Thoughts on thinking

The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they will be automated away.

I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical" (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot).

I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism). Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is a dark, sad, dead end.

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.

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.