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Recent (re)Reading:
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Signal to Noise - Eric Nylund
So a common theme in recent literature I've run into is filtering meaning from the vast quantity of content which our world offers - very much the opposite of what the world was thinking at the turn of the century; that we'd gotten it all figured out and just had to nail the last bits down. Gives a good indication of why faith is resurging in popular culture, when, in the 'Me' decade, you wouldn't have seen it for blood or money.
One of the beautiful thinks about literature is the possibility of discourses perpetuated throughout a subset of stories offering points and counterpoints to this or that view. 'Pattern Recognition' added a word to my lexicon which I expect to use: apophenia. Apophenia is a condition in which signals are pulled from noise where there is, in fact, _no signal_. Which is to say, meaning from the random. It's not a new suggestion that humans are pattern recognition machines - that we're basically wired up to make sense of the world around us whether or not there is any. One could heap everything from conspiracy theory to organized religion (okay, *wince* - or any religion at all, if you like) under the heading of apophenic revelations... all depending on your particular judgement as to where the actual signal lies.
It's a metaphor, useful, even popular, because so many of the people reading this stuff have some experience with computers or analog or digital signals and perhaps a vague perception of how to analyze them. It provides a view - a filter - on a discourse.
When I have a philosophical conversation with people, I tend to treat analogies as the worst possible method of communication, because there's so much room for misinterpretation. Kermit calls it the Ground Zero effect - anything you say can and will be misinterpreted and used against you.
At the same time, I've had to muse that the private language problem (something I'll have to look into in philosophy) implies that _everything_ you say is an analogy, potentially misinterpreted without sufficient context to firm meaning, which implies that metaphor provides some form of error-checking which doesn't necessarily exist in the language inherently.
I haven't ground these thoughts into something pretty and polished, but wanted to write the kind of introspective silliness which wanders around in my head. And people wonder why I spend a lot of time reading silly shit. The serious stuff takes up too damn many cycles, and it only gets compounded if you actually get me to read honest-to-god philosophical tracts - you should have seen me after I took the History of Scientific Revolutions class. But I wasn't writing then, so you never really will.
If my writing even really illustrates what's in my head.
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Signal to Noise - Eric Nylund
So a common theme in recent literature I've run into is filtering meaning from the vast quantity of content which our world offers - very much the opposite of what the world was thinking at the turn of the century; that we'd gotten it all figured out and just had to nail the last bits down. Gives a good indication of why faith is resurging in popular culture, when, in the 'Me' decade, you wouldn't have seen it for blood or money.
One of the beautiful thinks about literature is the possibility of discourses perpetuated throughout a subset of stories offering points and counterpoints to this or that view. 'Pattern Recognition' added a word to my lexicon which I expect to use: apophenia. Apophenia is a condition in which signals are pulled from noise where there is, in fact, _no signal_. Which is to say, meaning from the random. It's not a new suggestion that humans are pattern recognition machines - that we're basically wired up to make sense of the world around us whether or not there is any. One could heap everything from conspiracy theory to organized religion (okay, *wince* - or any religion at all, if you like) under the heading of apophenic revelations... all depending on your particular judgement as to where the actual signal lies.
It's a metaphor, useful, even popular, because so many of the people reading this stuff have some experience with computers or analog or digital signals and perhaps a vague perception of how to analyze them. It provides a view - a filter - on a discourse.
When I have a philosophical conversation with people, I tend to treat analogies as the worst possible method of communication, because there's so much room for misinterpretation. Kermit calls it the Ground Zero effect - anything you say can and will be misinterpreted and used against you.
At the same time, I've had to muse that the private language problem (something I'll have to look into in philosophy) implies that _everything_ you say is an analogy, potentially misinterpreted without sufficient context to firm meaning, which implies that metaphor provides some form of error-checking which doesn't necessarily exist in the language inherently.
I haven't ground these thoughts into something pretty and polished, but wanted to write the kind of introspective silliness which wanders around in my head. And people wonder why I spend a lot of time reading silly shit. The serious stuff takes up too damn many cycles, and it only gets compounded if you actually get me to read honest-to-god philosophical tracts - you should have seen me after I took the History of Scientific Revolutions class. But I wasn't writing then, so you never really will.
If my writing even really illustrates what's in my head.
