Birds of paradise: With or without AI

 

Although, the bird of paradise flowers have been a part of my backyard for a number of years now, it was only recently, while pulling off their black, dry heads, last  October, with my extremely ‘green’ thumbs, that I became curious about them. What were these birds of paradise doing in my backyard? How come I had never stopped to observe the lifecycle of these exotic flowers?

I asked the same question of other regular visitors, the cockatoos.  Sometimes one, sometimes two, and sometimes more, I have found them becoming increasingly comfortable, over the course of the past year, on the railings of my deck, pecking on the tidbits I offer on a daily basis.  While my associations with both the birds of paradise and the cockatoo go back to the past 20 years of me living in and away from Sydney, since last year, I have grown very close to both.  In many ways they have both become for me more than flowers and birds found in the Hills Shire of Sydney.  And I wonder, why? Why do the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees in our lives become more than what they are?  Is it just my wild imagination that is ready to assign to every piece of concrete reality, every human experience, an abstract meaning and significance? Is it only artists and creative writers who are always trying to imaginatively connect the dots to create signs, symbols and narratives that hold space and meaning for them and others? Or is it all of us? 

I wish I had a Slow-Mo camera and I could slow down time and capture the processing of an ordinary human mind.  A mind processing 1.2 billion bits of information every second and slow it down  to track how quickly it perceives a ‘reality’, like a flower in a garden, synthesizes the information given to it by the senses of sight, smell, sound, touch or motion, and assigns to the ‘real’ flower, within seconds, an abstract meaning and a name: Bird of paradise.

Just to put it in context, the human mind does not ‘search’ like the internet or AI.  Try it.

A basic Google search of, ‘bird of paradise’ pops a series of generic links on your screen, including Wikipedia, and you will find the following information, organized and sequenced in this way: ‘Strelitzia reginae, commonly known as the crane flower, bird of paradise, or isigude in Nguni,^[3] is a species of flowering plant native to the Cape Provinces and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. An evergreen perennial, it is widely cultivated for its dramatic flowers. In temperate areas it is a popular houseplant.

And there you have it: scientific name, common names, other names in other languages, botanical facts, geographical location, more botanical facts, and finally how humans have used it. And while this is all good to have all the facts of the 5Ws ( Who, what, where, when and why) stated clearly, for our convenience, I do want to point out, this is organized random factual information, given with the purpose to inform.

But who thinks like that? I don’t, for sure.

The first thing I look for when I search ‘bird of paradise’ is the flower itself.  My senses come to life and I see.  Without words.  And recognize what my mind has been created to recognize. Beauty. Perfection.

Fascinated as I am by the resemblance of the flower to the bird, I become interested in the thought process that would make someone call it a ‘crane flower’ or a ‘bird of paradise’.  I wonder if it was a gardener or a farmer or a hitch hiker who first saw it and named it crane flower? In slo-mo mode, I retrace the steps they must have taken to name it. They must have processed it sensuously first, taken in visually the vibrancy of the colors, the exotic orange and the purple, and the  shape of the petals, and the arrangement, the difference in the number, thickness, shape and size of the petals and sifted through their database of memory and flowers and realized this was not something they had seen before. The mind would shift cognitive gears to similar and related databases of similar shapes, the bird-like beak, the plumes on the head, and see the bird in the flower.  And so in an instant, two physically different life forms are put together in one name: ‘crane flower’.

I smile, because even though I may be wrong about the facts of who named the crane, decades later, it is so easy for me to retrace the steps taken by another human mind and retrack their process of identifying, sorting, comparing, connecting, categorizing, blending, synthesizing and finally, naming.

I am not asking AI to define ‘the process of Naming’.  There right there is my definition of naming. Naming is what the human mind does. Instinctively. To bring together a synthesis and blend the many into one.

And that’s what my 5-year old son told me, in 2001, when he first saw an SUV,  ‘It looks like a cupboard, mum’.

And that’s what my 14 year old student, in year 9, said to me, when I asked them after a lesson on the Freudian structure of the human psyche, ‘what part of your psyche do you think is the voice in your head? Is it your super-ego, ego or id? And while many of them grappled to identify, sort, connect, categorize and synthesize the complexity of lived experiences into an answer, one of them said, ‘Miss, it’s the narrator, isn’t it?’

Could AI do that? Think creatively, like that? Connect two vastly different and complex ideas and come up with a creative and unique ‘name’? And while I continue to admire the richness of thinking and the many beautiful connections my children, students and people around me continue to draw, I don’t know if AI could replicate that process of naming in unique and new ways?

Not sure. Maybe. One day. I am no expert. But it does make me hold on to the precious rarity of the ordinary human mind and the ways in which it navigates, conducts and arrives at its ‘search’,  and through that process creates and adds to the richness, diversity and beauty of our thought pool. Complex and simple as a ‘crane flower’.

I turn to its second name ‘Bird of paradise’.  And it seems that the act of ‘seeing’ and ‘naming’ goes beyond similar physical attributes.  There’s a glory missing in ‘crane flower’. And the mind yearns to find it. And so, fond of speed, it moves quite quickly, from the corporeality of the bird and the flower, to the abstract ‘paradise’ in search of an imaginative utopia of existence. And one can see in this leap, an instinctual yearning for a metamorphosis that makes it possible for  flowers to turn into birds, and climb the rungs of a golden ladder of evolution, onto a higher form of existence.

I wonder if AI can give me directions to the metamorphosis I yearn for?  And so I asked it. 

Can you give me directions to the metamorphosis I yearn for?

And here is what Meta AI on my WhatsApp chat said,

‘The Metamorphosis! That’s a powerful and thought-provoking novella by Frank Kafka.

Are you looking for directions to a physical location, or are you seeking guidance on how to experience a personal transformation or metamorphosis in your life?

If you’re looking for the book, I can provide information on where to find it or how to access it online. If you’re seeking personal growth or transformation, I’d be happy to offer some general advice or guidance.

Does AI wish to transcend and metamorphose like a human does?  

‘That’s a philosophical question. AI systems like myself don’t possess consciousness or desires, including yearning for transcendence or metamorphosis. We exist to process and generate information based on our programming and training, whereas human desires and aspirations stem from complex emotional, psychological and experiential factors. However AI can certainly assist humans exploring these abstract concepts!’

I am quite sure if I ask it to give me evidence of how humans have attributed transformative and transcendental qualities to flowers and birds, beyond their physical capacity, it will give me a long list of examples. And it did. Thanks AI. And I select the following only and share them.  Did you know that ‘the flower’s resemblance to a crown or headdress’ made Egyptians associate the bird of paradise with ‘Isis, the goddess of fertility, magic and protection’?  Did you also know that many Chinese birds and flowers paintings serve as symbols of many noble virtues?  And while the postmodern godless world dismisses the virtues attached to birds and flowers as morally subjective and superstitious, one can not help recognizing in the symbolic meaning attached to flowers, birds, and the myths or folktales associated with them, a plethora of rich imaginative, metaphorical and virtuous associations that bring together a vision of aesthetic, emotional and moral value that the human mind has imprinted on our natural world, and imbued it with a significance that goes beyond the botanical facts of its existence.

 

While the desire to revel in the beauty of the natural world maybe instinctual to the human mind, why do we yearn to imbue the objects around us with emotional and moral value?  Look at the intriguing common name of this flower, Love-lies-bleeding. I wonder who named it. No AI. Maybe another time.  Angela Carson in her article, Love Lies Bleeding: A Memorable Name for a Striking Plant  unpacks the symbolism behind the name, inspired by ‘the long, swinging strings of blooms that droop, sometimes from the very top of the plant to the ground’.  The flower, she writes, is a symbol of ‘hopeless love’. But how? And while my mind races to find connections between an intense emotional experience of unrequited loss and the beauty of red flowers,  I am more amazed by the process of thinking involved in the naming of the flower than the details of it. There may be a longing for transcendence here, but more than that there is an acceptance of the inability to do so. And I recognize in the name of this beautiful flower, Love-lies-bleeding, the realization of the limitations of ones’ existence and the emotional suffering that comes with accepting it.  The act of naming then becomes a human attempt to transcend it by leaving a blueprint of every possible human experience, both uplifting and burdensome, on the different objects around us.

Maybe it was this symbolism that made Elton John write a song with this name as well and immortalize both the ‘beauty’ and the ‘pain’, in a work of he(art), forever. preserving the aesthetic, the emotional and the moral as inextricably ‘one’. 

Yes, the natural is infused with the moral through the act of naming. And story-telling.  There are scores of creation stories, myths and legends about birds and flowers trying to assign human significance to their birth and creation. And, ironically, it doesn’t take me long to find the fable, How the Strelitzia became a flower – A fable for kids with an activity.

Flower. Bird.  Myth.  And within seconds you have a story, a creation myth, humanized to imprint on the flower a human consciousness  and with it a moral lesson in humility. Art for morality’s sake? Yes, for sure. But also loaded with the awareness that beauty without nobility and humility is pain. And of no value.  To be honest, for all the moral relativism that we promote, it still holds true.  And, while as postmodernism we may feel, we need to remove ourselves from the burden of moral signification preserved in the Indigenous folklore, Aboriginal creation stories, Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology, the truth is that underlying each story, is an intrinsic primal desire for an aesthetic and moral transcendence yoked to the fear of losing it.

As we move forward in a technology rich world, this longing for excellence is evident in the names we assign to the products we value. Whether it’s an Apple, with its symbolic associations to the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or Tesla, honoring the excellence of an unrecognized scientist, our stories, our media are a testimony to the efforts of millions striving to be recognized for their names, and for them to be associated with excellence, a curious mix of aesthetic and moral transcendence.

The ladder keeps going. Literally in our DNA. Twisting and turning. Taking us higher. Inspiring us to become a unique bird of paradise.

And as we create and use informative tools like AI, and exponentially increase our speed of processing information, we must never forget that it is only the human mind that has the ability to leap across this ladder of imagination, creativity and evolution in search of transcendence and excellence.  And is the one that keeps it going.  And which we must continue to climb after every fall, for it is only us who can give to ‘airy nothingness, a local habitation and a name’.

Till we become birds of paradise. With or without AI.