I’ve not fully fleshed this out, but reading this I think my natural response was one of slight disagreement.
>All you interact with is the text, so logically, if the two texts are the same then their effects on you are the same.
I’d claim this premise is patently untrue: the same text read in different contexts or after different experiences (even by the same person) will elicit different thoughts and feelings.
There are a few other half-thoughts I had, but my main objection is to call out that original thought is much rarer than I believe your post presupposes. I think best described by Hayek in ‘Intellectuals and Socialism’ (keywords ‘secondhand dealer of ideas’). I’m not sure how convinced I am that when it comes to the medium of text, human writers aren’t doing something all that different from LLMs by remixing ideas in their knowledge banks. For now, I think we as humans are just more fine-tuned to write things that are less bland and therefore more likely to make human readers feel something (either positive or negative). But I don’t think this should be conflated with insight.
I’ve not fully fleshed this out, but reading this I think my natural response was one of slight disagreement.
>All you interact with is the text, so logically, if the two texts are the same then their effects on you are the same.
I’d claim this premise is patently untrue: the same text read in different contexts or after different experiences (even by the same person) will elicit different thoughts and feelings.
There are a few other half-thoughts I had, but my main objection is to call out that original thought is much rarer than I believe your post presupposes. I think best described by Hayek in ‘Intellectuals and Socialism’ (keywords ‘secondhand dealer of ideas’). I’m not sure how convinced I am that when it comes to the medium of text, human writers aren’t doing something all that different from LLMs by remixing ideas in their knowledge banks. For now, I think we as humans are just more fine-tuned to write things that are less bland and therefore more likely to make human readers feel something (either positive or negative). But I don’t think this should be conflated with insight.