"Your memory is a river. What is a lake?"

In AI, cutting edge is "Creativity Machines". An expert system is slowly cut off from its data source, so that it begins to corrupt, and it has to work through problems in novel ways. The output is then examined for useful novelties.

Experience flows through you like a river. It cuts deeply and quickly at first, and as it slows it creates meanders, forks, and forms pools and backwaters. Your dreams (in the sense of "REM sleep impressions") are lakes of experience that have become cut off from the data stream: evidence of inevitable corruption as brain cells go about their lifelong business of dying. In the sense of "aspirations" or "goals", your experiences mold your dreams as inexorably and blindly as water eroding rock in response to gravity. If I have a dream, is it mine, or does it belong to the experiences that shaped "me", the natural forces that made it?

In terms of Gloranthan Illumination philosophy, this Nysalori riddle points out the dissonance between what we are and what we strive to be, and helps support a theory of redeeming Chaos.

Nysalori riddles

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