There are also threads that are very technical that only a select few forum members can understand. Does that bother you? I'm just curious. :smile: — Wheatley

No it doesn’t bother me. That’s how they like to address questions. It is technical but it doesn’t appeal to me. They’re like a group in a dark room trying to turn lead into gold, or the masons; secret hand signals and words.

Been happening for a long, long time. — Outlander

Doesn’t this almost sum up my post, a sort of fatalism that it’s all over. It reeks of ennui.

Been happening for a long, long time. — Outlander

What has?

Do we really want anything new? The new things we have are constantly becoming more of a liability than an asset. — Outlander

It’s interesting what you took to be “new”; things we produce. A materialist point of view. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s kind of limiting.

The idea of mindfulness is to be open to understand things as they are. Mindfulness is being in a stable state where you think with your whole mind, to be ready to see and observe, to be ready for thinking.

I think the idea of always living in the present is a bit misleading. To me it means clarity of thought at any time. The nostalgia and pain that comes to you from thinking about the past is real. Mindfulness is understanding your experience of that. Those feelings are happening in the present so they are real, they’re not the memories themselves. It’s not that you’re living in the past, it’s that you’re experiencing nostalgia, heartache and pleasure as a result of thinking. Mindfulness is understanding what’s happening to you.

You keep referring to “the Being” as a subject and it being the fact “in spite of (Heidegger’s) own refusal.” Only someone who refuses to see would persist in thinking that. I don’t know why you persist in this.

If to say that everyone has forgotten or trivialized the essential question of philosophy is not to disqualify, I do not understand what disqualify means. — David Mo

You introduce the word disqualify as the definition of Heidegger’s view of Western philosophy. Then you go to your dictionaries to dig up the meaning of disqualify as meaning “rejecting someone from a "competition" because they have done something wrong” and then ask Xtrix to defend Heidegger on that basis. Sounds a little cheap to me.

But he repeatedly says it's not a "being" — Xtrix

I agree here. My impression, in English translations, is that the capitalisation of “Being” is to set it apart from a “being”. Though it doesn’t seem to me to be very difficult to tell the difference.

I think it’s virtually impossible to prove something to someone who actively does not believe. I have no trouble with the concept of “Being” and I find it hard to understand why others can’t or won’t. But in some ways you either get it or you don’t.

Edit: I’m relatively new to Heidegger, but it seems to me that we do wonder about our existence, so that suggests that the meaning of Being is under question. How and why would we instinctively question something we don’t believe exists?

Heidegger is then saying that we should try to discover the meaning of Being through the way we exist and live.

Maybe I should gave said that we’ve become essentially materialist creatures.
Consciousness contains the past. Like I said, ghosts and devils.

Why do you think it is? — Pop

Maybe because we’re essentially materialist creatures. Without that the world’s full of ghosts and devils,

Like an internal family feud that can’t be resolved because they can’t talk about it because it just causes trouble.

Consciousness is what it feels like when your brain is working. — praxis

Working to do what?

but there still remains a cultural aversion to engaging with consciousness. — Pop

At first I thought that might not be an accurate statement, that it’s just that we begin to wobble when we address it, but on reflection you might be right.

Edit: maybe not an aversion but a pretence to engaging with it which, I guess, is a form of aversion.

This?

Does AI undo its legitimacy as art? — Forgottenticket

Do you mean that art challenges the legitimacy of AI?

I find it difficult to be sure what your posts are getting at.

Do you mean that by moving the goalposts about art we allow AI to be creative? And that aesthetics, being related to logic, allows AI to legitimately take part in the creative act. My feeling, anyway, about aesthetics is that it’s the non creative‘s door into art. They take part in art by applying a slide rule to what others do instinctively.

What’s new logic? Is that a logic that lay dormant until we found it? Can there be another sort of logic? I don’t know, I’m not even sure if that’s what you were getting at,

2: If it's just machines making use of logic, then every single boss from every video game would count because they continually defeat humans at logic every day. The Turing test for logic was completed on the first defeat. — Forgottenticket

So the AI defeats us in logic, right? And so logic in humans, so what? Move on, nothing special here to look at.

Is it, as it appears, that the final proof of AI abilities is in producing art, like poetry? Is that what we’re using as proof that it’s equal to the human experience, not just the logical aspects, which AI supposedly excels at, but the actual human experience of living. If that’s the case then it suggests something very particular about art and being human, a benchmark for AI to crest.

If that’s the case does it also mean that logic is not what’s so special about being human?

I can understand why people would be anxious about all this. — fdrake

Anxious about what?

Art algorithms ... accelerate the pace of art revolutions. — sime

That’s an interesting post, but I don’t see it as evidence of algorithms accelerating the pace of art revolutions. I don’t see an art revolution that’s the result of algorithms.

Without semi-autonomous content creation tools, the present creation of vast and open virtual worlds wouldn't be possible. — sime

True.

Perhaps we could call the potential algorithmic output of content-creation tools "meta art" — sime

We could, but is it? And it’s still only potential.

in comprising a distribution over art objects, but it is still 'art' in the traditional sense in being ultimately shaped by the vision of it's users who program it, feed data to it, and tweak it's responses. — sime

So it’s an output tool, like a painting on canvas or printed pages. But what is the vision in feeding AI words and lines from existing poems? There is no vision except to create what is now redefined as a poem, as art. There is no poet, only the programmer. The vision then becomes that of the reader, as in reader-response literary theory. There is no vision of the artist because the construction of the poem is random and the meaning accidental.

And these tools also complement and fuel the need for traditional artists who produce hand-crafted content, as for example in virtual world content creation where there are neither enough algorithms nor artists to produce the infinite amount of diverse content required. — sime

But AI can only produce a work if it’s received the pre-existing work of traditional artists, because it cannot produce “the infinite amount of diverse content required.” In fact without the diverse content it would just be a tool waiting for someone to switch it on. Is that a revolution in art?

Art algorithms ... accelerate the pace of art revolutions. — sime

Can you give evidence for that?

What makes jesus god? — Daniel

There is the idea that a God exists in three modes: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit.

Hatred might be a desire.

What if you desire that which you hate in equal proportion?

Why’s that?

Edit: oh, because of your reluctance.

I agree.

I’ve questioned Baden about removals of my OPs and generally got helpful feedback.

It doesn’t make me reluctant to post again. It’s other posters who sometimes do that, but in the end I want to try again. “School of hard knocks” I guess, which isn’t so bad.

But really, what’s the underlying problem with these requests about quality? The mods step in; we generally agree with them,

Yes, it’s not like anyone’s going to come up with something profound, or never said or thought of before.

This from you on another OP.

“ After all, a society is judged by how they treat the least of them.”

I agree. I don’t mind being brought up by mods over quality but I want the chance to go head to toe with all posters, whether they like it or not.

Edit: oops; toe to toe.

'Opinion rules the world, but in the long run it is the philosophers who shape this opinion' - — A Seagull

I find it hard to see any truth in that. How and where does opinion rule the world? And where’s the proof that philosophers shape that opinion?

I don’t really have anything against Heidegger, I feel quite comfortable with his ideas. What I find of interest is the distance between theory and action in the world, how we can think something and be convinced of it then find ourselves entangled in something, by our own choosing, that contradicts that thinking. This is obviously another subject from the OP so I’ll leave it there.

You could in theory have an endless amount of apps for generating specific material. — Forgottenticket

That’s a very interesting point. There are many writers I like reading who are long dead. I’ve read all their books and can’t find any books by authors that come close enough to satisfy me. I might be very interested if AI could produce work just like theirs, that ticks all the boxes that does it for me.

What he'd done -- meaning joining the Nazi party or his earlier work? Because neither is true. He infamously never apologized for being part of the Nazi party, although he once referred to it (in a letter I believe) as a "blunder." — Xtrix

Of course you must know the truth of these issues.

He became an official member of the Nazi party in April, 1933.

He is quoted as saying it was “The greatest stupidity of his life”.

In some ways I can see that being the grounds for people rejecting him and his work; not because he worked with the Nazis but that it blew back on the grounds for his thinking and writing.
— Brett

In what way? I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. — Xtrix

Because he was so tuned into ideas of “authenticity” and “fallenness”. Why, how, did he think the Nazi part was a good idea?

What brought Burrough’s cut-ups to mind and the comparison was your post that said “ The AI was fed poems from many times and genre ... “

So my impression was that the AI had juxtaposed these different lines. (I don’t know if they were fed lines, word or phrases), that the juxtaposing then created interesting stanzas that then generated interesting ideas.

The Oval Office will be
Full of people you never knew.
And you’ll wish you had been born
Another boy or girl.
They will be, what, pre-adults now?
Have you ever seen so many P.M.s?

So, like Burroughs, pre existing material was juxtaposed to create new material in the sense of making it new or creating unexpected, even original, connections, etc.

I don’t see anything wrong with that, except that the writer is still required to keep driving the work in a specific direction.
What drives the direction of AI? If there’s no sense of direction then it’s merely interesting to watch it juggle words and lines.
Of course we can take what we want from it, just like we do with poetry, if you go along with literary theory views the reader bringing meaning to the work, not the author.

I personally find that idea interesting, to a degree. And in that sense, if the reader-response theory wins out then the AI is the next Shakespeare.

Yes they’re different. I said not much more interesting than Burroughs.

Robots aren't conscious; and they produce interesting poems. Can we start from there, please? — csalisbury

That sounds like the opening salvo to a discussion to me. More than like or dislike anyway. But fine, I’ll leave it there that the poems are interesting but no more than Burrough’s cut ups.

And some thought it wasn’t so cool. I thought it was interesting to begin with but then started thinking on it some more and decided it was not much more than Burrough’s cut ups.

What’s the point of the OP?

I think it’s good. — csalisbury

I’m only saying I think they’re pretty — csalisbury

That’s fine. So what are we here for?

But if we can’t define “poem” then how do we progress?

Though I can stick to the idea about whether they can produce poetry, putting the issue of “anything” aside.

I’m not saying they can replace poets either. First I wondered if they could produce poetry then I wondered if they could produce anything at all without human input. I was referring to your last post where you asked us to begin again.