gibberish
I have this growing problem in my life which is that the more I feel like I am getting close to the answers to important questions I care about, the less I'm able to explain to anybody else what I'm thinking about. It's like I've gone down a long path to some mythical fountain of youth, and am almost there, but then, when somebody stops and asks me what I'm doing in this jungle, I can't remember how I got there.
Articulating this at length for the first time this afternoon to my parents, I think I've got an idea of the problem. There are lots of practical problems which theoretical knowledge can inform. Ok, great--so I have a practical problem, and I turn to the relevant theory. But the theory is, by its nature, an abstraction away from those problems. It generalizes to all of them. Further, the way theory develops is by solving problems, and those problems end up being reduced, for the sake of efficiency, into a single canonical form.
The problem is that that canonical form sounds ridiculous to people, because it's designed to expose this bizarre unresolved problem in how we think.
I got a ride back up to school with Darmstadter Rockrimmon the Younger, and was trying to tell him about why anyone would care about non-classical logic. I asked him how many grains of sand were in a heap. He said,
"People actually care about this stuff?"
"No, not heaps per se, but..."
But what? How do I backtrack to why this matters in the first place? It did, I'm sure about it, because I got here. Now that I've had time to think about it, I could come up with some more or less everyday reasons why it matters, but I never have those on hand.
The result? Alienation. It's off the hook.
Articulating this at length for the first time this afternoon to my parents, I think I've got an idea of the problem. There are lots of practical problems which theoretical knowledge can inform. Ok, great--so I have a practical problem, and I turn to the relevant theory. But the theory is, by its nature, an abstraction away from those problems. It generalizes to all of them. Further, the way theory develops is by solving problems, and those problems end up being reduced, for the sake of efficiency, into a single canonical form.
The problem is that that canonical form sounds ridiculous to people, because it's designed to expose this bizarre unresolved problem in how we think.
I got a ride back up to school with Darmstadter Rockrimmon the Younger, and was trying to tell him about why anyone would care about non-classical logic. I asked him how many grains of sand were in a heap. He said,
"People actually care about this stuff?"
"No, not heaps per se, but..."
But what? How do I backtrack to why this matters in the first place? It did, I'm sure about it, because I got here. Now that I've had time to think about it, I could come up with some more or less everyday reasons why it matters, but I never have those on hand.
The result? Alienation. It's off the hook.