Playing God
To answer the first question, it's like evolution, and you get to be God. Now, for a skeptic, God is no more than chance, coincidence, and random happenstance, if we even accredit that much substance to him. For others, the random happenstance and the successes and failures of life are evidence of God's favor and disfavor. We need only read the Book of Job to understand the human connection between good and bad life events and God himself.
Growing up in a Catholic household, we're taught that God speaks to us through our experiences. We see signs as a matter of spirituality and these signs communicate things to us. They communicate things from God. At base, the skeptical approach to this would be to say, this is a fiction created out of chance to control that which is beyond our power to control, or at least place hardship into a context we can live with.
Today, methods of divination rely alternatively on chance or time. Astrology relies on time. I Ching relies on chance. Tarot relies on chance. Catholics rely on signs and happenstance.
For skeptics, we all have life experiences that taught us valuable life lessons. But we don't attribute them to the workings of a conscious benefactor.
As a writer working with ngram poetry, and now an artist working with ngram images, we rely on the random number generator to provide us with unique images each time through. There is no way to generate a random number ex nihilo. Instead, mathematicians create a "twister" algorithm that mimics the distribution of a randomly generated set. This algorithm would produce the same content over and over but for the fact that it takes one variable as a seed. Two seeds that are the same would produce the same set of numbers over and over. So, it looks like we have the same problem, right? We still can't generate a random number!
There are two ways around this problem. The first is to ask the user for a seed. The second is to generate the seed using the computer's unique timestamp. So, let's travel back to God. God is chance, and chance is Time. At least for those of us who use computer algorithms to generate poetry and images.
Evolution
Now, how do animals evolve? Well, evolution gives us a testable if unsatisfying answer. If you throw poop at the wall enough times, eventually, you'll end up with a Picasso. Since you don't want to show your friends your crappy paintings, you only show them the Picasso. "Wow," they said. "That's like Picasso." The only major difference between you and Picasso is that Picasso is a painter and sculptor and you work in a different medium.
Evolution keeps Picassos and throws away the rest. So, every new template is based on a previous Picasso. This recursive element is what allows the poop-throwing process to occasionally stick. We're always basing our next Picasso on a previous Picasso.
To play God, you must be willing to cull. In fact, culling will be your most important act. In nature, the environment determines which are fittest. Some may see an invisible hand at play, but you don't need an invisible hand to describe what's happening. You only need the unpleasant metaphor I provided above. The artist thus becomes the equivalent of nature, selecting the fittest Picassos from the bunch. The vast majority of this will come down to chance. If you're a rabbit crossing an open field when an eagle happens to be flying by, it's the inverse of an artist noticing a particularly poignant representation and then selecting that for his Instagram or creating a sequence of images to tell a story, or alternatively, unfit for reproduction.
As a writer, you don't get to invent a lot of new words. You might get one or two if you're lucky. Ultimately, we're used to this. This mode of representation doesn't even feel new to us. This is our game.
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