Viewing profile — bbenzon

I gave ChatGPT three lists of topics for which it had to propose categories into which the topics could be sorted. Two lists were relatively short, 56 and 53 topics; I asked ChatGP…

ChatGPT responds the prompt, "story", with a simple story. 10 stories elicited by that prompt in a single session have a greater variety of protagonists than 10 stories each elicit…

In a few cases ChatGPT responds to a prompt (e.g. "To be or not to be") by returning a specific text word-for-word. More often (e.g. "Johnstown flood, 1889") it returns with inform…

This article recounts an intellectual journey that began in curiosity about the structure of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" in the late 1960s and has led to an interest in large language…

Culture elaborates expressive forms by developing ever more differentiated control over patterns in the expressive medium. In Rank 1 culture (preliterate) music evolves through con…

Chuck Jones believed in the “disciplines” one had to maintain for a cartoon, the constraints within which one acted. In the Road Runner cartoons, no one talked, though there could …

This is a brief guide to the various papers and books that William Benzon and David Hays have written about the long-term evolution of culture. Much of the work is descriptive in t…

This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding "Kubla Khan," which has an e…

These notes are in preparation for a post I will make on 5 July 2010 at the Forum on the website the National Humanities Center. I have been posting them on my blog, New Savanna (s…

Opening paragraph: The ontology of common sense is the discipline which seeks to establish the categories which are used in everyday life to characterize objects and events. In eve…