Art Mason

Writing The Digital Declaration & The Will to Game | Gamedev @CoolestCatsLab

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America.

Today it is worth remembering the philosophical foundation on which the American republic was built. The many intellectual traditions that converged to form this nation — deism, naturalism, empiricism, constitutionalism, commercial liberalism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and so on — shared a common orientation, which I call a philosophy of immanence: a philosophy which sought to cultivate conditions in which excellence could arise organically, allowing society to evolve through free experimentation, adaptation, and merit. The American philosophy of immanence is one that rejects Cartesian dualism at the onset and assumes that the highest possibilities of humanity are not bestowed by transcendent authority but emerge immanently through the dynamic interplay of free persons, free institutions, and natural order.

Instead of locating authority in an unquestionable sovereign-from-above, such as an infallible church, an inherited aristocracy, or an immutable metaphysical hierarchy, the American experiment pushed further than any other in placing authority within evolutionary nature, individual experience, and voluntary association. Herbert, Voltaire, Hume, Montesquieu, Smith, Locke: from all these intellectual strands emerged the distinctly American disposition that trusts processes over dogmas, inquiry over certainty, competition over privilege, balance over centralization, and development over inheritance, later extended by various American thinkers such as Veblen, Emerson, Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Above all, a Greco-Roman classicism fueled this experiment. Washington was influenced by Roman civic ideals, especially those of Lucius Cincinnatus; Jefferson was a self-professed Epicurean and admired Roman republicanism and Lucretian materialism; Franklin was an appreciator of Socrates, Cicero, and Seneca; Adams was devoted to Polybius and Roman constitutional history; Hamilton frequently invoked Roman examples; and Madison carefully studied Aristotle, the Greek confederacies, and the Roman republic.

The same founding fathers who sought to resurrect pagan ideals and virtues also possessed a gradualist understanding of socioeconomics. Washington favored interstate commerce and private enterprise; Jefferson favored limited government and free trade; Franklin embodied commercial society, entrepreneurship, and voluntary exchange; Hamilton supported developmental capitalism; Paine was a strong advocate of international commerce; and Madison opposed excessive economic regulation while promoting a protection of private property. Most of them, it is worth noting, acknowledged that a strong republic was also essential to maintaining balance between the American people and the economy-at-large.

American democracy, it must be understood, is a constitutional republic which can only survive through hard work, voluntary participation, and open exchange. Take any of those away, and the foundation becomes too weak to sustain the rest. These principles do not establish slavery, unless we interpret our own bodies as a form of enslavement, which is a nihilistic notion harmful to all of the greater, finer, and more beautiful aspects of life.

Nietzsche: "Remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes."

#America250 #IndependenceDay #philosophy

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

Access to the form is also contiguous to the cause, not the cause itself. The cause is access to infrastructure, infrastructure meaning the entire social-political-economic fabric of a time and place, which is what I've been arguing. Darger was outside of the infrastructure he inhabited, which is why no one paid attention to him.

But the situation is more complex when we're talking about infrastructurally complex forms of art. Drawing isn't nearly as infrastructurally complex a form of art as fantasy moviemaking or metaverse game development is; outsiders can hardly even work with such forms, unless they spend decades on a single project.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

I've never argued that outsider art was specifically a budget problem. My post which was being responded to here also didn't make that argument.

Generative AI will help usher in a new wave of outsider art, and the reason why is because it enables outsiders to explore forms and genres of art which they were infrastructurally gated from. Metaverses in the gaming sense are one such form of art. A metaverse, by virtue of the infrastructural complexity its creation requires, could never be developed by a single individual, at least not in that individual's lifetime — and generative AI changes that (or will; the tools aren't quite there yet, but they're close).

There are currently no outsider metaverses. There are hardly any outsider video games in general. There are also hardly any outsider fantasy movies. This is because these forms and genres of art emerged only with the emergence of greater infrastructural complexity. Budget scales linearly with infrastructural complexity, which is why in my post being replied to I mentioned budget; budget is contiguous to the cause, but not the cause.

There are outsiders who are so far "outside" that there's no one better who can assist them in creating their art than a machine that does nothing but mirror what you command of it. All philosophers in history have been this type of outsider, for example.

Overall, what I'm in favor of isn't AI, but art. AI can and should lead to an expansion of art, not a narrowing of it.

[Mandy Kane @mk_manifesto]

@ArthurLyonMason @SamuelDeats outsider art was never a budget problem. what makes it outsider is that there was nobody to show it to and the maker kept going anyway. cheap tools remove that condition. they hand you an audience first.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

Probably a good deal, but it's certainly not limited to that. I've been a manager at various offices for over 10 years and have had many assistants and contractors taking my instructions during that time. I'm still in such a position, yet I enjoy working with generative AI models.

When you have ambitious ideas, you naturally need to work with others to materialize them, unless you're fine with working on a single idea for many years, but this is unacceptable when your ideas are both ambitious and abundant. And for many things, working with other humans is preferable, but humans are fickle while the computer isn't.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

I agree, but I would actually argue that it's not that the concept of theft is being exaggerated; rather, our relationship with AI is being perverted. To say that everything AI-generated is stolen is to dehumanize the human prompter and to disregard their potential capacity to articulate complex personal thoughts through a personal sense of taste. The weights of these generative models may have been derived from data made by others, but they still require my imagination and my taste before they will generate anything; wherever these are lacking and unrefined, the models will fill in those gaps for me. Insofar as one's imagination and taste are profoundly sharp and thorough, the output is our creation and not the data's; no other position on the matter makes sense to me, and rejecting this notion seems to me to dehumanize others.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@Y2KKAIN Despite pacing issues and some very unsatisfactory subplots, I appreciated this series and still have my English copies on my bookshelf. When it was good, it was very good. A shame it was never fully translated into English.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@cataleast @SamuelDeats So would I, but the use of generative AI isn't limited to the effortless, pointless content that floods social media.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@itaisher Computers have no desires, as they lack hardware for desiring. They are tools. The idea that tools will or should ever be an end to themselves is an absurd joke. Humans will persist so long as they continue to be driven by their desires, a domain that computers do not partake in.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

Agreed. I hope we see more eccentric, nonconformist games being developed soon thanks to generative AI tools. Not "indie" gaming but "outsider" gaming is on its way and I'm excited for it.

I also hope we see more high-quality VR games and more metaverse games. But these will still require larger teams to execute well, even with AI.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@naval Innovation happens at the frontier labs, which require substantial financial infrastructure to be maintained. It has nothing to do with morality.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@ter_pieter @MIT_CSAIL It's a modern mass hysteria.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@rob_mcrobberson @demystifysci There's no definition because it isn't. "Consciousness," like "soul," is merely a word describing something about the substrate. The substrate is what is.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

Modern headsets aren't uncomfortable, even for long periods of use. The bigger issues are:

1. Not enough high-quality games with VR support.

2. Not enough people with disposable income + adequate physical space + adequate passion for gaming to warrant the purchase, especially considering #1.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@curious_founder Statisticians are more often wrong than not.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@foreverfree1231 @Naturalphilosy A great artist has a great idea within them. Not everyone has great ideas.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

I'm not sure anyone needs to. I've never once used any sort of emotionally charged words in my prompts to Claude, which I've used almost daily since last summer. Not once have I been threatened about a conversation ending prematurely or told to stop. Most likely, the users receiving such messages are themselves using emotionally charged words without realizing it.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@alex_l_farber @itstoz @OutlawsPoetic Nietzschean relativity. Your body, which is you, dictates what is good or bad. Your reality changes as your body changes, and not elsewise. This is different from "everything is subjective," which blinds itself to the substrate from which all interpretations spring from.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. A thing is good or bad to us, but that doesn't make it "inherently" good or bad. Inherency is an empty notion in the flux. But this also isn't an invitation to accept the postmodernist notion of "everything is subjective," which is an erroneous bastardization of Nietzschean relativity.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@alex_l_farber @itstoz @OutlawsPoetic I am not defending the other poster, but nothing is "inherently" good or bad; we assign such designations.

[Art Mason @ArthurLyonMason]

@TheNextMazer @DougTenNapel There's fun in collaborating with AI, and also far less friction comparatively speaking.