A Particular Beauty: Irmin Schmidt
He recalls that Can would often record with the doors open at the studio, to absorb the sounds of outside. His interest in field recordings and natural sounds began around that time and continues to the present day. Requiem features a nightingale singing, a bird that has some significance to the area where he lives, “I was on our terrace one night, and it was such a beautiful night, and there were several nightingales singing. They are always around the house in summer, and this was particularly beautiful,” Schmidt says. “I got out my recording machine spontaneously. It didn’t occur to me in that moment that I would make an album with it.”
Irmin Schmidt was the keyboard player of the German band Can, who were based in Köln. The album Requiem can be found on Bandcamp – LINK. I have the CD and love it.
The most beautiful and human things we do
(quoting novelist Brandon Sanderson)
Maybe someday the language models will be able to write books better than I can. But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point, because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write [my first manuscript]?… It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, ‘I did it. I did it.’”
Cal Newport writes:
I understand art to be an act of deep human communication, in which the artist uses a tangible medium, such as a page of prose or a painted canvas, to transmit a complex internal cognitive state from their brain to that of their audience. It’s telepathy. And it’s one of the most beautiful and human things we do.
Misalignment
Institutions are misaligned from human flourishing at precisely the moment when AI alignment dominates public discourse. We pour billions into ensuring that machines serve human values, while the human institutions those machines operate inside, the workplaces, the institutions, the healthcare systems, the housing markets, continue to optimize for metrics that have nothing to do with whether anyone is actually thriving.
In other words, instead of laughing at people who are using ChatGPT as a replacement for a therapist we need to realize that they might not have anyone to turn to because we have allowed government to hollow out human institutions over the last few decades.
Replacing likeness with likeliness:
As the artist Hito Steyerl wrote in 2023, right at the start of the AI craze, generative models “represent the norm by signaling the mean. They replace likeness with likeliness.” This is true whether their output is text, images, or video, as in each case, the output is based on averages derived from vast data sets. This is a problem because it means that LLMs are only capable of recycling old information, not generating new ideas. While their outputs can at times seem surprising, even novel, this is always a mirage.
Using AI everything becomes more middle-of-the-road. That leaves humans to enjoy the margins, the less busy roads, the edges…
Feelings Are How the Body Talks to the Brain
I think that feelings are based in the body. It’s how the body talks to the brain. And we have to remember this very simple fact that the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around.
We’re not just a support system for this amazing three pounds of tofu in our heads. Once you realize that, you realize that the body, the messages coming from the body, are really important to the brain.
These feelings are the beginning of conscious experience. If you didn’t have them, it’s questionable whether you would have consciousness. There’s no doubt that the experience of consciousness is some kind of interplay between both.
from Ezra Klein’s conversation with Michael Pollan – LINK to text
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