Value is derived from scarcity, and artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and Midjourney is creating an infinite abundance of written and visual content… you do the math
Think of who is going to read it, and think of why they are going to read it. Then think, if their initial impression is favorable, how long it is likely to stay that way. Then come back to the "spirit", which has nothing to do with any of this stuff, remembering that as you were writing for publication (i.e. in view of other people with their ever-shifting egos and prejudices), "spirit" was almost entirely locked out of the room. A manuscript assessor is a useful person because they will answer you back on a systematic basis. They will challenge you and threaten you and occasionally praise you. Then they will get sick of your and you will receive replies of such dubious quality that you, and they, will move on. In the meantime you will have learnt a lot -- more that self-publishing will teach you (and I have done it, years and years and years ago, not once, not twice, thrice). Remember that in the end spirit alone counts, but you need limitless ego to first get spirit running, second get set up for limitless effort, and third keep spirit alive after every latest casual ejection (and publishers can be shown to be in the business for that pleasure alone). C'est mon expérience seulement but I wouldn't swap it. Never consider the ground to be level. Only spirit makes the ground level, and spirit only comes about when limitless ego with its limitless experience has expired. Would I like to be JKR? Would I like to be Lyn's daughter (who as Lyn's client has done Great Things)? Yes (as Sammy Mountjoy says in Golding's Free Fall), "Yes sir, I would like that very much". To which his headmaster replies, "In other words, you don't give a damn". But I seriously give a damn. I seriously think, If only this rubbish could be cleared out of the woodshed, being published might be what I thought it was once, A Good Thing. In the meantime, there is life, which was happening (no I don't usually quote him) while you were doing other things.
I relate to what you're saying -- you have accurately alluded to much of the meatal strife I've undergone in the writing of my novel and the endless ponderings as to what it is all for. Thanks for the advice Jim -- it's very much appreciated.
I did a novel once, a very long novel, and one that was roundly denounced by the Christians I knew (okay -- one) set in Byzantine Crimea (yes there was such a place -- it was inhabited by Goths) and in which though God didn't actually turn up, he sent his messenger, Elijah (you will recall from -- Matthew? -- that John the Baptist reincarnated Elijah). (Elijah fascinated me as a kid. He was so ruthless, and he lived in a real, ruthless, world. In fact he co-existed in my head with Robinson Crusoe and King Arthur.) My hero, or anti-hero (who had to put up with Elijah being ruthless more or less most of the time) certainly believed in God, but he could also see that God had produced Byzantium, and that even though God was prepared to protect him from the worst excesses of Byzantine Byzantium, he wasn't prepared to protect anyone else. So the tragedy of Christianity is not so much its failure to deal with the problem of pain (not so much a Christian problem as an Anglican one, and strangely, there were no Anglicans in Byzantium, at least in the seventh century, and even today Putin is having problems finding them to root them out) but the problem of itself. Nobody takes seriously Acts 5, but I would, because it's paradigmatic of the way the Holy Ghost deals with the problem of dissent--even dissent of the merely venal sort. We happen to live in an age where Acts 5, Byzantium, the Thirty Years War etc. etc. etc. are long in the past and Christians can retreat monastically into a world that never suffers these things, because it suffers the idiocies of the various styles of socialism (a), and its managing to turn into the butt of what IT was ultimately responsible for: i.e. those various types of socialism (sc. Taborites, Munsterites, Levellers, etc. etc. etc.) whose fundamental product ("Woke") may look like nothing more than a hare-brained product of philanthropism and humanism but without "universal love" we certainly wouldn't have philanthropism or humanism (b). Anyway, John 3:16 hardly describes what the history of the past 2000 years has been like, even though I am quite enjoying reading The Name of the Rose right now. (Another recommendation. I actually prefer it that Adso has mixed feelings about irony.)
The good news (for Christianity) is that Sparrow Fall will never be published. It was written in a Style and with an Attitude which Woke publishers (there are no others, at least of fiction, and have not been for many, many, many years) need gallons of smelling salts and sacks of pearls to deal with. I suspect that even though the God with whom my hero or anti-hero engages with such centrifugal energy is not a mummified fantasy, he is certainly God, to my eyes, and I suspect he ALWAYS hated being reduced to (publisher-friendly) agape when eros and philia were so much more fun. (It is true of course they like eros and philia -- or at least, pornography and Thelma&Louise.) Or to put it another way, the totalitarian God of Parmenides was even badly suited to the sensibility of (St) Paul, who kept sending out missives to the effect of YOU SNOWFLAKES JUST GROW UP (Corinthians, somewhere) except when he wasn't.
This again goes to Woke, but it also goes to the breadth and depth of history itself, which I wanted to capture in my book. I am very disappointed that over the centuries the market for such a book has gradually been gushing down the toilet, and I am of course expressing my frustration at this right now. As you can see, I spent far too much of my youth as a God-botherer, and wouldn't dream of being near so forward or trusting as I was then, but it is time for God to step up and tell me why his representative(s) on earth are justified in regarding wild curiosity about such matters as deeply upsetting, irritating, and, indeed, "corrupt". In Promethius Bound, Prometheus tells Zeus that all Power, all Glory and all Forever And Ever are ultimately answerable, to which Zeus responds (of course) with Might and Force (these could actually be presented onstage, at least at the time of Aeschylus). These are the end times, but we are not faced with the consequences of Elijah's ruthlessness (which in my novel is far preferable to that of the Emperor Konstans), but with the Love of Bernard of Clairvaux, who looked at Abelard, then heavenward, and cried, GUT HIM!
Nice to have God and the king on your side. Nice to be THAT sort of bot.
You have some devastating insight Jim. Your novel sounds fascinating. As an aspiring novelist myself I also lament the state of the woke publishing industry and wonder most days why I even persist in writing the damned thing when I know it will most likely never be published. But at 200,000 words already I'd be the worst kind of quitter not to finish it, if for no other reason than to say "I've written a novel." My own thoughts on God are still developing, and I discuss them in my recent article 'Marxism, Alcohol and God', suffice to say that I think all humans have the capacity to be vessels for God, but by no means does he live in all of us, and in this sense I suppose, I would agree that many, if not most humans are indeed nothing more than bots.
Anderson's theory of "spirits" is interesting. Though an atheist (and probably always an atheist) as a youngster he liked (St) Paul a lot. I think that's where the theory of spirits comes from. He thought that people had to be "taken up" by a spirit or a "cause" -- "of myself I am nothing" (that's Paul, anyway). So he was not an "individualist" (certainly not a humanist, and earnt the reputation in Australia of being a "nasty person" because he was the enemy of what he called, nicely, "philanthropism"). He thought "the inquiring way of life" was a spirit, and that it required induction (and since he had a lot of sympathy for "original sin" -- as did another atheist, T.E. Hulme -- I'm sure he could have mixed it with Augustine, Gottschalk, even Tom Bradwardine, as far as the business of "self-bootstrapping" is concerned).
So maybe it's not so much a question (from this point of view, which I rather favour) of being or not being a bot, but of being inducted into one way of life rather than another. Anderson favoured "productive" over "consumptive" ways of life. As you would expect. With the whole, highly developed ethical theory that came with it.
I've been writing novels since I was thirteen, and (you can see the tears run down my cheeks as I say it) many are called but few are chosen. My manuscript-assessor for a while was a leftie named Tom Flood (should I be saying this?) and we tolerated each other to the point where he was trying to recommend me to the likes of Lyn Tranter. So I have a sort of inside-track. (Can you see the laugh-lines on my face burst out as I say this?) I think Tom was right about the worst of my stuff -- it could be very very bad (and I never tried Sparrow Fall on him -- at 240,000 wd, imagine the cost!) We are blessed, however. Woke has turned on every smiling success-story (even the great JKR). Only the popular vacuous pleb-novel Bestseller survives -- and it always survives, because its trick is, Think Nothing, Do Nothing, Excite No Genuine Resentment. So imagine yourself at a Writers' Conference, standing up to speak on behalf of your Critical and Popular Mega-Success, and suddenly realising, Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Not just because Woke gets under the fingernails (and, quoting Harry Chapin, "hate gets under the skin"); it will play you for a while before it does what it always does with the Life Of Inquiry -- recognises that the ice-scream next door is slightly richer in cholesterol. We are blessed.
-- As Steve Buscemi says in The Sopranos! And what happened to him! But I rather think that Steve lucked it with the (metaphorical) literary intelligentsia -- i.e. made himself a visible target. Do you want to be a visible target around Tone And The Boys? My hungry ego wants fame and fortune. But I cannot tell a lie -- Lyn, your novel is shit. Is getting you to agent me won at the cost of sucking your toenails when they too smell of excrement?
I'm inclined to agree. Have you looked into the whole self publishing thing? I hear stories... I hear it can work out if you know what you're doing. But I've yet to explore it. I've yet to explore any publishing options because the thought of actually being published seems so out there... I know that's the wrong attitude.
I think the AI version has a significant amount of pretentiousness in its style. Artificial and repetitive after a while. I.e. dull.
I think what will take a while for AI to master is the harmony of the unusual, which humans can feel if its fitting, while AI can just apply it statistically.
Thanks for the comment Jay. I agree, the AI version was pretentious and plastic and I think the discerning reader will pick that up as you have, not just in my example but in any prose. The hilariously ironic thing is the AI actually did accurately articulate our exact criticisms of it - that absence of soul; or what you eloquently refer to as the harmony of the unusual.
Philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard, known as the father of human existentialism, already had the philosophical answer to this new problem of ours, I think. A human being is faced with a time to live; will age and die in forever changing circumstances - quite unlike a robot.
Kierkegaard would have agreed with you : You don't care!! You little single individual will live and eventually die as we powerless creatures always did. The only thing which really matters is your purity of mind - your ethics.
Thanks for the thoughts Andy. This is where I have landed with the existential issue too - true meaning can only be found in the pursuit of godliness, that which is true, real and which holds value. As such, struggle is crucial and here one gains their personal integrity and their relationship with God, however they come to understand him/it. To me this is the antidote to 'The Science' which is really just man's attempt to deify himself.
Kierkegaard also wrote "life is lived forward, but it is understood backwards" ... which quickly became a meme, at the disposal of everyone from William James to Brian Penton to ... me! Which just goes to show, we are all bots, at least in the matter of dealing with articulated reality.
John Anderson (he of Sydney University philosophy fame -- no, not the politician) had a theory of mind that disengaged it from the "contents of thought" (which can be replicated by bots like us). Mind, he said, is not cognition (which is relational); it is not conation (which is also relational) -- it is FEELING (which is qualitative). Now this doesn't address the possibility of originality (which is feeling generating a content of thought off its own base -- and not relying purely on the contents of civilization to feed into it), but it does tell us how dangerous the whole enterprise of BEING AUTHENTIC may be. (Heidegger, after all, was a great Kierkegaard fan, though, at least as a Nazi, he apparently never read The Concept of Dread.) When I communicate with a bot, I may well be communicating with any human being in a public service job, relay-running for a publishing company, holding down a university lectureship by the skin of their teeth. Their response? The boilerplate wasn't actually invented by Bill Gates. Devoid of feeling? Devoid of feeling other than the Will To Survive In Their Job. Devoid of intelligence? Devoid of every intelligence except the one that leads to promotion. Don't over-credit humans-being-human (either on the feeling side or on the cognition).
Still, I liked this piece. The feeling had been channelled to a place where it enabled me to think more about the notion of "cognition". Oh, and everyone should read The Concept of Dread. Everyone, that is, who has time.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Jim. I enjoy being challenged in good faith, which is why I'm here as opposed to a place like Medium! (where I have in fact already been cancelled). You have a piercing insight and I enjoyed reading this, though I had to take a couple of passes at it! I see what you're saying, and to an extent I agree with you, and I have plenty to say on the shortfalls of the human condition. I wonder how long it would take, if hypothetically we were to spin this discussion out , until we ran into the subject of God... Could be fun! Anyway, thanks again for reading.
Think of who is going to read it, and think of why they are going to read it. Then think, if their initial impression is favorable, how long it is likely to stay that way. Then come back to the "spirit", which has nothing to do with any of this stuff, remembering that as you were writing for publication (i.e. in view of other people with their ever-shifting egos and prejudices), "spirit" was almost entirely locked out of the room. A manuscript assessor is a useful person because they will answer you back on a systematic basis. They will challenge you and threaten you and occasionally praise you. Then they will get sick of your and you will receive replies of such dubious quality that you, and they, will move on. In the meantime you will have learnt a lot -- more that self-publishing will teach you (and I have done it, years and years and years ago, not once, not twice, thrice). Remember that in the end spirit alone counts, but you need limitless ego to first get spirit running, second get set up for limitless effort, and third keep spirit alive after every latest casual ejection (and publishers can be shown to be in the business for that pleasure alone). C'est mon expérience seulement but I wouldn't swap it. Never consider the ground to be level. Only spirit makes the ground level, and spirit only comes about when limitless ego with its limitless experience has expired. Would I like to be JKR? Would I like to be Lyn's daughter (who as Lyn's client has done Great Things)? Yes (as Sammy Mountjoy says in Golding's Free Fall), "Yes sir, I would like that very much". To which his headmaster replies, "In other words, you don't give a damn". But I seriously give a damn. I seriously think, If only this rubbish could be cleared out of the woodshed, being published might be what I thought it was once, A Good Thing. In the meantime, there is life, which was happening (no I don't usually quote him) while you were doing other things.
I relate to what you're saying -- you have accurately alluded to much of the meatal strife I've undergone in the writing of my novel and the endless ponderings as to what it is all for. Thanks for the advice Jim -- it's very much appreciated.
I did a novel once, a very long novel, and one that was roundly denounced by the Christians I knew (okay -- one) set in Byzantine Crimea (yes there was such a place -- it was inhabited by Goths) and in which though God didn't actually turn up, he sent his messenger, Elijah (you will recall from -- Matthew? -- that John the Baptist reincarnated Elijah). (Elijah fascinated me as a kid. He was so ruthless, and he lived in a real, ruthless, world. In fact he co-existed in my head with Robinson Crusoe and King Arthur.) My hero, or anti-hero (who had to put up with Elijah being ruthless more or less most of the time) certainly believed in God, but he could also see that God had produced Byzantium, and that even though God was prepared to protect him from the worst excesses of Byzantine Byzantium, he wasn't prepared to protect anyone else. So the tragedy of Christianity is not so much its failure to deal with the problem of pain (not so much a Christian problem as an Anglican one, and strangely, there were no Anglicans in Byzantium, at least in the seventh century, and even today Putin is having problems finding them to root them out) but the problem of itself. Nobody takes seriously Acts 5, but I would, because it's paradigmatic of the way the Holy Ghost deals with the problem of dissent--even dissent of the merely venal sort. We happen to live in an age where Acts 5, Byzantium, the Thirty Years War etc. etc. etc. are long in the past and Christians can retreat monastically into a world that never suffers these things, because it suffers the idiocies of the various styles of socialism (a), and its managing to turn into the butt of what IT was ultimately responsible for: i.e. those various types of socialism (sc. Taborites, Munsterites, Levellers, etc. etc. etc.) whose fundamental product ("Woke") may look like nothing more than a hare-brained product of philanthropism and humanism but without "universal love" we certainly wouldn't have philanthropism or humanism (b). Anyway, John 3:16 hardly describes what the history of the past 2000 years has been like, even though I am quite enjoying reading The Name of the Rose right now. (Another recommendation. I actually prefer it that Adso has mixed feelings about irony.)
The good news (for Christianity) is that Sparrow Fall will never be published. It was written in a Style and with an Attitude which Woke publishers (there are no others, at least of fiction, and have not been for many, many, many years) need gallons of smelling salts and sacks of pearls to deal with. I suspect that even though the God with whom my hero or anti-hero engages with such centrifugal energy is not a mummified fantasy, he is certainly God, to my eyes, and I suspect he ALWAYS hated being reduced to (publisher-friendly) agape when eros and philia were so much more fun. (It is true of course they like eros and philia -- or at least, pornography and Thelma&Louise.) Or to put it another way, the totalitarian God of Parmenides was even badly suited to the sensibility of (St) Paul, who kept sending out missives to the effect of YOU SNOWFLAKES JUST GROW UP (Corinthians, somewhere) except when he wasn't.
This again goes to Woke, but it also goes to the breadth and depth of history itself, which I wanted to capture in my book. I am very disappointed that over the centuries the market for such a book has gradually been gushing down the toilet, and I am of course expressing my frustration at this right now. As you can see, I spent far too much of my youth as a God-botherer, and wouldn't dream of being near so forward or trusting as I was then, but it is time for God to step up and tell me why his representative(s) on earth are justified in regarding wild curiosity about such matters as deeply upsetting, irritating, and, indeed, "corrupt". In Promethius Bound, Prometheus tells Zeus that all Power, all Glory and all Forever And Ever are ultimately answerable, to which Zeus responds (of course) with Might and Force (these could actually be presented onstage, at least at the time of Aeschylus). These are the end times, but we are not faced with the consequences of Elijah's ruthlessness (which in my novel is far preferable to that of the Emperor Konstans), but with the Love of Bernard of Clairvaux, who looked at Abelard, then heavenward, and cried, GUT HIM!
Nice to have God and the king on your side. Nice to be THAT sort of bot.
You have some devastating insight Jim. Your novel sounds fascinating. As an aspiring novelist myself I also lament the state of the woke publishing industry and wonder most days why I even persist in writing the damned thing when I know it will most likely never be published. But at 200,000 words already I'd be the worst kind of quitter not to finish it, if for no other reason than to say "I've written a novel." My own thoughts on God are still developing, and I discuss them in my recent article 'Marxism, Alcohol and God', suffice to say that I think all humans have the capacity to be vessels for God, but by no means does he live in all of us, and in this sense I suppose, I would agree that many, if not most humans are indeed nothing more than bots.
Anderson's theory of "spirits" is interesting. Though an atheist (and probably always an atheist) as a youngster he liked (St) Paul a lot. I think that's where the theory of spirits comes from. He thought that people had to be "taken up" by a spirit or a "cause" -- "of myself I am nothing" (that's Paul, anyway). So he was not an "individualist" (certainly not a humanist, and earnt the reputation in Australia of being a "nasty person" because he was the enemy of what he called, nicely, "philanthropism"). He thought "the inquiring way of life" was a spirit, and that it required induction (and since he had a lot of sympathy for "original sin" -- as did another atheist, T.E. Hulme -- I'm sure he could have mixed it with Augustine, Gottschalk, even Tom Bradwardine, as far as the business of "self-bootstrapping" is concerned).
So maybe it's not so much a question (from this point of view, which I rather favour) of being or not being a bot, but of being inducted into one way of life rather than another. Anderson favoured "productive" over "consumptive" ways of life. As you would expect. With the whole, highly developed ethical theory that came with it.
I've been writing novels since I was thirteen, and (you can see the tears run down my cheeks as I say it) many are called but few are chosen. My manuscript-assessor for a while was a leftie named Tom Flood (should I be saying this?) and we tolerated each other to the point where he was trying to recommend me to the likes of Lyn Tranter. So I have a sort of inside-track. (Can you see the laugh-lines on my face burst out as I say this?) I think Tom was right about the worst of my stuff -- it could be very very bad (and I never tried Sparrow Fall on him -- at 240,000 wd, imagine the cost!) We are blessed, however. Woke has turned on every smiling success-story (even the great JKR). Only the popular vacuous pleb-novel Bestseller survives -- and it always survives, because its trick is, Think Nothing, Do Nothing, Excite No Genuine Resentment. So imagine yourself at a Writers' Conference, standing up to speak on behalf of your Critical and Popular Mega-Success, and suddenly realising, Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Not just because Woke gets under the fingernails (and, quoting Harry Chapin, "hate gets under the skin"); it will play you for a while before it does what it always does with the Life Of Inquiry -- recognises that the ice-scream next door is slightly richer in cholesterol. We are blessed.
-- As Steve Buscemi says in The Sopranos! And what happened to him! But I rather think that Steve lucked it with the (metaphorical) literary intelligentsia -- i.e. made himself a visible target. Do you want to be a visible target around Tone And The Boys? My hungry ego wants fame and fortune. But I cannot tell a lie -- Lyn, your novel is shit. Is getting you to agent me won at the cost of sucking your toenails when they too smell of excrement?
Blessed, I say. Blessed.
I'm inclined to agree. Have you looked into the whole self publishing thing? I hear stories... I hear it can work out if you know what you're doing. But I've yet to explore it. I've yet to explore any publishing options because the thought of actually being published seems so out there... I know that's the wrong attitude.
I think the AI version has a significant amount of pretentiousness in its style. Artificial and repetitive after a while. I.e. dull.
I think what will take a while for AI to master is the harmony of the unusual, which humans can feel if its fitting, while AI can just apply it statistically.
Thanks for the comment Jay. I agree, the AI version was pretentious and plastic and I think the discerning reader will pick that up as you have, not just in my example but in any prose. The hilariously ironic thing is the AI actually did accurately articulate our exact criticisms of it - that absence of soul; or what you eloquently refer to as the harmony of the unusual.
Philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard, known as the father of human existentialism, already had the philosophical answer to this new problem of ours, I think. A human being is faced with a time to live; will age and die in forever changing circumstances - quite unlike a robot.
Kierkegaard would have agreed with you : You don't care!! You little single individual will live and eventually die as we powerless creatures always did. The only thing which really matters is your purity of mind - your ethics.
Andy Espersen
Thanks for the thoughts Andy. This is where I have landed with the existential issue too - true meaning can only be found in the pursuit of godliness, that which is true, real and which holds value. As such, struggle is crucial and here one gains their personal integrity and their relationship with God, however they come to understand him/it. To me this is the antidote to 'The Science' which is really just man's attempt to deify himself.
Kierkegaard also wrote "life is lived forward, but it is understood backwards" ... which quickly became a meme, at the disposal of everyone from William James to Brian Penton to ... me! Which just goes to show, we are all bots, at least in the matter of dealing with articulated reality.
John Anderson (he of Sydney University philosophy fame -- no, not the politician) had a theory of mind that disengaged it from the "contents of thought" (which can be replicated by bots like us). Mind, he said, is not cognition (which is relational); it is not conation (which is also relational) -- it is FEELING (which is qualitative). Now this doesn't address the possibility of originality (which is feeling generating a content of thought off its own base -- and not relying purely on the contents of civilization to feed into it), but it does tell us how dangerous the whole enterprise of BEING AUTHENTIC may be. (Heidegger, after all, was a great Kierkegaard fan, though, at least as a Nazi, he apparently never read The Concept of Dread.) When I communicate with a bot, I may well be communicating with any human being in a public service job, relay-running for a publishing company, holding down a university lectureship by the skin of their teeth. Their response? The boilerplate wasn't actually invented by Bill Gates. Devoid of feeling? Devoid of feeling other than the Will To Survive In Their Job. Devoid of intelligence? Devoid of every intelligence except the one that leads to promotion. Don't over-credit humans-being-human (either on the feeling side or on the cognition).
Still, I liked this piece. The feeling had been channelled to a place where it enabled me to think more about the notion of "cognition". Oh, and everyone should read The Concept of Dread. Everyone, that is, who has time.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Jim. I enjoy being challenged in good faith, which is why I'm here as opposed to a place like Medium! (where I have in fact already been cancelled). You have a piercing insight and I enjoyed reading this, though I had to take a couple of passes at it! I see what you're saying, and to an extent I agree with you, and I have plenty to say on the shortfalls of the human condition. I wonder how long it would take, if hypothetically we were to spin this discussion out , until we ran into the subject of God... Could be fun! Anyway, thanks again for reading.
JJ