Latest news with #Spinoza
Spectator
3 days ago
- General
- Spectator
Spinoza, Epicurus and the question of ‘epikoros'
With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his expulsion from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. An American professor of philosophy, Yitzhak Melamed, asked the Portuguese Jewish synagogue there for permission to film some footage. The rabbi pointed out that Spinoza had been excommunicated 'with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time'. So, no he could not visit the synagogue. The rabbi's letter called Spinoza an epikouris, a form of the word used of him in the 17th century. The reason for Spinoza's excommunication (herem in Hebrew) is unknown. Spinoza did write difficult stuff later about all things being God, but not when he was cast out in 1656, aged 23. Anyway, 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides discussed the nature of an epikoros as someone who denies God's providence. That is what Spinoza was to deny, as far as I can understand him, and what Epicurus had denied. To add a complication. Maimonides said in an early work that epikoros came from Aramaic, and others have since derived it from the p-q-r Semitic root, signifying 'licentiousness'. By the time he wrote Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides had learnt about Epicurus's philosophy. Do, then, epikoros and a modern form, apikoros, come from the Greek philosopher, or was his fame projected on to an extant Semitic word? Professor Melamed eventually received a letter from the Ma'amad (churchwardens) of the synagogue saying the rabbi had exceeded his authority and he was welcome to visit.
Wall Street Journal
09-05-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘I Am a Part of Infinity' and ‘Free Creations of the Human Mind': Einstein's Sense of Awe
When asked his view of religion, Albert Einstein often invoked a 17th-century Dutch philosopher. 'I believe in Spinoza's God,' Einstein told a New York rabbi in 1929. What exactly he meant by that has been debated ever since. In 'I Am a Part of Infinity,' Kieran Fox, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that Einstein's ideas on religion 'have always been approached in the wrong way.' The author claims that Einstein in fact wished to found a 'cosmic religion' whose 'mandate and meaning' was to remind us 'that we embodied Infinity.' Spinoza, Mr. Fox suggests, was but one of many 'radical geniuses who anticipated and inspired' the idea. These are bold claims—and I am not convinced.
Gulf Today
03-03-2025
- Science
- Gulf Today
AI will match human creativity for sure
Tribune News Service Most of the academic writers I know acknowledge that artificial intelligence is beginning to encroach on their field, including the ability to write a cogent essay demonstrating critical thought. If it's a bit bland or generic, well, so are a lot of student essays that we've read over the years. But we still claim as uniquely human the ability to write creatively. Only humans can combine feelings and words and their own associations to form art. That's not true. AI is, among other things, a web scraper, a gatherer of what's out there, a synthesizer. But so are writers, and what we value is their idiosyncratic skill at putting together what's out there. As poet T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay 'The Metaphysical Poets': 'When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.' But AI can assemble something akin to that, even if the formation currently involves more fumbled tries in its blind workings toward complexity than a human writer might attempt. In fact, the processes of a large language model, or LLM, are slightly opaque to even computer scientists. And the models are trained on huge sets of data, as are humans. The students in my writing workshops strive for something original, a high bar to pass. Definitions of originality vary widely: presumably something we haven't seen before. In fact, a lot of us need to read more because what we think of as original has been done and done before we were born. 'There is nothing new under the sun,' reads a famous line from Ecclesiastes, undoubtedly not the first time that sentiment has been expressed in a similar way. So if originality, per se, doesn't exist, what are we looking for? This: Take a known element, such as a toddler's birthday party, and join it to an element you usually don't see associated with it, such as a funeral. The occasion becomes decidedly mixed. I just made up that scenario, but you can too. It's called recombinant. The video player is currently playing an ad. Or take an ordinary object, such as a pen, and in your story, use it to dig a hole. This is repurposing. And lest you scoff at such an easy method to produce something new, understand that we certainly do applaud that as something original, from innovative ad campaigns to a short story that includes five languages. Those who judge creative writing in the classroom are so interested in process — 'This poem went through five drafts' — that we forget that in the end, the finished poem is what matters most. Does it make a difference whether a short story is the result of months of painful choices and revising or simply randomized selections that finally yield a masterpiece (six monkeys at typewriters eventually coming up with Hamlet)? If so, why? A creative writer produces a work of art. Are the 'how' and 'why' relevant? How does one know, anyway? Think of the Turing test: If an observer can't tell whether a response is human-generated or machine-generated, then the machine can be said to exhibit intelligence. And if some discerning critics still fondly believe that the novel they admire could have been created only by some demented genius in a garret or basement or castle, that's romantic delusion. Perhaps it was written by the AI inhabiting a data server in Texas. Last year, a poet in a nearby English department thundered that AI would never write poetry like Emily Dickinson. So another professor typed into ChatGPT, 'Write a quatrain in the manner of Emily Dickinson that uses black-and-white imagery and the idea of drowning, yet with a sense of elation.' In a matter of seconds, the AI had executed a pretty darned good quatrain, which I won't quote because you can try it yourself, and anyway, ChatGPT will come up with a new one every time. The kicker? The thundering poet termed the result uninspired and banal, so the other professor went into Dickinson's 1,800-poem corpus, retrieved an obscure quatrain and presented it to the poet, who called the result banal and uninspired. A surprisingly high number of professors I've talked to have strong opinions on AI but have never tried it out.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Commentary: Those who say AI will never match human creativity are wrong
Most of the academic writers I know acknowledge that artificial intelligence is beginning to encroach on their field, including the ability to write a cogent essay demonstrating critical thought. If it's a bit bland or generic, well, so are a lot of student essays that we've read over the years. But we still claim as uniquely human the ability to write creatively. Only humans can combine feelings and words and their own associations to form art. That's not true. AI is, among other things, a web scraper, a gatherer of what's out there, a synthesizer. But so are writers, and what we value is their idiosyncratic skill at putting together what's out there. As poet T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay 'The Metaphysical Poets': 'When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.' But AI can assemble something akin to that, even if the formation currently involves more fumbled tries in its blind workings toward complexity than a human writer might attempt. In fact, the processes of a large language model, or LLM, are slightly opaque to even computer scientists. And the models are trained on huge sets of data, as are humans. The students in my writing workshops strive for something original, a high bar to pass. Definitions of originality vary widely: presumably something we haven't seen before. In fact, a lot of us need to read more because what we think of as original has been done and done before we were born. 'There is nothing new under the sun,' reads a famous line from Ecclesiastes, undoubtedly not the first time that sentiment has been expressed in a similar way. So if originality, per se, doesn't exist, what are we looking for? This: Take a known element, such as a toddler's birthday party, and join it to an element you usually don't see associated with it, such as a funeral. The occasion becomes decidedly mixed. I just made up that scenario, but you can too. It's called recombinant. The video player is currently playing an ad. Or take an ordinary object, such as a pen, and in your story, use it to dig a hole. This is repurposing. And lest you scoff at such an easy method to produce something new, understand that we certainly do applaud that as something original, from innovative ad campaigns to a short story that includes five languages. Those who judge creative writing in the classroom are so interested in process — 'This poem went through five drafts' — that we forget that in the end, the finished poem is what matters most. Does it make a difference whether a short story is the result of months of painful choices and revising or simply randomized selections that finally yield a masterpiece (six monkeys at typewriters eventually coming up with Hamlet)? If so, why? A creative writer produces a work of art. Are the 'how' and 'why' relevant? How does one know, anyway? Think of the Turing test: If an observer can't tell whether a response is human-generated or machine-generated, then the machine can be said to exhibit intelligence. And if some discerning critics still fondly believe that the novel they admire could have been created only by some demented genius in a garret or basement or castle, that's romantic delusion. Perhaps it was written by the AI inhabiting a data server in Texas. Last year, a poet in a nearby English department thundered that AI would never write poetry like Emily Dickinson. So another professor typed into ChatGPT, 'Write a quatrain in the manner of Emily Dickinson that uses black-and-white imagery and the idea of drowning, yet with a sense of elation.' In a matter of seconds, the AI had executed a pretty darned good quatrain, which I won't quote because you can try it yourself, and anyway, ChatGPT will come up with a new one every time. The kicker? The thundering poet termed the result uninspired and banal, so the other professor went into Dickinson's 1,800-poem corpus, retrieved an obscure quatrain and presented it to the poet, who called the result banal and uninspired. A surprisingly high number of professors I've talked to have strong opinions on AI but have never tried it out. Most people will probably disagree with the points I'm making, and I hope this piece doesn't lose me a lot of writer friends. I've been a productive writer for decades, and the advent of AI worries me — but I don't feel I can ignore it or deny it. I also don't want to confuse process with result: Teaching writing is still important in the way that teaching math is still a worthy endeavor in the age of electronic calculators. We lose certain facilities at our peril. Moreover, plenty of valid reasons exist for preferring artisanal to machine-made, not the least of which is how one feels about the result, along with a perfectly understandable aversion to what one thinks of as soulless. But the articles I keep reading about how nothing can replace the role of human artistry, the imagination and lived experience in the creation of art, may console people until it's too late. Bear in mind also that today's AI is far more powerful than the AI of last year. Neural nets are getting better and better at putting together elements to form a result that's pleasing to humans. Could an AI not too far in the future write a column like this? I don't see why not. ____ David Galef is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University in New Jersey. ___
Chicago Tribune
21-02-2025
- Science
- Chicago Tribune
David Galef: Those who say AI will never match human creativity are wrong
Most of the academic writers I know acknowledge that artificial intelligence is beginning to encroach on their field, including the ability to write a cogent essay demonstrating critical thought. If it's a bit bland or generic, well, so are a lot of student essays that we've read over the years. But we still claim as uniquely human the ability to write creatively. Only humans can combine feelings and words and their own associations to form art. That's not true. AI is, among other things, a web scraper, a gatherer of what's out there, a synthesizer. But so are writers, and what we value is their idiosyncratic skill at putting together what's out there. As poet T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay 'The Metaphysical Poets': 'When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.' But AI can assemble something akin to that, even if the formation currently involves more fumbled tries in its blind workings toward complexity than a human writer might attempt. In fact, the processes of a large language model, or LLM, are slightly opaque to even computer scientists. And the models are trained on huge sets of data, as are humans. The students in my writing workshops strive for something original, a high bar to pass. Definitions of originality vary widely: presumably something we haven't seen before. In fact, a lot of us need to read more because what we think of as original has been done and done before we were born. 'There is nothing new under the sun,' reads a famous line from Ecclesiastes, undoubtedly not the first time that sentiment has been expressed in a similar way. So if originality, per se, doesn't exist, what are we looking for? This: Take a known element, such as a toddler's birthday party, and join it to an element you usually don't see associated with it, such as a funeral. The occasion becomes decidedly mixed. I just made up that scenario, but you can too. It's called recombinant. Or take an ordinary object, such as a pen, and in your story, use it to dig a hole. This is repurposing. And lest you scoff at such an easy method to produce something new, understand that we certainly do applaud that as something original, from innovative ad campaigns to a short story that includes five languages. Those who judge creative writing in the classroom are so interested in process — 'This poem went through five drafts' — that we forget that in the end, the finished poem is what matters most. Does it make a difference whether a short story is the result of months of painful choices and revising or simply randomized selections that finally yield a masterpiece (six monkeys at typewriters eventually coming up with Hamlet)? If so, why? A creative writer produces a work of art. Are the 'how' and 'why' relevant? How does one know, anyway? Think of the Turing test: If an observer can't tell whether a response is human-generated or machine-generated, then the machine can be said to exhibit intelligence. And if some discerning critics still fondly believe that the novel they admire could have been created only by some demented genius in a garret or basement or castle, that's romantic delusion. Perhaps it was written by the AI inhabiting a data server in Texas. Last year, a poet in a nearby English department thundered that AI would never write poetry like Emily Dickinson. So another professor typed into ChatGPT, 'Write a quatrain in the manner of Emily Dickinson that uses black-and-white imagery and the idea of drowning, yet with a sense of elation.' In a matter of seconds, the AI had executed a pretty darned good quatrain, which I won't quote because you can try it yourself, and anyway, ChatGPT will come up with a new one every time. The kicker? The thundering poet termed the result uninspired and banal, so the other professor went into Dickinson's 1,800-poem corpus, retrieved an obscure quatrain and presented it to the poet, who called the result banal and uninspired. A surprisingly high number of professors I've talked to have strong opinions on AI but have never tried it out. Most people will probably disagree with the points I'm making, and I hope this piece doesn't lose me a lot of writer friends. I've been a productive writer for decades, and the advent of AI worries me — but I don't feel I can ignore it or deny it. I also don't want to confuse process with result: Teaching writing is still important in the way that teaching math is still a worthy endeavor in the age of electronic calculators. We lose certain facilities at our peril. Moreover, plenty of valid reasons exist for preferring artisanal to machine-made, not the least of which is how one feels about the result, along with a perfectly understandable aversion to what one thinks of as soulless. But the articles I keep reading about how nothing can replace the role of human artistry, the imagination and lived experience in the creation of art, may console people until it's too late. Bear in mind also that today's AI is far more powerful than the AI of last year. Neural nets are getting better and better at putting together elements to form a result that's pleasing to humans. Could an AI not too far in the future write a column like this? I don't see why not.
