Oh jeez
I never meant to document on LiveJournal the reasons why I don't use it very often any more. Blame Nicole, and maybe Ryan.
Neal Stephenson's novels, for all their flaws, contain a lot of insights that I find appealing. I often find myself drawing parallels between his fictional worlds and the real world, as I'm going to do right now. What follows is an excerpt from The Diamond Age. For context, the first speaker (Miranda) is a woman trying to track down someone she met on the internet; in this book, the internet has been reconfigured to make this task extremely improbable, but not impossible.
"If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"
...
"It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers."
"But probability is probability," Miranda said.
"What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?"
"It could be a coincidence."
"Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved...as far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."
I want very much to believe in this concept of an "axis" perpendicular to analytical rationalism.
When I write serious stuff on LJ, I tend to be really verbose. The alternative is to be terse, which generally means that fewer people will know what I'm talking about; this is undesirable. The problem is the underlying assumption that, by writing in a very literal, analytical, and rational style, something of worth is produced. I contend that most of the time, the answer is no. This is a failure on the part of the author but also a failure of the language itself. Put another way, it's impossible to write "perfectly rational" prose, since the words themselves are ill-defined. This doesn't mean we should give up on communication which is based on reason, but it does make me hope there's other ways to skin the cat.
I write e/n shit to help make sense of my life. More generally, people read and write philosophical crap in general for many reasons; I use philosophical stuff to try to figure out how to live my life. So, if we consider introspective analytical rational prose (i.e.
) to be one axis, then there is another axis (because I say so). The alternative axis is one which helps me to make sense of my life and figure out how I am to live, but it does it in a way which is non-analytical and irrational. This could be called the "intuitive" method. The idea here is that by reading (narrative) about people's lives (or watching TV, etc.), I am educating myself about the human condition, indirectly. This is not a technique well-suited to LiveJournal. As it applies to LJ, it means people talking about themselves; this is not fundamentally bad, it's just that most of us aren't very interesting writers.
As a concrete example, consider the comment I left on Ryan's LJ (linked above). It has a brief anecdote about some people, and some serious-minded analytical blathering. As I stand now, I consider the former to be considerably more valuable, as far as LJ is concerned.
Very recently I've assigned myself the task of learning to write more pithily, that is, more briefly but still meaningful. This task is still quite nascent, however, so I don't know when or if it will bear fruit. This LJ entry is not a product of that project.
Me getting much sleep tonight: unlikely
Neal Stephenson's novels, for all their flaws, contain a lot of insights that I find appealing. I often find myself drawing parallels between his fictional worlds and the real world, as I'm going to do right now. What follows is an excerpt from The Diamond Age. For context, the first speaker (Miranda) is a woman trying to track down someone she met on the internet; in this book, the internet has been reconfigured to make this task extremely improbable, but not impossible.
"If you guys think you've found a way to beat probability, why don't you go into the Vegas ractives and make a fortune?"
...
"It wouldn't work," Mr. Beck said, "because Vegas is a game of pure numbers with no human meaning to it. The mind doesn't interface to pure numbers."
"But probability is probability," Miranda said.
"What if you have a dream one night that your sister is in a crash, and you contact her the next day and learn that she broke up with her boyfriend?"
"It could be a coincidence."
"Yes. But not a very probable one. You see, maybe it's possible to beat probability, when the heart as well as the mind is involved...as far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."
I want very much to believe in this concept of an "axis" perpendicular to analytical rationalism.
When I write serious stuff on LJ, I tend to be really verbose. The alternative is to be terse, which generally means that fewer people will know what I'm talking about; this is undesirable. The problem is the underlying assumption that, by writing in a very literal, analytical, and rational style, something of worth is produced. I contend that most of the time, the answer is no. This is a failure on the part of the author but also a failure of the language itself. Put another way, it's impossible to write "perfectly rational" prose, since the words themselves are ill-defined. This doesn't mean we should give up on communication which is based on reason, but it does make me hope there's other ways to skin the cat.
I write e/n shit to help make sense of my life. More generally, people read and write philosophical crap in general for many reasons; I use philosophical stuff to try to figure out how to live my life. So, if we consider introspective analytical rational prose (i.e.
) to be one axis, then there is another axis (because I say so). The alternative axis is one which helps me to make sense of my life and figure out how I am to live, but it does it in a way which is non-analytical and irrational. This could be called the "intuitive" method. The idea here is that by reading (narrative) about people's lives (or watching TV, etc.), I am educating myself about the human condition, indirectly. This is not a technique well-suited to LiveJournal. As it applies to LJ, it means people talking about themselves; this is not fundamentally bad, it's just that most of us aren't very interesting writers.
As a concrete example, consider the comment I left on Ryan's LJ (linked above). It has a brief anecdote about some people, and some serious-minded analytical blathering. As I stand now, I consider the former to be considerably more valuable, as far as LJ is concerned.
Very recently I've assigned myself the task of learning to write more pithily, that is, more briefly but still meaningful. This task is still quite nascent, however, so I don't know when or if it will bear fruit. This LJ entry is not a product of that project.
Me getting much sleep tonight: unlikely