Thoughts on thinking

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen.

Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

> Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

Humans have been interested in supernatural beings for thousands of years. Their appearance is usually less important than their powers and abilities.

The word is present in Old English and Old Norse, and elves appear in Norse mythology.

I'm not so sure about it.

Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays.

The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world.

Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experience was already homogenized.

The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted).

Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an unknown observation, not as a basis for it.

> Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human.

Now that’s reductionist to the point of being diminutive.

That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't based on anything you've ever seen before").

All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and what already exists.

Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of music that had never been heard before.

They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film because - by virtue of it being so different to any music anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible to audiences and the movie suffered as a result.

To argue that work is not creative because it is still based on "music" is absurd.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8

[1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie...

> Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen.

I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience.

Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This may be very different from person to person.

Incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing

What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences at <2 years old. Very consistent that boys like race cars and action figures, even though it's their first exposure.

(I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)

Its not, thats why the term humanoid exists.

This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the importance of education.

Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it answers.

> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You can't prompt engineer your own brain.

In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-289...

Hey, no need to get short!

We should try to be the bigger person.

That’s really the long and short of it.

It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims about them...

Creativity is much more than the derivative production of artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity is a process of human connection and communication—you can see this most clearly in the art of interpretation. A single literary work has an almost uncountable number of possible interpretations, and a huge element of its existence in the world as a price of art are the discussions and debates that emerge over those interpretations, and how they shape us as individuals, instill morals, etc etc. Quite a lot more than "making elves by adding pointy ears to humans".

Your post stinks of the very gross consumerist mindset the OP called out. The creation and preservation of meaning is about way more than the production of fungible decontextualized objects--it's all about the mediation and maintenance of human relationships through artifacts. The fact that the elves have pointy ears doesn't even begin to scratch at their actual meaning (e.g. they exist in a world with very big real problems that effect you and me too, e.g. race relations, and exaggerated features estrange these relations so as to make them more discernible to us and allow us to finally see the water we swim in).

If humans stop engaging with these processes, it's reasonable to believe that a lot of that semiotic richness, which is much of what, in my opinion, makes us human and not just super smart animals in the first place, will be lost.

> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

Pick up an Iain M. Banks book, my friend.

Go with 99.9%. But not 100%.

Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric. That was new.

In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or exploration of things in new combinations or from a previously untapped viewpoint.

Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what they know. So not likely to find anything new.

But many people try new things, or try to improve or vary something in a direction that is not easy, and learning something nonobvious and new is the “price” they must pay to succeed. Or a bonus they are paid for pushing through a thicket, even if they don’t succeed at what they set out to do.

No, that's not true.

Quick, what's 51 plus 92?

Now: Did you think back to a time someone else added these numbers together, or are you doing it yourself, right now, in your head? I'm sure it's not the first time these numbers have ever been summed, but that doesn't matter. You're doing it now, independently.

Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day.

I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...

You have fallen into the very trap he is criticising: you are entirely focussed on the product and how it differs from other ones, and have no sense of your individual journey of thinking being relevant

To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation".

When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context.

If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).

Not really new it came from observations or imagination of observed things.

I think you misunderstand the point. It’s about intention. Are you creating this thing for the purpose of transforming or communicating? Or are you just making it for some businessy reason.

Yes, elves are derivative, as was a lot of the Tolkien world in a way - being intentionally based on ww1 - but its intention was to create something beautiful and amazing and communicative and transformational.

Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years.

One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board.

But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone. The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything anymore.

It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important than the anccuracy and speed.

Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating.

When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.

You're trying to expand the human experience instead of individual human experience which is really yours from your perspective and mine from my perspective if I can be redundant by enumerating. The frustration comes from the sacrifice of individual experience to this weird aggregated experience in the machine. It will push the capability of technology but does that service the aim of luxury made easy for the many to acquire as tech is supposed to do? What profit a person to gain the whole world but lose the very thing that makes themselves them? It feels systemically dehumanizing.

> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

That's easy. The hard part is to explain it to other people, because we lack a shared background and terminology to explain it.

In full agreement with you on the flagrant incapability of a sizeable part of the HN crowd to understand and value of the arts.

Throughout history man has been celebrated and distinguished as the rational animal. As master of the earth this animal in our days dedicates its brightest minds to the continual increase of economic growth. Ask the rational man what is growth good for and after a few exchanges they perhaps will say that it ultimately improves our quality of life and even extends it. If might even allow the human race to flourish beyond earth and thus prevail long after resources on earth are depleted. But ask him then why is improving the quality of life a good thing at all? Is it just a meaningless cycle in which we improve the quality of life so that we can then improve the quality of life even further? No. Ask an individual human (in contrast to the ultra rationalist who thinks they represent the human race as a whole) what they work for, what they strive to achieve, what does quality of life ultimately mean to them and you will end up with happy times spent among family and friends. With meaningful moments listening to music, watching a film, reading a book. About time spent in creative endeavors that are totally their own. The rational animal in its hubris forgot what it thinks for and trapped itself in an endless cycle where the true meaning of being human is hidden from the sight of many.

But I think a wake up call is due very soon. The rational animal is about to discover the rationality it prides itself on was merely a sample of the true possibility. From the rational animal we have been relegated to another animal with some rational capability. As we slowly realize how futile are our attempts at thinking, we'll realize to our horror that the gift we are left with is the ability to recognize the futility and inadequacy of our attempts. Hopefully then we'll decide to retreat back into what truly makes us human, to what is ours, to what quality of life really means.

But I do know what numbers are. I've also done addition before, so I know what the steps are. The result of 51 + 92 is derivative from (at least) these two concepts, which derive from others and so on. Maybe I'm stretching the meaning of derivative here, but to me derivative doesn't mean strictly recalling something verbatim.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

> Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day.

This is the argument I use to dunk on ranters who spam conversations with “How can you say Christopher Columbus discovered the new world when there were already people living there?”

Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast majority of human existence was in a world without cars. There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were a very recent invention.

I'm reminded of that My dinner with Andre monologue, and totally agree.

I do think you're stretching the meaning of derivative. At that point, what can ever be called original? Every idea depends on pre-existing concepts. Even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants.

In fairness, Columbus thought he had found India, even after other, smarter people had told him otherwise. You can't give him too much credit, especially given that he was considered a monster even by contemporary monsters like Isabella I of Spain, his sponsor, who founded the Spanish Inquisition and still thought his treatment of the Taino natives was unconscionable. She wanted him to convert them to Christianity, and instead he exterminated them.

General patterns don’t actually exist. We create a pattern from multiple observations.

What is the point in saying there is nothing new,? So the word “new” is like “utopia”, with only a mythical aspirational meaning?

History has never stopped proving how inane such an utterly unsupported opinion is.

Just keep up with quantum physics. Constantly finding new strange counterintuitive effects that require intense research and explorations of combinations of ideas and imagination to envision. And then challenging invention of new highly artificially controlled conditions, not found in nature, to create.

Mathematics as a profession is all about discovery of new things (from exploration) and invention (from imaginative questions and quests).

Art produces new things all the time, but you have to have familiarity with art to see what is new. If all you see are materials and color you are not literate enough to read it. Anymore than a unique story is “just words”.

For that matter, in slower timescales, nature has never stopped creating new creatures with new attributes or behaviors.

Perhaps have you set your own sights much too low. Try doing something nobody has been able to do before, and sticking with it. You will discover something if you really do stick with it. Even understanding the barriers better than before reveals things, and forces new concepts into being.

Pointing out that we can mechanically apply an algorithm on novel inputs is possibly the worst defence of human creativity I can think of in this context.