|
|
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
A game of Eschaton:
-- Thanks for the link, Lauren! (Articles about this at NPR and the Times.)
posted morning of August 23rd, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about David Foster Wallace
|  |
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Nørretranders spends quite a bit of space in Chapter 9, "The Half-Second Delay", dealing with the experiments of Kornhuber and Deecke and of Benjamin Libet and with their indications that the consciousness of a decision to act is epiphenomenal -- that the volition to act arises out of unconscious processes, the conscious decision is a back-formation, a way for consciousness to explain the volition to itself. The result seems pretty clear from the experiments as they are described;* according to Nørretranders it causes a big problem for believers in free will. If volition is pre-conscious/unconscious/non-conscious, the argument goes, then the notion of our acting out of our free wills is illusory. It is not completely clear; but I don't think that Nørretranders is expounding his own belief here, but rather explaining a debate that is going on. It's difficult to tell because he does not attribute to anybody the argument that Libet's results negate free will; he just states it as a common-sense difficulty with the results. But it doesn't seem so clear-cut to me, and I'm interested to see where he goes with it. My gut sense is that free choice can be exercised without necessarily being a conscious act; that innate urges and instinctual volitions are not necessarily mechanical or deterministic. If consciousness is an epiphenomenon of one's brain state, why shouldn't the conscious decision process -- the back-formed story of a conscious decision process -- be epiphenomenal to processes in the brain state which are indeed deciding to act?
 *Though note, these results from Trevena and Miller call Libet's results into question.
posted evening of August 18th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The User Illusion
|  |
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
Clémence Loonis (cuya lectura de Altazor me ha encantado) ha filmado el poeta Miguel Oscar Menassa recitando varios poemas de GarcÃa Lorca:
posted evening of August 16th, 2011: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Federico GarcÃa Lorca
| |
Monday, August 15th, 2011
Wow! Spotify was not around yet a few years back when I tried to build a playlist of songs from Inherent Vice from YouTube videos... Now GalleyCat's Jason Boog has answered the call with his own playlist. Boog has shared a bunch of other literary-themed playlists, too. Thanks for the link, Christine!
posted evening of August 15th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Inherent Vice
|  |
So when we say "information" in everyday life, we spontaneously think of information-as-the-result-of-a-discarding-of-information. We do not consider the fact that there is more information in an experience than in an account of it. It is the account that we consider to be information. But the whole basis of such an account is information that is discarded. Only after information has been discarded can a situation become an event that people can talk about.The User Illusion
Chapter 5, "The Tree of Talking"
I'm kind of taken with Nørretranders' description of information, in these early chapters, as that which is not communicated -- as what has to be discarded in order for communication to occur. The state of being that one wishes to impart to one's interlocutor contains, necessarily, orders of magnitude too many bits of information for it to be expressed across any available channel of communication; so before one speaks one must create meaning by throwing away information. This also applies, in a different way, to memory -- in order to remember a moment of being one must forget vast reams of context.
posted evening of August 15th, 2011: Respond
|  |
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
 Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to go to The Strand, lovely bookstore that I have not been back to for far too long, and took the opportunity to buy several books that have been on my reading list for a long time now.
- The User Illusion, by Tor Nørretranders. (tr. Jonathan Sydenham)
- Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams.
- The Beats, by Harvey Pekar et al.
- Theogony and Works and Days, by Hesiod. (tr. M.L. West)
- Uno y el universo and Heterodoxia, both by Ernesto Sabato.
I felt like a kid in a candy store... Now I just have to avoid my initial impulse which is to jump in and start reading and commenting on all of them at once!
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Book Shops
|  |
|
In the first chapter of Tor Nørretranders' User Illusion (an engrossing and highly interesting read which I am starting on the recommendation of the Julian Jaynes Society) I find a quotation from James Clerk Maxwell which I think will serve very nicely as an epigraph for READIN (and for the phenomenon of blogging in general):
A memorandum-book does not, provided it is neatly written, appear confused to an illiterate person, or to the owner who understands it thoroughly, but to any other person able to read it appears to be inextricably confused.
 I don't really see yet how Nørretranders is planning to move from thermodynamics and information systems to consciousness and perception; but his enlightening summary of the history of physics in the 19th and 20th Centuries is delicious reading even without the frisson provided by wondering where he is headed with it.
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Epigraphs
| |
Monday, August 8th, 2011
 This is an exciting find: when Steerforth is growsing to Copperfield about his lack of ambition and drive, he makes reference to his childhood --
At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognised for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care," and became food for lions --
and my mind leaps of course to my own childhood, and to Pierre. But wait! How could Dickens have known of Sendak's work?... Clearly Sendak was taking off from an older source. I wonder what it was? Not finding much of anything with Google.
posted evening of August 8th, 2011: 6 responses
➳ More posts about David Copperfield
| |
Sunday, August 7th, 2011
Here is something that has been puzzling me about David Copperfield (which I've been reading, and lazily enjoying, for the past week or so): When David travels from his mother's home in Suffolk (northeast of London) to the school Murdstone sends him to, which I'm pretty sure was described as being near London though I can't find that now, he travels by way of Yarmouth, which is southwest of London (assuming Google Maps is not misleading me) -- and similarly, I believe, when he travels to work at Murdstone and Grinby. This doesn't make any sense to me. It is certainly possible I got mixed up about the location of the school; but in any case why would the carriage from Suffolk to Yarmouth not stop over in London? Never mind all that -- Google Maps is indeed misleading me. The Yarmouth referenced here is Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, fairly close to where David and his mother lived. (It is still farther away from London than is Suffolk, but I can easily imagine it to lie on a main road which bypasses David's mother's house.)
 Also -- I wonder what age David is when he goes to work for Murdstone and Grinby. I've been thinking it is roughly in the range of ten to twelve, but I don't think that was stated in the text, it is just a guess. (The first time in the book that David mentions his age is when he is fallen in love with the eldest Miss Larkins, near the end of his time at Dr. Strong's school, and he is 17 -- I think that could fit with him being about 11 at the time he's working in London.)
posted afternoon of August 7th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Charles Dickens
| |
Saturday, August 6th, 2011
Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere? Really--somewhere in the East? Another Krakatoa? Another name at least that exotic...
posted morning of August 6th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Birthdays
| Previous posts about Readings
Archives  | |
|
Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
•
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
| |
At Ivebeenreadinglately, Levi 
