Week half-over.
Jul. 7th, 2005 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptAnd there was indeed that date with the DVD player. Although I'm still not quite finished with Brigadoon (slept in, put in an application to be a grad student teaching, lunch, an emulated game... all that added up a bit.) First games of the summer softball leagues tonight. Work tomorrow.
Beware of Ant.And Grues, too. But most importantly, beware of stopping the jive handshake too soon. If you're looking to improve your situation, perhaps you should build a better mousetrap car. Either that, or have a glance at the How to Sound Like An Authority guide.
The Republicans would like to speed up your trip to the electric chair. That is, they don't want you appealing your case until you find a judge that reviews the case properly. It doesn't matter if the trial that convicted you has errors or misconduct, after all, if you weren't a criminal, why would you be in the court in the first place?
But the world outside Jesusland seems to be learning from our mistakes. The European Parliament shot to hell legislation proposing software patents. So that's a good thing to help balance the bad.
According to a meme, were I a Muppet, I would be Fozzie Bear. That sounds plausible. Is that a problem? If I were in Peanuts-land, I'd be playing a piano and trying to fend off the eldest van Pelt.
I was talking a bit with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fred_smith about my perception of reality. I described it as adding fragments of viewpoint on top of a "base" layer, and then wondered if other people did things the same way. The consensus reality that formed would be the result of many people deciding which fragments to accept as "normal" or as part of the "base" layer, a process that could be accomplished in many ways, most of them, I would suspect, are argumentative. Each person's view of reality would have some irregular fragments on it. If the line between genius and madness is thin, it's probably because both types of people have several fragments laid on top or arranged in a particular way as to provide a most interesting point of view. If I think of it that way, then perhaps my habits of drawing from other people's sources to create my worlds, or depositing my characters in their worlds and watching them adapt aren't so strange at all. Admittedly, it's easier to use another person's fragment and tweak than to attempt creating a new fragment. Although if there's really nothing new, then the whole trick is rearranging the fragments so they appear to be new.
From that point, though, I think the realization I came across is that fiction is the underlying layer of the reality-fragments, not fact. For an example of this kind of thought, have a look at The Politics of Culture. The fictions, like mythology, religion, political ideology, and science, create their fragments of "facts" that are consistent within their own system but possibly incompatible with another. Most, if not all of them, will fall prey to Gödel’s work on closed systems. Do the layers create the fragments in some sort of battle for dominance, or is it the people who wield the fragments as weapons against each other's mindscape?greyweirdo ranted that it would be impossible to abolish the concept of money because it's a convenient way of trafficking in goods using symbols. Ideas are the same way - they transport by sigils, maxims, abstractions, and other symbols that represent the thing being talked about.
I'm not sure that this fictional underpinning is a bad thing - a certain about of shared fiction makes it easier to function as a society. What I wonder, though, is whether the fictions have been twisted to the point that their fragments are edged and sharp rather than more like jigsaw pieces, designed to fit together, or whether the fictions will naturally create sharpened fragments.
I somehow think this ties into the concept of the Song of the Suburbs as well, since suburbia is a place where fragments collide, sometimes violently. Maybe I wouldn't be coming up with these sorts of concepts if I wasn't already comfortable with the idea that there could be fragments of my mind acting with some autonomy from the rest. You never know.
Beware of Ant.And Grues, too. But most importantly, beware of stopping the jive handshake too soon. If you're looking to improve your situation, perhaps you should build a better mousetrap car. Either that, or have a glance at the How to Sound Like An Authority guide.
The Republicans would like to speed up your trip to the electric chair. That is, they don't want you appealing your case until you find a judge that reviews the case properly. It doesn't matter if the trial that convicted you has errors or misconduct, after all, if you weren't a criminal, why would you be in the court in the first place?
But the world outside Jesusland seems to be learning from our mistakes. The European Parliament shot to hell legislation proposing software patents. So that's a good thing to help balance the bad.
According to a meme, were I a Muppet, I would be Fozzie Bear. That sounds plausible. Is that a problem? If I were in Peanuts-land, I'd be playing a piano and trying to fend off the eldest van Pelt.
I was talking a bit with
fred_smith about my perception of reality. I described it as adding fragments of viewpoint on top of a "base" layer, and then wondered if other people did things the same way. The consensus reality that formed would be the result of many people deciding which fragments to accept as "normal" or as part of the "base" layer, a process that could be accomplished in many ways, most of them, I would suspect, are argumentative. Each person's view of reality would have some irregular fragments on it. If the line between genius and madness is thin, it's probably because both types of people have several fragments laid on top or arranged in a particular way as to provide a most interesting point of view. If I think of it that way, then perhaps my habits of drawing from other people's sources to create my worlds, or depositing my characters in their worlds and watching them adapt aren't so strange at all. Admittedly, it's easier to use another person's fragment and tweak than to attempt creating a new fragment. Although if there's really nothing new, then the whole trick is rearranging the fragments so they appear to be new. From that point, though, I think the realization I came across is that fiction is the underlying layer of the reality-fragments, not fact. For an example of this kind of thought, have a look at The Politics of Culture. The fictions, like mythology, religion, political ideology, and science, create their fragments of "facts" that are consistent within their own system but possibly incompatible with another. Most, if not all of them, will fall prey to Gödel’s work on closed systems. Do the layers create the fragments in some sort of battle for dominance, or is it the people who wield the fragments as weapons against each other's mindscape?
greyweirdo ranted that it would be impossible to abolish the concept of money because it's a convenient way of trafficking in goods using symbols. Ideas are the same way - they transport by sigils, maxims, abstractions, and other symbols that represent the thing being talked about. I'm not sure that this fictional underpinning is a bad thing - a certain about of shared fiction makes it easier to function as a society. What I wonder, though, is whether the fictions have been twisted to the point that their fragments are edged and sharp rather than more like jigsaw pieces, designed to fit together, or whether the fictions will naturally create sharpened fragments.
I somehow think this ties into the concept of the Song of the Suburbs as well, since suburbia is a place where fragments collide, sometimes violently. Maybe I wouldn't be coming up with these sorts of concepts if I wasn't already comfortable with the idea that there could be fragments of my mind acting with some autonomy from the rest. You never know.
