A Poem in Pixels
The somatosensory cortex is the portion of the brain that makes sense of sense data without recourse to nor interference from language, as I understand things. I’m not a brain expert, but I am given to understand that the tuning of this cortex is to the body, the skin, the eyes that see a projectile heading in this direction, etc.—things we need to attend to below the radar of language. Proprioception, for example, is the sensory mechanism that enables us to maintain balance, to sidestep a mud puddle maybe without having to think “Move your left foot sideways by eight inches, lift your fight foot, pivot to the left,” and so on. By contrast, an AI robot approaching a mud puddle would have to draw on active algorithms to program each individual movement. Which of us is more intelligent, eh? I am completely certain that bots cannot write poetry, and this is why: No one could possibly generate a finite set of instructions for encoding and decoding a poem, not even the poet herself. The only place that might occur is during “exercises” in a classroom, and the class set of poems would be unremarkably similar.
