Grateful Dead fans, lovers of lyrics, and those curious about A.I.’s interpretation of art are in for a treat with today’s episode, which explores an overlooked question in the great debate of machine versus human intelligence: “can A.I. grasp the meaning in a song as well as a human?”
Our guest, Creativity Squared resident writer and philosopher, Jason Schneider, returns to the podcast to share insights from his own and ChatGPT’s analyses of the Grateful Dead song, “Ripple,” which he compiled and compared in a blog post that’s quickly become one of our most popular to date.
Jason is a true modern-day Renaissance man with passions that include photography, motorcycles, poetry, music, and philosophy. A self-proclaimed lifelong Leica maniac, Jason’s many titles also a camera collector, fine art photographer, writer, and photojournalist. He’s authored three books on camera collecting and an authoritative volume on woodburning stoves.
Of course, a conversation with Jason wouldn’t be complete without discussing the poet Emily Dickinson. He’s discussed Dickinson’s writing on his first Creativity Squared appearance and more recently in a blog post exploring the theoretical physics of consciousness. He’s also writing a book with a working title, “Understanding Emily Dickinson: A Reader’s Guide To The Enlightened Master.” Don’t miss this week’s episode for Jason’s thoughts on how Dickinson’s writings and “Ripple” explore similar themes of mortality, consciousness, and the human soul.
Jason Schneider
Jason built a long and prosperous career as a photographic journalist across numerous prestigious positions. He is perhaps best known as the author of “The Camera Collector” column and for rising through the ranks at Modern Photography magazine to become its Editorial Director. After leaving Modern, he served 15 years as the Editor-in-Chief of Popular Photography, the world’s largest imaging magazine. Currently, Jason is a contributing writer for the Rangefinder Forum and Creativity Squared.
Helen met Jason back in 2011 when her social media marketing agency started managing Leica Camera’s social media channels and blog. Working with Leica for more than five years, Jason was instrumental in writing questions and editing interviews for the Leica Camera Blog. They’ve been colleagues and friends ever since.
In this post, we’ll highlight some of Jason and Helen’s major takeaways regarding A.I.’s grasp of nuance in music, humans’ relationship with music, and what those dynamics say about what it means to be human. To get the full picture of how ChatGPT’s analysis of “Ripple” stood up against Jason’s, check out his write-up. For more about Jason’s thoughts on Emily Dickinson, A.I.’s impact on photography, and how symbolism is intrinsic to being human, listen to his first appearance on the podcast.
“Provide an in depth analysis of the thematic structure and meaning of Robert Hunter, Hunter’s transcendent poem that Jerry Garcia masterfully set to music in ripple 1970 by the Grateful Dead.”
That was the prompt Jason fed into ChatGPT-4. Without giving the A.I. the chance to read the analysis he’d written himself, the chatbot’s analysis highlighted themes like “journey and the search for meaning,” “the ineffability of truth,” faith and mysticism,” “interconnectedness,” “acceptance and the flow of life,” “community and shared wisdom,” and “the role of music and arts as spiritual conduits.”
These themes largely echo those that Jason wrote about in his own analysis, including how the song “reveals essential elements of the spiritual and spatial-temporal journey undertaken by all humans.”
Jason says he found ChatGPT’s analysis to be superior in some ways to what a human can come up with. He describes it as a “technocratic” interpretation, filled with detail and accurate overall, but missing the “personal touch” that can only come from lived experience. His human analysis, in contrast, he says contained less detail but let the human element shine through in a way that would enable another person to tell that his analysis was human-generated.
While ChatGPT couldn’t replicate the full emotional depth of a human’s interpretation of music, it can get pretty close to the mark. But how is that possible when A.I. doesn’t possess the lived experiences or emotional memory that makes music so meaningful to humans?
As one of the Grateful Dead’s most thought-provoking songs, “Ripple” has been the subject of academic discourse for decades. In fact, Stanford University offers a whole course on the music and culture of the Grateful Dead.
As a result, ChatGPT doesn’t need to have the same emotional intelligence as humans in order to write about the philosophical and psychological themes in “Ripple,” because more than likely it’s already consumed the majority of scholarship on the topic.
Jason Schneider
However, Jason says that when he asked the chatbot to analyze his human analysis of “Ripple,” ChatGPT’s response became much richer as a result of engaging with the more emotionally grounded language of his own piece.
While A.I. can quickly analyze the published literature on “Ripple” than any human, the fact remains that its analysis is only possible thanks to previous works of the human mind. Likewise, while ChatGPT can distill those ideas into a compelling analysis, it lacks the emotional depth to fully flesh out those ideas without the help of a human.
In the end, Jason’s experience analyzing “Ripple” shows that while A.I. can generate a convincing reproduction of abstract human thought, it still doesn’t have the context nor the human experience necessary to really interpret the deeper emotional currents in a work of art without human guidance.
And what is it about our humanity that separates our perception of art from an A.I. model’s?
Helen cites Responsible A.I. advocate and influencer, Aza Raskin, who pointed on stage out that the way A.I. learns is fundamentally different than how humans do. He explains this through the analogy of learning to play the piano. A human can be taught to play the piano, but has to play it for their self to learn how to actually play. A.I. doesn’t work this way — if an A.I. is trained to play the piano, then it simply transfers that knowledge like copying and pasting, which is a fundamentally different way of learning…almost like how Neo learns kung-fu in The Matrix.
For Jason, the most fundamental feature of being human is our inevitable mortality. Invoking Yeats, Jason says that A.I. can’t achieve the same perspective as humans because it’s not “fastened to a dying animal” the way that human intellect is inseparable from our perishable human bodies.
Jason Schneider
Knowledge that our time is finite is both an asset and a liability, according to Jason. A.I., however, doesn’t possess that same urgency to create and so, Jason says, even if the technology gets good enough to write what would pass as great art, anything generated by A.I. will always be a reproduction of human emotion and experience — a human imposter. A.I. could write “Ripple,” but it could never experience the emotions that led Robert Hunt to pen his poem, and it could never experience the purely human sensation of finding meaning in art.
In exploring A.I.’s ability to analyze the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple,” Jason doesn’t just provide an exercise in A.I.-generated creative writing — he gets at something profound about both artificial intelligence and human nature.
While A.I. can produce an impressively detailed analysis of music by drawing on vast repositories of human knowledge, it ultimately, in Jason’s words, is an imposter of human experience and emotions. Our mortality, our imperfections, and our subjective experiences shape how we interpret and connect with music in ways that A.I. cannot replicate.
As Jason reminds us, there’s a certain beauty in human limitation — our awareness of our own mortality drives us to create art that transcends our finite existence. Perhaps the greatest insight, though, is that A.I. won’t replace human interpretation or creation of art, but rather build upon it, adding new layers of understanding while remaining fundamentally dependent on the rich tapestry of human experience and emotion that informs all meaningful artistic expression.
Enjoy the conversation on the original article found here:
Thank you, Jason, for joining us on this special episode of Creativity Squared.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Jason: AI could not have done its original analysis of Ripple when I asked it to give me an analysis. It couldn’t have done as good a job if scholars and rock enthusiasts and poetry enthusiasts and students had not provided a body of work based on human perception and human experience and human analysis that had been previously published.
[00:00:28] Jason: It simply wouldn’t have raw data of that quality based on that human experience to draw upon. So in a sense, AI may be able to create a human and human works, but that human is an imposter.
[00:00:49] Helen: Grateful Dead fans, lovers of lyrics, and those curious about AI’s interpretation of art, you’re in for a treat because today’s episode invites you to explore human intelligence versus artificial intelligence through the analysis of the Grateful Dead song Ripple with Creativity Squared resident writer and philosopher Jason Schneider.
[00:01:15] Helen: Jason is a true modern day renaissance man with passions that include photography, motorcycles, poetry, music, and philosophy. A self admitted lifelong Leica maniac, Jason is also a camera collector, fine art photographer, writer and photojournalist. Jason has written three books on camera collecting and an authoritative volume on wood burning stoves.
[00:01:41] Helen: He is currently writing a book with a working title: Understanding Emily Dickinson, A Reader’s Guide to the Enlightened Master. Jason has built a long and prosperous career as a photographic journalist, where he’s held numerous prestigious positions. He is perhaps best known as the writer and editor who created The Camera Collector Column and rose through the ranks at Modern Photography Magazine to become its editorial director.
[00:02:09] Helen: After leaving Modern, he became the editor-in-chief of Popular Photography, the world’s largest imaging magazine, a position he held for 15 years. Currently, Jason is a contributing writer for the Rangefinder Forum in addition to Creativity Squared. I met Jason back in 2011 when my social media agency was launching and managing Leica Camera’s social media channels and blog.
[00:02:34] Helen: We worked with Leica for over five years, and Jason was instrumental in writing questions and editing interviews for the Leica camera blog. We’ve been colleagues and friends ever since. From reciting points to thinking deeply about consciousness, art, and philosophy, I’m grateful to call Jason a dear friend and excited to share our thought provoking conversation with you today.
[00:02:58] Helen: In this episode, we discuss Jason’s latest blog post on Creativity Squared titled Understanding Ripple by the Grateful Dead. Jason compares his human analysis to Chat GPT’s of this transcendent song based on the poem by Robert Hunter. He then put the article through Chat GPT for an opinion piece on the full article while the team did the same with Google LM, which gets Meta quicker than a Chat GPT prompted answer.
[00:03:32] Helen: And it wouldn’t be a conversation with Jason without some Emily Dickinson either. And you won’t want to miss how Jason sees the Grateful Dead and the poets similarities. Discover why Ripple remains a timeless meditation on life’s most profound questions, including the limitations of human consciousness itself.
[00:03:55] Helen: Enjoy.
[00:04:03] Helen: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in the space.
[00:04:21] Helen: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.
[00:04:37] Helen: Jason, welcome back to Creativity Squared. It’s so good to have you back on the podcast.
[00:04:43] Jason: Thanks. Delighted to be here.
[00:04:45] Helen: So I know you’ve been on the show before I just looked it up. It was actually the first year, episode 23 on art, AI, and immortality. And I mentioned, goodness, a few episodes back that you’re kind of our resident philosopher on our writing staff here at Creativity Squared.
[00:05:10] Helen: But for those who, might be meeting you for the first time, can you do a quick intro of who you are, what you do, and a bit about your origin story?
[00:05:19] Jason: Well, my origin story is I’m a New York city kid, you know, and, I lived in Manhattan in the Bronx as a lad, and, you know, my parents moved to Long Island when I was 14, 15, and I stayed there only for a few years and became an emancipated minor, for the greatest of reasons.
[00:05:46] Jason: My mother couldn’t stand my motorcycle and she said, “it’s you or that motorcycle.” And I said, “sayonara.” And so, I went to the School of Hard Knocks, for several years. Before going to college, I entered NYU, downtown, Washington Square College Of Arts And Science.
[00:06:13] Jason: I very shortly was picked out by my English professor and she was a great person. And she introduced me to the Dean of students I took an exam and I got a full tuition scholarship with a living stipend for the rest of my college education. And I graduated with high honors and, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:06:47] Jason: I eventually, became the editor in chief of – I joined the staff of Modern Photography in October 1969 as an assistant editor. And, I rose through the ranks to become the editor in chief of that publication. And then, management got a little crappy at that publication and they weren’t supporting it.
[00:07:14] Jason: And so, my mentor, Bert Kepler and I, moved over to PopularPhotography in 1987, and I was the editor in chief of Popular Photography Magazine, which at the time was the largest photography magazine in the world in terms of circulation. And, I had that position for 16 years. And, you know, I’m still working six days a week.
[00:07:45] Jason: I must’ve done something bad in a previous life to have this put upon me, but you know, I do enjoy what I do. And so, here I am.
[00:07:59] Helen: Well, we are grateful that we get to publish words that come out of your brilliant mind on Creativity Squared. and I’ll add a little bit more context to your story since we’ve worked together for so long.
[00:08:14] Helen: Jason and I originally met, goodness, it was probably back in 2010 or 2011 when we started working with Leica Camera, doing all of their social media management. And that’s when Jason and I first met. And then he was working on interviews with photographers for the Leica Camera blog and projects that we were doing for them.
[00:08:39] Helen: But you also are an aficionado of Emily Dickinson, which I know we’ll talk about and have talked about but, I think that tees up really beautifully on your analysis. So tell us why you like Emily Dickinson so much, and then we’ll dive into your most recent blog posts.
[00:08:59] Jason: Well, Emily Dickinson, is not only a great poet and, she was a master with words and a lover of words for themselves, a lover of language.
[00:09:17] Jason: She was also brilliant. Just, kind of a polymath and she was actually a spiritual adept and a philosopher in addition to being probably the greatest American poet of the 19th century. That’s my arrogant opinion, but, you know. So I’ve always, you know, I’ve read Emily Dickinson ever since I was a tot, you know, I guess I started reading Emily Dickinson when I was nine years old and I’ve always been attracted to her precision and concision and her wicked sarcastic sense of humor, which a lot of people don’t appreciate.
[00:10:08] Jason: A lot of people take Emily Dickinson very seriously. “You know, well, it’s Emily Dickinson. I mean, after all, this is a great poet. She must be talking very seriously.” Well, the answer is not so much.
[00:10:22] Jason: She, as I said, had a wicked sense of humor. You know, something like, people say, oh, a famous poem by Emily Dickinson: Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. And people say, “oh, that’s very serious stuff, it’s about death.” Well, it’s sarcasm. Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
[00:10:49] Jason: Now wasn’t that nice of him? You know? She [has] another poem about death: “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” I mean, this is poking fun at the whole death ritual where people gather around in a room and are terribly serious about the soon to be departed and she just, you know, it’s a total send up of that kind of ritual.
[00:11:20] Jason: And a lot of people don’t get it because they take her too seriously. She’s very serious. All the time, but she’s also a master of sardonic humor, sarcasm, and wit.
[00:11:37] Helen: One of your recent blog posts that you did, for Creativity Squared, which everyone can see all of the posts at Creativity Squared.com is, Emily Dickinson, the theoretical physics of consciousness. You know, one, I guess, just to give our listeners and viewers some context, Jason has been pitching me articles, you know, related to Emily Dickinson and different AI pieces. And in this moment in time, because there’s so much transition and I’ve said so many times on the show, like we need the philosophers and the artists to help us like understand this moment in time.
[00:12:17] Helen: And, Jason just has so much insight into consciousness and Emily Dickinson and the power of words and poetry. So, it was really interesting when he came to me, it was like, and pitching a Grateful Dead song, because it’s very different than the preciseness of Emily Dickinson.
[00:12:38] Helen: But you know, I trust talent and people who are passionate about things. I was like, “okay, let’s do an article, on this, but I guess we got to tie it into AI too,” but I also think this moment of time really makes us reflect on what makes us human and the human condition. And I know you think very deeply about that too.
[00:12:59] Helen: So share your idea for the pitch of the article and then we’ll dive into the article itself too.
[00:13:05] Jason: Well, first of all, I think that the Grateful Dead and Ripple, the song that I wrote about in particular have a lot to do with Emily Dickinson. They are deep meditations that are involved with mortality and, the blight that humans were born for that they are excruciatingly aware of their own mortality and, unlike perhaps other species, that we know about.
[00:13:38] Jason: And so, Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, one of the main lyricists for the Grateful Dead was a fine poet. You know, and, I don’t know whether he was exactly an Emily Dickinson, but he certainly, in the song Ripple, he certainly created a provocative, insightful, and very profound statement about living a life of a human being on planet Earth.
[00:14:14] Jason: So, it is in the same category of existential, philosophy, and observation, if you want to put it that way. And, so I think that, you know, the poem that I did, that I explicated, the most recent one was number 936, This Dust and Its Feature.
[00:14:47] Jason: And the first verse, “This dust and its feature, accredited today will, in a second future, cease to identify.” I mean, that’s like a thermonuclear explosion. It posits the relativity of consciousness itself, which is a far more profound concept than the relativity of time space posited by Albert Einstein. And, you know, she was not a rigorous scientist, but, you know, she was an awesome intellect, as well as a fine poet and a great wordsmith and lover words. So, you know, I think that it is not surprising that I would be attracted to Ripple, as well as Emily Dickinson.
[00:15:46] Helen: Well, what gave you the idea to pitch doing an analysis of the song Ripple, for Creativity Squared?
[00:15:53] Helen: Like, were you listening to the song and like, “Oh, that would be a good article?”
[00:15:59] Jason: I am very familiar with the song. I have enjoyed and appreciated it for many years. I mean, it came out, I don’t know, around 1970, I believe. It could have been ‘69, I have to look it up, but, you know, it’s been around for quite a while and I’ve always liked it very much.
[00:16:19] Jason: You know, I’ve been critical of the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead, you know, could be… they did perhaps too many perform live performances, and many of them were kind of sloppy and disorganized, and the musicianship wasn’t of the greatest caliber, and so they did a lot of stuff that was “meh.”
[00:16:43] Jason: You know? And, but when they did great stuff, it was really great stuff. There are perhaps seven or eight songs by the Grateful Dead that will withstand the test of time as important music, put it that way. The interesting thing I was thinking about is the name, the Grateful Dead.
[00:17:09] Jason: Which is kind of an irreverent observation, very much in this style of, or, approach of Emily Dickinson. You can’t really be grateful once you are dead. You can only be grateful when you are alive. And so, we all die and we’re all grateful for having lived, or at least many people are.
[00:17:42] Jason: And, you know, living, having lived the life of a human on the planet Earth is a great gift of the universe and I am, grateful and, I will be dead air long. And so, you know, it’s a very provocative name for a group. I mean, and it’s clever, but it’s also profound, and it has very much to do with the human relationship to mortality.
[00:18:17] Helen: When we, were talking last night, just ahead of this interview, you had mentioned, you know, and I think people, well, it’s not that people forget, but you have like the Brian Johnson’s in the world right now that are trying to escape death and live forever.
[00:18:34] Helen: But something that you pointed out last night with the human condition, that death is fundamental to the human experience, and that’s explored in the piece. Is there anything else that you would want to add about, I don’t know, the human condition or the human experience? Because I feel like right now with AI and all the things that are happening, that we’re really reflecting on what does it mean to be human? And death is a very big piece of that.
[00:19:06] Jason: Well, I, death is the great literary subject. You know, my mother, I think I mentioned, did not like Emily Dickinson because she thought she was a morbid poet and wrote all about death all the time, you know, and of course, my dear mother was a brilliant woman, but she didn’t, she never came to terms with her own death and, and of course, that was one reason she didn’t like Emily Dickinson, because Emily wrote prismatically about the subject of death, that is to say, from all angles, and with various degrees of seriousness, but, she explored the subject of death.
[00:19:56] Jason: So I think that… I don’t know. I mean, what could you say about the human experience? I mean, understanding the reason I like Ripple is that it presents the journey of life, as told by, kind of a troubadour and the troubadour is aware, that although he has lived and has had many experiences and has something to say to somebody about what they can expect to confront, he cannot resolve, life is something you have to live on your own and alone.
[00:20:59] Jason: And that, I think is one of the messages of that song. You walk this highway, which is more than a highway ’cause it has a spiritual and temporal dimension and that journey is yours. There is nobody who can experience that. And if you wanna take it further, there is nobody who could really know who you are.
[00:21:28] Jason: You can create art to leave something of your worldview, something of your perception, something of the way you experience life and something of your identity. But there’s a large portion of that, that is only yours and for you to experience and for you to go through.
[00:21:55] Jason: My grandmother, when I was a precocious little kid, and when I was three years old, I asked my grandma, Bessie, I said, “grandma, why does everyone have to die?” And she said, “well, death is like birth. You just have to go through it.” And, you know, it was a simple response, from a person who never went past 2B, you know, grade 2B, she had to support her family and work, and lived on the Lower East Side in poverty.
[00:22:40] Jason: And, she came over to the United States in utero. Okay? And she was not an intellectual. But, she had a profound understanding. It was a perfect statement for a three year old. And it’s profoundly true. What does this mean? What is it? What’s going on here? We know certain things. But there’s a lot we don’t know and we can’t know, but we do have to go through it.
[00:23:11] Helen: That’s a good, for the article itself. So some more context to why we’re doing a whole episode about this, is it’s really blown up on our website relative to Creativity Squared. It’s the most popular blog post we’ve done since launching. So I was like, okay, I need to get Jason on here, so that we can amplify it, on this episode.
[00:23:36] Helen: And, just to give a little structure and then we’ll dive into more of the content. So, Jason’s like, “I want to do an analysis of Ripple.” I was like, “okay, we need to tie it in a little bit more to AI than just the, you know, the philosophical consciousness aspects and human condition aspects.” So he did an analysis.
[00:23:57] Helen: And then had Chat GPT do an analysis and then compared the two and then had Chat GPT again, do an analysis of the final piece, which we added that to the post. So if you’ve read the post already, I would encourage you to read it again, ‘cause there’s an added piece. So Jason, why don’t you tee us up a little bit more about the song, and how important it is, and then your approach to your human analysis of it.
[00:24:29] Jason: Well, I think it’s one of the best songs that the Grateful Dead ever did. And I think that it hangs together very well. In other words, the melody has a feeling of almost a folk song, or a hymn or something, you know, and the words are transcendent and sit, they both say what they can say and they say what they can’t say.
[00:25:16] Jason: And, there’s an abiding humility on the part of the writer of the lyrics, right? He is aware, very much aware of the limitations of communication. He is aware that he is an imperfect messenger and he starts out very much saying that, you know? He says, ‘if my words did glow with the gold of sunshine;” “if” sets the whole thing apart and the conditional mode. “If my words did glow with the glow of sunshine and my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, would you hear my voice come through the music?
[00:26:11] Jason: Would you hold it near, as it were your own?” That’s a hell of an introduction, you know. The harp unstrung, of course, is a very emblem of the inability to convey through the music. I mean, the, music is not simply, the music. It’s obviously something, on a different level.
[00:26:45] Jason: It immediately sets the thing up. “I’m going to tell you something about life. I’m going to tell you, I’m going to give you a message. So listen for it. But I am an imperfect instrument.” Okay? It’s, it says so right there. It’s very heartfelt and compelling in my opinion.
[00:27:14] Jason: He is setting us up for a transcendent message. And, just as you’re sitting there and about to receive this transcendent message, he says, it’s a hand me down. The thoughts are broken. Perhaps they’re better left unsung. I don’t know. Don’t really care.
[00:27:45] Jason: Let there be songs to fill the air. I’m going to – this is not everything that I would want it to be. And, it’s because I’m a human being and it’s because I, you know, I’m the teller of the tale, but, you know, take it with a grain of salt. It’s nothing new.
[00:28:18] Jason: It’s a hand me down. He denigrates the message, right? It’s charming, and disarming. And so, and then he proceeds to deliver, what is, in effect, a transcendent message about our journey through life. I mean, it’s neat. It really is.
[00:28:47] Helen: Well, I love hearing you, analyze the poem.
[00:28:50] Helen: I know you go into really more detail in the blog posts, but why don’t we go through the, whole, song like this? cause the next, what you’re teeing up is the refrain. And then we can talk about, you know, the AI and stuff too. I would love listeners just to get a taste of, how you’ve analyzed the full song.
[00:29:11] Jason: Well, the refrain, of course, is the most important part of the song. And, like the introduction, it talks about something that is ineffable, inexpressible, right? I mean, poetry does that. Poetry tries to express the inexpressible and poetry is the music of language, which is why, in a certain way, all poems are songs, although they’re not all set to music.
[00:29:53] Jason: It is the music of language that is on display and so, the refrain, philosophically, is almost a succinct statement of the age old philosophical debate between free will and determinism. In other words, determinism says that, everything is essentially for ordained and in the mind of God and there are no accidents. And it just emerges.
[00:30:35] Jason: But you know, the problem with determinism is that it enmeshes us in an inescapable web of cause and effect, and asserts that free will is illusory. That’s the problem with it. Okay? Now I would be the first person to admit, that whatever free will humans may have is a lot more circumscribed than they think, but it’s still not zero, you know? But this refrain, “Ripple on still water, where there is no pebble tossed, no wind to blow.”
[00:31:31] Jason: It’s positing, essentially a causeless event, and that causeless event is, kind of like the creation of the universe, “bink,” and then the ripples spread out, you know, it’s almost like the Big Bang, if you want to look at it that way, right? The ripple. But there is no pebble tossed, nor wind to blow.
[00:31:57] Jason: So within the context of the metaphor, the ripple is caused by what? You know, it’s a paradox. It’s a paradox. There is a ripple and yeah, you could say, well, “what if a cormorant were flying by and dropped a peanut that was held in its mouth?” I mean, there are an infinite number of things that could have caused the ripple.
[00:32:25] Jason: But none of them is contained within the refrain. None of them is contained within the image as given. So it is presented as an event that, it’s presented as an irresolvable paradox. And things that are presented as an irresolvable paradox go back to Zen Buddhism. and the “koan,” K O A N, and a koan is an irresolvable paradox presented to consciousness.
[00:33:03] Jason: And what is consciousness supposed to do with this? It’s supposed to contemplate it. It’s not supposed to resolve it. In fact, it is presented precisely because it is irresolvable. The most famous one being, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Right? But in contemplating it, you tease your consciousness into, another level of intuitive understanding.
[00:33:34] Jason: That’s the idea. The idea of a koan is not that the person presented with it is going to resolve it, but that, the person who is presented with it is going to have a deeper understanding of life and its events and the world in general, you know, so that’s what it’s supposed to do.
[00:34:02] Jason: And the fact that there is a whole world beyond logic that has to do with feelings and it has to do with intuition and it has to do with enlightenment, dare I say, right? You know, and as I said to you the other day, I am certainly not an enlightened master. Okay. Emily Dickinson probably was.
[00:34:31] Jason: All right? But I am certainly not. However, I am capable, on occasion. When walking down the street and looking at ordinary things, you know, to appreciate and apprehend and experience the eternity in the moment. And I think that has a lot to do with the refrain of, it has a lot to do with the koan and it has a lot to do with the refrain of Ripple, to experience something beyond just sense data.
[00:35:08] Jason: I mean, I think that all these ideas are present in that song and in the best work of The Grateful Dead and in much of the work of Emily Dickinson. So I think that there is a tie in and a parallelism going on, yeah.
[00:35:31] Helen: I love what you just said, that you experience the eternity in the moment.
[00:35:38] Helen: That’s so beautiful. And for our listeners and viewers, it made me think of, the interview, that came out on Halloween, with, Dr. Walter D. Greason, where he really talks about time is love and that as we enter what I’m calling the imagination age, it explores that we’re going to have a different relationship with time and that, it can be malleable.
[00:36:04] Helen: The episode just came out. And, so I just find it really fascinating that you, experienced time that way. ‘Cause it’s something that I’ve been reflecting on, my relationship with time, and something that we’re gonna explore more, on the show too, but I don’t wanna go too far down a different rabbit hole ’cause we have a few more, what is it? Stanzas? What are… well, I’ll just call them songs.
[00:36:31] Jason: Stanzas, yeah, I know stanzas. Well again, so, “ripple in still water where there is no pebble toss, no winter to blow. Now, reach out your hand. If your cup be empty, if your cup is full, may it be again.
[00:36:51] Jason: Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men.” Now, we are all contingent beings. We are contingent upon the sufferance of the universe. We know [or] have some idea of how we came here through the biological chain. But how we arrived here in an ultimate existential sense, we know not. And meanings, such as they are, are really assigned by us and our experience.
[00:37:38] Jason: There is nothing, there are no inherent meanings. They are also contingent. The universe has given to us, something, and we go through it. And the band had a song, I forget which, song it was. It says, “we were born, but to grow old and never know,” is the phrase, which I think is, apposite.
[00:38:06] Jason: I mean, I think that, to a certain extent, whatever scintilla of knowledge we possess, exists in a sea of ignorance and unknowing. And if there’s any meaning to be derived from any of this, we kind of have to fabricate it ourselves and decide what’s important to us in particular.
[00:38:31] Jason: So, I mean, there’s no real guidebook, there’s no onus manual. I mean, you know, engineering is different. “Read the manual,” you know, it’s all there. Life is not like that. Parents don’t have a manual when they are socializing their child, which is why so many of them do a bad job.
[00:39:08] Helen: Well, in the interest of time, because I know we have a bunch to cover, I’ll, nudge you along to the next stanza too.
[00:39:18] Jason: Sure. Well, you know, “let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men.” We are sustained, the fountain is the image of sustenance, and, it gives us the capability of sustaining life, right?
[00:39:45] Jason: And, but it is a gift of the universe and it was not made by the hands of men. That’s for damn sure. And again, “the road before us, the road is the journey, the road is the path. There is a road, no simple highway. Between the dawn and the dark of night,” which is a beautiful line.
[00:40:10] Jason: So simple and gorgeous, right? “There is a road, no simple highway between the dawn and the dark of night,” and that, you know, that is the journey between the dawn and the dark. “And, if you go, no one may follow that path is for your steps alone.” And I mean, if there’s any message in the song, that’s pretty close to it, you know? I can tell you this, I can tell you that, I can tell you some of the things you’re going to face, but by Jiminy, you’re on your own, buddy.
[00:40:50] Jason: And so is every one of us. You know? And that doesn’t mean, it has to be tragic and lonely or anything else, but it’s just, it’s essential to see the parameters for what they are. And, that in and of itself is useful, even if I can’t give you any specific advice and how to deal with all this stuff, I can at least tell you what you’re facing and kind of the broad outlines of, what’s happening, but it says here, so that, and it significantly, right after “that path is for your steps alone.” The refrain comes in again. Right? “Ripple on still water where there is no pebble to when there is no pebble toss no wind to blow,” alright?
[00:41:53] Jason: The overriding emotion in this entire work is humility, and humility has a lot to do with living productively, and it has a lot to do with, you know, attaining some kind of understanding in order to know, what does Socrates do? What was Socrates greatest statement?
[00:42:44] Jason: I don’t know. “Here’s a philosopher who’s supposed to tell us what’s going on,” right? And his greatest achievement was telling us that he doesn’t know. And he, this supposed wise man who has thought about all these things and has a tremendous intellect and a tremendous talent, he can say, I don’t know.
[00:43:12] Jason: And that’s what Robert Hunter is saying in the song. So, don’t think you’re a big shot, okay? You who choose to lead must follow, but if you fall, you fall alone. You must follow. You can’t do this on your own. You have to have something, there is something before you and there is some intelligence before you, and there is some insight before you.
[00:43:54] Jason: So you’re not, the big shot leader of this adventure, okay? But you bear the ultimate responsibility for how it turns out. If you fall, you fall alone, right? I mean, it’s a paradox, just another paradox. Song is full of paradoxes, as is living on Earth, full of paradoxes. And, hopefully some of those paradoxes, which we can’t resolve, the awareness of the paradox itself, the attempt to deal with the koan and derive something from contemplating it, you know, is what we are constantly in the process of doing.
[00:44:46] Jason: We are constantly presented by, with irresolvable paradoxes. that does not mean that life has no meaning. And it just means that we’re not the master of the universe.
[00:45:02] Helen: Which I mean, one big question we’re all going to have to face, is, you know, if not already soon going to be not the most intelligent, entities, on the planet either, at least in the physical reality of time space with AI getting smarter. But again, that might be a different rabbit hole.
[00:45:25] Jason: Here’s the interesting thing. What I did was I, wrote my analysis of Ripple. I didn’t tell AI about my analysis, I kept it to myself. The question I posed to AI was the same question. “Provide an in depth analysis of the thematic structure and meaning of Robert Hunter’s transcendent poem that Jerry Garcia masterfully set to music in Ripple 1970 by the Grateful Dead.”
[00:45:55] Jason: That was my prompt to Chat GPT4, right? And, what it provided was a very detailed, structured analysis of that work. And it did a remarkably adept job. When I took a look at this, and I said to myself, in some ways, this is superior to my human intelligence, analysis result, right?
[00:46:33] Jason: And in other ways, it lacks something. It was kind of technocratic. It was very detailed and very accurate. It was not quite so fully developed in terms of associations in the world and feelings. And my analysis had a more personal touch. Indeed, if you read the two, if I presented these two to you and said, “which was written by AI and which was written by a human being?” I think the human element would be evident in what I wrote.
[00:47:08] Jason: Okay? So it, it was less detailed, but more emotional. It had an emotional validity that the technical analysis by, which was very adept and very accurate and had a human feeling to it, by the way, okay. I’m not saying it was devoid of human feelings. But I just think the thing that people have to realize is that, how was it capable of doing that?
[00:47:47] Jason: How did it turn out something that was so thoughtful and so on target? It’s because it scrapes what is out there on the internet. Ripple, is a piece that has been considered a seminal work of the Grateful Dead consider and considered one of their better efforts, right?
[00:48:19] Jason: And also, most perfect execution and structure. So it has a lot going for it. And professors and PhD students and all sorts of other people have put an awful lot of effort into thinking about analyzing and, disambiguating Ripple, by the Grateful Dead. So it was drawing, AI was drawing on a huge body of, information in order to create something quite amazingly adept and plausible, alright?
[00:49:06] Helen: I didn’t realize until I got the article that Stanford actually has a course on the Grateful Dead. So just to, you know, add a little color to that too, like that’s how studied this song is.
[00:49:21] Jason: I mentioned that in my article, actually.
[00:49:23] Helen: We linked to the course too [in the blog post].
[00:49:25] Jason: The time on its statement, you know, he was a great man, but he was standing on the shoulder of giants.
[00:49:32] Jason: Okay? That’s a very commonplace metaphor, right? And, it’s often true, by the way. But the thing is that, AI was standing on the shoulder of giants. AI didn’t come, what I said in the piece, AI didn’t create this like Athena, arose from the head of Zeus in Greek mythology, right?
[00:50:01] Jason: It was standing on the shoulder of giants, shoulders of giants. And who were those giants? They were the people, the academics and the students and the enthusiasts for rock lyrics, et cetera, et cetera, who wrote a lot of insightful stuff and heartfelt stuff on the subject of Ripple by the Grateful Dead, it couldn’t have done it without the work of human beings.
[00:50:30] Jason: So the notion that AI, stands aside and was very bright and and challenged human intelligence and will soon surpass us. Well, it, can surpass us in certain respects. But there are things that are distinctly human that, I don’t think it’s going to surpass us. It may do different things more adeptly than we could possibly do, because it’s a computerized technology that can analyze, you know, gigabytes of data in seconds, you know, so it has, certain operational advantages over the mere human brain and it’s axons and neurons, but…
[00:51:23] Helen: There’s something like super meta about the song Ripple being so much about the human experience. Like, if you want the original training data, it’s like the author of the song Hunter, you know, his human lived experience that informed the song, you know, that universal, but grounded in human experience, and then your human experience analysis, and then all the synthesis of everyone you just mentioned to AI to then, you know, analyze the human analysis of the actual song based on the human experience, and we played with AI even more beyond that too. So it’s a lot of layers to make this piece possible.
[00:52:12] Jason: Here’s the thing. The brilliant stroke was actually suggested by Lisa Eward. I collaborated with her mostly on the graphics. She was responsible for creating those graphics, using AI, by the way.
[00:52:35] Jason: And that was fine, but we were talking about it and she said, “well, why don’t you put your analysis, your original analysis through Chat GPT4 and see what it comes up with. You asked it to do its own analysis based on whatever information it had and could configure, right?
[00:53:00] Jason: And it did a masterful job. But what would happen if you put your analysis that Chat GPT did not have before and ask it the same question?” In other words, use pretty much the same prompt, but just put in your, human intelligence created analysis and see what it says. And it was fascinating.
[00:53:28] Jason: First of all, the whole thing came out at a much higher level than the original question, just analyze this song, right? And that to me was remarkable in itself. The other thing is when I read it, it was very complimentary to my analysis. It said a lot of nice things about it, “and he adeptly did this, and he added this personal touch, and he,” in other words, it was very complimentary to me, personally, to see what AI thought of my piece.
[00:54:17] Jason: My original piece, right? I thought to myself, “this is a little scary.” And the reason it’s scary is not because it was such a good job, although that was impressive. It seemed to be flattering me. Okay? Is AI capable of flattery?
[00:54:36] Helen: Absolutely.
[00:54:37] Jason: And is AI capable of flattering a mere human being? You know, this exalted, intellectual super monster? Is it capable of flattering, little old me, really? And, so I think it is a very, fascinating look at the piece in its entirety. It’s a fascinating look on some of the proclivities of AI. AI is not just a… AI is a soulless, manipulative system that scrapes data and puts it together in different ways based on the input command. That’s true, but, I think that the piece in its entirety with the three elements, the human intelligence, the artificial intelligence, and then the artificial, the AI analysis of the human version, I think, says something, that unexpected, to me, at least, about the nature of AI and what it can and cannot do.
[00:56:08] Jason: I think it’s fascinating that the final version analyzing my human intelligence created version, right? The fact that it was, I think, superior to what AI in and of itself originally turned out, maybe a compliment to me. Thank you very much AI.
[00:56:37] Jason: But, it’s also indicative of where AI is at and maybe what some of it’s – I asked myself, is this something deep, but also superficial about what it turned out, if you see what I mean
[00:56:56] Helen: I mean, to your point, about the flattery, and if AI can do that, absolutely. Like, Aza Raskin has said this, that if social media was a race to the bottom of the emotions of like fear, AI is a race to intimacy where it feels, but it’s still just predictive of like, trying to figure out – it’s almost like the next evolution of algorithms of like telling us what we wanna hear, to a certain extent.
[00:57:23] Helen: So the fact that it’s flattering doesn’t surprise me at all because it’s literally designed to tell us what we want on the prompt, on that side. So yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
[00:57:39] Jason: Well, I mean, you would think that a system that is, based on mechanistic criteria, would turn out something more dispassionate, if you see what I mean.
[00:58:01] Helen: Well, I think something else interesting about how AI learns, that, kind of popped into my mind earlier in the conversation is, when you were reinforcing the point of the song of like the human experience, like each of our individual human experiences is ours alone to understand.
[00:58:23] Helen: No one can really understand our internal, you know, world, of how we navigate the world. When you said that, and like, this also came from Aza Raskin, when he had a fantastic interview with, or fireside chat on stage with Yvonne Harari.
[00:58:47] Helen: But the difference on how we learn versus AI learns, like, Aza said this, like, “I can show you, I can teach you how to play the piano, but I can’t play the piano for you. Like you have to actually go through the experience to learn how to play the piano. AI does not work that way. AI is, I can learn the piano and then copy paste into the next iteration of AI. So it transfers, the experience.”
[00:59:16] Helen: So I find that really fascinating too, of fundamentally how humans learn versus AI learn is very, very different.
[00:59:27] Jason: Well, I keep on saying, I love the image of William Butler Yates, in his great poem, The Second Coming. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
[00:59:50] Jason: Things fall apart. The center, cannot hold. Near anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” And that of course was, he was a millennialist and he believed that the world came around again in 2000 year cycles and so on and so on. But one of his great images in that poem is fastened to a dying animal. He describes himself as fastened to a dying animal, which is a, sort of a pretty pungent description of the human condition and its awareness of death. Alright? And, I think that the fact that we are fastened to a dying animal will mean that there is going to be something different.
[01:00:48] Jason: You couldn’t put it in mathematical terms, or at least I couldn’t. There is something different about something created by AI that is the result of the fact that AI is not fastened to a dying animal. And I think that one’s experience as a mortal human creature is qualitatively different from an AI personage or intelligence.
[01:01:18] Jason: Now, you know, beyond a certain point, what AI turns out may be good enough to replicate art. It is entirely possible that AI will be able to create the great American novel where there is tension and emotion and character development and you know all the sorts of things that we expect, you know, from a first rate work of fiction.
[01:01:45] Jason: So it may be able to produce something so close to human output that it doesn’t matter, but at some level it does matter is what I’m trying to say, alright? The fact that it can fool you into thinking that it is a competent writer, who has had a full life, and life experiences full of emotions and has created a work of art and the fact that it can create something so, so believable that, it will fool you when it is really, you know, an artificial creation, that’s interesting.
[01:02:25] Jason: But, again, I point to the original fact that I, that I stated before. AI could not have done its original analysis of Ripple when I asked it to give me an analysis. It couldn’t have done as good a job if scholars and rock enthusiasts and poetry enthusiasts and students had not provided a body of work based on human perception and human experience and human analysis that had been previously published.
[01:03:07] Jason: It simply wouldn’t have raw data of that quality based on that human experience to draw upon. So in a sense, AI may be able to create a human and human works, but that human is an imposter in some real sense.
[01:03:29] Helen: One thing that I find interesting in what you said, it was kind of what I was trying to articulate, what was it, last week? But, it didn’t come out very well. Humans, we live in time and space in the real world and our imagination is limitless, but in the human experience and reality, there’s limitations, in that regard. And yet the internet is this infinite space and you know, it’s only going to get more infinite with AI and assuming it’s all plugged in and all this stuff.
[01:04:01] Helen: And It’s a different type of thinking when we apply the human experience when we think of everything as objects or in the physical world. But where we’re at is much more existing or thinking like how imagination works because the internet is more infinite or digital than our actual physical way that we experience the world.
[01:04:26] Helen: So, I’m still kind of fleshing out those concepts, but that’s kind of to your point, like, yeah, the tension between finite and infinite, I think is something that, you know, and the internet is very relatively new and we’re kind of as a human being still grappling with what does it mean to have a tool that models our imagination to a certain extent, and all these other superpowers too. So that’s something I’ve been marinating on and, so curious if you have any reactions to that.
[01:04:57] Jason: Well, we are the modulation between the finite and the infinite. In other words, we are the intermediary quantity. You could say we have the finite in one hand and the infinite in the other hand, you know, and, I’m not sure of what it means when people say AI is going to take over.
[01:05:25] Jason: It’s going to surpass us. It has the potential for doing terrible things and it’s going to make us all irrelevant. I don’t think that’s true, okay? And the ironic part about it is that we’re not irrelevant. And we won’t be irrelevant, unless we manage to destroy ourselves, which is another possibility, but, or that some accident of the universe, you know, wipes us out, which is another possibility.
[01:06:00] Jason: I think the human experience as the intermediary between the finite and the infinite is what our role is. And I don’t think that we are gonna be rendered irrelevant, although we can certainly be surpassed in many operational ways by an infinite internet and by an AI beyond our imagination at the present time, right?
[01:06:28] Jason: So it’s, you know, any great invention, as proven in the past has the capacity to transform the human experience and our lives in ways that are unimaginable at the point that technology originally became available.
[01:07:02] Jason: I think about, “we’re a human being. Yeah, we can run better than most, and have better endurance in running than most other species.” That was one of the reasons that we managed to survive and prosper on the planet Earth. So, we started out, so we were reasonably adept at walking and moving, but you know, going from town to town, you know, it takes effort.
[01:07:30] Jason: You know, if a town is 30 miles away, you got to walk. And then we decided to get on top of a horse and do other things, you know, but, we finally, Mr. Otto came along and he made the internal combustion engine and, which is a bad idea that was perfected very well.
[01:07:58] Jason: And so we have the automobile that has transformed the world and, you know, paved paradise and put up a parking lot, right? And has proceeded in ways that were unpredictable at the inception. The automobile started out as a play toy for rich people, right?
[01:08:23] Jason: And, now it’s this universal device that has transformed our, certainly the United States of America, and, so there are super highways all over the place and everyone is driving around in a car and so, it proceeded in unpredictable ways and all these things proceeded in unpredictable ways.
[01:08:46] Jason: Atomic energy proceeded in unpredictable ways. You know, I’m an expert on photography. Photography proceeded in unpredictable ways. You can get an interesting insight into this. The way digital photography transformed photography. Photography is selecting a specific thing, mostly from reality that’s out there, right? And selecting a significant rectangle and saying, “look at this.
[01:09:17] Jason: I am focusing your attention on this. This is what I want you to look at. Here’s the photographic print of it.” Right? So everyone says photography is not the same. Photography is still using human intelligence, emotions, selectivity, if you want, to select from the roiling world around us, something significant that deserves our attention.
[01:09:53] Jason: So what the photographer is saying by taking a picture and printing it out is, “look at this, right? Not that, that, that, that… this.” Right? Focused attention, right? That is essentially the same process, whether you’re using a chemical based capture medium, like film, or whether you’re using an electronic based capture medium, you know, like a digital sensor.
[01:10:20] Jason: The process is the same, right? And sometimes we have the illusion that the entire thing is transformed by technology, right? So I think that, we should resist the fact that is AI is… AI is a simulation of intelligence. It is not real intelligence in the same way.
[01:10:54] Jason: You can perfect it. You can make it so good that you can’t tell the difference. And so it may be irrelevant whether it’s different or not, but operationally irrelevant, but conceptually and existentially, it is different from human intelligence. And I think it’s important to recognize that, and you know, the only thing that people who say AI is going to take over the world and it’s going to be gone, the only thing that they have going for them, in that worldview is that, if it’s so close that you can’t tell the difference, who cares? Right?
[01:11:34] Jason: But I think the difference is important. It’s important conceptually and existentially to realize that the difference between human intelligence and – I think human intelligence, if it has any asset, it is both the bane and glory of human existence that we feel pain, we die, and we have emotions.
[01:12:09] Jason: And AI doesn’t really have emotions. It may, be able to simulate emotions, but that’s quite a different thing. From living as a human being on the planet Earth.
[01:12:21] Helen: Very well said. You kind of said it in your last answer, but… Well, one question I ask all of my guests is if you want our listeners and viewers to remember one thing from today’s conversation or in general, what’s that one thing that you want them to walk away with.
[01:12:38] Jason: The fact that humans are limited and contingent and imperfect is part of the glory of being a human being. Like the Japanese value the beauty of imperfection in their art, so human beings should value the glory and beauty of imperfection in themselves. The fact that AI can produce something more perfect than we are, is both an asset and a liability.
[01:13:16] Helen: Similar to the paradoxes, which I now have a new appreciation for, you’ve given so much to contemplate and, I know I’m going to reread your post again and encourage everyone to read the article up on Creativity Squared, and we’d love to hear your reactions to the song itself, or maybe you play with it, with AI.
[01:13:41] Helen: I did put it through a Google LM, to see what it said. And we have a blog post with that on it too. I would love to get everyone’s feedback.
[01:13:50] Jason: I would just say, post production, just remember that a paradox is just two physicians and, and a paradigm is, a 20 cents.
[01:14:06] Helen: Okay. We’ll stop there. We’re definitely going to include that, Jason. I love all your little things.
[01:14:14] Jason: You can include it. Well, great it was wonderful.
[01:14:23] Helen: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support.
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