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stillpointlab 13 minutes ago [-]
One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language.
My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life.
Although, language is a bit provocative, and I probably mean something closer to semiotics.
Thought-provoking article. When the cave painters were at work, they most probably didn’t see themselves as “artists” and of course not scientists, philosophers. That was an age where all those things were together at once, living in a religious state, I think. Little by little, they separated (to sometimes unhappy results). Brings to mind the old myth where humans were both male and female originally, but gods, fearing their power, separated them, leading us to look for our half. Same with art and science, I think.
So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.
I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:
“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”
Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!
The_Blade 1 hours ago [-]
I happen to be re-reading Deleuze right now (and knew Bergson at some point), and I'm not really sure what the author adds to the equation. I.e. art is the pure desire-machine, schizophrenic and completely deterritorialized, whereas pornography is the desire-machine territorialized by determinate conditions of e.g. OnlyFans. If anyone else knows Deleuze I'd be curious; him and Guattari is not exactly a vibe hang. Long-winded way of saying it seems like a lazy dichotomy.
My data point is I got to stare at Wheatfield with Crows and The Death of Marat within 24 hours and I was walking around Brussels a drooling mess, only capable of leaving decoy cheap sunglasses for pickpockets
card_zero 5 hours ago [-]
? Sentimental means excessively moving, so how is that showing that the statue of David doesn't fit the category (actually here my quibble is with the article, not you), and, just because people miscategorize it in your opinion, how does that mean there's no such category?
Edit: I see the article is laying claim to being properly, meaningfully moved. It seems that by including "sentimental" the article is saying: Through art, we are in touch with the truth and beauty of the mystery of creation itself, but you are just having an unnecessary moment because you saw a cliche.
5 hours ago [-]
d4ng 35 minutes ago [-]
“The basic realism of science, then, rests upon the following claim: the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it, even though the facts themselves need not be plain.”
What facts can plainly be stated within this universe? Can facts exist outside the common language within which they are expressed?
krapp 34 minutes ago [-]
E=MC^2 is true in any language, and it remains true in the absence of language.
d4ng 26 minutes ago [-]
How can we prove that?
krapp 19 minutes ago [-]
I'm not going to waste my time describing the entirety of the last century of physics, or the numerous technologies we've developed whose operation depends on this being true. We don't have to prove it, it's one of the most thoroughly tested and proven concepts in existence. Read a book.
d4ng 7 minutes ago [-]
That answers a different question. The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework.
Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language. Simply asserting that they do is the realism that I am disputing.
Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
Papazsazsa 3 hours ago [-]
Author's argument is that when early humans painted, they weren't expressing an interiority they already had; they were engaging the creative process of reality directly.
I disagree in the sense that reality includes the intangibles which machines cannot (today) reach, which is why any LLM-generated art is, for the most part, not art. It's images, it can be aesthetic or narrative or whatever – but I think it's fine to gatekeep art as an inherently human thing.
orangedog 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen really creative short films put together using vid generators. In that situation, they're just using it as a tool to produce content which is part of a bigger artistic process.
Perhaps there is some level of creativity between which something isn't art but humans can do that with any tool.
Papazsazsa 47 minutes ago [-]
There's no hard-and-fast rule of course – but there is a (broad, fuzzy) threshold.
One need only look at the latest superhero reboot in which many true artists had their 'art' reduced to mere 'content'.
riazrizvi 5 hours ago [-]
_Tools_ have a response to this post.
shimman 3 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of archaeological evidence that art + toys were made before tools by a good amount of time IIRC. It makes sense to me as humans were always social creative creatures and the ideas that we didn't want to express ourselves 300,000 years ago seems kinda silly.
ChrisClark 4 hours ago [-]
is this a broken AI bot?
ricree 4 hours ago [-]
Looks like, though a shame if true, since the account is more than 10 years old and presumably had a person behind it at some point.
orangedog 2 hours ago [-]
What suggests that it is?
krapp 32 minutes ago [-]
"_Tools_ have a response to this post" is not a sensible comment that a human would likely make. It reads like a prompt to an AI accidentally pasted into the wrong place.
orangedog 12 minutes ago [-]
It is terse but the comment is sensible to me.
krapp 9 minutes ago [-]
OK, what does "_Tools_ have a response to this post" mean to you, in the context of the posted article, and as a response to it? Why would a human being organically reply to the article with that sentence?
12 minutes ago [-]
QuercusMax 5 hours ago [-]
I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.
We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.
OkayPhysicist 4 hours ago [-]
I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.
When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?
ElProlactin 3 hours ago [-]
> ...and it's clearly linked to our cognition.
People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.
So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.
beedeebeedee 3 hours ago [-]
There’s a great book called Paleopoetics by Christopher Collin’s that looks at exactly that
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.
QuercusMax 2 hours ago [-]
Do we have an idea of when the physical capability for vocal language originated? Other great apes have all kinds of vocalizations they can produce, and you don't need THAT many different sounds to support language.
OkayPhysicist 1 hours ago [-]
To answer that you'd need to know what even constitutes vocal language. There's a number of languages that make extensive use of clicks and whistles that would seem to me are pretty orthogonal to the ability to pronounce, say, English.
We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.
alchemist1e9 4 hours ago [-]
Fits the archaeological gap also because Homo erectus controlled fire yet left no art, clothing, or deliberate burials.
Isamu 6 hours ago [-]
Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought.
Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants:
> [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’.
Which is also fine, it's not "provocative" or "slopsationalism", it's just a PoV that is different.
There are many sides to a debate, not just mine. It's not black and white, there is much grey that is just as legitimate as your or my PoVs. And any other PoV isn't by default "provocative" and especially not "deliberately" so.
ghurtado 3 hours ago [-]
> Is it?
Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.
> It's not black and white
Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.
> most folks here are accountants:
But it's not that black and white, remember?
beepbooptheory 3 hours ago [-]
It doesn't even make sense, provocative is a good thing for an article to be to most people! It's nice to be moved whichever way by someone else's writing!
There is an assumption on this forum I see a lot that any published written work has some hypothetical ground-level, some wholly un-ornamented, just-the-facts form, and anything the writer adds beyond that is a kind immoral indulgence. With this, provocative is bad because its unnecessary to some 'truer' telos of the text.
It's a kind of funny misunderstanding of writing to see here, because its exactly the one you'd expect a programmer to have!
My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life.
Although, language is a bit provocative, and I probably mean something closer to semiotics.
I guess they have never heard of the bowerbird: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/eptuty/b...
So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.
I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:
“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”
Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!
My data point is I got to stare at Wheatfield with Crows and The Death of Marat within 24 hours and I was walking around Brussels a drooling mess, only capable of leaving decoy cheap sunglasses for pickpockets
Edit: I see the article is laying claim to being properly, meaningfully moved. It seems that by including "sentimental" the article is saying: Through art, we are in touch with the truth and beauty of the mystery of creation itself, but you are just having an unnecessary moment because you saw a cliche.
What facts can plainly be stated within this universe? Can facts exist outside the common language within which they are expressed?
Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language. Simply asserting that they do is the realism that I am disputing.
Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
I disagree in the sense that reality includes the intangibles which machines cannot (today) reach, which is why any LLM-generated art is, for the most part, not art. It's images, it can be aesthetic or narrative or whatever – but I think it's fine to gatekeep art as an inherently human thing.
Perhaps there is some level of creativity between which something isn't art but humans can do that with any tool.
One need only look at the latest superhero reboot in which many true artists had their 'art' reduced to mere 'content'.
We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.
When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?
People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.
So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.
We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.
So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a...
Not sure if I agree but interesting nonetheless.
Is it?
Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants:
> [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’.
Which is also fine, it's not "provocative" or "slopsationalism", it's just a PoV that is different.
There are many sides to a debate, not just mine. It's not black and white, there is much grey that is just as legitimate as your or my PoVs. And any other PoV isn't by default "provocative" and especially not "deliberately" so.
Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.
> It's not black and white
Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.
> most folks here are accountants:
But it's not that black and white, remember?
There is an assumption on this forum I see a lot that any published written work has some hypothetical ground-level, some wholly un-ornamented, just-the-facts form, and anything the writer adds beyond that is a kind immoral indulgence. With this, provocative is bad because its unnecessary to some 'truer' telos of the text.
It's a kind of funny misunderstanding of writing to see here, because its exactly the one you'd expect a programmer to have!