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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Would we expect to find God in his creation? I'm not religious or so, but I think this is a strange assumption and an interesting discussion that also applies to things we create.

If I write a book, I will never be in the book. My person will shape the book, I can't write a book in a way that doesn't impart some sense of me in it. Yet I can't actually ever be in the book. I can write characters that believe I exist and even worship me as a creator, and even write a character in the book with my name that does fantastical things to demonstrate that he is the author of their reality, yet it won't really be me in the book.

I, as a creator, cannot be part of my creation. That's like looking at your foot print on the ground and expecting to find your foot somehow still in the print it left. The print is shaped by the foot, but the foot is not part of the print.

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Interesting. What if I write an autobiography? Isn't it also I the author as a character in my own book? Do you believe that if a photograph is taken of you it can't be "you" in the photograph, since an image cannot really capture the essence of who "you" are? If so, I think that's missing the point of what both literature and photographs are trying to convey.

I think I'm inclined to disagree. What I suspect you're saying is that a book cannot possibly capture your entire being - the chemical bonds in your DNA for example, or the patterns of your neural pathways. But that isn't really what "being in a book means. Mark Twain is both an author and a character in his own books, for example.

If you write an autobiography, the character bearing your name in the book isn't you. It's a character in a book, while you are a human being.

You can never shake hands with a fictional character. You can create another fictional character that shakes the hand of the first fictional character, but the you that writes can not shake hands with the character you wrote bearing your name. These are entities from separate ontological categories that can never meet as equals.

The one pushing cannot be the thing getting pushed.

How far does this go? If I am watching a Youtube video of Jenna Marbles, is your claim that I am not really seeing Jenna Marbles, because I am only seeing a pattern of electromagnetic radiation that I falsely attribute to being Jenna Marbles?

Your view strikes me as solipsistic. I have no problem saying Mark Twain was both an author and a character in his own books, and Jenna Marbles is both a human being and a character in her own streams.

In fact, given that Mark Twain the human being is now food for worms, arguably the character in his writings is considerably more real and more alive than the author himself. I would argue that since human lives are ultimately ephemeral, the representations and images of ourselves that we leave behind in the world are potentially more meaningful than our biological bodies ever can be.

Throughout our lives, we impact the world in various ways, we leave footprints on the ground, we cast shadows and show up in mirrors, and form ideas in people's minds, but even though those effects look and act like we do, they aren't truly us, they don't actually experience the world.

There is an equivocation there. The Mark Twain that appears in his book is not the same as the Mark Twain that wrote his books. It's two entities bearing the same name. It's a category error to say the two are the same, it's conflating the idea of a thing with the thing the idea represents.

We do of course both have an idea of Mark Twain the dead author, and Mark Twain the literary character, and that may muddle and be the same idea in our mind, but that idea is not the same entity as Mark Twain the person. Unlike a person, an idea does not have subjectivity, it does not experience.

You can write a book where the character Mark Twain has a conversation with Harry Potter, even though Mark the human could never meet Harry the fictional character. If people and characters the were truly the same thing, wouldn't they be subject to the same constraints and limitations?

Interesting,could Jesus be considered a character in the book, representing God?

I am purely interested in the Philospophy here. I love your reply with regard to the analogy of a book BTW, really great how you presented your view of a creator.

So are we saying creators are never part of their creation ? Does that mean AI being created by us humans, can never know we created it, does that mean, that evolution of AI means human intelligence can no longer exist after this point ?

I think in this context, God's prophets could be considered a form of self-insertion.

> So are we saying creators are never part of their creation ? Does that mean AI being created by us humans, can never know we created it.

This seems like a broader existing problem with knowing whether other sentient beings exists. We don't have access to any other subjective experience than their own, so we really can't tell. We can assume that because we think and feel and experience other humans do too, but we can't actually know. We don't have access to their thoughts and experiences. So we couldn't know whether the AI we created merely acted like it thought and experienced, or if it actually did.

> does that mean, that evolution of AI means human intelligence can no longer exist after this point ?

I don't think this follows.

I wrote a short dialogue about this a while back, mostly for fun. I think the creator-creation-relationship is a very interesting topic. https://memex.marginalia.nu/commons/dialogue.gmi

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