Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
But your comment, while thought-provoking
Thank you, that makes me very happy! I really appreciate it.
has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
Something I may not have emphasized enough was that there's a fundamental ambiguity in that claim. Does a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia getting gangbanged enrich human culture? Does, say, a non-sexualized drawing of a horse enrich human culture? We can't really answer the question as it's posed. We need more information, more context. Is the drawing of the horse Guernica, or is it something that a kindergartner put together with finger paints to take home and put on the fridge? That information is going to change how we answer the question. So it is with fetish art as well. That's my position.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture". We've been painting images for thousands of years and we've explored a tremendous amount of the possibility space. It's possible that we've simply run out of fresh ground to cover, within the confines of this one medium. But a painting with a sexual subject matter is no worse off than any other type of painting here.
I think the future possibilities of art lay in what could broadly be described as "narrative", and I do think some of those narratives will contain sexual content that might strike some observers as "excessive" at first glance.
@Folamh3 made the following claim:
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang. [...] I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we're profoundly ashamed of [...]
to which I objected, briefly. @twodigits expressed interest in a more detailed and thorough rebuttal. I said that I didn't want to compress it to a list of bullet points; but I realized upon further reflection that there was probably nothing shorter than a small book that could do full justice to this topic. I started to prepare an abridged version of my argument to post here, but even the abridged version broke 10k characters by the time I was finished with the introduction. So, you're getting the bullet point version. I'm happy to further expand on any of the points raised here, if people are interested.
Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror. The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject - and sex is traumatic, uncanny, and unsettling in a particularly aesthetically interesting way; it is simultaneously both a natural and necessary act, and also the center of our strictest ethical prohibitions and most ferocious spiritual crises. I don't think that every artistic work that has pornographic content necessarily has high value, or even any value at all; undoubtedly, the majority do not. I only think that pornographic content isn't disqualifying when evaluating a work's artistic merit. That a work contains graphic sex is, in a vacuum, as informative as saying that the work contains depictions of landscapes or sunsets.
It has been remarked repeatedly in the psychoanalytic (Freudian) tradition that there is an intrinsic link between art and trauma. Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror:
I have sought in this book to demonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its power, is based. By suggesting that literature is its privileged signifier, I wish to point out that, far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems to have it, this kind of literature, or even literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power, "the great darkness" (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continual compromising: "Literature and Evil" (Georges Bataille). Hence also its being seen as taking the place of the sacred, which, to the extent that it has left us without leaving us alone, calls forth the quacks from all four corners of perversion. Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word. [pg. 208]
McGowan and Engley on their Why Theory podcast, a podcast which analyzes both classical philosophy and contemporary culture from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, put it perhaps more poignantly and directly in their episode on psychoanalytic aesthetics:
The art object doesn't give me something... it takes away something. I think that's the absolute psychoanalytic premise. You look for the great work of art by looking for those works that take away something from us. [62:48]
I think this is such a lovely formulation, one that strikes me as almost self-evidently true. Existence is suffering, and the greatest works of art reconcile us to that fact; and in some sense it really is just that simple.
Further justification for this premise is given by framing it as an anti-capitalist gesture (again quoting from the same episode):
[The great work of art] takes away from us the dream of success, so there's a way in which the great work of art, psychoanalytically understood, is inherently anti-capitalist. Because it does not allow us to believe in the promise of accumulation. Its whole point is you have to keep going [emphasis mine - this is what distinguishes the psychoanalytic theory of art from mere nihilism or defeatism] - but even if you win, even if you get it, what you're getting is nothing. [50:00]
Now, I'm significantly more friendly to capitalism as a literal economic system than, well, than basically everyone else who's into weirdo continental philosophy. So unlike most of the intended audience for this work, I don't think that merely saying that something is anti-capitalist makes it ipso facto good. But if "capitalism" is treated here as a synecdoche for utilitarianism, then I can definitely get behind the sentiment being expressed. Art is the domain where we refuse to be governed by utilitarian logic; it's wasteful, irrational, even to the point of being actively detrimental; but that's what makes it beautiful.
Funny enough, in this same episode, there's a section which is very relevant to a post that @Baila wrote some time back - at 44:30 it is flatly stated that a canon of the great works of psychoanalytic art would simply be "the works that induce the most amount of psychic trauma". Eisenman has company! Of course, a purely literal reading of this claim is hard to defend from objections: if the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art? Obviously some additional nuance has to be added, but I still think the claim is gesturing at something importantly true. I would perhaps invoke something like the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean: everything in the right amount, at the right time, in its proper place. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing; you have to have the right amount of the good thing, and no more. I think we can imagine too, a "proper amount" of suffering. Not too little, and not too much, but rather exactly as much as is called for.
If this premise about the link between art and trauma is accepted, does anything more even need to be said in defense of sexuality as legitimate artistic content? Plainly, there is something traumatic, unsettling, "shameful" about depictions of sexuality; otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly controlled, and the claim I'm responding to would never have been made in the first place and I would not be writing this post. "No, don't go there, that's too far" - well, it's precisely an artist's job to go to such places. Nonetheless, I think some further elaboration is possible.
In many ways, sexuality is the artistic subject par excellence, because sex makes everyone see like an artist does; they see what is concealed from ordinary sight, they see the act as more than it really is. The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects. There is something intrinsically spiritual about it, something intrinsically excessive - "here, no, here you have to stop; this is different." In an ironic way, the censorship of sexualized art is itself already a recapitulation of the fundamental artistic act; the distinguishing of an object against all reason, an act of resolute commitment, the creation of a value. Why, exactly, would anyone get so dreadfully upset about pixels on a screen, numbers on a hard drive, light entering the retina? But you know it's not just pixels on a screen; you see it as something more. It is precisely this "something more" that art makes us confront.
In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan spoke on the origin of the incest taboo:
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifer and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws, which are regulated by a system of exchanges that he defines as elementary structures – this is the case to the extent that guidance is given concerning the choice of a proper partner or, in other words, order is introduced into marriage, which produces a new dimension alongside that of heredity. But even when Lévi-Strauss explains all that, and spends a lot of time discussing incest in order to show what makes its prohibition necessary, he does not go beyond suggesting why the father does not marry a daughter – because the daughters must be exchanged. But why doesn’t a son sleep with his mother? There is something mysterious there.
He, of course, dismisses justifications based on the supposedly dangerous biological effects of inbreeding. He proves that, far from producing results involving the resurgence of a recessive gene that risks introducing degenerative effects, a form of endogamy is commonly used in all fields of breeding of domestic animals, so as to improve a strain, whether animal or vegetable. The law only operates in the realm of culture. And the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son / mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasizes.
If everything else around it may find a justification, this central point nevertheless remains. If one reads Lévi-Strauss’s text closely, one can see that it is the most enigmatic and the most stubborn point separating nature from culture.
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from. This was empirically vindicated by Haidt's work on moral reasoning - people persisted in their moral judgements even when all of their discursive justifications had been disarmed. Only the intrinsic, transcendent horror of the act remained. But it is precisely this transcendent horror that is the domain of art.
Anyway. I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something. I just think that, as I said in the beginning, the fact that a work contains graphic sexual content should not be an intrinsic mark against it. Every work has to be evaluated holistically, in its full context. I don't really accept a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" types of artistic content in the first place, but even if I did, I would think that sexuality was very much on the legitimate side, for all the reasons aforementioned.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
birthrate citizenship
Is that like, whoever raises the birthrate the most gets to become a citizen? That’s certainly one plan for dealing with the problem.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
If a person lives and dies without seeing it, do you think their life was necessarily made lesser thereby?
I think I would have to say so, yeah! At least a little bit. It's a pretty damn good movie.
I'm given to understand that one of the generally accepted defining characteristics of art is that it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, optional, chosen rather than compelled, a luxury rather than a necessity.
Yes, but that's not the same thing as "frivolous". Frivolous means unnecessary is a bad way. Art is unnecessary in a good way. Art is, to use Kant's phrase, purposive without purpose.
Due to technological progress, we're rapidly approaching a point where reality itself will be as "optional" and "unnecessary" as art is. There is a small but non-zero chance that some of us will live to see the advent of the experience machine - i.e. The Matrix, a perfect VR recreation of reality, but tailored to your desires, and with all suffering eliminated (the computer could make sure you have enough excitement and danger to not get bored, of course - but only as much as is necessary. Everyone could be guaranteed a charmed life that is free of major tragedy). And even if we don't live to see it, we can plausibly conjecture that some future generation will, if progress in AI and neuroscience continue.
Now why, exactly, should one not plug themselves into the experience machine? What is the argument for resisting it? This is one of my overriding concerns, and much of what I write here - about art, about suffering, and so forth - should be read in this context.
I simply take it for granted that there is no "rational" argument for rejecting the experience machine, within the bounds of what is currently taken to be rationality. Everyone who is "prudent", who weighs the pros and cons without bias or illusion, who refuses to let themselves be seduced by sentimentality, will inevitably be lead to the conclusion that it's better to simply plug themselves in and let the machines generate wondrous experiences for them until the heat death of the universe.
I think, if you want to avoid this fate, then you have to make a fundamental choice to be oriented towards authenticity qua authenticity for its own sake, the individual subject exercising his capacity for freedom for its own sake, and, ultimately, the horror of reality for its own sake (because why expose yourself to the risk of suffering when you could simply... not?). And art is the physical manifestation of this uncanny excess, the refusal to capitulate to prudence or necessity, man's assertion of his will to continue living against all reason. You are correct that art is unnecessary - but so is existence itself, ultimately. (I believe I should point out that art is not the only practice that can fill this role - in some ways mathematics is even better, and even more sublimely purposeless than art is, because the pleasure that one derives from mathematics is more rarefied, and the potential audience who can appreciate it is so limited.)
I am at this moment actively hunting for more value down a variety of rabbit holes, some of which might be completely bizarre and inexplicable to you
I doubt that. It is rare that I am totally at a loss for an explanation as to why people think as they think or do as they do. I am highly empathetic and it's easy for me to make myself feel what others feel, love what they love, hate what they hate. It is the duty of a philosopher to be a brief abstract of humanity.
You're free to provide examples of these rabbit holes if you want to discuss further.
But do you recognize that value is sometimes, perhaps even often claimed falsely?
Yes, but I wouldn't phrase it quite like that.
Suppose we have a man who becomes infatuated with an inanimate mannequin, because he thinks it's of supreme value. He neglects his wife and kids, he withdraws from everything else in life, his world becomes centered around spending time with the mannequin to a comical degree. And he dies happy, never recanting or regretting his actions. Was he "wrong" about the value of the mannequin? There was something wrong about his actions, certainly, but I wouldn't say that he was wrong about the value of the mannequin itself. I think that value is, partially, relational (which is not the same thing as arbitrary or solipsistic) - it's a relation that exists between you and someone or something else, it's not something that inheres solely in the object. The relationship that he instantiated with the mannequin is proof of its own validity. But there were other, higher values that rightly had certain claims on him, and his fault was in ignoring those higher values that he should not have ignored.
I ask if you wonder if there might be less?
That would be disrespectful.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
FCfromSSC
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I think everyone who has read a novel or watched a movie is familiar with the experience of information you learn later coloring your perception of what came before. Like, you're watching a movie, and in the beginning there are a lot of tantalizing clues about how the story might develop, and you're interested to see where it goes; but then the big twist at the end sucks, it doesn't stick the landing. So you end up concluding that the movie as a whole was bad and not worth the time. "Yeah, it was cool in the beginning, but it didn't go anywhere". Your knowledge of what the complete work looks like invalidates the excitement you felt in the beginning.
Or, to take a more extreme example: suppose you have a neighbor who you have had nothing but pleasant and friendly interactions with for years, and then one day you learn that he's actually been a serial killer this whole time, committing murders unbeknownst to you. You would immediately change your judgement of him and start thinking that he's a terrible person, regardless of how outwardly friendly he had been to you up until that point. Certainly, your previous pleasant interactions with him were real and are still real; the past isn't literally rewritten. It's just that the prior information you had about him is no longer relevant in your overall evaluation of his moral status, due to the overwhelming significance of the new information you've acquired.
Hopefully these analogies illustrate how it is conceivable that learning that a work was actually created by AI could shift your overall evaluation of it, even if you previously had a very positive evaluation based on your direct experience of the work. I agree with @DTulpa's assessment here: if I learned that my favorite album was actually AI, I wouldn't be able to look at it the same way again.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I would prefer to simply write a longer post on the issue rather than boiling it down to a few bullet points which, due to their brevity, would necessarily be as mysterious as the original claim itself, and demand yet further elaboration. But I only have time for one or two long posts per day, and FC is currently monopolizing my time. I may write a toplevel post on this issue in the near future.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
how would you define the center of the "artist's temperament"?
I would define it in terms of two central interrelated traits. I will try to be clear and direct, with specific examples:
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The artist is someone who regularly experiences complex and exotic states of the soul. Not all emotions are created equal; some are more refined and subtle than others. Suppose we compare "sadness" with "melancholy". A child can be sad, there's nothing special about it; the child sees a baby duck fall down and hurt itself, he feels bad for it, he is sad. It's a simple stimulus-response relationship. With something like melancholy on the other hand, as compared with simple sadness, the list of initial requirements is longer. It requires one to have a certain amount of temporal history, as well as a certain self-reflexivity. Reflecting on lost opportunities, thinking about what could have been, gazing wistfully into the distance - it is sad, yes, but the inflection is different. It can start to mix with positive overtones as well - the sheer pleasure of reflecting on one's own life narrative and taking a bird's eye view of it. The artist ascends the scale of refinement to increasingly unusual and uncommon experiences, experiences and emotions that may be so rare they don't even have a name yet.
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The artist is someone who perceives (in the widest possible sense of "perceives") features of people, objects, events, and phenomena that are ignored or unnoticed by non-artists. There is nothing artistic (in the sense of, exemplifying the artist's temperament) about appreciating the beauty in a sunset, because everyone already knows that sunsets are beautiful. It's well-trodden territory. The artist sees beauty in things that other people don't (yet) recognize as beautiful; or he sees ugliness where other people don't (yet), or he perceives entirely new properties that have yet to be named. Ideally we would like his observations to be veridical in some sense, and not just the idiosyncratic hallucinations of a madman; the ultimate test for this is whether his works are persuasive. The greatest mark of success of a work of art is if it makes people say "yes, I had never noticed that before; I had never noticed that such and such was so beautiful, or so ugly - but now I do". And, finally, the observations that the artist first pressed into physical form eventually pass over into common sense - everyone simply knows that such and such is beautiful, or ugly, or whatever, it's just always been obvious.
To be clear, this is a description of a temperament, a set of psychological traits. You can have a person who makes art but doesn't possess this temperament, and you can have a person who possesses this temperament but doesn't make art. The two are independent.
I do think that these traits are correlated with what one might call the stereotype of the "tortured Romantic soul" - a certain moodiness, a certain angst, a certain emotional volatility. But it's not a one-to-one causal relationship. There can be people who instantiate the traits I described but don't fit the stereotype.
What I don't get is where you're getting the makings of an "A" perspective from with regards to art, other than sheer assertion.
I don't think I can really go further on this until you answer the clarifying questions I posed with regards to your views on the "A" view itself and how it stands with God. Crucially, I need to understand: are the thoughts I have expressed here just entirely foreign to you, or are they thoughts that are familiar to you, and it's just that you don't understand how anyone could have these thoughts about art in particular?
I believe you have described yourself as a non-utilitarian in the past. Where does utilitarianism end for you? Where do you draw the line and say "no, this right here, this is beyond the reach of any rational cost-benefit analysis, and I won't hear another word about it"? Because that's how I feel about art. You presumably have something similar in your own experience, so you can use that as an analogy for understanding my experience. Does that make sense?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang.
It absolutely is. I mean that in all sincerity.
Chapter 8 of Kristeva's Powers of Horror may help stimulate some initial thoughts in this direction.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I think a shoe factory is closer to digital art (like, Photoshop, the free limitless copying and distribution enabled by the internet, and all that those things enable) than it is to AI art. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's closer.
Comparing the differences in attitudes that artists have towards digital art and AI art is instructive. You'll find a few ultra-trads who think it's "cheating", but most people basically learned to live with it, even though it did bring about changes in how art is done and lead to job downsizing in some cases. Similarly with a shoe factory, at least there's still at least one person who actually had to design the shoe in the first place. AI art is a different class of existential threat from digital or the camera because it's the first technology that cuts humans out of the loop entirely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Do you feel the same way about how most clothes needed to be produced by a tailor, but now they're mass produced for orders of magnitude less money?
What about how bread used to be produced by bakers, but now you can get bread in the store, once again for orders of magnitude less?
There certainly is something lost in both cases, yes.
I would prefer it if people formed more relationships with other individuals, rather than with anonymous corporations. That's not the world we live in and we're never going to go back to that world. But, if I were God, that's how I would set things up.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Do you really think that a person's private motivations for being in favour of/opposed to X are identical to their publicly stated motivations more often than not? At every point on the political spectrum?
Well, it gets very complicated. People can be unaware of their own motivations, they can believe one thing for multiple different reasons, they can tell half-truths, they can believe something one day and not believe it the next.
I would just say that, as a general methodological principle, one should start by trying to find where the authentic principled disagreements are, rather than immediately jumping to cynical conclusions.
If AI visual art was banned but AI voice acting was seen as fair game, it's only a matter of time before lots of people start noticing that this seems kind of arbitrary and unfair.
Sure. But this isn't a psychologically realistic model of AI detractors. I assure you that the people who feel passionately about AI visual art feel equally passionately about voice acting.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Animals can presumably feel pain, but cannot create art
That's a good point.
I did specify though that there was more to it than just consciousness:
[...] and that it created the piece with intent and drew from its conscious experiences as inspiration.
So the bare fact of consciousness alone is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for me to find value in a work.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
does the crusade go after Pirate Bay
Yes? Generally (there are always exceptions and nuances) I'm a pretty strong defender of intellectual property rights. I've never been very friendly to TPB.
boorus
Not as bad, but I do think it's really shitty when people take all the private pics from a small artist's patreon and repost them on boorus.
If it's the potential to produce slop, do Blender Kids, refried meme generators, and gposers need be next on the list?
Nah, they're fine.
If it's the economic threat or worker solidarity, do we roll back the sewing machine or the CNC mill?
If I had lived 200 years ago I probably would have been a luddite.
If it's the spirit of art as form of communication, do we beat down the Kinkaides and Rothkos?
What do you have against Rothko? He's at least inoffensive.
For Kinkaide, I think I would direct you to my reply to FC. What is there in Kinkaide that remains unread? I would prefer to ask that question, instead of just dismissing him.
If it's the unearned reward that aigen produces, can we hunt down Duchamp and Basquiat and force them to actually put some effort into it?
Both were great artists. The effort exerted was sufficient.
If it's about people pretending, badly, to think, can we start bludgeoning bureaucrats?
He who is without sin...
(I'm not without sin, to be clear.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Have you ever felt pain? If yes, then you know what it means to have a conscious experience. It's that, and the other things like that (sensations more generally, the way things look, the way things sound, and the like).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I'm not sure how you justify the "probably" in the last sentence.
It was a joke.
Fundamentally, this would be called "curation" rather than "illustration,"
I agree that this is a valid point. It's not enough to outweigh the negatives for me, but I agree that that is at least something you can say in defense of AI.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
But even before AI, art is our creation, is it not? Where within art are the vast unknowns that could loom over us?
I could supply a list of concrete examples, drawing from works in the canons of painting and literature, and discuss certain persistent interpretive difficulties with those works. You might then be persuaded to agree "ah yes, there is something unknown about that work", or you might not. I could discuss the intimate relationship that art bears to subjective experience; how the mere fact of our subjectivity is itself quite awe-inspiring and miraculous, how we are very far from being transparent to ourselves, how we are very far from understanding why we do what we do or why we feel what we feel, or even what we feel when we feel. How many mysteries there are in what is ostensibly most intimate. But I think all that would be somewhat beside the point, because my intuition here is that the disagreement is one of fundamental attunement; it can't be resolved by any finite list of examples or arguments.
In an interview, Derrida (who was a Jew) was asked if it was time to eject Heidegger (who was a literal member of the Nazi party, and, depending on who you ask and which documents you place the most evidentiary weight on, a somewhat enthusiastic and unrepentant one) from the philosophical canon. After all, hadn't his politics discredited even the ostensibly "apolitical" portions of his philosophical work? Wasn't it time to simply leave him behind as an embarrassing accident in the dustbin of history? Derrida's response was, "No. Of course not. There is still so much that remains unread in Heidegger." (He, of course, could not have meant this literally - Heidegger was his greatest philosophical influence, and Derrida had read all of his works cover to cover multiple times, and lectured on them extensively.)
Does that mean anything to you? When you look at... anything - a person, a work, a system, a phenomenon - are you struck by the impression that there is so much that remains unread? Do you want to believe that there is so much that remains unread?
We make images for our own pleasure. We find that some images please us more than others. We discover rules and techniques that optimize the pleasure generated by the images; these rules and techniques clearly derive from our own psychology and history and nature, but they seem both discoverable and explicable, and can and have been reduced to engineering.
Simply wrong! Just, not even correct at all! And by that I mean, yes, what you have described here is indeed a process that can actually take place; the process is physically realizable. But the process thus described has little in common with what I think art could be, or should be. And if you think that this is all that art is good for, then it's unclear why you would go into art instead of the pharmaceutical industry.
What part of this does not fit within the "B" perspective? What realities of art does it neglect, which could form an argument for "A"?
Let me respond with some clarifying questions first.
Suppose that there were no God; even if you think this is absolutely inconceivable, try to grant it as a hypothetical. What would become of the "A" view then? Would it still make sense, in any context, or no? If there were no God, would reality shrink to the point that we actually could master it all in a rational, calculated way?
Are there certain attitudes - wonder, awe - which, when applied to mortals and their deeds, can easily be construed as a category error at best and blasphemy at worst?
Basically, I would like to determine the extent to which the light of the Almighty makes everything else seem dull in comparison.
With regards to philosophy and epistemology, I would argue that "A" is better, because it better fits observable reality and the historical record, while "B" appears to me to consistently generate notable disasters; a straightforward argument from prudence.
Another clarifying question. Would you say that you support the "A" view because:
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There are certain enigmas which deserve respect; one must learn not to exceed one's station; we are all strangers dwelling in a strange land, and like all guests we must be gracious to our hosts; or
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It is a contingent, empirical truth that there are a number of facts about reality which remain unknown, and therefore, on a rational cost-benefit analysis, we should refrain from hasty action. But in principle, if we could learn enough true facts, we may not need to be as prudent.
But commercial and popular art of the sort we are discussing here is inherently frivolous
I've been speaking about art as a totality - all of it, across time and space, not just one kind or type. And furthermore I disagree that commercial art is "frivolous". There is no single fact about a work's provenance, medium, or content that can identify it as "frivolous" - that is always a determination that must be made on an individual basis. End of Evangelion for example is an exemplary film, plainly a creative triumph of the first order, despite it being a thoroughly "commercial" work and having a mass theatrical release.
but I also can observe that much of what people claim to value as "art" is in fact pretention covering for laziness or naked greed.
If I tell you that I highly value Duchamp's The Large Glass, more than the large majority of representational works that would traditionally be considered "technically correct", would you believe that I'm being sincere? Or is this just pretension and laziness? I encourage you to be honest; I won't take it as a violation of charity if you say that I'm lying, or deluded.
I have known too many artists to believe that the pursuit of or mere association with art confers any special virtues beyond those innate to discipline and skill, or indeed any significant insight into philosophy or truth.
I never said it did.
Beauty and Truth are not synonyms
I never said they were.
Again, I am an artist by trade and by temperament.
No, I don't think you are. Trade yes, temperament no.
From what I've been able to glean from your posts on this forum, I don't think I've seen much that would indicate to me an "artist's temperament". You seem to have a good head on your shoulders: sturdy, even-tempered, concerned with practical matters, not prone to strong emotional disturbances in either direction. Concrete rather than idealistic. Perhaps your self-image is entirely different, but this is how you come off in your posts.
Of course there may be certain domains where you recognize that no finite method of analysis is up to the task any longer; where you have no choice but to abase yourself before something greater and "lose your head" for a moment. But this by itself does not make one an artist. The mystic is undoubtedly sincere in the feeling of oceanic vastness he experiences when he communes with the Divine, but the mystic is not an artist. In fact the two types are fundamentally opposed; the artist is this-worldly in a way that the mystic cannot be.
I don't want to give the impression that I know exactly what an artist must be, or that there's only one way to be an artist. Undoubtedly, multiple types of people can be artists. Artists can have substantial political and philosophical disagreements with each other, and neither of them is less of a "real artist" for it. But nonetheless, if the phrase "artist's temperament" is going to mean anything at all, then it must be something determinate, to the exclusion of what it is not; and I don't really see how it applies to you.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
We will have cheap pleasing images for our books, advertisement, and maybe even in art museums
Yeah, this does help clarify the disagreement more. I don't think that more "cheap pleasing images" is a necessary thing, or even a good thing. I think we already had quite enough as it is. There was already a supply glut, we didn't need more. And for me the negative of knowing that say, a book cover might be AI, outweighs any positives that might come from the technical quality of the image itself. I'd gladly trade quality for the guarantee that every image was produced by a human (I tend to have a very eccentric notion of what counts as a "pleasing" image anyway).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?
I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.
...But then, why would you expect others to respect your own appeals to freedom, when you've concluded that no one actually cares about Freedom as such as a terminal value?
I may still fall back on appeals to freedom at times out of laziness or force of habit, but I've been gradually trying to work it out of my vocabulary for a while now. If the best argument you have in favor of something is "well, you could just not tell me to not do it", then that is a little lame. With regards to sexuality, for example, I believe that a libertine sexual ethos is part of a system of spiritual values that can be given its own positive defense on its own independent merits.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
The only way some behavior is evidence that some belief in a principle is sincere is if that behavior is costly to the person
So what do you think would be an appropriately costly test for the anti-AI-art position?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
And second, art specifically has a certain level of mysticism around it, to the point that even atheist materialists will talk about human-manually-made art (or novel or film or song) having a "soul" or a "piece of the artist" within it
That hasn't been a tenable position for quite some time. Duchamp took a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917. Probably, he did not simultaneously impart a piece of his soul into it.
You are getting at something important though. I'd be a lot more interested in AI art if I had a reasonable degree of confidence that the AI was conscious, and that it created the piece with intent and drew from its conscious experiences as inspiration. I'd actually be very interested to learn about what it's like to be an entity who has the entire internet memorized! What does it experience, what does it feel. I have nothing against that at all, even if it does put humans out of work. Losing the Darwinian competition to another conscious, feeling subject is not so bad. Losing the Darwinian competition to a hoard of mindless replicators is horrific and should be avoided at all costs.
The AI art we have right now seems to me to be more akin to waves on the beach just so happening to etch very detailed pictures into the sand by random chance; this to me is lacking the principle features that make art interesting (communication between conscious subjects; wondering at what kind of subjectivity could have lead to the present work).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists?
No. That's not it.
I'm not, typically, a moralist. I hate cancel culture; I hate people who act like they can judge others. I roll my eyes equally at leftists who work themselves into knots over sexism and racism, and trads who gnash their teeth at the withering away of the values of yesteryear. Whatever happened, I ask, to freedom? Isn't anyone going to stand up for freedom? Freedom, the most protean of all ideals, against the dreary weave of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots: the freedom to dare and dream, the freedom to be true to what is one's ownmost, no matter how idiosyncratic, no matter how questionable or uncanny.
But freedom has a limit; it is, after all, only one ideal among many, one concept among many, no matter how charming of a concept it may be. I can't actually bring myself to get upset if someone gets canceled over AI art. That's how high the stakes are for me - my other "principles" turn to dust in the face of this reality. This makes me a hypocrite; but so what? If I contradict myself, then very well, I contradict myself. Some instincts are too powerful to be ignored.
I think most people have a limit like this - the limit beyond which talk of "freedom" reveals itself to be a hollow game, a luxury to be reserved for more genteel times, a mirage that dissipates when it is confronted with something of genuine weight and seriousness. AI art is that limit for me; other people will have their own, and I will try not to judge them for it, even when I find their beliefs to be incomprehensible. For the individuals who truly have (or at least claim to have) no limit, no possible limit to freedom, we might rightly view them with suspicion. Attempting to subsist on a spiritual diet consisting of nothing but the NAP alone is the veganism of the soul; it is lacking a certain red-blooded vitality, there is something missing. There can be no great love without great hatred.
I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
The fact that you are so perplexed by the response is, indeed, part of the frustration.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
It's not.
The best way to understand people on the other side of a culture war issue is to start from the assumption that they really do genuinely believe what they say they believe.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Sure, that would upset anyone. But there are also many non-artists who don't like AI art. Also, people who have objections to AI painting also tend to have objections to AI music and AI voice acting, even if those areas don't overlap with their personal skill set. Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
In the West, most of the abusive people are women
Can you clarify what you mean by this? The overwhelming majority of violent criminals (including rapists) are men. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in violent political unrest (e.g. the CHAZ in Seattle) are men.
When it comes to say, the architects of corporate wokeness, or deep state NWO bureaucrats, there are more women among their ranks, but also still plenty of men.
I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable. And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not. (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte). So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious. But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it! And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.
I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit. But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used. Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense. When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you. At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.
Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy. Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything. But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable. And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument. What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics. He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support. Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.
You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough. But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.
Well, yes? That's literally his position. He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it. The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic. And being psychotic is a bad thing. (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)
I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing. Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.
Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy. No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit. The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class. So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection? Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".
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