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Comment by TPCrow | Hacker News Reader

Creativity isn't magic.

Humans are not magically creative as much as they'd like to be.

If i ask you to think of a random number, you don't just pull it out of thin air, It can be based on tens to hundres of things: -Should i do a relaly low or high number? -People always use round numbers that end in 0 or 5, maybe i shouldn't do that, or should i to make it seem truer -what other large "random" numbers have a heard? -i remember seeing a number recently, maybe try a modification of that -you used {x} as a random number last time, go similar to that?

All this adds up in that under a second thought you have when i asked you to think of a random number. the literal same thing goes into all creative works, the output is a function of the input.

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Yes, but this function you defined, that applies tens of judgements to select a "random" number, is based on a random number input itself. The random part is just the seed, it then passes through various neural nets that expand on it and turn it into a plausible answer.

Randomness is injected into all brain processes on account that biological neurons are stochastic. So there is an amount of randomness mixed into everything the brain does.

Some neural nets can map real images into a Gaussian, and back. That means they disentangle the factors of the image into a mix of independent factors that map into the standard deviation. Any set of random numbers could be converted back into an image, by the reverse process.

> Yes, but this function you defined, that applies tens of judgements to select a "random" number, is based on a random number input itself. The random part is just the seed, it then passes through various neural nets that expand on it and turn it into a plausible answer.

On what basis do you make this claim? Humans are empirically terrible random number generators. If you ask someone to pick a random number, the result is very not random. Our biases are large and obvious, so it seems faulty to claim that our "seed" number is in any way truly random.

> Randomness is injected into all brain processes on account that biological neurons are stochastic. So there is an amount of randomness mixed into everything the brain does.

There's also some amount of randomness in what happens if you drop a rock but the net result is largely the same: it falls down. The fact that there is some randomness to a process does not mean that the randomness is actually driving the process.

> Some neural nets can map real images into a Gaussian, and back. That means they disentangle the factors of the image into a mix of independent factors that map into the standard deviation. Any set of random numbers could be converted back into an image, by the reverse process.

I don't see how this is relevant.

Do you think humans are good at anything or just generally useless ?

That's a really bizarre question. I think humans are good at a lot of things. I also think this is utterly irrelevant.

What's your point actually? Honest question.

You're acting like the brain is some kind of simple algorithm, more goes into a painting or a composition than just a bit of simple logic. A composer is not sitting there at 2am on her Piano going "Hm, I like round numbers, so I might make this note a F because it's the fourth note in the C major scale".

I might be wrong but from my understanding, we don't even really understand how neural nets are able to make certain decisions or generate certain pictures yet, correct?

> You're acting like the brain is some kind of binary computer

It's not binary but it is a computer. The alternative is to believe in magic.

> we don't even really understand how a computer is able to make certain decisions or generate certain pictures yet, correct?

I don't think that's correct, no. We understand how the process works. We may not understand the weights a specific neural net ends up with, but that's an issue with just having so much data to deal with. Similarly we don't "understand" how a web page ends up with a specific PageRank. We understand the process, but we can't manually reproduce the result because it's just too much data.

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