[HN Gopher] Some of literature's most powerful inventions
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Some of literature's most powerful inventions
Author : barrabas
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-03-19 05:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Not to be glib, but this reminds me of days spent reading TV
| tropes.
|
| I think the author is stretching a little to say noone considered
| this since Aristotle. Not only is there a lot of overlap with
| meme theory, people have been doing literary criticism forever.
|
| Nice article though.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Absolutely, it's weird isn't it-talk about an elephant in the
| room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never
| heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it
| doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel
| universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though-it makes
| the article entirely ridiculous.
|
| And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's
| work. He's got degrees in literature and neuroscience. And the
| Smithsonian magazine article was advertising for his book, so
| he's hardly gonna mention the rabbit-hole that is Tv Tropes or
| people will never get around to reading his book... So I almost
| didn't post the above first paragraph.
|
| But that page also says "His most recent work anatomizes the
| fundamental difference between computer AI and human narrative
| intelligence; a sample can be found in his 2021 proof in
| _Narrative_ of why computers will never be able to read (or
| write) novels. "
|
| Ok well...that, I thought, sounds 99.99% likely to be total
| nonsense, so I had a look.[1] The paper's called _Why Computers
| Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a
| Narrative_..
|
| "In this article, I'll provide a definite answer. And that
| answer is: never. No computer, no matter how immense its
| circuitry, will ever be able to extract the know-how from a
| fairytale that can be gleaned by human children. No machine-
| learning algorithm, no matter how futuristic its software, will
| ever author a sonnet or short story. The reason for this is
| simply that literature encodes a great deal of its thought-
| stuff in narrative, a mode of communication that requires
| causal reasoning to process. And while the ability to do causal
| reasoning is embedded in the architecture of the human brain,
| computers are hardwired to perform a method of thinking--
| symbolic logic--that is fundamentally incapable of grasping
| cause-and-effect."
|
| I found it hard to read.. "As we saw above, this process of
| scientific learning does not yield absolute truths, and in
| fact, when we make the mistake of conflating science with truth
| (in the way that "Enlightenment" thinkers from Thomas Macaulay
| to Steven Pinker have done) we can veer into smugness,
| imperialism, and other habits antithetical to the curiosity,
| open-mindedness, and bias awareness necessary for effective
| science." (sample paragraph)
|
| Anyway, at the end he gives his proof - although he seems to
| have changed it, somewhat significantly, from "Will Never" to
| "Cannot"! :
|
| _A Logical Proof That Computers Cannot Read (or Write)
| Literature_
|
| _1. Literature has a rhetorical function._
|
| _2. Literature 's full rhetorical function depends on
| narrative elements._
|
| _3. Narrative elements rely on causal reasoning._
|
| _4. Causal reasoning cannot be performed by machine-learning
| algorithms because those algorithms run on the CPU 's
| Arithmetic Logic Unit, which is designed to run symbolic logic,
| and symbolic logic can only process correlation._
|
| _QED: Computers cannot perform the causal reasoning necessary
| for learning to use literature._
|
| I imagine by "Cannot" he means "Cannot now, and won't ever" -
| at least, the title and the abstract say that.
|
| This all strikes me as total garbage.[2] And thus the garbagey
| flavour of the Smithsonian article, not surprisingly, doesn't
| seem an isolated aberration.
|
| [0] https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/about/current-
| research/rese...
|
| [1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778252
|
| [2] Sorry I don't have more time or the inclination for more
| than this shallow dismissal. _Ars longa, vita brevis._
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Thanks for this.
|
| Bringing this down to the CPU is as absurd as all those 17th
| century opponents of materialism. "How can rude matter bring
| about all the ineffable qualia!" Hilarious.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, that article was discussed on HN before, it was such
| garbage that it's ridiculous this person is seen as 'an
| intellectual'.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Ok thanks, I'm glad it's not just me! :-)
|
| This is the discussion you mean, I think:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127165
| tlholaday wrote:
| > people have been doing literary criticism forever.
|
| Do you have any examples? I'm recollecting Augustine, Aquinas,
| Boethius, Abelard, Plotinus, Maimonides, et al, and nothing
| like Poetics comes to mind. What am I not remembering?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not the commenter you responded to, but Northrup Frye at the
| very least tried to take a systematic approach to literary
| theory, using Aristotle as a model. I would like to peek into
| the parallel universe in which his approach in the _Anatomy
| of Criticism_ (1957) became as widely adopted as, e.g.
| deconstructionism.
| tlholaday wrote:
| Yes, many instances of modern literary criticism come to
| mind, such as Ben Jonson's commentary on the works of
| Shakespeare, his friend, producer, and cast member;
| Cervantes' analysis embedded in Quixote and Sheridan's
| analysis embedded in Tristram Shandy; Tolstoy's What Is
| Art; etc.
|
| My impression remains that during the period between
| Poetics and, oh, Canterbury Tales, the great thinkers
| didn't publish anything about Narrative.
|
| Thanks for the Northrop Frye tip!
| gone35 wrote:
| Russian formalists
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| None to add to that, though I was more thinking (as another
| child post) of poets and thinkers who were clearly self-
| referentially aware of what they were doing and what was
| going on generally with literary narrative (Swift and
| Coleridge come to mind).
|
| Edit: oh that child post was you :). Yeah there was for sure
| a gaping lacuna before Chaucer, and even then you may be
| right that there was nothing as explicitly on the nose until
| the 20th century.
|
| TV tropes and Mr Smithsonian are still late to the race in
| the scheme of things but nearer the pointy end than my
| original post may have given credit.
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