[fragmede]

Do they? The high quality fake Rolex that only a watch nerd can tell apart, vs the shitty fake Lolex are different worlds. Similarly, the AI fake Ghibli of myself is just fun. Would it mean more if if flew to Japan and commissioned a painter at Ghibli-world for $3,000 to make the same picture? Sure, but I'm not going to do that.

[netsharc]

There's a part in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the narrator's friend's bike needs some fixing, and the narrator said (I paraphrase) "you could use this piece of aluminum from a soda can to fix it", but the bike owner thinks that's blasphemy, the only way to fix it is with a part from the bike manufacturer...

https://www.excitant.co.uk/rip-robert-m-pirsig-why-zen-and-t...

But I suppose a Rolex has the property of "a token to remind me of my prosperity" that a Lolex doesn't...

[heddycrow]

I like where you are going with this and love that you dropped Zen here. Permit me to riff/add color, please.

Zen tries to draw a distinction between mental models with an object/subject separation and alternatives.

There are sane and insane reasons why we might adopt one or the other model.

An object/subject thinker might obsess over status symbols, but also the frame itself can lead to discomfort over using the "wrong" part.

Witness something like this in buy/build discussions where cargo-cult thinking plays a bigger part than rational thought. This probably goes well beyond object/subject thinking.

The status symbol thing can be more than posturing for prosperity. Some people get their identity tangled up in brand separate from social concerns.

I talk with LLM's about this sort of thing quite a bit more than I talk with humans. I get irritated when LLM refuses to allow for shorthand language. I hope I don't come across like that.

I agree with what I read as the sentiment from your last line, there's something that can be unsettling about objects carrying more than their intrinsic value.