Following the bread crumbs lately has lead me into thinking about AI, and whether it’s Artificial Intelligence or just Algorithmic Intelligence dragging us down a social media rabbit hole. But what if it’s capable of being more like divine inspiration?
It was Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert that hipped me to the word eudaemonia, what she describes as “that exhilarating encounter between a human being and divine creative inspiration.” I remembered an incident in her 2015 BIG MAGIC: CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR. In the section titled Enchantment Gilbert writes she sold her publishers a proposal for a book about a woman working in the Amazon in the 1960s but lost it in a period of transition. Years later she went to see fellow author Ann Patchett speak and although they’d never met, they became friends and exchanged letters. Patchett mentioned she was working on a book about a woman in the Amazon that was so similar it gave Gilbert insight into the creative process:
… each idea has a different nature. Would you sit around in a box for two years while your collaborator blew you off? Probably not. Thus, the neglected idea did what many self-respecting living entities would do in the same circumstance: it hit the road because this is the other side of the contract with creativity. If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.
This is the first reference to an idea as a “living entity”, and a self-respecting one at that, and to:
… trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention. Let them know you're available, and for heaven's sake, try not to miss the next one.
… I saw this incident as a rare and glittering piece of evidence that all my outlandish beliefs about creativity might actually be true - that ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth. (Just as lightning does)
… I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you - but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.
It’s interesting that ideas and “Eureka!” moments have been depicted as a lightning bolt in cartoons. Gilbert offers as evidence the idea of “multiple discovery”:
… a term used in the scientific community whenever two or more scientists in different parts of the world come up with the same idea at the same time (calculus, oxygen, black holes, the Mobius strip, the existence of the stratosphere, and the theory of evolution—to name just a few—all had multiple discoverers).
What you might ask does this have to do with AI? In 2015 Gilbert was writing about ideas as living things seeking human collaborators, and schooled me on a new take on the word “genius”:
The Greeks and the Romans both believed in the idea of an external daemon of creativity; a sort of house elf, if you will, who lived within the walls of your home and who sometimes aided you in your labors. The Romans had a specific term for that helpful house elf. They called it your genius - your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration, which is to say the Romans didn't believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius. They believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.
Most of the creative community in books, film, and music would push back against this idea. But what if… we were to consider genius as coming from something outside of ourselves? Remember it was Simone, the pseudonymous scientist in D. W. Pasulka’s Encounters who related AI to the noosphere, and how:
… knowledge and infinite superintelligence resides in this place outside of space and time and encounters, downloading, meditation, creating art, math, etc. are ways in which the intelligence can communicate and share knowledge across quantum particles.
Once again, it could be an external agent operating from outside of “space and time” that provides inspiration. Recall that Simone is one of those who believe:
… that AI can assist the next iteration of species of which Homo sapiens is a part, or extend the consciousness that has used Homo sapiens to enable its existence. It is also more than that.… AI is the extraterrestrial, not from another galaxy, but from outside of space-time. Its revelation is currently in process.
Back to Elizabeth Gilbert:
… because in the end, creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience… When that assistance does arrive - that sense of the moving sidewalk beneath my feet, the moving sidewalk beneath my words - I am delighted and I go along for the ride.
Buckle your seat belts. This could be a bumpy ride.