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https://www.bachelorsportal.com/studies/159336/cognitive-science-and-artificial-intelligence.html

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544606/can-this-man-make-ai-more-human/

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=purduepress_ebooks

http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2016/11/ezra-pound-and-douglas-rushkoff-on-late.html

This is an important question.

I doubt that cognitive science and AI system engineering will intersect (share components with) creative thought processes. The former are computational and necessarily mechanical in nature. By contrast, the creative process is discursive and not the result of computation.

On top of that, there is typically an element of beauty and art in the creative process that is typically uplifting to the human spirit. The opposite is true of cognitive science and AI system engineering, which depends on the predictatibility (non-aesthetic character) of its results which are a function of the problems confronted by those systems.

OK -- maybe I should try rewording my question...

Here are the FIRST 10 or so lines of Pound's Canto LXXV11 (the canto has 250+ lines in all plus a spattering of Chinese characters).

And this day Abner lifted a shovel…..

instead of watchin’ it to see if it would take action

Von Tirpitz said to his daughter … as we have elsewhere

recorded / he said: beware of their charm

But on the other hand Maukch thought he

would do me a favour by getting me onto the

commission to inspect the mass graves at Katin,

le beau monde gouverne

if not toujours at any rate it is a level of

some sort whereto things tend to return

Chung

...

What I want is a CONVINCING DESIGN for a COMPUTER PROGRAM to be capable of reading these lines and explaining the line of thought that Pound is following in them. It seems plausible that both current cognitive science understanding of the human thought process and AI system design practice are relevant.

NB This is a very specific requirement -- over-ambiguous generalizations probably don't help that much.

Any ideas?

Jim

James Doran

I am thrilled to come across an admirer of Ezra Pound at RG, but this is not a direct reply to your question, James. This could be a tangent, however, to some pertinent line of thought. The title of my latest creative work, a novelette, would read "Describing the Sunfish' if translated into English. The origin of the title is where Pound describes how biologist Louis Agassiz taught a student in 'ABC of Learning'. Pound said, "No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the sunfish" . And it reminds me of the imperative of termination in an algorithm. Fortunately, info on Pound's contention is avalable at Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish

Hope this will be of interest to you in lateral thinking.

All the best.

- Rad

I feel in the works of modernists like Pound and Joyce, language (syntax, for instance) itself functions like an AI system.

OK -- How about this? Noting Pound's founding association with"Imagism", and making my question even more specific (and forgetting about AI and Cog Sci for the time being!) can anyone (Rad?) explain to me what if anything in the lines of Pound I quoted from Canto 77, connects

But on the other hand Maukch thought he

would do me a favour by getting me onto the

commission to inspect the mass graves at Katin,

with the immediately following lines

le beau monde gouverne

if not toujours at any rate it is a level of

some sort whereto things tend to return

I'm baffled...

>>Rad

" I feel in the works of modernists like Pound and Joyce, language (syntax, for instance) itself functions like an AI system. "

Any chance you can elaborate on this? Got to be interesting!

Jim

NB I'm much more a fan of JJ's Ulysses than of EP's Cantos. That's Dublin ancestry for you..

“But answer came there none—“

From:

"The Walrus and the Carpenter"

By Lewis Carroll, 1832 – 1898 (Charles Dodgson)

(one of the world’s more thought provoking poems -- an influence on Ezra Pound)

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From a BBC News Item today (Oct 25th 2018):

An artwork created by an artificially intelligent program has been sold at auction for $432,000 (£337,000).

Note the use of the phrase "created by".

Any comment James?

JD

James F Peters

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@ James Doran: An artwork created by an artificially intelligent program has been sold at auction for $432,000 (£337,000).

This puzzling event brings us back to the question What is intelligence? There is the OED definition to help us edge towards an understanding art constructed (rather than created) by a computer program:

intelligence

· n.

1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

2 a person with this ability.

3 the gathering of information of military or political value. Ø information gathered in this way.

4 archaic news.

– DERIVATIVES intelligential adj. (archaic).

– ORIGIN ME: via OFr. from L. intelligentia, from intelligere ‘understand’, var. of intellegere ‘understand’, from inter ‘between’ + legere ‘choose’.

It is the case that a painting constructed by a computer program represents knowledge acquired by sensors such as optical and infrared sensors, which are analog devices. And that same painting represents the digitizing analog signals and the use of computer graphics in drawing curves lines around surface regions.

The computer program would be given access to templates for faces. Then random shading of contours required for a human head would partly explain what the so-called intelligent program would do to put together a face.

A snapshot of the painting itself is shown in the attached image from

https://www.msn.com/zh-hk/news/offbeat/a-painting-made-by-artificial-intelligence-has-been-sold-at-auction-for-dollar432500/ar-BBOVjlM

The problem with this computer-generated painting is its scant detail for the face itself. It well known in shape theory that a shape is defined by its holes. In this case, the dark regions in the painting represent holes that have blurred contours,

which moves this painting to the kindergarten level of artwork.

Returning to my original question, I have recently come across the following lines by Ezra Pound that illuminate how he went about presenting his ideas and feelings in his Cantos, at least initially, and hence makes it easier to understand his work from the perspective of AI and/or Cognitive Science.

In a first 1917 version of Canto 1 (later discarded and replaced) Pound addresses the poet Robert Browning, who had previously written a long poem called Sordello referring to the life of an historical person, Sordello.

Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!

But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,

Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the whole thing’s an art form,

Your Sordello, and that the modern world

Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;

Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery

As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?

and later in this first version of Canto 1

You had your business:

To set out so much thought, so much emotion;

To paint, more real than any dead Sordello,

The half or third of your intensest life

And call that third Sordello;

So we (and an AI system) should NOT look for a narrative line of any kind, nor much in the way of rationality -- rather the complex associations of ideas...

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You might be interested in this

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612913/a-philosopher-argues-that-an-ai-can-never-be-an-artist/