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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The British philosopher R G Collingwood noticed that the painter doesn’t invent painting, and the musician doesn’t invent the musical culture in which they find themselves. And for Collingwood this served to show that no person is fully autonomous, a God-like fount of creativity; we are always to some degree recyclers and samplers and, at our best, participants in something larger than ourselves.

    But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – ie, merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn.

    This is what happens when people try to apply philosophy to science. They get romantic and egotistical. “Oh, humanity, will your wondrous powers of learning ever be duplicated? Not by brutish machines, I daresay. They only do what they are told and learn what is given to them.”