Comment by TeMPOraL
1 day ago
I mean what is your criterion on invention here? On the one hand, each specific word could be seen as a new invention. On the other hand, all languages basically correlate strongly with the environment of their users - it's why LLMs turn out to be universal translators - and pattern-matching is hardly an invention, isn't it?
I don't know, but my current intuition is that invention = more or less preexisting ingredients + some tiny spark of creativity ("connecting the dots") rather than this grand myth of "creating something from nothing". And then the tiny spark could itself be a remix of previous tiny sparks (connecting the dots between dot connections, a bit like maps between n, n+1, n+2, ...-dimensional manifolds), and so on.
> and pattern-matching is hardly an invention
Exactly. That's what I meant with turtles all the way down, until the tiny spark disappears into a dot and it turns out that creativity is just an illusion - akin to how nobody would call the gene (the spark, the pattern matching) formed by evolution (the brain connectome) "creative".