Thought Libations
There is an old adage, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway (though, he likely borrowed it from his influences1), that goes something like this: “Writing is easy; you sit down at the typewriter, and open a vein.”
What this sarcastic aphorism (sarcaphorism?) is getting at, is that good writing is hard. Really, really hard. Indeed, there is always a price to be paid for thought—in time and blood.
With the rapid (rabid) propagation of AI into all dominions of technological life, there is a growing, vocal contingent of people warning against not only the material consequences of relying on power-intensive “generative” AI2, but also the social, psychological3, and even spiritual harm of ceding our thought and creativity to machines.
The express impetus of many of the creators and adopters of these technologies (apart from the evident market motivations), is to “level the playing field” by shirking the innumerable hours one must dedicate to a craft in order to be good at it4, as if the difficulty of thought is something that can—and must—be surmounted as technology improves. This entails a belief that the value of thought and creativity lay in their products, not their processes. They want to “make” the art, “write” the book, without the making and the writing; they want an omelette without cracking any eggs.
At the crux of this aporia is creativity itself. Champions of “generative” AI would claim that simply by asking Chat-GPT to write you a book, or Sora to make you a Marvel movie, the AI is producing something entirely unique—that they are additive5. What I’d like to argue, borrowing heavily from the likes of David Lynch, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, is that ideas exist outside of what I’ll call, in a general sense, closed systems. Further, I will suggest the process of capturing ideas, or attempting to, is central to what makes us human, and something a contrived machine is incapable of on a fundamental—perhaps ontological—level. My goal is to finally put the tiresome question of whether an AI could—or does—think/create to bed for myself, but also in the hopes it might, in some way, assuage the anxiety of others.
Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks (and no doubt before), man has understood that there is something distinctive about thought. This understanding manifested in generations of Idealism, and, subsequently, much privileging of humanity over the rest of nature. While I don’t believe the ability of thought places humanity high up on some transcendent rung, there still seems to remain an unabridged distance between us and our environment.
Thought is what sustains this negation: it’s what humans do. We are saddled with it. It is common to us. Like Uno, “it came free with your fucking Xbox.”6 We are discerning creatures. A dog could “think”, but it’s “thought” would not be like ours. It would be dog-thought, categorically inaccessible to us, and “thought” only nominally. Whether a machine could “think” is a similarly fruitless question in my opinion.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” - Edsger Dijkstra
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand if a machine can think and create, I first need to determine ny criterias for these things. How do we consider thought and art? What do we value about them?
Society covets the products of thought—ideas. Ideas are the currency of creativity. We take them very seriously: we demarcate our history with people and their ideas; we make judgments about people based on their ideas. Everyone wants to come up with a good idea, because to come up with good ideas is considered monstrously valuable. The Book (an Album, a Film, etc.) has become emblematic of ideas, the form of them. We consider these the distillations of ideas, the Idea made concrete, tangible. For, we like when things have a beginning and an end. We find comfort in being able to trace the outline of something—it reassures us that things can be fully contained. To write a book is to ostensibly demonstrate mastery over one or many ideas. Everyone wants to have written a book.
We covet ideas, yet they are impeccably fickle things. To understand the ideas of others requires great effort, and to come up with an idea, to add to the conversation in a substantial way, can feel nearly impossible (who amongst us hasn’t come away from a great book, film, essay, or piece of music in awe that such a thing could possibly be conceived?). Learning great ideas is edifying, but it can also be dispiriting to one’s own pursuits. That is why a good idea, when it strikes us, can feel like a divine boon. Wrestling one into submission is even more invigorating. It charges us with a religious-like fervor.
The language we use to describe ideas is telling. We tend to assign autonomy to ideas when we speak about them (e.g. an idea “strikes” us, as I used above). I think this is intuitive. Though it sometimes requires great concentration to conceive of an idea, sometimes the opposite is required. I myself find that my best ideas arrive when I am not actively seeking them, usually when I am performing a rote activity that preoccupies my body, allowing my mind to wander widely like a dog let off its leash. “Shower thoughts” is one such example of this phenomenon. All this is to say, while we can do our best to orient ourselves towards ideas, we cannot force them. The fact is that we are at the behest of the idea, not the other way around.
“For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs. Dalloway and bringing up light buckets. I don’t like the feeling.” - Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
We don’t get to choose when a good idea dawns on us. I think this is one of the main reasons people defer to “generative” AI: they want to come up with ideas, but they feel incapable, or too lazy to bother. Because ideas are so valuable, it is easy to feel inept when you can’t come up with one. That’s why it’s such a tragedy to squander a good idea (write them damn things down!). David Lynch summed up this sentiment best:
Deleuze and Guattari are in concord with Lynch here. As they say in their final collaborative book, What is Philosophy?: “Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.”7
D & G elucidate further on the precious and elusive nature of ideas. In their words, ideas are “sudden jolts that beat like arteries”, and our inability to grasp them in their totality is why “we constantly lose our ideas”, thus driving us to “hold on to fixed opinions.”8 Ideas, for them, are like signs of wicked movement—the smell of O-Zone that follows a lightning strike, a rainbow that proceeds a summer rain. Where we might conventionally consider ideas to be unities, they, conversely, consider them epiphenomenal, mere impressions of a collision of ineffable forces in the crucible of chaos. In this view, one can say that ideas slip through our fingertips because they were never ours to own in the first place. We can only wrest some of their power from them.
How is it, then, that we can reliably access the arena of ideas? Are we entirely at the mercy of chance, or is there some way to increase our odds?
David Lynch opens his book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, by stating that “Ideas are like fish.”9 (Try to not read that in his voice, it’s impossible.) This comparison is quite fitting, I think. There's something humbling about fishing; not the type that involves mammoth ships and mammoth nets, but the canoe—clandestine pond—sunny afternoon—case of beer—rod-and-reel kind. The fisher casts their line, knowing that it is ultimately up to the fish whether they catch one. They understand that the water is the fish’s realm, and that a bite is never ensured. There are certain things they can do to increase their chances, such as using bait; but bait only affects the chance of a bite, it doesn’t guarantee it. This is the fun of fishing, the excitement of thought.
Pushing the fishing analogy further, Lynch postulates that if fish are ideas, then bait represents one’s desire.
“Desire for an idea is like bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in—those ideas. The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish—a fragment of an idea—that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way.”10
You cannot dictate when an idea will strike, but you can lure them with your desire. To me, such a desire manifests as—or is demonstrated by—an “openness” to things: an openness to ideas, the vast breadth of them, and the possibility of them in everything. Desire, then, might look something like attentiveness or curiosity (its attractive quality). The deeper your desire, the higher the likelihood you’ll encounter a fish. To accept that inspiration can come from any manner of things is to invite the world.
“To discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love.” — Simone Weil, Waiting for God
However, the battle is not won the moment a fish bites. If you don’t set the hook, it can escape, and if you reel too ferociously, you risk snapping the line. One must tire the fish out, let it thrash until it submits. Thought is a battle of attrition, a wrestling contest with ideas: curiosity gets the bite, but tenacity nets the fish. To capture an idea through thought is to attempt to rend it from its domain, and to fail spectacularly along the way, each failure building up your knowledge and confidence until you have enough of both to tackle the big ones.
It’s hard not to think of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea here. Perhaps the marlin in the story represents the novella itself—the novella qua big fish—that Santiago/Hemingway spends the length of the narrative wrangling, nearly killing him. In the end, Santiago is only able to bring home the fish’s skeleton, a mere remnant of its full magnitude. It is no mistake that this battle kills the fish, and almost kills the fisher: to capture an idea is to render its image intelligible, to strip it from its habitat and petrify it so that it can be observed and analyzed. Something is always lost in translation. Here it is no different. “Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modeled by man, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe.” [Weil, p. 168]
Nothing is ever finished. One can spend their whole life in the museum of the mind, speculating about the time when our ideas were alive, what their environment was like, trying to understand them in their totality. But the living cannot remain in the world of the dead unless they want to join it. One must return and communicate one’s findings, and then, once curiosity is exhausted, they must find something else to satiate it, or it will whither. And then there will be nothing for the fish to bite. The fisher brings the catch home to feed the village (even if it only feeds their imaginations), and before long they must set out again.
Desire is another contiguous region for Lynch and D & G, and in the latter we find also an affinity for fishing allegories.
Speaking again of the opaque, turbulent realm of ideas, D & G argue that being oriented towards ideas is “as if one were casting a net”. But, they warn, “the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open sea when he thought he had reached port.”11 In both Lynch and D & G we find this recurring motif of caution with regard to the pursuit of ideas. There is, in all three, a trepidatious respect for the deep sea. I think it's fair to say that for these thinkers, to be human is to be a contingent agent, subject to forces beyond our cognition. To pursue ideas is to wade into unknown waters where man has little dominion (it is no surprise that the majority of Earth’s waters have yet to be conquered). As D & G remark, “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight.”12
“If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.” - David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
When ideas are mighty, thinking becomes an act of courage, one that can pay dividends if we are willing to overcome our smallness. If desire is the bait, then courage is the condition that allows us to kick off from shore in the first place.
This pilgrimage into the unknown that constitutes thought is, for D & G, the miracle of philosophers, scientists, and artists. Quoting D.H. Lawrence, they write, “People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent.”13
If thought is a confrontation with chaos, then courage is what gives us the capacity to confront it, to escape ourselves, to wander from the shelters of convention in order to wade into the primordial waters and return with fish, big or small, that rattle our stable enclaves of order.
“The painter does not paint on an empty canvas,” the previous passage continues, “and neither does the writer write on a blank page [...] the page or canvas is already covered with preexisting, pre-established clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision.”14
What’s implied by this (in my interpretation), is that thought requires chaos in order to inject new materia into its planes. Indeed, Lawrence says, “Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions [in order to stave off the stagnation caused by] the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions.”15
In this framework, I believe “generative” AI can be equated to said crowd of imitators. Because “generative” AI is only capable of providing a composite of what already is, it exists in a closed system. It is incapable of reckoning with chaos and thus incapable of generating anything new, only recycling what is extant. What AI produces is inert because AI cannot desire; it cannot wield courage, or cut through the umbrella. In fact, it is the umbrella, nothing but the embodiment—the veritable unbodiment—of convention and opinion. On its own, it exists in a form of homeostasis, where there is nothing but what Alexandre Kojève calls the “articulated silence of algorithm.”16 It can only practice its borrowed logic, happy to honour its obligations to its masters. It is adept at sifting, sorting, and shuffling the contents of a bin, but it cannot meaningfully contribute to said contents. That is why it is ironic to call it “generative” AI, because it is not truly generating anything. When it tries, it presents only meaningless collages of incongruous elements.
As I mentioned before, the champions of this technology want to make an omelette without cracking any eggs; i.e., they want spontaneous generation—immaculate conception—from their machines. But, much like humans, without feeding new material into the machine, it is incapable of actual iteration. Without regular feedings from its masters (usually, in the case of AI, by scraping and stealing the work of humans17), “generative” AI would be content to spend eternity wandering the bone museum, with no desire of its own to venture outside for new wonders. Nietzsche was right when he said, “I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.”18
Back to D & G: “Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation.”19 By transmuting chaos, people accomplish an impossible operation: opening a closed system without inviting the whole of oblivion inside. Through thought and art (which are inexorable), humans gift the world more to chew on. We grow into the world, with it, and each does so with their own style: “Monet’s house also rises up like a slit through which chaos becomes the vision of roses.”20
Artists and thinkers render slivers of chaos sensible, intelligible; they return from their journeys bearing spoils, chaotic effigies that birth possibilities of experience. But this operation is delicate. It does work to the system, and work, by definition, must bear a cost. One doesn’t “cross the Acheron” and return unscathed. D & G are brutal, but honest about this fact: “Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. [...] The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead.”21
Like any act of transmutation, rendering chaos comprehensible requires an exchange. To nourish the world is to feed it parts of you, often through struggle and strife. Thought and art are inherently arduous, vulnerable tasks, but also miraculous feats: to accomplish them is a worthy sacrifice, because they afford us the possibility of change, the opportunity to become something new. For D & G, becoming is what a human is, and without change, there can be no becoming—thus, no “human”.
As Joe Bousquet so eloquently put it (and D & G expand on22), “My wound existed before me. I was born to embody it.” Thought is a wound that existed before us, and it is ours to tarry with. We open our veins in service of widening the world. To cede this essential activity is to let our plane-walking blood drain into the warm bath of inertia.
“There is no path... Beyond the scope of light, beyond the reach or dark... What could possibly await us? Yet we seek it insatiably. Such is our fate.” - Aldia, Dark Souls 2
Our unique challenge as a species, I think, is to realize our capacity for courage. The capacity for courage is common to all humans, but the path of thought is individual: our techniques differ, our baits (curiosities) differ, and it affects which types of fish (ideas) we attract, and how we construe them. Everyone applies their own inextricable style to thought: “Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things.” By alleviating the social and economic conditions that depress the spectrum of our possibilities, we can better reveal how thought can be an emancipatory, contagious process of “peopling”, something to be celebrated, not sloughed off like some vestigial organ.
We will all return to silence. This much is inevitable. Our great, common burden is the choice to defy our origins, to express the human quark and step outside ourselves, to have the courage to not just cross the Acheron, but to return, forever changed, dying a thousand deaths, but living a thousand lives.
What’s remarkable about our world is not the silence of algorithm, but the song of people.
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I’m sorry this was so long. If you somehow made it to the end, I sincerely thank you for reading! Hopefully it was at least somewhat cogent.
I plan to never write about this again.
Bibliography
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy?. Translated by H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell. Columbia University Press.
Kojève, A. (1980). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan Bloom and translated by James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lynch, D. (2006). Catching the big fish: Meditation, consciousness, and creativity. TarcherPerigee.
Nietzsche, F. (1995). Thus spake Zarathustra. Translated by T. Common. Modern Library.
Weil, S. (1973). Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Harper & Row Publishers.
References
Deleuze and Guattari (p. 201).
Ibid., p. 201.
Lynch (p. 1).
Ibid., p. 25.
Deleuze and Guattari (p. 203).
Deleuze and Guattari (p. 41).
Deleuze and Guattari (p. 203).
Ibid., p. 204.
Ibid., p. 204.
Kojève (p. 147).
Nietzsche (sec. VII)
Deleuze and Guattari (p. 204).
Ibid., p. 204.
Ibid., p. 202.
Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure immanence: Essays on a life (A. Boyman, Trans.). Zone Books. p. 31-32.