The Stuff of Souls: AI & Imagination

Does our mind give us a soul? Is our mind "made of" nothing but physical parts?

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We used Generative AI various way for each shot of the video. We used stable diffusion and midjourney. The motion was controlled using Runways GEN-2 Motion brush. You can see my storyboarding concepts evolved and converged on the video above. A lot of this exploratoy process is thinking about how the visual narrative pairs with the quote itself. Trying things out, seeing how it looks, if it feels right.

Much of the aesthetic was generated by prompting for "tilt shift photography."

For the expanding neurons I started with an animation of a particle source, ran it through stable diffusion, and then used prompts in Haiper to ask for "Nissl stains", which is a technique to visualize biological tissue.

The voice started as my own, to define the pacing, which I cleaned up with Adobe's sound tools because I recorded it on a rooftop deck where there was background traffic. I ended up using eleven labs to create a whole new voice, more fitting for the Dan narrator.

Dan was always looking for biological explanations. So an animate / inanimate wooden fish works on many levels. Dan rebuked a Christian view, and what better animal to stand for both Jesus and the complexity of nature. And what do we humans do? We fly fish. You might not follow all my symbolism, but maybe the vibe of tiny toy world speaks to you on a perceptual level.

Dan's book published in 2017 is called "From Bacteria To Bach And Back: The Evolution Of Minds." You can listen to him talk about his view on Radio Boston.

I reworked another version to be more "soulful" using funk music:

How about the soul in our music? Is it born from individual experience?

Prompts included "soulful male voice" and "funk" with the lyrics from Dan's quote. But they song itself, and the voice is from udio.

As the creator of this video, I feel there is a lot of "me" in there - from my own experience reading Dan's books, to the trial and error generation and curation of media. Yet I also recognize much of it that is "not me." I am quoting someone else, feeding "lyrics" into a song generator, and prompts into image generators. Everything stands on a pile of culture and reference, entangled in our collective data, and modeled (moderately well), by our current algorithms, and curated preferences.

A few days after I completed this video, Dan Dennet passed away. It took the wind out of my sails. I wanted to talk to Dan. He was one of my childhood philosophy heros. The result was that I stopped sharing it. Even though I made it for people to see, it somehow seemed tacky. After some time has passed, I still like it, and it makes me smille when I imagine his conversations and the translations for the Italian newspaper.

Exactly, thats the view.

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The Stuff of Souls: AI & Imagination

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