Nature, Beauty, Art (and AI)

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. —Albert Einstein All forms of language are by nature ambiguous. This is because languages consist of symbols—representations—of things. These symbols may be words, images, glyphs, gestures, or other perceptible signs. Ambiguity arises because the connection between a symbol and the thing it symbolizes (in linguistic terms, the connection between a “signifier” and the thing “signified”) is never absolute and may depend on context. For example, the word “cat” on its own is likely to be perceived as relating to a furry animal. However, to the road worker grading the dirt track in front of my house, “cat” may be a reference to a piece of heavy machinery derived from the machine manufacturer’s brand: Caterpillar. To a user of a Unix operating system, “cat”…