But is it Art?

artistIs computer art the same as human art? This piece argues that there is no real distinction; I don’t agree about that, but I sort of agree that in some respects the difference may not matter as much as it seems to. Oliver Roeder seems to end up by arguing that since humans write the programs, all computer art is ultimately human art too. Surely that isn’t quite right; you wouldn’t credit a team that wrote architectural design software with authorship of all the buildings it was used to create.

It is clearly true that we can design software tools that artists may use for their own creative purposes – who now, after all, creates graphic work with an airbrush? It’s also true that a lot of supposedly creative software is actually rather limited; it really only distorts or reshuffles standard elements or patterns within very limited parameters. I had to smile when I found that Roeder’s first example was a programme generating jazz improvisation; surely the most forgiving musical genre, or as someone ruder once put it, the form of music from which even the concept of a wrong note has been eliminated. But let’s not be nasty to jazz; there have also been successful programs that generated melodies like early Mozart by recombining typically Mozartian motifs; they worked quite well but at best they inevitably resembled the composer on a really bad day when he was ten years old.

Surely though, there are (or if not there soon will be, what with all the exciting progress we’re seeing) programs which do a much more sophisticated job of imitating human creativity, ones that generate from scratch genuinely interesting new forms in whatever medium they are designed for? What about those – are their products to be regarded as art? Myself I think not, for two reasons. First, art requires intentionality and computers don’t do intentionality. Art is essentially tied up with meanings and intentions, or with being about something. I should make it clear that I don’t by any means have in mind the naive idea that all art must have a meaning, in the sense of having some moral or message; but in a much looser sense art conveys, evokes or yes, represents. Even the most abstract forms of visual art or music flow from willed and significant acts by their creator.

Second, there is a creator; art is generated by a person. A person, as I’ve argued before, is a one-off real physical phenomenon in the world; a computer program, by contrast, is a sort of Platonic abstraction like a piece of maths; exactly specified and in some sense eternal. This phenomenon of particularity is reflected in the individual status of works of art, sometimes puzzling to rational folk; a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa is not valued as highly as La Gioconda herself, even though it provides exactly the same visual experience (actually a better one in the case of the copy, since you don’t have to fight the herds of tourists in the Louvre and peer through bullet-proof glass). You might argue that a work of computer art might be the product, not of a program in the abstract, but of a particular run of that program on a particular computer (itself necessarily only approximating the ideal of a Turing machine), and so the analogy with human creators can be preserved; but in my view simply being an instance of a program is not enough; the operation of the human brain is bound up in its detailed particularity in a way a program can never be.

Now those considerations, if you accept them, might make you question my initial optimism; perhaps these two objections mean that computers will never in fact produce anything better than shallow, sterile permutations? I don’t think that’s true. I draw an analogy here with Nature. The natural world produces a torrent of forms that are artistically interesting or inspiring, and it does so without needing intentionality or a creator (theists, my apologies, but work with me if you can). I don’t see why a computer program couldn’t generate products that were similarly worthy of our attention. They wouldn’t be art, but in a sense it doesn’t matter: we don’t despise a sunset because nobody made it, and we need not undervalue computer “art” either. (Interesting to reflect in passing that nature often seems to use the same kind of repetition we see in computer-generated fractal art to produce elegant complexity from essentially simple procedures.)

The relationship between art and nature is of course a long one. Artists have often borrowed natural forms, and different ages have seen whatever most suited their temperament in the natural world, whether a harmonious mathematical regularity or the tortured spirituality of the sublime and the terrible. I think it is quite conceivable that computer “art” (we need a new word – what about “creanda”?) might eventually come to play a similar role. Perhaps people will go out of their way to witness remarkable creanda in much the way they visit the Grand Canyon, and perhaps those inspiring and evocative items will play an inspiring and fertilising role for human creativity, without anyone ever mistaking the creanda for art.

Output consciousness

OutputThe analogy with a digital computer has energised and strongly influenced our thinking about the human mind for at least sixty years, beginning with Turing’s seminal paper of 1950, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, and gaining in influence as computers became first real, and then ubiquitous. Whether or not you like the analogy, I think you’d have to concede that it has often set the terms of the discussion over recent decades. Yet we’ve never got it quite clear, and in some respects we’ve almost always got it wrong.

In particular, I’d like to suggest: consciousness is an output, not processing.

At first sight it might seem that consciousness can’t be an output, on the simple grounds that it isn’t, well, put out. Our consciousness is internal, it goes on in our heads – how could that be an output? I don’t, of course, mean it’s an output in that literal sense of being physically emitted: rather, I mean it’s the final product of a process, in this case a mental process. It may often be retained in our heads, but in some sense it’s the end of the line, the result.

It may be worth noting in passing that consciousness is pretty strongly linked with outputs in the simpler sense, though: so much so that the Turing test is based entirely on the ability of the testee to output strings of characters which gain the approval of the judges. Quality of output is taken to be the best possible sign of the presence of consciousness.

Wait a minute, you may say, consciousness isn’t a final output, it’s surely part of the process: what goes on in our conscious mind feeds back into our further thoughts and our behaviour. That’s the whole point of it, surely; to allow more complex and detached forms of processing to take place so that our true outputs in behaviour will eventually be better planned and targeted?

It’s true that the contents of consciousness may feed back into our mental processes, and that must be at least partly why it exists (its role in forming genuine verbal outputs is probably significant too) – I’m not suggesting consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, like, as they say, the whistle on a train. Items from consciousness may be inputs as well as outputs. To take an unarguable example, I’ve never managed to remember how many days there are in each month: but I have managed to remember that little rhyme which contains the information. So if I need to know how many days there are in August, I recall the rhyme and repeat it to myself: in this case the contents of my consciousness are helpfully fed back into my mind. Apart from clunky manoeuvres of this kind, though, I think careful introspection suggests consciousness does not feed directly back into the underlying mental processes all that often. If we want to make a decision we may hold the alternatives in mind and present them to ourselves in sequence, but what we’re waiting for is a feeling or a salient piece of reasoning to pop into our minds from some lower, essentially inscrutable process: we’re not normally putting our own thoughts on the subject together by hand.  I think Fodor once said he had no conscious access to the mental processes which produced his views on any philosophical issue: if he inspected the contents of his mind while cogitating about a particular problem all he came up with were sub-articulate thoughts approximately like “Come on, Jerry!”  I feel much the same.

With apologies if I’m repeating things I’ve said before, I think it may help if I mention some of the confusions that I think arise from not recognising the output nature of consciousness. A striking example is Dennett’s odd view that consciousness might involve a serial computer simulated on a parallel machine. We know, of course, that when people speak of the brain being ‘massively parallel’ they usually mean that many different functional areas are promiscuously interconnected, something radically different from massively parallel computing in the original sense of a carefully managed set of isolated processes; but Dennett seems to be motivated by an additional misunderstanding in which it is assumed that only a serial process can give rise to a coherent serial consciousness. Not at all: the outputs from parallel and serial processing are identical (they’d better be): it’s just that the parallel approach sometimes gets there quicker.

It’s a little unfair to single out Dennett: the same assumption that properties of the underlying process must also be properties of the output consciousness can be discerned elsewhere: it’s just that Dennett is clearer than most. Another striking example might be Libet’s notorious finding that consciousness of a decision arrives some time after the decision itself – but of course it does! The decision is an event in processes of which consciousness is the output.

It’s hard to see consciousness as an output, partly because it can also be an  input, but also because we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We want to believe that we ourselves enjoy agency, that we have causal effects, and so we’re inclined to believe that our thoughts are what does the trick – although we know quite well that when we move our arm it’s not thinking about it that makes it happen. This supposed identity of thoughts and self (after all, it’s because I think, that I am, isn’t it?) is so strong that some, failing to find in their thoughts anything but fleeting bundles of momentary impressions , have concluded there is no self after all. I think that level of scepticism is unwarranted: it’s just that our selves remain inscrutably shadowed to direct conscious observation. “Know thyself”, said the inscription on the temple of the Delphic oracle – alas, ultimately we can’t.