Asking a writer where ideas come from, is like asking a sailor where the wind comes from. If your sails are working, the wind is just there. So in terms of the work I put into writing, getting ideas is zero percent. Ten percent is figuring out how to word it. And ninety percent is figuring out how to order it. Even non-fiction has to be written like a story, where one idea flows into the next.

One more personal insight. From playing piano, I've identified five different possible sources for what your fingers are doing on the keys. If you're reading music, your eyes are telling your fingers what to do. If you're improvising, your ears are doing it. If you're playing exercises, it's your brain. If you're playing a song from memory, it's also your brain, but a different function, plus some muscle memory. And the fifth one, after years of playing, I only noticed this week. Your fingers can direct themselves, based on what feels good for your fingers, with total indifference to the notes.

I suppose this is something that people with high body intelligence take for granted: that the body might volunteer helpful movements on its own, instead of just waiting for instructions from the head. I've only had the slightest taste of that, while doing improvisational stretching on cannabis. But it's something I can continue to work on.

I saw a Mastodon post recently about why AI generated art should neither be considered "AI" nor "art." They said it's obvious that there's no intelligence behind the programs when you simply ask it to generate art for which it has no reference points -- that is, no database of matching images. It can easily generate fantasy images of dragons and elves because those things are popular tropes and plenty of stock images exist for them, conveniently labeled. But once you ask it to generate an image of anything without a past, then its attempts are crude, unconvincing, and even nightmarish.

Of all the reductionist statements I've seen about AI, the one I've found most useful came from a Hacker News thread about ChatGPT: "It's just a big Mad Lib engine." AI takes words and pictures, and jumbles them up and puts them together in intelligible ways. It's not a way of creating stuff, but a way of exploring and remixing stuff that humans have already done. So it's basically the same thing the internet was already doing, except instead of searching the internet for a whole human-made thing that you're interested in, you can have the AI do a Frankenstein of a million human-made things.

I think chatbots and image bots are not on the verge of a world-changing breakthrough, but already into diminishing returns, and more processing power will only make them do the same thing more smoothly. More generally, following Jerry Mander's book In the Absence of the Sacred (1991), I think the best biological metaphor for human technology is not evolution but inbreeding: We are going deeper and deeper into a world of our own creation. This can lead to insight, and I'm hopeful about therapy bots -- but it can also lead to madness.

If any new technology leads to human transcendence, it will be one that enhances our perception of the living non-human world, and thereby turns our attention outward in a way that was not available to our ancestors.

One more comment from Matt:

It's also clear what's going on with AI through the repeated use of one term: "content." That word has slipped into our vocabulary and become normal, but if you step back, you can see it's an oddly capitalist term. It's what AI companies see themselves as providing. Content. As if this were something that needs to be continually supplied.

I've never, as a writer, thought of myself as a "content creator," but I feel as if I'm seeing that label be self-applied more and more. For me, the term "content" becomes ridiculous when I apply it to older art. Is Pride and Prejudice something called content? Is Picasso's Guernica something called content?

Of course, this is a shift that's occurred before. Probably, Indigenous Americans thought it was quite strange that white people just bought knives from a general store -- as if knives were interchangeable and their origins unimportant. The further back you go in anthropology, the more art is embedded in (is synonymous with) objects of daily use. In my wife's office, she has little gnomes on her bookshelf that sit there just for fun. A hundred thousand years ago, if someone had three little figurines in their home, they probably had deep spiritual meaning and long histories.

If, with the help of some time-machine working in reverse, a man of the Middle Ages could be suddenly transported into the skin of a man in the twentieth century, seeing through our eyes and with our 'figuration' the objects we see, I think he would feel like a child who looks for the first time at a photograph through the ingenious magic of a stereoscope. 'Oh!' he would say, 'look how they stand out!'

We must not forget that in his time perspective had not yet been discovered, nor underrate the significance of this. True, it is no more than a device for pictorially representing depth, and separateness, in space. But how comes it that the device had never been discovered before -- or, if discovered, never adopted? There were plenty of skilled artists, and they would certainly have hit upon it soon enough if depth in space had characterized the collective representations they wished to reproduce, as it characterizes ours. They did not need it. Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved.

In such a world the convention of perspective was unnecessary. To such a world other conventions of visual reproduction, such as the nimbus and the halo, were as appropriate as to ours they are not. It was as if the observers were themselves in the picture. Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of -- what shall we say? -- of 'meaning', if you choose. It seems the most adequate word.

Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health. Such effects relate to inflammation, immune responses, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

Stanford scientists boost hypnotizability with transcranial magnetic brain stimulation. This could be big, because hypnosis can be really powerful, except that a lot of people are immune to it. In the future they'll wonder why we were always competing with placebos, instead of just making placebos better.

Exploring the psychedelic mirror. There's a common belief that it's bad to look at yourself in a mirror when you're tripping, but this study looked at a bunch of Reddit posts, and concluded, "the positive affect to the experience was statistically significant compared to negative affect."

Fun thread on r/Psychonaut, Anyone here smoked enough dmt to know why we're here and wtf is going on? Personally, I don't want to see through the veil. I just want to feel at home in the world. Of all the effects people report from psychedelics, the one I most envy is the feeling that whatever happens, we're safe.

And some music. I've been listening to them for 40 years now, and this week I put together a sub-200 minute Hawkwind playlist on Spotify. Also there's a guide to Hawkwind albums at the bottom of my albums page.