I was wandering around in my mind the other day, kicking over the occasional mental rock in search of plot devices for this book I'm planning to write. Essentially trying to imagine the unimaginable: a post biological intelligence, in this case.
As a motive for their investigation of our humble and bucolic little lump of dirt, I had given some thought to creativity as being something they'd come to value in their machine age- so much so that perhaps they'd send probes to their galactic neighbors in search of it. One could make the argument that its a faculty which must be lost when all your synapses become circuit boards, and all your thoughts algorithms. I suppose some manner of random number (binary, in our digital case) generator could be implemented to bring forth novelty (much as our DNA seems to do), but the result would be almost complete conceptual gibberish, rather than, say, Dali's "Swans Reflecting Elephants".
However, nothing in this painting is a truly created concept, just re-imagined. Everything we do and see is processed by our meat computer in exactly the same way as would be by a silicon/gold matrix of circuits and diodes- which shouldn't be surprising, as have we not built computers as emulations of our own, lipid-based thinking machines? Short and long term memory, interconnected circuits, binary outputs down at the level of the receptors at the end of the synapse, programming based on commonly understood notions that are coded as fact.
So don't beat yourself up too badly when you can't seem to conjure from the ether completely novel concepts, unheard of and unseen by the eyes of man or machine. I say it is simply not possible, given our tools and programming. What we can do is what has ever been done: stretch the boundaries of the framework we have to the point that maybe you can burst the seam a little at one side and spill into the unknown.
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