1. Had a break from schooling this week, tried to use it to get a clearer idea of how to proceed. Sort of worked; I still feel disorganized and like little is getting done, but I have a bit of a better idea of what I’m doing.

2. It occurs to me that the main reason to wax regretful on the way things used to be is to remind ourselves that things don’t have to be the way they are.

3. On that note, I had reason to think of the film Harvey recently: the 1950 comedy based on a stage play about a kindly middle-aged man who talks to an invisible rabbit. That we don’t see films like this anymore goes all-but without saying: a cheerful fantasy comedy about being pleasant which sometimes dials down to allow the performers to soliloquize in rich, literate dialogue, and which just happens to star America’s finest actor, not slumming it but giving a knock-out performance that he regarded as one of his favorites.

4. I know a number of people who love playing with AI image generators. I enjoy the images that come out, but I can never regard AI images as the same kind of thing as actual art. The reason is because I know there’s no thought behind it; if you ask “why is the figure positioned this way?” the answer is “The algorithm calculated that this was one of the proper ways to do it.” Which is to say, there’s no reason. It may look good, but there’s nothing more.

I’m the kind of person who loves to hunt up details, to look into corners and consider why the artist did things this way and what it conveys. That’s not an option in AI generated work, so I don’t have much interest in it, except superficially, and I doubt I’ll ever use it myself.

5. Speaking of AI, to say that artificial intelligence demonstrates anything about the nature of the human mind is akin to saying that paint demonstrates something about the nature of light.

Both are meticulously crafted imitations of the outward effects of the original phenomenon; nothing more.

6. When you think of creation ex nihilo (from nothing), one point that seems to me to be often overlooked is that the creature has to be brought into being in a certain state. That is, it would in fact have no past save in conception, but since every actual thing we know of comes from something else and so has a past, we have to imagine that the thing created from nothing would be created in such a state as would indicate a past.

It’s what I call the Pygmalion principle. Pygmalion, you’ll remember, carved a sculpture of a woman which was so beautiful that he fell in love with it, and Aphrodite turned it into a real woman, whom he married (the classic version is either Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Kim Cattrall’s Mannequin, depending on whom you ask). But the point is, the sculpture-turned-woman would come to life as if she had grown up over time, when in fact she hadn’t. When Pygmalion and Kim are telling their friends how they met, their friends would reasonably say “but Miss Cattrall, you’re obviously at least eighteen years old and have the knowledge and emotional maturity of a woman of your age, so you can’t have been carved from a block of marble just a month ago.”

All of which is to say that the evidence of the age of the Earth from dating processes, measured decay, and so on may not be as strong as it seems at first glance.

7. Having said that, I should clarify that I favor the old earth idea: the billions of years, etc. I think it’s more picturesque and seems perfectly reasonable, and I don’t know that the visions of Genesis (and given that Moses wasn’t there, they presumably are visions akin to those in the Apocalypse and the Prophetical books) really contradict it.

My point’s only that, if I were inclined to reject it, talk about the time it takes for certain elements to decay or for light to reach the earth from the stars wouldn’t really be a logical obstacle, it seems to me.