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Comment on: “Is It Art?” Dan Falk, Saturday, October 15 2005

In 1843, Lady Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada) made her famous objection to Charles Babbage’s prototype computer, “The Analytical Engine,” that it “has no pretensions to originate anything. It can [only] do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

Harold Cohen (the artist who wrote AARON, the computer programme that paints pictures) agrees that AARON is not “creative” because it is just mechanically following the rules Cohen wrote. (Cohen may be creative, but not AARON.) Yet Cohen thinks his newer program, which is “no longer ‘rule-based’ in the old sense” may be creative because it is capable of modifying itself. But what difference does that make? The self-modifying capability is itself rule-based! And even if a random element were thrown in, that would just be rules plus a bit of random shake-up, and still no more creative than the “malfunctioning toaster [that can produce] a piece of toast with burn marks completely unforeseen by the toaster’s builder.”

In any case, none of this has anything to do, one way or the other, with the “consciousness and intentionality and subjectivity” (all really just synonyms for the same thing: feeling) that Toronto’s cognitive scientist John Vervaeke invokes. The real point is that we don’t yet know the rules underlying most of our abilities, whether creative or uncreative. The paradox will come if and when cognitive science does discover the rules underlying our “creative” abilities, for then there will be no degrees of freedom left for creativity (other than chance).

So perhaps we should focus on “giftedness” rather than on creativity: Perhaps the genius is the one who has the ability to master and play according to rules that none of the rest of us can master,
rather than just the one who can modify them.

Harnad, S. (in press) “Creativity: Method Or Magic?”
Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.

The irony of “A Temetetlen Halott” (“Unburied Remains” or “The Uninterred Corpse,” woodenly translated “The Unburied Man”) is buried in its one good metaphor: that what tormented Imre Nagy (the abettor of the ill-fated and short-lived Hungarian uprising of 1956) the most at the end was that his (inevitable) posthumous rehabilitation would be at the hands of his own assassins (rehabilitating themselves).

The film ends on the note that Imre Nagy’s exhumation and reburial with honours was not done until 1989, after the remains of the post-1956 regime had faded out (and on the very day his successor/executioner János Kádár died). But it seems to be lost on the film-makers and the nation that the internecine squabbles among the true-believers (few) and the opportunists (many) about whether 1956 was a revolution or a counter-revolution had itself been just another incarnation of Hungary’s unburied cycle of red/white — previously black-yellow/red-white-green) oscillation and carnage. The same archetypes keep re-emerging, out of the self-same mother-soil and blood-types that the film is here whitewashing (in accordance with the current cycle), if not beatifying.

But Hungary is perhaps no worse than the rest of the planet in this regard, and certainly not the worst.

The film itself, apart from a few moments of good character acting, is dead dialogue and dreary docudrama throughout.

(full disclosure)

If 9/11 was a wake-up call to the Muslim world about where runaway islamic fundamentalism leads, 9/1 (New Orleans) was a wake-up call to the western world about where runaway arms and runaway media violence lead.

Bible-belt Yahoos
and the Darth Vaders of Wall Street
elect a Manhattan mobster
as President.

Yes, the law of large numbers
may still ensure
he’s routed,
this time.

But can anything rout
the rot?

Re:  www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/george-soros-democrat-open-society.html

(1) George Soros has done — or tried to do — incomparably more good than harm.

(2) The hatred fomented against him is not only undeserved, but unpardonably shameful and despicable.

It cannot be left unsaid, however, in response to “if he hadn’t gone after the British pound or the Thai baht, someone else would have” that not only can this be used as a justification for humanity’s worst sins, but he could have given the money back (as others would not have done).

As to “the difference between my engagement in the markets, where my only interest is to get it right and make money, and my political engagement, where I stand for what I really believe in” — this is a classical example of cognitive dissonance. Self-deprecating irony — “I was a confirmed egoist but I considered the pursuit of self-interest as too narrow a base for my rather inflated self” — does not resolve the profound contradiction. Neither does centrism; nor theorizing, whether by Karl Popper or by George Soros. Nor does enlightened plutocracy.

But (1) and (2) remain true. In the scheme of things, George Soros is squarely on the side of the angels, or has at least tried to be. The same cannot be said of most people with resources on the Hampton end of the human scale.

Re: Feeding cats plant-based diet

As a vegan, I am against breeding animals to be pets; companion “domestic” animals should only be rescued ones, and the aim should be to phase out the pet industry and mentality altogether. But the reality is that astronomical numbers of purpose-bred animals are living, and being bred today. The obligate carnivores among them are being fed a small fraction of the body parts of a far more enormous number of animals that are being purpose-bred for human consumption.

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