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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25458 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Art's primary goal is communication.

This word makes me nervous.

At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad". Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that? Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story? It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic. I think we're in agreement that this is no good.

But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity. I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".

Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:

"I actually had the feeling that something very unique for me took place. I had the impression that an interpretive edge, a lever, appeared to me. It's not as though I created it myself. I never have the feeling, even when I'm happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it's me. This is why I have a feeling both of responsibility and irresponsibility when I write a text. When I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something that had imposed itself on me. In Of Grammatology, I had this feeling in an even stronger way. I felt as though something had happened to me. I don't want to give this a religious sensibility - it wasn't an apparition or an ecstasy - but that something had taken hold of me and happened not by me, but to me."

I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.

I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.

That would be a catastrophe.

(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway! Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)

Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God?

Sorry if I was confusing here. I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that. I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.

I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But those were my initial motivations at any rate.

the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?)

I don't see any reason why Christianity would necessitate either of these. I'm personally pretty uncertain about the latter (I have no good model of what a soul would involve/not involve (and what would be materially handled), but I also really don't understand consciousness, which I definitely have), and I definitely reject the first (at least, if we mean libertarian free will), and that seems perfectly compatible with Christianity. In fact, I think the net evidence from the scriptures definitely leans against libertarian free will.

I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.

Counterargument: you are going to die, the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones. The Good is always and forever sovereign over the Truth because it is only via the Good that we care about the Truth, and indeed, we can dwell endlessly on how the Genesis narrative presents this, and how our goal is really a renewal of paradise (from the Persian word walled garden)

the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones.

I think that's a complex issue and the proper response varies on a case by case basis.

I will note though that I only have so much control over my beliefs. I can't just will myself to believe that modus ponens is false, or that I don't exist, or that people can fly. There's a give and take with what the world imposes on me by force.

Art isn't for communicating information, it's for communicating viewpoints, "what-it's-like-to-be"s. If I write a song true enough, I can make you feel for a minute what it was like to be me losing my wife. (I can't actually do that, but some people can.) The only purpose of art is to make us feel less alone, which is why AI art is a contradiction and is fake and gay.

Adding onto this, I will be interested in AI art on the day that it becomes like-something to be an AI, and those AIs create art to express what that's like to us. I'm looking forward to that very much, but I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.

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