On 10/30/2013 12:21 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
And I seem inclined to try to sieve other's and re-present it contorted through my own expresser (what is the opposite of a sieve... a pug-mill or a meat-grinder? I think one of the things I do here in this forum that is surely maddening to anyone who tries to follow my missives is precisely what I'm talking about doing automagically... to ingest one point of view and regurgitate it from a slightly different one (with added ingredients from earlier meals, of course, just to push the metaphor hard)...
You make a great point, here. I danced around the production problem by allowing for a leaky/uncertain input. I.e. I may _intend_ to pay sole attention to one thing (mess, object, phenomenon, whatever). But there's a wiggle or fuzziness to my attention. As a result, what comes out the other end might contain something new, something that doesn't _seem_ to exist in the original thing on which I focused (or said I'd focus).
But that probably doesn't account for all of creative/production. There are plenty of others, e.g. your material from earlier foci, or perhaps a multi-tasking ability to be able to simultaneously consider and merge foci. The more important one, I suppose would be if/whether there's something pivotal happening inside the machine (consciousness?), something creative rather than merely transformative.
But it is your very re-combobulation of the conversations others have here that I find entertaining/useful/fascinating.
Same here, of course. On 10/30/2013 12:45 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I left out an important point in all of this, I think. The work going into building "ontologies" for various (sub)domains is roughly the act of building a shared, formalized "constraint sieve". My interest is in developing a working environment for ensembles of these.
One thing that's always bothered me (right down to the etymological nightmare of the words "ontologies" and "methodologies") is the assumption that ontologies are at all stable, much less static, or even real. These languages we have for various things (experiences, domains, identities, expectations) have always seemed so arbitrary to me. Of course, that's what sparks my defense of postmodernism against people who are clearly smarter and more linguistically endowed than me. ;-) But more importantly, as I age, I consistently find my peers are maturing faster than I am. They (for good or bad) fall more naturally into "expertise" or "guru" statuses or fall more naturally into "right wing nutjob" or "cancer patient" or whatever classification system may be most convenient for them.
Of course, I can't help but think that if they're doing that, then I must be doing the same, even if i can't accurately observe it about myself. And if I'm maturing like they are, then what can I do to _stop_ it? I've thought seriously about leaping off the cliff and trying some psychedelics. My yard alone tells me there should be some useful fungus around here somewhere. ;-) It seems like those drugs are an established mechanism for "cracking the cosmic egg", as it were.
But this is an individual, ontogenic observation, not a population based, transpersonal, or objective one. Perhaps there are stable or even static/true classification systems out there and I'm just too lazy to find them? And, if that's the case, then the Satanists are right. It's not wrong to purposefully go crazy through, say, meditation or psychedelics, but why would you do that if you can be _right_ and _know_ things about the world? Why would you take the risk of abandoning the Truth?
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