Synaesthesia
In case my (few) readers haven't noticed, I think that I'll be spending a fair amount of time circling around literature here. As I alluded to before, I think that this is because i (shamefully) enjoy reading books which my good academic sense indicates are a patent waste of time. Part of me agrees with this sentiment and laments that I don't enjoy most 'canonical' books, while the other part of me says 'feck-em.' The two parts have signed a truce wherein I get to read the books that I want to read, but they have to be good - and how do we define that?
Thus the last few posts about literature and creativity, and presumably the many more to come. I hope I don't become too tiresome prating on about this subject in mostly-unedited blog posts of debatable quality/construction, but that's the way it is. Quite frankly, it's one of the few things that I'm actually able to write about (continuously).
In any case, I'd like to stop for a brief moment and examine how I understand most people examine perception. One of the things we do in consulting firms is try to break issues in to their component parts. So an individual vector (speaking mathematically) will possess an x-component and a y-component. Simple Cartesian stuff. Similarly, Polar graphs: a degree and a distance. Two degrees of freedom contain all imaginable possibilities in 2-D. Similarly, 3-D is imbued with three dimensions. 4-D includes time and space, and has generated all the infinite plays on choice and time and infinite universes. Boring.
But a system that I read about once in my freshman philosophy course has always struck me as different. It was in Augustine's Confessions (or whatever he called it; I really only remember what the professor had to say about it), and he was speaking about his philosophy which didn't espouse any degrees of freedom at all. There was Godliness (or, I suppose, Righteousness), and not. It's important to note that, spatially, this is not a 1-D situation--there's no opposing pole, no Manichean duality imposing an equal and opposite quality to righteousness. It's the difference between, for example, hot and cold--1-Dimension--which implies a space between values, tepidity, and Hot and Not-Hot, which implies no such spatial relationship. In the 2nd viewpoint, there is no difference between the almost hot and the freezing cold
So far so good. It's interesting to note that it's generally possible to interlay any set of two (or three, or four, but any number over 3 ceases to have a useful spatial representation (at least that I know of)--so it no longer implies correlation, but simply demographic) 1-D variables over eachother. Marketing specialists call this 'segmentation.' For Example, politics. Left to right, take Fiscally Liberal to Fiscally Conservative. Top to bottom, take Socially Liberal, Socially conservative. In the top left quadrant (#2, I think), you have democrats, top right is libertarians, bottom right is republicans, and bottom left is communists. It's possible to do it with rich vs. poor, male versus female, over-levered vs. under-levered on top of recessionary growers vs. shrinkers. simple. 2x2 matrix makes it easy to classify things according to whatever variables you like.
But where this is interesting is in systems that don't necessarily conform to dualistic lines. As any player of Armored Core should know, a given color can be made out of an RGB code, or a tripartite value that defines degree of redness, blueness, and greenness. this is basically a 3-D cartesian system. But, awkwardly enough, colors can also be made to conform to a color wheel which only has two degrees of freedom, rather than 3. This is more often than not portrayed as two intersecting triangles, but really, it's a circle. say you're standing at [YELLOW]. You can either move left, to blue, or right, to red. the path to blue will take you through [PISS YELLOW], [PUKE], [GREEN], [SEA GREEN], and eventually to [BLUE]. You can continue along to [RED] and back to [YELLOW] as well, if you like. That's the first degree (it's only 1 degree because you'll eventually come back to yellow no matter which way you go). The second degree is the tint: you can move up, to [LIGHT YELLOW] and eventually to [WHITE], or down to [DARK YELLOW] and [BLACK]. So, now that we think about it, since each color will eventually terminate in black or white, it's actually a sphere - the two degrees are of latitude and longitude. But this is clearly different from the cartesian degrees, since it's a closed circuit. With Descartes, you can get asymptotes to the axes, and then you can go over them, so that you can have (positive infinity, 0) or (negative infinity, positive infinity). With colors, you just get stuck at black.
And yet, there is every bit as much variation in the colors, as much complexity, as in the cartesian system. More important, while the two operate on wholly different principles, the same value [YELLOW] can be represented equally accurately with an RGB code (cartesian) as with the color wheel (non-cartesian).
So why is this important? Well, it's fairly easy in my mind to see how increasing degrees of freedom works in a cartesian system (an axis overlaid on the origin of another plane at a 90 degree angle), even if I can't visualize 4- or 5-D systems. But what would a color-like system work like with 3 degrees, rather than 2? I can't even come close to wrapping my mind around it. The only thing that maybe makes sense is emotions (degree of anger, degree of happiness, degree of amusement, degree of intensity (or rapture?)), but how does it work? The sickening thing is, this seems to my mind to be much more descriptive of how my mind, and presumably, the human mind works than the logical, cartesian system.
And yet, what's the point? Is the spiralling, mindnumbingly complex interplay of variables, closed or open, really descriptive? Do we learn anything from it? I can't figure out why it's impactful (cue irony at consultant-ese). I used to think finding the key to this 'mechanism' would unlock myriad new ways of understanding my (always) intractable problems, and fascinations. But it seems that the more I analyze it, the more I run around in circles. I'm still stuck at yellow.
Thus the last few posts about literature and creativity, and presumably the many more to come. I hope I don't become too tiresome prating on about this subject in mostly-unedited blog posts of debatable quality/construction, but that's the way it is. Quite frankly, it's one of the few things that I'm actually able to write about (continuously).
In any case, I'd like to stop for a brief moment and examine how I understand most people examine perception. One of the things we do in consulting firms is try to break issues in to their component parts. So an individual vector (speaking mathematically) will possess an x-component and a y-component. Simple Cartesian stuff. Similarly, Polar graphs: a degree and a distance. Two degrees of freedom contain all imaginable possibilities in 2-D. Similarly, 3-D is imbued with three dimensions. 4-D includes time and space, and has generated all the infinite plays on choice and time and infinite universes. Boring.
But a system that I read about once in my freshman philosophy course has always struck me as different. It was in Augustine's Confessions (or whatever he called it; I really only remember what the professor had to say about it), and he was speaking about his philosophy which didn't espouse any degrees of freedom at all. There was Godliness (or, I suppose, Righteousness), and not. It's important to note that, spatially, this is not a 1-D situation--there's no opposing pole, no Manichean duality imposing an equal and opposite quality to righteousness. It's the difference between, for example, hot and cold--1-Dimension--which implies a space between values, tepidity, and Hot and Not-Hot, which implies no such spatial relationship. In the 2nd viewpoint, there is no difference between the almost hot and the freezing cold
So far so good. It's interesting to note that it's generally possible to interlay any set of two (or three, or four, but any number over 3 ceases to have a useful spatial representation (at least that I know of)--so it no longer implies correlation, but simply demographic) 1-D variables over eachother. Marketing specialists call this 'segmentation.' For Example, politics. Left to right, take Fiscally Liberal to Fiscally Conservative. Top to bottom, take Socially Liberal, Socially conservative. In the top left quadrant (#2, I think), you have democrats, top right is libertarians, bottom right is republicans, and bottom left is communists. It's possible to do it with rich vs. poor, male versus female, over-levered vs. under-levered on top of recessionary growers vs. shrinkers. simple. 2x2 matrix makes it easy to classify things according to whatever variables you like.
But where this is interesting is in systems that don't necessarily conform to dualistic lines. As any player of Armored Core should know, a given color can be made out of an RGB code, or a tripartite value that defines degree of redness, blueness, and greenness. this is basically a 3-D cartesian system. But, awkwardly enough, colors can also be made to conform to a color wheel which only has two degrees of freedom, rather than 3. This is more often than not portrayed as two intersecting triangles, but really, it's a circle. say you're standing at [YELLOW]. You can either move left, to blue, or right, to red. the path to blue will take you through [PISS YELLOW], [PUKE], [GREEN], [SEA GREEN], and eventually to [BLUE]. You can continue along to [RED] and back to [YELLOW] as well, if you like. That's the first degree (it's only 1 degree because you'll eventually come back to yellow no matter which way you go). The second degree is the tint: you can move up, to [LIGHT YELLOW] and eventually to [WHITE], or down to [DARK YELLOW] and [BLACK]. So, now that we think about it, since each color will eventually terminate in black or white, it's actually a sphere - the two degrees are of latitude and longitude. But this is clearly different from the cartesian degrees, since it's a closed circuit. With Descartes, you can get asymptotes to the axes, and then you can go over them, so that you can have (positive infinity, 0) or (negative infinity, positive infinity). With colors, you just get stuck at black.
And yet, there is every bit as much variation in the colors, as much complexity, as in the cartesian system. More important, while the two operate on wholly different principles, the same value [YELLOW] can be represented equally accurately with an RGB code (cartesian) as with the color wheel (non-cartesian).
So why is this important? Well, it's fairly easy in my mind to see how increasing degrees of freedom works in a cartesian system (an axis overlaid on the origin of another plane at a 90 degree angle), even if I can't visualize 4- or 5-D systems. But what would a color-like system work like with 3 degrees, rather than 2? I can't even come close to wrapping my mind around it. The only thing that maybe makes sense is emotions (degree of anger, degree of happiness, degree of amusement, degree of intensity (or rapture?)), but how does it work? The sickening thing is, this seems to my mind to be much more descriptive of how my mind, and presumably, the human mind works than the logical, cartesian system.
And yet, what's the point? Is the spiralling, mindnumbingly complex interplay of variables, closed or open, really descriptive? Do we learn anything from it? I can't figure out why it's impactful (cue irony at consultant-ese). I used to think finding the key to this 'mechanism' would unlock myriad new ways of understanding my (always) intractable problems, and fascinations. But it seems that the more I analyze it, the more I run around in circles. I'm still stuck at yellow.