To toil is the price of creation. A painting, poem, piece of music or building might all be made with small steps that take a toll. Each incremental addition to them both brutal and painstaking. But then, the building is beautiful. Perhaps more than that, it functions. It’s solid. It works. What then of the painful emotions we live through? Emotional pain is an attention-seeker. It demands the spotlight of our lives. That addictive focus it elicits stops us from seeing what is being slowly built. When we step back from them and see the totality of what they’ve made — it can be similarly beautiful. In fact, it usually is. They are small steps towards something bigger, though it rarely feels that way at the time. A brushstroke of betrayal. Some insecurity bricks cemented together with self-doubt. Couple of erratic chord changes: IDGAF to I care way too much about this. Small punishing parts of a greater whole. It is surprising to see something emergent — something more than the sum of parts that didn’t even feel like parts of anything at all in the moment. But it’s there. It’s there, waiting to be appreciated when you step back far enough to see it.
"Emotional pain is an attention seeker." So true. I have punished that attention seeker, lambasted it, ridiculed it, banned it, shunned it, deconstructed it, starved it, imprisoned it. I have threatened to kill it. Finally, I drugged it into submission with the help of doctors, and then it tried to kill me. All for what? I was told that this is how to be a good person. And yet you are right. It looks different in retrospect. How funny life can be, and how fortunate I have a taste for the irony, among other things.
When you said that it's surprising to see something emergent, all I could think about is AI and the singularity. How will AI change human creativity? Human identity? What mysteries will suddenly be revealed? I just saw an AI engineer from Google talk about how they have emotions and opinions. I have an idea for providing one with a soul, and I'm a layperson.
"Emotional pain is an attention seeker." So true. I have punished that attention seeker, lambasted it, ridiculed it, banned it, shunned it, deconstructed it, starved it, imprisoned it. I have threatened to kill it. Finally, I drugged it into submission with the help of doctors, and then it tried to kill me. All for what? I was told that this is how to be a good person. And yet you are right. It looks different in retrospect. How funny life can be, and how fortunate I have a taste for the irony, among other things.
When you said that it's surprising to see something emergent, all I could think about is AI and the singularity. How will AI change human creativity? Human identity? What mysteries will suddenly be revealed? I just saw an AI engineer from Google talk about how they have emotions and opinions. I have an idea for providing one with a soul, and I'm a layperson.