Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…together that satisfy constraint. Although when you have a new idea, often it's putting existing ideas together into a new hole. But I think creativity can be much more than that. I mean, if we think about what we discussed about what it means to be a physicist and how science proceeds, I mean, it's an example of creativity. You know, if you think about creativity like Newton, understanding the motion of planets and things like that. I mean, we talked about dialogue between experiment and theory. We talked about building models at a good level of description. We talked about analogies. And I don't think I agree with you that I, for example, all that, I don't think it's in the machine. I think there is no reason why we would not be able 1 day to build machines that can do that. I'm not sure if just scanning up things will lead to that. I think maybe we need to do more introspection of how we function as scientists to come up with a good data set and the good procedures to teach machines to be good scientists. So just an example, like creativity in science requires a lot of abilities to create something really new and how to interact with the world around us that I don't think machines have and yet. I mean, so I think I agree with you that just getting up, I don't think will lead to total success. We need to have developed other abilities in those machines. Yeah. I think I'm just trying to understand what the gap is because it would be consistent with your argument. If you're saying that we can learn the abstract structure of the world and be generatively competent in 1 domain, why would we not Because for me creativity is not just about coherence and respecting the constraints. I mean transformative creativity in my mind is about discovering interesting new subspaces. So we can traverse these constraints collectively and serendipitously sometimes we happen upon these fascinating new subspaces and we go on to explore them. And when we look back after discovering them, think, that was a very transformative creative stepping stone. Yes. I think if you look at the history of science was very clear. I mean, like think about mathematician inventing imaginary numbers or Newton describing the motion of planets or regents and something about waves and diffraction. I mean humans forever have seen waves entering a port and being diffracted. So starting to make more circle like patterns. But okay, if you're just showing those patterns to machine, it would sort of stupidly predict the next frame because it's under I mean, velocity will propagate. But but what do we do as physicists? We have to 1st, some people are really good at observing that something is intriguing. Then you have to simplify the geometry. So maybe you put it in a very simple geometry. And then you have to then as an aspect of modeling that I was describing, how do we model this and so on. And so I think all that is very much needed and I don't see how you could know, it's your interaction with the world and simplifying the world and and that requires an interaction. So I don't think you can learn it just by looking at everything that was ever written without enforcing those interactions.…

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