The Thinking, Walking Biped, part ten. Walking and Creativity

Many of the most creative minds have had their greatest inspiration by walking out in nature. There did not have to be an actual correspondence of what the mind saw and the act of creativity; it was simply the inspiration of the mind prompted by the overall beauty of nature. There have probably been more poets who have done this than who have not. It was also a common practice among composers. For example, Antonín Dvořák would walk every morning at dawn while jotting down musical ideas. He did this every morning along the Turkey River when he visited Iowa in 1893, and then play the organ at the Catholic church. Gustav Mahler was famous for having a composer’s hut in the Alps away from his summer house during the summer when the opera, which he conducted, was not in session. He did not just hide in this hut, but walked on the surrounding forest trails.

Sometimes there was actual nature imagery in the music, aside, that is, from the thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (number 6) or in the second part of the Rossini’s William Tell overture. I am thinking again of Mahler. One time, in his childhood, Mahler had been left in the woods alone by a father who forgot about him. His father ran back to rescue him, only to find little Gustav sitting in rapt wonder at the natural world. The memory of this experience did not leave him. According to one documentary, this memory appears at the very beginning of Mahler’s first symphony, where the offstage trumpets represented distant bird calls and the cuckoo call, starting in measure 25 in the oboe, actually was a cuckoo that he heard.

Many other creative people have walked in nature to get at least a general inspiration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo, and even Pierre Curie.

Here is an example of what I am not talking about. The great Roman orator Cicero used the natural world to help him remember his speeches, which he presented without notes. Or so I have read once in a speaker’s handbook long ago. He could remember each portion of his speech, but he sometimes had difficulty remembering which portion would come next. But he was very familiar with his garden walking path. So what he would do was to recite each portion of his speech as he went along the path. Then, while speaking, he would imagine himself walking on the path. Each thing he saw reminded him of which topic was next. This is not an example of walking and creativity, since the topics and the objects did not need to have any real correspondence; it was just Cicero’s memory prop.

An experiment at Stanford in 2014 confirmed that walking enhances creative thinking. This is yet another example of how science confirms what we have known, or think we have known, all along.

The End of Creativity

Aldous Huxley wrote a short novel in which he saw a pickup truck speeding out of a Hollywood movie studio, overloaded with unsolicited screenplay manuscripts. The truck veered, and one of the manuscripts fell off. This didn’t really happen, of course. But, almost a hundred years ago, one of history’s great writers complained about how people in power (in this case, movie producers, but this would also include editors and literary agents) would barely if ever look at what they derisively called their “slush pile” of submissions.

Today, little has changed. The term “slush pile” is still standard. I have written a lot, and published very little, fiction. One of my stories ended up in a magazine that was printed and spiral bound at a copy shop. You cannot submit fiction directly to an editor; and very few literary agents, I suspect, even look at the submissions they receive. Out of hundreds of agents to whom I have submitted samples, only about three have responded personally. The others, I suspect, just have unpaid assistants write rejections or, if the submission is online, the software automatically sends out a rejection. I suspect that few of my submissions have even been looked at.

I could say all kinds of bad things about fiction agents. But the purpose of this essay is to defend just one aspect of their refusal to look at submissions. And that is, AI software can write fiction and submit it. How is an agent to know whether a real person wrote the novel? A robot can click on the “I am not a robot” button, I assume.

And they can write them really, really fast. Amazon self-publishing recently had to set a limit on the number of submissions a single source, such as an email, can make: three per hour. One can easily see that an AI program could write ten times that many novels, and keep doing it all night without coffee and without amphetamines. A single computer could write more novels than the whole world’s collection of novels before, say, 1990.

By definition, these novels are formulaic. They follow formulas. That’s what computers do. The resulting novels are very unlikely to have any deep thoughts, and the plot lines will almost certainly be lame. No agent or editor would call them good. By slightly altering the parameters, the AI programmer can produce a great number of very different novels, all bad.

But that doesn’t matter. Most readers cannot tell the difference between good fiction and bad. Maybe a hundred years ago a reader could distinguish them. And today, some readers still can. This probably includes you, intelligent reader. But people who can tell good novels from bad are not as big of a market as those who just want something to distract them. A publisher can pay almost nothing for an AI generated manuscript, and sell a lot of copies. Each such title would be immensely profitable. If good writers complained that a certain major publisher sold books that a computer may have written, a lot of readers would just tell us to stop griping and get with the modern world.

An important reason for this is that, during the twentieth century, the rules of good literature were jettisoned. Plots no longer had to make any sense, especially if they included dream sequences. Fantasy literature is particularly vulnerable to having plots that make no sense; the writer could just change the laws of nature when he or she wanted to. There needs to be no character development or beautiful description. Certainly no meaning-of-life stuff. Poetry is even worse, which is why most poets only read poems by other poets whom they know. Real human writers turned fiction into something that a computer would eventually be able to write. That time has come.

I have spent many hours sending things to fiction agents. Each one has a slightly different set of rules, and they will not read any submission that does not follow these rules. Should you include a summary, or not? A sample of the writing, or not, and if so how much? I’m not sure that it matters, because the submission will almost certainly not be read. Some agents include a list of rules, the last of which is always, I will look at the submission if it looks like something I would like. I doubt that, in the contentment of retirement, I will ever do this again. And the main reason is that neither agents nor publishers could possibly find a good, human novel in the mass of fake AI manuscripts

I have been moderately successful at publishing nonfiction in those subjects about which I am an expert, even if not the top expert in the world: botany, evolution, ecology, scientific thinking. Check out my books at stanleyrice.com. A computer could write nonfiction, but it would quickly get recognized as fake, because of the unlimited number of errors it would contain. Publishers might even have legal liability if readers followed stupid advice from a random manuscript. For nonfiction, agents and editors want not just a good book but evidence of expertise. This doesn’t prevent fake nonfiction from being published. There are whole “scientific” journals that will publish anything even if it makes no sense at all and since the “journals” are online it costs almost nothing to publish them. Professors have lost their jobs from claiming fake papers as their publications. But it is harder to write fake nonfiction than fake fiction.

Writers in the movie industry have gone on strike over AI taking over their jobs. Most moviegoers would not know the difference between a human writer and a computer. But the stakes are higher, since in a movie you have immense production costs aside from the writing. If moviegoers recognized a movie as “a real stinker,” the producer would quickly be out of business. Maybe.

So my plan is to stop submitting any fiction or poetry. Each submission would go into a pile of mostly computer-generated submissions, potentially numbering in the billions of billions. A needle in a haystack, or a snowflake in hell, would stand a better chance. I will have them printed up for future generations of my family. Someday, in an underground vault, they might get found. And my poems, too. Sorry, Randy, I know you are a good poet but who else can know it? I notice that neither one of us lives off of our fiction or poetry income.

A similar thing is happening in music. A good composer can still outdo a computer. Even when a Huawei program finished Schubert’s unfinished symphony, it required a little human help from composer Lucas Cantor. I listened to it. It simply did not sound like Schubert. But it was competently written and scored. Computers can provide all kinds of sounds that no musical instrument can produce, but composers still need to tell the computers what to do.

But maybe not for long. During much of the twentieth century, composers on university faculties prided themselves on writing music that was distinctly unpleasant to listen to. Their philosophy seemed to be that you are not supposed to actually enjoy music; it is supposed to be a psychological experience, and if you do not connect with the composer’s music, there is something wrong with you. This was the dominant philosophy during the years I took music courses at the university. I heard from two music graduate students about this. I was considering sitting in on a composer’s forum. A graduate student asked me, Do you use notes? I said of course I used notes. Then don’t bother with the forum, she said. Another graduate student told me that the “new music” of the twentieth century created only one emotion in her: terror.

Within a couple of decades, this approach to music was starting to die away. Perhaps they did not know it, but these out-of-touch-with-musical-pleasure composers were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. If a computer could write music that is just as good as the self-proclaimed leaders of musical innovation, then someday they will.

A lot of careers are being replaced by AI. Even some physicians I have consulted stopped to look up my symptoms on WebMD. I got lots of different diagnoses. Some of them would have been funny had they not been intended as serious.

Robots have been making cars for decades.

And now they are writing novels. These days, poor Aldous Huxley would have been left mouldering in the dust.

Religion and Good Ideas

Once again I am writing about a book years after it was published. Steven Johnson is one of those thinkers who can apply concepts across many different fields of thought. Perhaps the best example of this is his book Where Good Ideas Come From.

He contrasts the creativity of liquids as opposed to gases and solids. Stay with me on the development of this idea. Consider the origin of life, which occurred in water on Earth and probably must occur in liquids anywhere in the universe. In gases, molecules bounce off of one another chaotically, causing each new association to instantly fall apart; and in solids, the molecules do not move relative to one another and form new associations. Only in liquids can new associations form and last long enough to prosper. Johnson says that the same thing is true of ideas. New ideas cannot readily form in societies with rigid structures of thought. Nor can they persist, even if they form, under chaotic conditions. The chaotic conditions of thought that came immediately to my mind when I read Johnson’s ideas were the kinds of random “creativity” found in the early to middle twentieth century: the random music of composers such as John Cage and the more general randomness of Dadaism. Not much has come from these ideas. I’ve talked with people whose minds bounce from one idea to another: just when they have an insight that I think might yield fruit, they have moved on so that I cannot even talk with them about their own good ideas. Life, and good ideas, cannot form in either rocks or nebulae. (Johnson had many memorable phrases, but I think I made that one up myself.)

You can, of course, guess where I am going with this. Solid, rocklike thought cannot create new insights or solve problems. Perhaps the premier example of this is religion. When you force your thinking to be built upon a solid rock, which most religions insist you must do, you cannot solve problems. This is how religion kills creativity. Religious leaders, furthermore, offer chaos as the only alternative to their rock-hard religions. If you disbelieve what they say, then you might as well just live in an “Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die” mentality—this is what Paul said, and what religious leaders since him have said. Either you should believe everything the preacher says, or you might as well go on a crazy binge of rape and pillage, they imply. But gas is not the only alternative to rock. There is the liquid alternative, which has just the right amount of stability. Formal religion says that its truths are unvarying; stereotyped liberalism says that there is no truth. (I actually do not know any people who are of this kind of liberal.) A liquid way of thinking allows new ideas to form, and the ones that are closer to truth can persist, while the ones that do not work can be washed away.

Sometimes circumstances force rocklike religion to dissolve a little. The Black Death shook up the power of the Catholic Church, opening the minds of many Europeans to various reformation movements, as well as to the Renaissance and the beginning of science. The official doctrines of the Catholic Church are not, in fact, the same as they were in 1350 or 1600, even though it took centuries for them to finally admit Galileo was right. Today, a similar dissolution may be going on with regard to gay rights (a subject to which I have not given enough thought to have any intelligent opinions). There is not necessarily a point in time when everyone admits the error of their previous rocklike thinking; but after a while they come to accept new realities. Racism has declined slowly among conservatives. Could even George Wallace say that he stopped being a racist on such-and-such a particular date? People may never actually admit the error of previously unassailable beliefs; they may simply ignore them after a while.

Fundamentalism is not just the rocklike perpetuation of old ideas. Fundamentalists invent new ideas, then ossify them. For example, prior to Oral Roberts, there was no doctrine about the special quasi-divine status of Oral Roberts. But he turned this idea into rock, and even in death he still has followers who accept this status. A more liquid way of thinking not only allows new ideas to form but can allow followers of charismatic religious leaders to recognize the artificiality of the rock to which they had once anchored.

I also posted this essay on my other blog, Honest Ab.