Novels, paintings, music, mathematical formulas—from grand scriptures like Buddhist sutras, the Bible, and the Quran, to any casual remark we utter—are all "artifacts," just like pots, pans, buildings, airplanes, and mobile phones. Some artifacts seem to be composed entirely of the 118 physical elements, yet they possess shapes, styles, and meanings that can only be described by a textual metaverse. Some artifacts seem purely illusory, but behind all illusions, there must be physical traces.
A lost ancient text must be inscribed on some parchment buried underground. A folk song never written down must have vibrated through generations of throats and rippled through waves of sound. A chat sticker that disappears after being viewed must have altered the electromagnetic field on some computer. A question posed to artificial intelligence must have triggered an electrical wave disturbance and inference in an artificial neural network; and you, too, must have experienced a momentary or even lifelong surge of brainwaves and neuronal storage in your mind. Even if all of the above vanish into the river of time, the process of their dissipation must have left other traces.
In the 2010 novel "Death's End" (The Three-Body Problem III): Luo Ji raised his staff high above his head, his white hair and long beard flowing, looking like Moses parting the Red Sea, and solemnly cried, "Carve the words onto stone!"
Humanity transcends animals because it created an illusory textual metaverse, which in turn acts upon the physical universe. All textual descriptions are illusions, but based on these illusions, humans have constructed nations, countries, companies, morals, laws, capital, and skyscrapers. Even if an illusion vanishes with the blink of an eye or a power outage, once it has appeared, it proclaims its eternal existence. The only question is how to record it more permanently: personal memory, oral tradition, murals, parchment, paper, local computer hard drives, internet remote servers, decentralized IPFS.
In the 2010 movie "Inception," once an idea is planted in a person's mind, it can never be eradicated; it can only be guided through layers of dreams to find an outlet.
Every time we arrange flowers, tighten screws, or when we speak, take photos, even when we are thinking or dreaming, we are creating artifacts. Everyone is a creator.
Last modified by one, 2025-08-10