about helpfulness. It's about fashion. It's about adhering to justifications that are deemed proper by society in general.

If property dualism is correct then qualia I suppose. Otherwise the constituents of experience just are whatever physical things mental phenomena are reducible to. — Michael

Makes sense.

What would qualify as a constituent of experience? I'm drawing a blank.

Without trying to describe or justify a whole politcal or philosophical system, I'd like to ask a question. If we could improve equality, is the question below what needs to happen?

Would you be willing to accept a set of principles that increases the prospects of others, even if it means having fewer opportunities yourself? — Rob J Kennedy

Improvement in equality can happen in many ways. The Bubonic plague brought about greater equality because it killed off so many slaves. Those who were left had an improved bargaining position. This enraged the aristocracy, but there was nothing they could do about it. They weren't willing to accept any new set of principles, but they had no choice but to pay more for labor, and money is power. Equality is about power distribution.

I mentioned before that direct realism was Aristotelian. It said that our minds directly contact the forms in the things around us. Indirect realism was a rejection of that kind of idealism.

Ironically, some in this discussion see indirect realism as a haunted scenario and reject it in favor of some kind of behaviorism in which perception plays a dubious role.

Think about what? Representationalism makes perfect sense metaphysically, which just indicates an logically necessary method describing how our intellect works. But to think about how the brain as a physical substance works, as that by which our intellect is possible, representationalism wouldn’t even be a theoretical condition, hence wouldn’t make any sense to include it in an empirical descriptive method. — Mww

I think we're just disagreeing on language. I don't think it's very likely that the brain takes in sensory input and constructs experience out of it. That was the original idea behind indirect realism.

I think there's more likely a built-in framework that takes cues from sensory data. In other words, it's a kind of tango with world and conscious entity as the dancers. Is this direct realism? Not exactly, although it's something Aristotle might accept if we made the model something cosmic, which isn't outside the bounds of reason.

a tacit admission that whatever is said from a purely speculative point of view, sufficient for us to comprehend what it is we do with our intelligence, cannot possibly be the method the brain, in and of itself, actually uses to provide it. — Mww

I'm not understanding this. Could you say more?

"Expectations" in attention are mediated by the modulation of neuronal membrane activity - where is the representation explicitly in this other than a useful metaphor? — Apustimelogist

Yes, the model wouldn't be a representation. To some extent it's probably innate, but influenced in some ways by culture and language.

This kind of thinking is probably reflective of my view that I don't think representations are inherent. — Apustimelogist

The more I think about it, the less I think representationalism makes sense. How exactly would the brain organize the massive stream of data coming into as a coherent representation, moment by moment? I'm guessing it doesn't. As Kant said, the foundations of it are a priori. I think it's a complex model, like a hardwired memory. Like read-only-memory.

I talk about neurons a lot but I think even on the level of experiences, I was convinced by the types of analyses from the likes of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations that representation cannot be pinned down here either and experience is even somewhat mechanistic as a flow of one experience to the next which can sometimes seem completely involuntary, unanticipated, inexplicable. — Apustimelogist

Exactly.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by this but the picture I was painting I wasn't necessarily implying anything about representation. I am a bit agnostic about representation in the sense that I don't think you need the concept of representation to explain how the brain works but I am not necessarily adverse to using this concept, especially as it is so intuitive. I just am not necessarily sold on the idea of some kind of inherent orintrinsic, essentialistic representations with intentionality in the brain. Neither do I think we should take it literally when neuroscientists attribute representation to the kinds of correlations that they detect in particular experiments. — Apustimelogist

I was thinking that when attention is directed outward, toward the future, expectation may play a necessary role. Attention will mainly go to whatever is unexpected or out of place, so it's efficient. This implies some sort of modeling, but it could be reflexive, hardwired, algorithmic, whatever it takes to avoid ghosts. Just a thought.

The learning of the causal connection between them is then done by the neurons in our head. — Apustimelogist

Do you think it could be that we carry around models that are populated by sensory input? Not exactly a representation.

While many elements of our perceptual capacities are indeed actualized without conscious attention or at a sub-personal level, this doesn't undermine the direct realist view. The key point is that perception is an active, embodied process that unfolds over time, not just a matter of passively receiving and internally representing sensory inputs. — Pierre-Normand

Are you saying that perception can't be passive? The hormone that deals with goal attainment is dopamine. It's probably the most powerful hormone affecting active behavior. But it goes off line and allows the body to rest and the nervous system switches to behavior that allows sleep, digestion, and healing. So what do you think happens to perception at those times? Is it just a leftover from the more active states?

Consider the example of walking in a city. As we walk, we periodically glance at the ground ahead to guide our footsteps, while also attending to the store fronts and other features of the environment. The character of our phenomenology shifts as our attention moves from one aspect of the world to another. This highlights how perception is a dynamic process of engaging with and exploring the environment, not just a static representation in the brain. — Pierre-Normand

I think it shows that perception is involved (I don't think we're going to agree on the issue of phenomenal vs functional, so I'll let that go). I don't see how it shows that perception is nothing other than a process of engaging and exploring the environment. But is that what you meant? If it is, what leads you to think so?

The brain is certainly crucial in enabling this dynamic interaction, but it is the whole brain-body-environment system that constitutes the basis of perceptual experience. The various neural subsystems - from the cerebellum to the sensory and motor cortices - work in concert with the body's sensorimotor capacities to enable us to grasp and respond to the affordances of our environment. — Pierre-Normand

The central nervous system (CNS) is separated from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier. It has its own immune system. We can shut down the brain's connection to motor neurons with paralytic drugs, and perception persists. Sensory nerves are just sending electrical impulses in, so it's not inconceivable that we could separate the CNS from the rest of the body. We have machines that can reproduce the functions of the lungs, heart, and kidneys. Right now it wouldn't make any sense to save a brain because there would be nowhere to put it long term. It would just be an insane experiment. But are you saying that this is inconceivable?

So while much of this process may occur without conscious attention, this doesn't mean that perception is just a matter of what's represented in the brain, as the indirect realist view suggests. The direct realist alternative is that perception is a matter of the whole embodied organism dynamically attuning to and engaging with its environment over time. — Pierre-Normand

I wasn't saying that functional consciousness (the part that goes on without any conscious awareness) proves indirect realism. I was trying to sort out the part you think conscious awareness plays in the overall functioning of the organism. I'll agree it's a component, but more in terms of higher level planning. What I was looking for was the reason to insist on embodied consciousness. As an interesting idea, it works. I'm not seeing how it goes beyond that, though.

And then, of course, there are direct realists who view experience/perception as the actualization of a capacity that persons (or animals) have to grasp the affordances of their world. Brains merely are organs that enable such capacities. — Pierre-Normand

Most of that capacity is actualized without the involvement of phenomenal consciousness, so it's not clear to me what this direct realist is saying exactly.

in these, admittedly very, very trying, circumstances. But i push forward... — AmadeusD

:lol: Life is so hard sometimes.

recognising it as a cow consists in not running for the gate because it's a bull, keeping a eye out for pats on the surrounding ground, counting how many cows there are as opposed to kangaroos, and so on. That is it consist in interacting with the cow and with other things. You know it is a cow by those interactions - indeed, knowing it is a cow is those interactions. — Banno

I think you've identified one factor. If that's all there was, the art of identification would be unlearnable. But that is about interpretation of what you sense. I told you I sensed an odor, and I know I've encountered it before, but I don't know what to call it, and I don't know where it comes from (although it may be that I know it, but the memory is unavailable for some reason).

So my phenomenology says interpretation is secondary. Language is secondary. You can recognize what you sense even though you can't identify it. I can, anyway. You may not be able to.

Well, here's the puzzle: did you recognise it, or just think you recognised it? Dejà vu?

You have no way to tell.

Hence, following a rule has to be public. — Banno

So you're looking at a cow. Do you recognize it as a cow? Or just think you recognize it? Knowing that it's called a "cow" doesn't make any difference. There is no fact about which rule you've been following all this time. Other people can't help you with that.

Therefore perception has to start with innate confidence in a world circumscribed by space and time, where you, the real you, reside in an unchanging spot as it all swirls around you, or you fly through it as it rests on arbitrary x-y-z axes. The intention is emerging from somewhere you can't detect. It rests on nothing you know of.

And you have no vantage point on it to be able to say how it works. Pretty cool, huh?