Thoughts Group Together For Safety or Modular Thought, part 2
I checked out McLuhan, the Man and his Message. I figure, thinking being what it is, someone has a specialty under which the whole phenomenon of clusters of thought is explored ad nauseum, and I should find it and read it in case he had something to say about it. Plus someone recommended I read about McLuhan years ago.
Also, after looking at one of ocular_fusion's postings of photos of Glenn Gould, he is the same general shape as John Linnell in several dimensions
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- Gould had crooked front teeth, a light-bulb head, long face, thin limbs and a certain type of lean jaw that you usually only see on young men - Gould lost his earlier, it appears. Think Ethan Hawk for the whole jaw-upper lip sort of style.
In any case, if you fancied the way either man looked, the other man might be an easy addition to ones mental book of Men I Like To Look At. Hey, and, of course, both are keyboardists.
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Chaos saith: The half-baked theory never made any claims about causal chains. I had more of a cultural diffusion model in mind. The remark about GEB was flippant, and entirely unthinking. It fascinates me that it sounded feasible enough to inspire "empirical" research ;-)
I went ahead and baked the other half. I am never sure where the casual links for certain things will lie, and am delighted to find them, so I took a look. Plopping a question down into an LJ community is hardly scientific research, but it's better than you 'n' me just sitting around wondering. More people are involved, in any case.
What is a "bent of mind", exactly? Are you saying that people who are wired a particular way will seek out Bach, TMBG and Glenn Gould, or things possessing some common feature(s) they share?
"Bent of mind" is a vague bucket term I made up because I haven't come up with any good verbal definition. It is still at the the mental picture stage, and we know how rife with problems canine thinking can be. (I always imagined that dogs think in pictures smells, because it sure looks like they are thinking something in there, but not with English.)
I guess, yeah, I had the working theory that either by nature, nurture, or some convergence of both, there were shapes and grooves in thought, and that some folks had channels of one type, others had another, sort of like the way creeks and rivers work - most everything follows the current, but the water itself can change the course of the waterway with enough repetition.
It is worth considering that although the set of Bach lovers and TMBG lovers may overlap, an interest Bach does not necessarily predict an interest in TMBG. Perhaps the reverse is true, but so what, if the set of Bach lovers is large enough to include practically everybody?
Definitely. I have never met a Bach-hater, and it does't predict liking TMBG, Bach having big name recognition, and TMBG having much smaller fame, and Gould even smaller. Maybe we need a Wenn diagram.
Well, according to your own theorizing, a set of things that map neatly onto an integer series
Har har. Good one. :) I had flattened out the way I had pictured it from a big old 3D model down to a number line because that's easier to see - I was thinking in fact that the unused nature of certain values on all the axes would create dead zones in thought above each plane, if all the planes meet at (0,0,0), and certain globs of thought at the intersection areas of favored values met. Say, a dense knot of thought around (1,1,1) or (2,4,8) and (4,2,8) and (4,8,2), if you see? That big major universal ideas are unavoidable because of this tendency of brains to like certain "pretty" numbers?
Anyway, I AM NOT A CRACKPOT.
Sincerely,
Abraham Simpson
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Also, after looking at one of ocular_fusion's postings of photos of Glenn Gould, he is the same general shape as John Linnell in several dimensions
***
- Gould had crooked front teeth, a light-bulb head, long face, thin limbs and a certain type of lean jaw that you usually only see on young men - Gould lost his earlier, it appears. Think Ethan Hawk for the whole jaw-upper lip sort of style.
In any case, if you fancied the way either man looked, the other man might be an easy addition to ones mental book of Men I Like To Look At. Hey, and, of course, both are keyboardists.
***
****
Chaos saith: The half-baked theory never made any claims about causal chains. I had more of a cultural diffusion model in mind. The remark about GEB was flippant, and entirely unthinking. It fascinates me that it sounded feasible enough to inspire "empirical" research ;-)
I went ahead and baked the other half. I am never sure where the casual links for certain things will lie, and am delighted to find them, so I took a look. Plopping a question down into an LJ community is hardly scientific research, but it's better than you 'n' me just sitting around wondering. More people are involved, in any case.
What is a "bent of mind", exactly? Are you saying that people who are wired a particular way will seek out Bach, TMBG and Glenn Gould, or things possessing some common feature(s) they share?
"Bent of mind" is a vague bucket term I made up because I haven't come up with any good verbal definition. It is still at the the mental picture stage, and we know how rife with problems canine thinking can be. (I always imagined that dogs think in pictures smells, because it sure looks like they are thinking something in there, but not with English.)
I guess, yeah, I had the working theory that either by nature, nurture, or some convergence of both, there were shapes and grooves in thought, and that some folks had channels of one type, others had another, sort of like the way creeks and rivers work - most everything follows the current, but the water itself can change the course of the waterway with enough repetition.
It is worth considering that although the set of Bach lovers and TMBG lovers may overlap, an interest Bach does not necessarily predict an interest in TMBG. Perhaps the reverse is true, but so what, if the set of Bach lovers is large enough to include practically everybody?
Definitely. I have never met a Bach-hater, and it does't predict liking TMBG, Bach having big name recognition, and TMBG having much smaller fame, and Gould even smaller. Maybe we need a Wenn diagram.
Well, according to your own theorizing, a set of things that map neatly onto an integer series
Har har. Good one. :) I had flattened out the way I had pictured it from a big old 3D model down to a number line because that's easier to see - I was thinking in fact that the unused nature of certain values on all the axes would create dead zones in thought above each plane, if all the planes meet at (0,0,0), and certain globs of thought at the intersection areas of favored values met. Say, a dense knot of thought around (1,1,1) or (2,4,8) and (4,2,8) and (4,8,2), if you see? That big major universal ideas are unavoidable because of this tendency of brains to like certain "pretty" numbers?
Anyway, I AM NOT A CRACKPOT.
Sincerely,
Abraham Simpson
****