Is it possible to create a fantasy world that is totally sui generis - borne out of one's imagination and nothing else?
Of course not. We are all products of our biology, history, language, culture, and time, and we perceive and imagine only through those lenses. A feat of pure fantasy in the sense of bearing no relation to the real world is therefore itself a fantastical notion. Fantasy is always ineluctably rooted in reality.
An individual's imagination in other words is best thought of as a kind of confluence of many currents coming together to form little eddies and whirlpools, none of them ever the same but all of them born from the same mixture flowing in from the various tributaries. Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth as the paradigm case - a great imaginative feat, of that there is no doubt, but plainly and unabashedly springing from the author's cultural background, knowledge of history, birthplace, language, and all the rest. And there is no creation in the field of fantasy and science fiction about which similar things could not be said - the only real difference being that very few authors or game designers embed their creations in the real world as consciously as Tolkien did.
What we downplay in this, and what truly separates us from our Robot Overlords, is the role of experience. There is no question that the World Wars - both of them - were significantly present in the mixture of influences that created Middle Earth (certainly in its later iterations), for example, and no question either that other important features of his life (such as his Christianity and his very loving relationship with his wife) were also in the water. This will be, to a greater or lesser extent, true of everybody, even at the level of what books one has read, what films one has seen, and where one has been on holiday. It all goes in; it all contributes; and we personally often have little to no insight into how.
The individual human being is therefore a unique blend of all of those features that I earlier identified - biology, history, language, culture, time, and so on - combined with all of the things that have ever happened to them, every second, since the moment they were conceived. This makes their imaginative ventures inescapably an expression of themselves.
AI cannot hope to replicate this, since all it is capable of is drawing together existing creations, mixing them together, and spitting out pastiche. And we should therefore play to our own strengths. Pastiche is treated as an inferior act of creation partly because it apes too much the work of another, and we sense that there is something illegitimate in this: the original work has so much of the author in it, and to copy is therefore to expropriate the product of his or her unique experience and character. What we need, in fact, is a properly worked out critique of pastiche, and a philosophy of creativity that emphasises above all pastiche's negation. We need, in other words, to embrace the fact that fantasy is a product of reality and an expression of ourselves, and worth taking seriously as a consequence.
We are different than machines only in our sophistication.
ReplyDeleteNo, we're entirely different categories of thing.
DeleteI used to believe that, as well.
DeleteReally? So machines have relationships and interactions with the physical world, and memory? You might want to rethink that.
DeleteThere's nothing special about meat that makes it inherently superior to silicon. It's all just maths when you get down to it. There's no fairy dust involved.
DeleteWe're not there yet though. There's things we haven't quite figured out. But the mist of uncertainty has resolved into tractable problems.
"I used to believe that" is so funny as a response honestly, as though the novelty of a thought has bearing on it's truth. I hear all the time that philosophy will develop with age. But nobody ever considers whether it will progress into truth or falsehood. Our bodies develop with age, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Whenever I hear someone say "you'll let go of that hard philosophy as you get older", I think "perhaps I shall, and these hard teeth also!"
DeleteBut that's just a fallacy. It's not to say that you are wrong.
Rather, this is: you are wrong. You are wrong because, if you are right, then your statement is meaningless. That is, if I understand your statement correctly. I take it to be this: "humans are only sophisticated neural networks, taking in stimuli and displaying an illusion of consciousness". If you are correct, your statement is meaningless.
As anyone who has used chatGPT for any length of time knows, it doesn't take into account whether a statement is true. It doesn't have any internal logic to reason about the world. It merely speaks as conditioned. If it were true that we were of the same kind as it, then we wouldn't have any internal reason to evaluate the truth of your claim. Your statement would be literally meaningless. You could have meant nothing by it, because meaning comes from internal experience.
Perhaps it is appropriate that you "used to believe that". After all, according to what you apparently believe now, you can believe absolutely nothing at all.
(I hope this isnt bothersome, noisms, I got a bit caught up in it. Neither to you, venger. I appreciate a good argument, and since I haven't really pulled any punches, you can feel free to make me look as ridiculous as you like (though I am sure I have already done so myself.))
Good comment.
DeleteThere are a bunch of different ways I've seen the "we're actually just machines too" position argued, but I'd pick out a couple of phrases from your comment, Pilgrim: "internal logic" and "internal reason". What exactly is it you mean by this? Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your point, but I think this is a reference to what Dennett refers to as Cartesian theatre. I think you're suggesting that there is an "internal" process that is distinct from the sensory input processes that interprets those inputs and makes choices etc, and that it is this internal homunculus that does the "believing". You're suggesting that Venger's statement is logically inconsistent, because they state they believe something while denying that the entity(?) that does the believing exists. Am I in the right ballpark?
DeleteFor my part, I don't think there's an inconsistency. Venger's position could be that it's entirely possible for a complicated human machine to be conscious, to have beliefs etc, without there being a distinct "internal" anything (e.g. functionalism), or their position could be that the "I" that used to believe something is the figurative a ghost in the machine, the illusion of consciousness (e.g. full on eliminativism). It's only inconsistent if you understand the word "belief" to alone belong to the magisterium of the soul.
When we ask ourselves questions like "What does it mean to be human?" we'll get a variety of answers that may or may not be close to the mark depending on how far down the rabbit hole we're willing to go.
DeleteIf we are made in the image of God (fairy dust included), and man makes A.I., there's a through-line, albeit corruptible.
Will it turn out like Terminator, The Matrix, Bladerunner, Colossus, Westworld, or any number of cool scifi films? I don't know, but the ending will probably surprise us.
To sum up... yes, we're special. But are we special enough? Humanity needs to get its act together!
In the same way that we are different from animals, we are different from machines in every way that it means to be human.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that we are so different to animals is arrogance and human chauvinism. Language and raw synapse count separates us and almost nothing else.
DeleteIt’s meaningful for humans to separate ourselves from animals. Look how animals behave. Eating their kids, cannibalism, incest. Compulsory predation. Every culture, however respectful of nonhuman life, has some separation between humans and animals. So that’s meaningful enough for me. While also bearing in mind that we have to show some compassion for nonhuman life and attempt to caretake and maintain the natural world, or else we’ll doom the world (and ourselves) to a horrible fate.
DeleteJason, while I agree with you, I think you've made a few errors. We know for a fact that cannibalism, incest, and all other manner of evil acts are human behaviors. If humans did not, on occasion, behave this way, we would have no laws concerning them. That's probably the really human thing: being able to look at something we did and say that it was morally wrong. I don't think that any other animal can subject itself to so much mental anguish over self-serving actions as we can. To err is human.
DeleteYes - one of the things that is so 'human' about humans is the idea (common to all cultures) that there is an objective way to assess right behaviour, against which we can fall short.
DeleteMachine art is only interesting in the way that surrealist art techniques are interesting. You can make a mildly interesting poem by cutting up a book and piecing it back together in a random way, but the novelty wears off very quickly and it's not a substitute for a creative process driven by conscious intent. Plus all you end up expressing is a sense of discomfort and alienation, which is really a small part of the entire realm of human experience. AI can make all sorts of uncanny valley monsters but that's about all it can do.
ReplyDeleteWhy anyone sincerely believes that it's going to be able to take the place of screenwriters, I do not know.
Because most tv/film today is bilge, churned out to distract the proles. We're at least 4% past Sturgeon's Law at the moment. You really can't even imagine why people might at least *think* modern screenwriting could be replaced by AI? I am not a champion of AI-generated "creativity" but it sure looks as if plenty of humans are only capable of regurgitating crudely amalgamated, even-worse versions of the works that have passed before their eyes. I don't think AI art will rise to humanity's heights - but today, mass culture has sunk far enough that AI is within striking distance of the common denominator.
DeleteI kind of agree with you both. AI will not replace art, but it may replace the thin gruel that we're currently served. I say 'may', because I remain to be convinced that it can produce longform writing of even a bad standard.
DeleteYou know I think AI art has always fallen short in what Noisms is here terming "fantasy", I've never had my imagination captured in a positive sweep with it. What it does excel in is making unsettling monstrous images that gnaw negatively, I think it might well have a place in horror...
DeleteI agree. It's good at the disturbing and surreal - exactly what you would expect from something that lacked a soul!
DeleteGenerative AI is the new thing people project their hopes and fears on, but let's remember that the only type of AI to achieve legal personhood so far is a corporation. I saw the same motive (produce illustration as cheaply as possible) and means (pastiche) at work in the 4e era. The homogeneous look of modern fantasy comes from having publishers write art orders that function like AI queries: instructions that can be outsourced to a legion of freelancers racing to the bottom of who will do this work for less. Inevitably artists whose livelihood has been atomized in this way will ape the look of those who have been afforded time to develop their own talent and experience. Stealing their work and using it to train AI is just the latest in an ongoing series of efforts to make artists behave more like machines for the benefits of owners.
ReplyDeleteWell put.
DeleteI think the properly worked out critique of pastiche that you're looking for is in Coleridge. He distinguishes between "fancy" (i.e. pastiche) and "imagination" (depth of creation) at some length and demonstrates the superiority of the latter. McGilchrist further theorizes these two paths to creation represent the thinking of the left and right hemispheres respectively.
DeleteThanks for this. I have read a bit of Coleridge and studied him back in university but haven't revisited him in years. I'd also forgotten the McGilchrist angle but that's absolutely right.
DeleteJesus. The AI talk again. Am I the only person around here that's read Magus: Robot Fighter?
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's a great idea to try to speculate what AI can or will eventually be able to accomplish. Once upon a time, people thought we'd have ubiquitous flying cars and moon colonies by the 1990s. And yet the sweeping changes in genetics and information technologies have radically altered our way of life in the last two decades.
Rather than guess, or worry, or fear, or...whatever...I'm simply going to do my best to be the best human I can be and promote that in others. The Butlerian Jihad, if necessary, will eventually occur...with or without my help.
You're undoubtedly right.
DeleteCue the frequent observation that there's a huge chasm of quality separating fantasy writers who dip afresh into reality for inspiration (via experience, or scholarship) from those who work from copies, or copies of copies, of fantasy fiction tropes.
ReplyDeleteYes. I think Orson Scott Card made this observation once in a podcast I listened to. He said that the thing you should copy in Tolkien is the method, but most people take the wrong message and copy the content.
Delete100% agree, but what makes it hard is that it's the content we love, not the method.
Delete"Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree — the hrönir derived from another hrön, those derived from the hrön of a hrön — exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original."
DeletePrediction: You will find the greatest resistance to your anti-pastiche philosophy of creation of fantasy in the fanfic community, which is a massive bolus of nerds (women in particular) pushing out absolutely abderitic, highly imitative, essentially pornographic drek which is effectively indistinguishable from the "work" of an AI, and constantly formulating sophistic defenses of the legitimacy of this kind of derivative work. Tragicomically, the main fan fiction sites are a massive pipeline into publication in today's speculative-fiction ecosystem, such that publishers are also liable to be arrayed against any effort to spread an anti-pastiche mentality.
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective - I have no knowledge of that field at all except that Naomi Novik (sp?) got her break from writing fan fiction? And the 50 Shades books of course,
DeleteYes, Novik's Temeraire series is supposed to be Aubrey-Maturin fanfic with dragons and the names scraped off, isn't it? I understand the "Locked Tomb" series is also a product of the fan fiction pipeline, and not only that but is merely one series concerning lesbian space necromancers, all apparently spawned from the same fanfic or trope or something. And if you really want to ruin your mind for productive uses you could read this: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Omegaverse_Litigation
DeleteSadly, I'm not remotely an expert on this topic myself, these are just examples I can pull off the top of my head due to the present prolificacy of this species of garbage.