kant's critique of pure reason

> “Indeed, the very act of living is by default a cognitive state, Lyon says. Every cell needs to be constantly evaluating its surroundings, making decisions about what to let in and what to keep out and planning its next steps. Cognition didn't arrive later in evolution. It's what made life possible.“

Yes. Cognition isn’t just about solving differential equations and the like. It also refers to the most basic functions/processes such as perception and evaluation.

Not Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays are successful commercial theater. They were performed in his day, profitably. They have been widely performed for centuries since, in various adaptations, usually profitably. And usually, minus the poetry.

If you read the Canterbury Tales, read one half way through and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. Plot twists hadn't been invented yet. Those now-cliche plots were new back then.

> I’m not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to get through due to how different Milton’s english is from my own.

I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader, who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any kind of esthetic appreciation.

As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but what I discovered was that what really works is an alliterative verse translation! (I was then informed that it is believed that Milton may have been drawing on an Old English poem about the Fall, "Genesis A", and so this may not be an accident.)

Two example renditions of the prologue:

     1. Man's first folly,    the fateful fruit's taste,
     From forbidden tree's    tempting twig it came,
     Death and doom dealt,    despair in our world,
     Eden erased,    exalted man to mend,
     Restoring realms    of radiant bliss, sing,
     Sacred muse,    who soared on secret summits,
     Oreb, Sinai,    sharing whispered wisdom,
     With shepherds,    teaching truths to chosen kin,
     Heavens and earth    hewn from harrowing haze,
     Sion's slopes,    Siloa's silver stream,
     Flowing fast    by God's grand guiding hand,
     Grant thy aid    to my aspiring anthem,
     Aiming high    above Aonian heights,
     Pursuing paths    untried in prose or rhyme.
     
     2. Man's fatal first taste, the forbidden fruit
     Whose bitter bloom brought bale and sorrow bleak
     With paradise perished, till One more mighty restores   what was lost
     Reclaims the radiant seats—O sacred Muse,
     Who on Sinai's summit secret
     And Horeb's height inspired
     Chosen seers to teach the tribes since time first woke,
     How heavens and earth arose from Chaos hoar,
     Or if thou rather tread Sion's summit steep,
     And Siloa's silvern stream that rushed thereby
     Where dwelt the oracle and rock of God,
     That poured forth fates—now lend thy light, that I
     May soar on song's ambitious wings
     Above Parnassus' peaks, pursuing lofty themes...
     Great matters meet for grandest strains of lore.
     Thee chiefly, thee, heart's truth, soul's purest shine,
     O Spirit blest, who scorneth shrine and show
     Inspire my strain; for thou, who knowest all,
     Hast known since earth's first sunrise. Mighty wings
     Did brood with wings outspread upon the formless void
     Kindling Chaos into teeming, shaping flame;
     To attain the epic theme, this lofty matter,
     In hymns that hallow Heaven's eternal ways.

The real question is whether many humans will pass it.

> This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossible, yes. Likely enough to warrant belief in a computer can pass the Turing Test? In my opinion, no.

I never understand this creativity argument against AI. How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? I would say that computers are perfectly capable of that.

That's like saying people will eventually find the printing press cheap because our paperback novels weren't laboriously drawn by monks. People prefer the clarity and uniformity of mechanized typesetting over the artisticness of blackletter scribbled in cursive with a bird feather. CGI in movies is a similar story. People want to hear stories told by computers rather than puppets. People don't play dungeons and dragons anymore because it's now cheap to have AI generate realistic looking 3d fantasy worlds on the fly thanks to video games. Technology wins, every single time, because it gives us what we want and it solves the greatest problem people have always had, which is other people. Anyone who says differently is kidding themselves.