Couplets: Literature, Humanism and Psychology

Couplets: Literature, Humanism and Psychology

Author: Shandong/Taiping Liu

In 1980s, literary thoughts began to return to humanity, and "literature is humanity" became the loudest slogan at that time. It is against this background that I started my own literary creation. First I wrote lyrics and modern poems, and then I wrote couplets by the way. As can be seen from this cut-in path, I have a preconceived qualitative view of the concept of couplets, that is, "the attribute of couplets is literary." Indeed, in my early joint works, there were almost no practical works for occasions, and they were basically words expressing feelings. Sometimes, in order to make lyricism reach the incisive position, we do not hesitate to break through some temperament restrictions, such as binge drinking all night, and get "every time we see injustice, we want to learn the sword;" Knowing that reading is useless, I thought that with the help of God, I had printed the back of my business card to show off. Later, during the fourth generation meeting of China Couplet Society in Huangmei, Hubei Province from 65438 to 0998, Mr. Guo Dianchong had a discussion with a group of people in Nanjing, trying to make the couplets on business cards more "legal", but without results, because no one could change them into legal sentences on the premise of maintaining the original couplets. From this, I have formed such a rough concept: the form of literature serves the content, and it is of course best to achieve a high degree of unity between form and content, but if you want to make a choice, you must give priority to the expression of content. In the so-called "joint hospital for diseases", some joint works with certain defects in parallelism and level are actually minor headaches and brain fever, while those joint works piled up by cliches, but with neat antithesis and harmonious rhythm, are the real serious diseases and terminal diseases. There are all kinds of diseases in couplets, but vulgarity is difficult to treat. Those couplets with neat form and mediocre content suffer from this common fault. The language of literature is a dynamic "creation", while the stale language is just a mechanical "operation", and the difference between words is completely different. Literature is the creation of human beings rather than the operation of machines, precisely because literature is "the science of human beings" rather than "the science of machines".

Later, I really saw the magic of machine couplets. After entering the 2 1 century, the network culture has become increasingly prosperous. Microsoft China Research Institute has developed a small program called "Couplet Online", which means that the computer will couple couplets. So I also found the tennis world and tried it. As long as the operator gives an online link, the computer can instantly make ten dialogues for the operator to choose from. The more mediocre and monotonous the sentence, the more perfect the dialogue given by the computer. For example, if I say "the spring breeze blows the earth", the computer will immediately give a very steady confrontation, such as "Sichuan is full of people", "Ruiqi is full of China" and "Zhao Ruixue has a good year". However, when the language of the sentence is unfamiliar and refined, the computer has to make some inexplicable sentences. For example, I typed "I must learn the sword every time I see injustice" in the sentence box, and the computer program worked hard for a long time to give ten antitheses, but all of them were nonsense such as "All are lonely and boundless", "Who is proud as a halberd", "Who is wronged and has no opponent" and "smug". After reading it for a long time, I realized that the computer program took the liberty to think that the words "Jian" and "Jian" in the sentence were intentionally homophonic, so it was ridiculous to come up with a bunch of "homophonic pairs" out of thin air.

Of course, "operation" is also secretly accumulating strength and trying to challenge "creation". The research of contemporary artificial intelligence has made rapid progress. In May this year, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google, beat Ke Jie, the world's first human Go player, 3-0. For a time, artificial intelligence and its working principle "deep learning" became the focus of public opinion. In this context, a domestic scientific research institution has developed a couplet robot code-named "Wei" by using the latest scientific and technological achievements, and plans to recruit top human couplet masters to test the performance of "Wei" by man-machine combat.

The test was conducted on CCTV's Wit program, and I was invited to design test questions for the program. The competition is divided into three rounds. The rule is that "Wei" and three couplet masters answer questions at the same time, the guests at the scene comment on the hidden answers, and then the audience votes for the answer of "Wei". If the answer of a couplet master in a certain link is selected by a majority of votes, the player will be eliminated. If all the answers of the couplet master are selected in three rounds, the robot wins and the test conclusion is "qualified". If the answer of "Wei" is selected in a round, the game is over and the robot test result is "unqualified".

The first round of competition is "no love" and the sentence is "it will rain tomorrow". The more neat the literal antithesis between sentences, the more irrelevant the meaning and the better the answer. Wei performed well in this round of response, and made a "conspiracy to change" confrontation, while the couplet masters used "Ming Festival flurry", "Yesterday's stroke" and "West Wind last night" respectively. Finally, the audience voted for "West Wind Last Night", and the author Zhao regretted being out, and "Wei" won.

The second round is the artistic conception competition. With the theme of the lyrics "The most beautiful thing is not the rainy day, but your shelter from the rain", I created a pair of couplets. The answer to Wei is a seven-character couplet: "I can't look back; Why do you know that this day is the same? " While the two human players gave full play to their strengths and wrote two brilliant long couplets:

Two tender memories, the most unforgettable is holding the spring shirt and smiling in the rain;

Thousands of lovesickness are sent everywhere, and the autumn leaves are even more worrying under the eaves.

-Jia

Cold springs hung on the eaves, recalling the drizzle at that time, several petals of peach blossoms suddenly gaunt;

Looking for old dreams in the world, listening to clear songs, some thoughts are gradually blurred.

Jinrui

As a result of this round of competition, the audience naturally locked in the seemingly incomprehensible seven-character couplet "Wei", and finally two human players won. During the judging process, Sa Beining, a famous host as a guest, said that he was inexplicably moved when he read the words "Autumn leaves fall under the eaves". This artistic conception reflects the delicate feelings of human beings, and of course the machine can't write it.

After the robot couplet was defeated in the second round, the original third round of test questions was taken as an additional test round. With the absolute sentence of "Wait for the monk to eat apricots, eat left, eat right, eat down, eat middle", "Wei" answered "The Lancang River is in high tide, water comes from the east, water comes from the west, water comes from the south, water comes from the north and tap water". Because the second round of competition has produced the final test results, the answer to "extra test" has not yet been voted.

When we celebrate that the masters of couplets have defended human dignity in the field of couplets creation, we should also see that robots in the future will become more and more like people because of the "deep learning" mechanism of simulating human brain neural networks. In fact, the robot's attempts to write novels, draw pictures and compose music have been quite successful. There are two possibilities for the prospect of rapid machine progress. One is that robots will rise in a straight line, reaching and surpassing the height of humans. One is that robots approach humans with asymptotes, always approaching but never reaching the height of humans. Personally, I prefer the second possibility. Some futurists are also imagining that in the highly developed future of science and technology, all productive labor will be borne by machines, and human beings will only pass the time in the fields of art and philosophy. It is believed that machines can never be equated with people because some factors in human nature cannot be calculated by some "algorithm". There are some stylized factors in literature and art at the formal level, which can be completed through "operation". Taking poetry creation as an example, the deployment machine at the language level can be completely completed. However, poetry is not limited to the language level, and a large number of suggestion and implication machines may not be competent. In fact, the more superficial and stylized the writing, the easier it is for the machine to master. For example, the characteristics of modern misty poetry are the fragmentation of images and the randomness of combination. The words of the machine are mixed with human works, which is difficult to distinguish in form; Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, the writing of modern poetry has fallen into the dilemma of stylization. Machines have mastered dozens of common images, and roughly combined them, it seems that they can also write regular metrical poems. However, the human thinking robot in the image may be able to learn, and the human thinking robot in the inspiration should never learn. Robots may describe the scenery, but they don't use it to express their feelings. Even if they express their feelings through imitation, they can only be full of hypocrisy; Maybe we can combine images, but the combination is weak, so it is hard to bear the confusion, struggle and awakening on the road of life. Because human beings have feelings and sustenance, machines can't. Buddha said that all sentient beings in the world mean all sentient animals, and machines, like stones and stones, can only be attributed to "ruthlessness."

From this perspective, literature is not only a study of human, but also a study of mind, which was mentioned by the ancients in China long ago. Liu Xizai's "Art Outline" said: "Literature, mind learning." Poetry written by human beings is not only the combination of Chinese characters and characters he knows, but also the ups and downs of the author's life, hope and despair, desire and depression, love and anger, sadness and joy ... The words flowing from such a mixed heart can naturally reach people's hearts and make thousands of hearts with similar emotional experiences throb. Therefore, the height of "autumn leaves falling under the eaves" is not only a neat dual with "hand in hand in spring shirt, smiling in the rain", but more importantly, the kind of "melancholy" and "disappointed" thoughts presented outside the picture. "Yue Ji" says: "What people move is what things are." "Poetry" also said: "Angry animals are touching, so they are full of temperament and dance." People's hearts are easily moved by foreign objects, and they can also move other hearts because of "simultaneous response, unity is strength"; The machine will never be moved by foreign objects. Similarly, the "operation" and "imitation and creation" of the machine can hardly make the softest part of the human mind feel like a slight electric shock. Even if one day the robot evolves a clear self-awareness, forms a distinct personality different from another machine, and even produces an irrational impulse to die, it is difficult for people and machines to be equally moved by the subtle differences in the operating mechanism of the mind. In fact, we can assert that human beings will only be imitated all the time and will never be surpassed.

At this point, we seem to have come to a conclusion: for the creation of poetry couplets, mediocre creativity, outdated language and simple writing are actually the realm that machines can reach, and the height of human art depends on our hearts and true feelings. In the foreseeable future, folk practical couplets will be written, such as popular Spring Festival couplets, birthday couplets, wedding couplets, industry couplets, first house couplets and so on. All kinds of clever couplets may be better than human beings in writing, but the writing that expresses feelings, inspires people and expresses emotions may always be done by a specific person. The excellence of antithetical couplets lies in the ingenious antithesis, the cadence of tone and the ever-changing sentence patterns, but more importantly, it is profound in connotation, sustenance and emotion, because it is pure literature. Literature is not only a study of human, but also a study of mind. Every article contains thoughtful thoughts, every sentence is innovative, and every sentence contains true feelings. Such words can be called the crystallization of human wisdom. Otherwise, what's the difference between us and a poem-writing robot or a couplet robot?