I’m arguing they’re minds of unknowable foreignness to our own. We fill in the gaps because the text per se has meaning. If anything, we give those minds meaning through the text, not the other way around.
We impute “the thoughts that produced” those writings. One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers that produced a particular output in response to a prompt.
(I’ve absolutely read works without a care in the world for the author.)
I thoroughly agree. What I'm disagreeing with is this being an indispensable reason for reading. There is nothing oxymoronic in reading e.g. the output of an LLM. (Plenty of bad writing contains something that makes it worth reading.)
We can debate fine meanings of ancient texts. But at minimum the bare facts of, say, the story of Gilgamesh passed through ancient humans' minds in a similar way as it passes through ours. That's still more than we can say for AI-written text.
> One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers
Humans aren't matrixes, though. Humans want to communicate with other humans, beings who face the same problems we do. That's why we care about human thoughts. No one cares what a matrix thinks, no one healthy anyway.