cervantes – Lee Duigon

Mindless simulations of human thought processes will only take you so far. It is not “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise. It’s an imitation.

Nowhere is that more obviously seen than in the arts. And yes, translation is an art. If you can read enough Spanish to get by in Cervantes, you soon realize that no translation into English has ever quite done him justice.

Dig Google’s computer “translation” of the Simon & Garfunkel classic, The Sounds of Silence. Because a robot has no mind, and can only do whatever it’s been programmed to do, and is bound to be even more of a doofus than the programmer, what comes out here is pretty close to pure gibberish.

Gee, I can hardly wait till they translate the Declaration of Independence.

Here is a quote that just jumped out at me this morning, as I was reading the “Christian Marriage” chapter in Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.

“[M]ake sure that you are judging me by what you really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your friends, and not by ideas you have derived from novels and films. This is not so easy to do as people think. Our experience is colored through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.”

Wow! And he wrote that before we had television, comic books, and video games to confuse us even more.

In Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote of a man going totally bonkers just from all the silly books he read. But Lewis is not talking about popping your cork. No–he’s talking about not being able to tell the difference between the inside and the outside of the bottle anymore, or even to realize that the bottle is there.

What do any of us know that we really only know from television?

If that thought doesn’t make you want to cling to God’s word with both hands, for all you’re worth, I don’t know what will.