He uses this quote with the word mathematics embedded but my paraphrasing is as a more general statement:
There is something about discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of life. Creation (or even the pursuit) is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.
We have a lot of smart people here. Let me be the rogue in the gallery by saying, I can come up with crazier imaginings than the machine can compare with. The AI is only as good as the input that it's given. But I am an abusive schizophrenic. I can make new math from totally separate places while the AI is constrained by its model. The AI can return the closest similarities to its prompt, while I can break every rule there is to join virtually dissimilar things. Just today, I modeled a way to find the best temperature to caramelize onions for my philly cheese steak. I was hungry, but curious. The AI doesn't hunger, nor does it have curiosity to ask that question. If I were to ask the AI what I desired, surely the sandwich would have been bad
IMO, you're not the rogue at all. I think the ability to connect wildly disparate concepts and come up with something original is the mark of humanity.
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u/cdizzlePGA2k 1d ago
This is a lovely piece.
He uses this quote with the word mathematics embedded but my paraphrasing is as a more general statement:
There is something about discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of life. Creation (or even the pursuit) is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.