Consider the following question: “why did you write something sad?”
for an LLM, the answer is that a mathematical formula came up heads.
for a person, the answer is “I was sad.”
Maybe the sadness is random. (That’s depression for you.) But it doesn’t change the fact that the subjective nature of sadness fuels creative decisions. It is why characters in a novel do so and so, and why their feelings are described in a way that is original and yet eerily familiar — i.e., creatively.
randomness is a central part of a human coming up with an idea.
So, here’s how I understand this claim. Either
As an endorsement of the Copenhagen Interpretation about the ubiquity of randomness at the quantum level. Or
As a rejection of subjectivity (à la eliminative materialism), which reduces thoughts, emotions, and consciousness to facts about neural activation vectors.
(1) means randomness is background noise cancelled out at scale. We would still ask why some people are more creative than others, (or why some planets are redshifted compared to others) and presumably we have more to say than “luck,” since the chances that Shakespeare wrote his plays at random is 0.
Interpretation (2) suggests that creativity doesn’t exist and this whole conversation is senseless.
Actually, it seems pretty likely randomness is a central part of a human coming up with an idea.
Consider the following question: “why did you write something sad?”
Maybe the sadness is random. (That’s depression for you.) But it doesn’t change the fact that the subjective nature of sadness fuels creative decisions. It is why characters in a novel do so and so, and why their feelings are described in a way that is original and yet eerily familiar — i.e., creatively.
So, here’s how I understand this claim. Either
(1) means randomness is background noise cancelled out at scale. We would still ask why some people are more creative than others, (or why some planets are redshifted compared to others) and presumably we have more to say than “luck,” since the chances that Shakespeare wrote his plays at random is 0.
Interpretation (2) suggests that creativity doesn’t exist and this whole conversation is senseless.