Little by Little...

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We went into town today to drop off some charity shop donations of clothes and books, as we're in the process of thinning down some - only some - of our stuff, in truth probably to make way for more of the same. After the drops we went up to Bangor's little 'village' Kyffin, at the top of town, for coffee at Jo Pott's excellent little café there. She serves great coffee and bakes most of the cakes and other stuff on sale there, including her beautiful lemon sponge. The ambience of the place is world music, posh chocolate and well, comfortably 'alternative'. She keeps a daily copy of the i Paper, Private Eye, and a floating selection of other periodicals.

Today I picked up the current issue of The New Internationalist, in which I found a good essay by Remy Ngamije entitled "Approaching Infinity", which gave me much food for thought. Randomly, I've just lit upon a YouTube episode of the excellent podcast "The Rest is Science" pondering just the same topic. I've touched on infinity before in these pages more than once; in particular, and with reference to this current stream of thought, my post of just shy of three years ago: "Bounded, Unbounded". The crux and substance of all of this is in the infinity of infinities, some larger than others, but all infinite in themselves. This can be seen from both a logical and/or a philosophical standpoint: logically, an infinity is simply adding or subtracting a digit from a given series of numbers [n+1, or n-1 and so on]. But in the interstices of the number line there are also infinities: [0...1] for instance, an infinite number of decimal points, slices of the number one above zero: the same applying in the other direction on the number line: [0...-1].

Philosophically, infinity being divisible by infinity by infinity is simply Zen. In Remy Ngamije's piece, he argues that the use of AI to 'create' art and 'literature' denies the nuance of human creativity by flattening it out into a process of regurgitation; creating pastiches of its un-thought-through  sources, scraped from billions of examples of genuine human creativity, mindlessly and carelessly. He describes the genuine human creative process as one where many - most - will create also-rans and duds on the way to - maybe - the creation of works of art, by way of what he terms '...small infinities...'. Anyone engaged in a creative process is motivated to make something special, crystalline and unique in their discipline's firmament: the distinction between artistic genius and Sunday amateur is a very fine one indeed, but pretty much any observer will be able to detect which is which given the comparison.

In this continuum of endeavour, Ngamije sees a realm comprised of '...small infinities...', where a small number of the infinity of creative possibilities actually 'hit the spot', which he rightly asserts that 'creative' AI models can never aspire to, tied as they are to a secondhand world inferior to the infinities of the human intellect and the interiority of human thought. By the way, pictured, is an as yet unwrapped, tiny [6"x6"] canvas sitting on a tiny replica of a large studio easel that my father made some years ago, out of oak. I have had a mind to start making some visual art again for some time, and I think starting small would be a good idea, especially given the constraints of my personal spaces to date. I mean to exercise some of my 'small infinities' in this very small arena. Keep you posted...

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