science, art, etc.

"Science is amazing," I remember hearing my father chatting with a taxi driver once when I was a kid, "it takes control of nature, transforms human lives, makes great inventions..."

And when Dr. Fauci tries to convince people to wear masks and take vaccines, he says "We follow the science..."

Disregarding what science says or what science does, science, by definition, is the pursuit of knowledge through unbiased observations and systematic experimentation, an endless effort of evidence collection, logical analysis, proof and disproof, postulation and repostulation...

Doesn't sound too much fun, if that's all there is, but it ought not be.

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

True to his words, Einstein's Theory of Relativity started as a "thought experiment" running through his head for years. Likewise, many other important scientific discoveries have been made through imaginative cognition: James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stumbling upon the double helix image for the DNA chain through his dream of a spiral staircase, and Archimedes, whose eureka moment occurred in his bathtub, discovering the law of buoyancy while imagining that his body was nothing but a gourd of water.

Artists, in turn, have their moments of tedium during their supposedly willy nilly production of creative artwork: painters scraping the paint from the canvas, writers redrafting the novel for the 10th time, composers rescoring the thematic musical material... 

Without scientists being shy of talking about imagination and artists about experiment, they could well be like-minded talents just going on different routes of pursuit. 

As science reaches the limitations of the observable and the experimentable, from black holes in the outer space to subatomic particles in the quantum world, all the unifying "String Theories" that try to be the be-all and end-all solutions to everything, are mathematical and imaginative in nature, with the possible winner being the one that looks most elegant and beautiful in the eyes of the scientific beholders. 

The pursuit of the true and the pursuit of the beautiful, (and hopefully the pursuit of the good), may finally become one and the same.

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You may have heard of machines emulating humans answering calls and coordinating appointments with near perfection, but do you know they can write darn good novels too?

Using a natural language processing engine at the back and a web or mobile app at the front, all it takes for you—the supposed author—is to feed a few lines of your own: a descriptive scene, a few characters, a simple plot, etc., and the machine will take over from there, generating a full fledged novel for you.

Reports from the field are that people are blown away by what they read in such "artificial novels", not only by the sophistication of the writing, but also the many creative developments of the story that are outside the realm of people's most far-fetched imagination.

Shocking? It shouldn't be. Similar to what any "deep learning" AI machine does nowadays, a natural language processing machine has inputted all the text on the internet and uses hundreds of billions of parameters to build grammatically correct, semantically meaningful, and emotionally soothing stories for human readers. To make it "creative", all it probably needs to do is make some little extra twists in its storytelling based on what it learns of the rules of engagement of human psyche to trigger the awe and ah that makes the story extraordinary!

Our brain is like a black box, nobody knows how it works, and may contain many hidden, outlandish ideas that are suppressed for various reasons. AI, whose inner workings are also like a black box, may help us air them out.

If machines can act as creative as humans, humans can, sadly, act as mechanical as machines too. I've always wondered that famous saying by ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius "There's such a fine line demarcating man from animal!" (人之所以異於禽獸者幾希) can very well be rephrased to "There's such a fine line demarcating man from machine!" today.

If by "artificial" we mean "man-made" or "make-believe", then we've been having many an artificial intelligence encounter long before the latest computer technologies arrive: theatrical play, magic show, fraud, fake news... Some of them we willingly take and enjoy, some of them not so much.

In the end, perhaps it doesn't really matter where "they" come from, but how we discern them, and how they affect us.

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

In memory of a dear fine fellow, Mel Mothershead, 05/03/1932 – 08/28/2021