I'm glad! I'd be curious to know how this resonates with your experience making electronic and sample based music. Are there seeds in that context too?
I do! 'Song seeds' really resonates. Sometimes I think most of my work is done before pen hits paper. The actual writing feels like the final stage of an attentive act (love). The seeds grow as I search for ever fuller beauty, look for how the world fits together--nothing more. I also see a connection between a musician needing to play the song and a writer needing to reread what's just been written. Interesting to consider how writers 'perform' their work as their imaginary readers.
This experience seems so common--that the work somehow preexists its entrance into time. I find it so interesting. I'm tempted to suggest that this might ultimately be the thing that distinguishes human art from procedural generated images/sounds/text. The former involves attending to the idea and drawing it into bodily existence where the later sees an algorithm calculating probabilities.
Yeah exactly. It definitely seems like AI lacks a kind of 'intentionality' beyond its human creators. I was recently reading something that describes how a novel grows semantically clearer and meaningful but syntactically more wild and unpredictable as it progresses ('the meaning of the whole goes to 1 as the predictability of its sequence goes to 0'). I don't see how a prediction machine can untether itself from the predictable (and material) without producing nonsense; it's hard to imagine it writing a Moby Dick or an Odyssey.
That is so helpful, especially how you link what is predictable to what is material.
The nicest thing I could possibly say about genAI is: insofar as it performs calculations relative to the entire corpus of texts used to trained the language model, the texts it generates are produced relative to a unity. MAYBE this is analogous to the experience of an artist seeking the unity of an idea through their materials. Maybe. But, a language model only has one unity to draw on, while the human soul can be possessed by many different divine principles (which seems necessary for a Moby Dick or an Odyssey).
Ah yeah, I like the way you put it. 'Possessed by many different principles' is a great way to frame it. As mysterious as consciousness is, it seems to me that it most certainly isn't purely material, nor mechanistic and computational in its processes/activity. David Bentley Hart compares Narcissus+pool to our fixation with a technology that reflects our intelligence back to us; and while I'm wary about sounding alarmist, the way many suggest we're NOT looking at the reflection of our intelligence but our intelligence itself (mind=machine, literally), unsettles me. But anyway, I'm digressing now.
Loved reading this, feel some kind of camaraderie with the rest of the song-writers!
I'm glad! I'd be curious to know how this resonates with your experience making electronic and sample based music. Are there seeds in that context too?
Absolutely, just sub out guitar or piano for sample, sound, texture, etc.
Beautifully put!
Thanks for reading, Justin. Do you think there is an analogy with writing novels and stories here?
I do! 'Song seeds' really resonates. Sometimes I think most of my work is done before pen hits paper. The actual writing feels like the final stage of an attentive act (love). The seeds grow as I search for ever fuller beauty, look for how the world fits together--nothing more. I also see a connection between a musician needing to play the song and a writer needing to reread what's just been written. Interesting to consider how writers 'perform' their work as their imaginary readers.
This experience seems so common--that the work somehow preexists its entrance into time. I find it so interesting. I'm tempted to suggest that this might ultimately be the thing that distinguishes human art from procedural generated images/sounds/text. The former involves attending to the idea and drawing it into bodily existence where the later sees an algorithm calculating probabilities.
Yeah exactly. It definitely seems like AI lacks a kind of 'intentionality' beyond its human creators. I was recently reading something that describes how a novel grows semantically clearer and meaningful but syntactically more wild and unpredictable as it progresses ('the meaning of the whole goes to 1 as the predictability of its sequence goes to 0'). I don't see how a prediction machine can untether itself from the predictable (and material) without producing nonsense; it's hard to imagine it writing a Moby Dick or an Odyssey.
That is so helpful, especially how you link what is predictable to what is material.
The nicest thing I could possibly say about genAI is: insofar as it performs calculations relative to the entire corpus of texts used to trained the language model, the texts it generates are produced relative to a unity. MAYBE this is analogous to the experience of an artist seeking the unity of an idea through their materials. Maybe. But, a language model only has one unity to draw on, while the human soul can be possessed by many different divine principles (which seems necessary for a Moby Dick or an Odyssey).
Ah yeah, I like the way you put it. 'Possessed by many different principles' is a great way to frame it. As mysterious as consciousness is, it seems to me that it most certainly isn't purely material, nor mechanistic and computational in its processes/activity. David Bentley Hart compares Narcissus+pool to our fixation with a technology that reflects our intelligence back to us; and while I'm wary about sounding alarmist, the way many suggest we're NOT looking at the reflection of our intelligence but our intelligence itself (mind=machine, literally), unsettles me. But anyway, I'm digressing now.