> If you think that an AI can generate beauty, then you don't believe in beauty.
> Sensing the remnants of the soul of the person who wrote the code.
And that is how a software developer gets respect. The ability to articulate the human spirit through pictural "thought experiments". Classical art ceases to be beauty as it does not map to spirit in the present, thus romanticism of antiquity IS porn.
>You believe beauty is a trick of the light, a relativist human projection. You believe beauty is an arbitrary hallucination, that can be replicated in a lab and forcefully induced.
It was very shocking to me when I found out so many of my friends believe this. Coincidentally usually the ones who don't lift too.
> The problem as always here is that all representative language is circles within circles, all names are tautology. Words can only point to the world, not contain it. Expressing it fully is impossible, but that is a weakness of language, not of beauty and truth. We can only point to it, and then leave it to the reader to choose whether to look at our fingertip, or, to where it points.
For me, it has helped to conceive of this in terms of marriage. The sign is the feminine, the thing signified is the masculine. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — I think an alternate way of expressing this is to say that marriage is a profound mystery and cannot be articulated in language, because it itself underpins language. To articulate the union between a sign and a thing it signifies is to introduce other signs-things signified into the environment — that is, to divorce them.
In the case of AI-generated imagery, there is no masculine underlying reality anchoring the feminine appearance and image. (All sin could be conceived of as some kind of divorce in this way.) Porn is like that to an extent — the woman on the viewer’s phone isn’t real, doesn’t love the viewer, and won’t have the viewer’s kids. The one redeeming fact about “normal” porn is that the woman on the phone is at least the image of a real woman. But the image posted here isn’t even that. It’s not even a woman — that’s not a word that can be used to describe that. Because that’s not what it is; that’s only what it looks like, to the viewer. The viewer projects womanhood onto that thing. The viewer becomes God. And yet not God, but a copy of a God who is now dead. A simulacrum.
If signs aren’t anchored in some kind of objective reality, they very quickly become simulacra of themselves. They become copies without originals. They lose a couple fingers or their eyes look weird — they touched up the eyes but forgot about the hands. Or…they take photos with filters. They apply crazy amounts of makeup. They selectively display parts of their lives on social media. Etc. Because none of it is directed at anything real anymore — only the appearance of reality. Only the appearance of beauty.
ZHP wrote that “It is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear.” The marriage does happen eventually, when enough of the accidents are set in stone. It’s just a really horrifically bad marriage.
Nice, now apply this to the simulacra of masculinity, from Tate-bros "buy my course" to "just clean up your room" platitudes (pls do the deed tho ya nasties), every type of aphorism becomes a pastiche disconnected in a principally dynamic world (or ELI5: masculinity is now Disneyland, and it is a boring money-sink!). And yes with AI you can drop-ship or email-market faster. Good grief!
> If you think that an AI can generate beauty, then you don't believe in beauty.
> Sensing the remnants of the soul of the person who wrote the code.
And that is how a software developer gets respect. The ability to articulate the human spirit through pictural "thought experiments". Classical art ceases to be beauty as it does not map to spirit in the present, thus romanticism of antiquity IS porn.
>You believe beauty is a trick of the light, a relativist human projection. You believe beauty is an arbitrary hallucination, that can be replicated in a lab and forcefully induced.
It was very shocking to me when I found out so many of my friends believe this. Coincidentally usually the ones who don't lift too.
> The problem as always here is that all representative language is circles within circles, all names are tautology. Words can only point to the world, not contain it. Expressing it fully is impossible, but that is a weakness of language, not of beauty and truth. We can only point to it, and then leave it to the reader to choose whether to look at our fingertip, or, to where it points.
For me, it has helped to conceive of this in terms of marriage. The sign is the feminine, the thing signified is the masculine. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — I think an alternate way of expressing this is to say that marriage is a profound mystery and cannot be articulated in language, because it itself underpins language. To articulate the union between a sign and a thing it signifies is to introduce other signs-things signified into the environment — that is, to divorce them.
In the case of AI-generated imagery, there is no masculine underlying reality anchoring the feminine appearance and image. (All sin could be conceived of as some kind of divorce in this way.) Porn is like that to an extent — the woman on the viewer’s phone isn’t real, doesn’t love the viewer, and won’t have the viewer’s kids. The one redeeming fact about “normal” porn is that the woman on the phone is at least the image of a real woman. But the image posted here isn’t even that. It’s not even a woman — that’s not a word that can be used to describe that. Because that’s not what it is; that’s only what it looks like, to the viewer. The viewer projects womanhood onto that thing. The viewer becomes God. And yet not God, but a copy of a God who is now dead. A simulacrum.
If signs aren’t anchored in some kind of objective reality, they very quickly become simulacra of themselves. They become copies without originals. They lose a couple fingers or their eyes look weird — they touched up the eyes but forgot about the hands. Or…they take photos with filters. They apply crazy amounts of makeup. They selectively display parts of their lives on social media. Etc. Because none of it is directed at anything real anymore — only the appearance of reality. Only the appearance of beauty.
ZHP wrote that “It is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear.” The marriage does happen eventually, when enough of the accidents are set in stone. It’s just a really horrifically bad marriage.
Preach
Nice, now apply this to the simulacra of masculinity, from Tate-bros "buy my course" to "just clean up your room" platitudes (pls do the deed tho ya nasties), every type of aphorism becomes a pastiche disconnected in a principally dynamic world (or ELI5: masculinity is now Disneyland, and it is a boring money-sink!). And yes with AI you can drop-ship or email-market faster. Good grief!