#by ThoughtWeaver

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

What's one of your favorite things to talk about?

This depends on how broadly I define "thing," but if I restrict the definition to "topic that will keep my attention for longer than two hours," then it's probably phenomenology or related topics. (This is kind of weird since my degree was in mathematical logic, which is of course basically completely unrelated to those things, but some of my undergrad classes did focus on them.)

For instance, here are some things I've wanted to write posts about at various times:

Whoa, rubberhand illusion, you guys!

Woah, phenomenology, you guys!

Zombies!

Whoa, phenomenology and zombies!, you guys!

Experiential individuation

Furthermore, apparently we also know more or less the answer to why phenomenology came about in the first place, which is sort of like the beginnings of life, because philosophers in the 1870s decided that the self was the the hard problem in philosophy, so they started worrying about it more and more until the self ended up the central philosophical problem, and then they worried about the hard problem for several generations until people like Heidegger decided the self was not so interesting after all and then they moved on to other problems

That's not so interesting as it might seem, since we now realize that the self is like the "smartest" and most complicated thing and as such is hard to pin down in a sentence. What is actually hard is, for instance, explaining why we feel like (for instance) the zombie barber is not a barber, or (for instance) why consciousness is so hard to get a grip on (yet we have it?)

Ohhh the you guys! of all time

Cantor's theorem!

These are all the things I think about when my brain is idle, by the way. When it's fully occupied, it's thinking about the calculus of formal logic and the formalization of basic concepts of arithmetic, or, y'know, statistics or whatever.

The funny thing is that if I were a phenomenologist it would be very, very easy for me to become a philosopher of math, and vice versa. In math you're always explaining the same three or four things in new ways, and in phenomenology you're arguing about the same three or four issues using different words, and this makes the job of inventing the words much easier.

[cobalt-cactus]

Chapter: 25/?

Fandom: Baldur's Gate (Video Games)

Rating: Explicit

Updates: Bi-Weekly*ish

Relationships: Lae'zel/Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate), Lae'zel & Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate)

Characters: Lae'zel (Baldur's Gate), Shadowheart (Baldur's Gate)

Additional Tags: Fluff, Sweet, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Romance, Developing Relationship, Spoilers, Pillow Talk, Lesbian Sex, Explicit Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Soft Lae'zel (Baldur's Gate), Protective Lae'zel (Baldur's Gate), Slice of Life, LGBTQ Themes, Alternate Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, Anti-Githyanki Racism (Dungeons & Dragons), Cultural Differences, Firsts, Minor Arnell Hallowleaf/Emmeline Hallowleaf (Baldur's Gate), Minor Gale (Baldur's Gate), Minor Dame Aylin | Nightsong/Isobel Thorm, Minor Karlach/Wyll (Baldur's Gate), Minor Astarion/Gale (Baldur's Gate), Minor Selûne (Dungeons & Dragons), Minor Urlon (Dungeons & Dragons)

Summary: Lae'zel and Shadowheart experiment with their Thoughtweave wedding bands, prevent Gale from making a bigger fool out of himself than he already has, and finally get some private time again.

[revelry-in-severity]

RPG AU Classes- Kanade

Meets up with Mafuyu to get her out of her house

Starting Class: Enchanter- Can mess around with the memories of others, works with Ena well because Ena can add her illusions, doesn't have the stamina to do much, very much a stationary magic user, buffs up her teammates as much as she can, confusion is a common status ailment when Kanade is on the field which leads to Mafuyu easily picking the enemies off

Mizuki is the one to start their party quest when they ask to go looking for Rui who they haven't heard from, Kanade fully believes WxS can handle themselves even if she does worry about them, which defeats her previous thought

Is constantly checking over the members in her party

Upgraded Class: Thoughtweaver- Can now physically pull her memories to act as barriers or attacks, did not build up anymore stamina whatsoever but Ena continues to make it look like she's in different places anyways, can also mentally communicate with the others now so they don't have to give away any of their strategies, Mizuki has suddenly started laughing more often because of this

[ralph-with-coffee]

Grace

in all you do, think, and say,may you embrace kindness, generosity,and righteousness.let each action and thoughtweave connections of hearts,embraced in gratitude and respect.may there be peace in your heart and mindfor a long journey into the unknown. 2.15.2023

[thenighteternal]

Omniscience

[digging-holes-in-the-river]

I picked up Radix last night, and reread the first few pages. I might end up rereading the whole book. We’ll see how accurate my description from last night is -- it’s been a while since I read it. (I think I’ve read it twice so far -- first in 2009 and again in 2012.)

Anyway, reading the first few pages, it’s striking how visually dense the descriptions are. Like, here’s an example sentence:

He drove first along a rutted dirt road that smoothed into a causeway and arced out of the industrial district.

That just seems like a lot of visual description, all packed succinctly into one line. It gives me a clear mental image of what that entire stretch of road looked like. And it isn’t even a descriptive sentence! Attanasio doesn’t write “The road was...”; he fits all that visual description into an action sentence which keeps the plot moving. (Ugh, I sound like a five-paragraph essay.)

Anyway, it’s interesting because... with descriptions that dense, if you paused to construct a detailed mental image for each one, it would take forever to get through the book. And I know I didn’t do that when I first read Radix, because I sped through the book in a matter of days. But somehow, I still extracted meaning and clear visuals from the book (or at least large parts of it; there were surreal parts of it that failed to resolve into clear images, but which still gave me a strong sense of meaning).

Sometime in grad school, I got it into my head that the human mind processes sentences by constructing a sensory simulation of the scene that’s described, and therefore I needed to carefully visualize every image in every book, or I wouldn’t be “really getting the meaning”. Which, uh... in retrospect, was not a good idea, and deeply screwed up my ability to read anything (fiction or non-fiction) for the next few years.

For what it’s worth, there is some evidence that people process language (or at least concrete, descriptive language) by constructing a sensory simulation of the scene that’s described. But, like, to whatever extent we do this, it’s largely an unconscious process; we don’t sit around consciously visualizing everything that anyone says, or else it would be impossible to focus on the conversation at hand.

But anyway, during this phase where I had convinced myself that I needed to read each sentence carefully, and consciously construct an image associated with it, it took me forever to read fiction, because I would sit there, reading every sentence over and over again until I could visualize the scene perfectly in my mind. This was extraordinarily time-consuming. I want to emphasize that this is *not* how to read. I think it contributed to a lot of my sensory processing issues; I used to be able to read in a crowded room, but now I can’t (maybe I’m using the auditory parts of my mind to process text more than I used to?). And in general, I’ve been feeling like my sensory issues have gotten worse over the last few years, but maybe my sensory processing is theoretically fine, and I’m just using the wrong parts of my brain to process information. (Here’s a previous post I wrote about my difficulties reading and how I’ve been recovering from them.)

But anyway, all of this makes me wonder, how do we read? Because last night, when I read that sentence from Radix, my eyes brushed over it fairly quickly and then moved onto the next sentence. And I could feel my mind constructing meaning, but what did that meaning contain? Did it actually contain a sensory simulation, containing all the sentence’s visual details (but processed much faster by the subconscious mind)? Or did my eyes gloss over some of the details, and just extract the fact that the protagonist drove down a road?

I think it’s closer to the former, but my intuition is that... the meaning my mind simulates is much less concrete, much less definite, than the visual images I was trying to consciously construct. And so my mind might skip over some details, or generate a rutted road and a smoothed road but not necessarily the full mental image, all at once, of the whole road connected together. Or something. I don’t know. But my mind seems to extract meaning out of the sentence, even when I read it very quickly, and that meaning seems to be at least partially sensory / visual.

But it also seems to contain something other than the visuals. It seems to contain abstract understanding and a visceral emotional sense of what it’s like to experience this road. And I think that’s partially conveyed by the sentence structure. One thing I’ve noticed about Attanasio’s writing is that he puts a lot of visual description into the verbs. The description of the road “smoothing” out and then “arcing” gives a sense of movement, which goes well with the narration of the protagonist driving, and which wouldn’t be conveyed by saying “The road started out rutted, and gradually transitioned to smooth.”

Anyway I’m just really interested in the writing in Radix, and how it conveys meaning, and what that meaning looks like in our minds. Because the first time I read it, a lot of the descriptions were semi-incomprehensible to me, and I had the distinct sense that I was reading the book impressionistically (see a previous post I made on this topic). I had the sense that I couldn’t quite visualize what was going on, but at a deeper level, I nonetheless perfectly understood what was happening.

Anyway I’m writing this post now because this phenomenon continues to fascinate me.

[alicebeckstrom]

And until that time was come, never again after the days of Eärnil did the Nazgûl dare to cross the River or to come forth from their city in shape visible to Men. ~ The Silmarillion, Of the Rings of Power (Shadowed Mists by ThoughtWeaver on DEVIANTART) #Tolkien #RingsOfPower #��lairi #Nazgûl #Ringwraiths

[the-utmost-bound]

In his chapter on love, Haidt writes:

Passionate love is a drug.  Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy).  It’s no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine.  Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction.

I rolled my eyes when I came to this paragraph, because psych writers are always doing this.  “This normal human experience activates the same part of the brain as drugs!”  “It releases the same neurotransmitters as drugs!”  Usually, the point is to say “Therefore, this experience is a drug.  And drugs are bad, so this experience is bad too!”

Which isn’t what Haidt was doing; his point was that we eventually gain a tolerance for drugs, where they no longer feel good anymore because we’re so used to them.  And the same thing happens with passionate love; after a few months it inevitably wears off.

And yet, even in Haidt’s case, I dislike the description.  There’s something disheartening about hearing our experiences described in this way, as if love were an insect under a microscope, dissected and analyzed by scientists in white coats.  I’ve always thought that... there’s something about looking at these first-person experiences from the third-person brain-is-a-lump-of-meat perspective that deflates them, makes them seem less real.  “You only have these feelings because you’re subject to your animal urges.  You’re a product of chemistry, a will-less automaton.”

I don’t know how to explain.  But I’ve never liked descriptions like this and I’ve always found them dehumanizing and demoralizing.

Except... I found this passage in my favorite novelist (and friend) David Zindell’s memoir, and... it talks about love in a very similar way, but somehow I don’t find it demoralizing at all.

Falling in love is a disease, a derangement of the senses, a divine madness -- so declared the ancients who pondered this mystery.  Modern scientists have confirmed their cynicism.  New love, they observe, can resemble mania, dementia, and obsession.  The brain scans they have made of the smitten suggest that love -- or being in love -- looses an electrical storm within the brain’s most primitive structures and appears related to people’s more primitive drives: thirst, hunger, the craving for drugs.  Indeed, the longing for deep romance can obliterate even the will to live.  The poets certainly knew this.  All the great lovers of their stories ended their lives tragically: Tristan and Isolde; Lancelot and Guinevere; Romeo and Juliet.  The wonderful (and terrible) thing about being in love, though, was that one didn’t care.

Not sure what it is that makes this passage less depressing.  But I find it uplifting, just like I find all of David’s writings.

Saving this for future ponderings on the aesthetics of ideas.

[my-textile-journal]

Mood Board and Concept

[Thursday, May 21, 2020]

My inspiration for the SDC’s theme “Colour and the Universe”.

I believe I will be picking out 5 colours from the above images to match on color atlas.

The two included diagrams are visual representations of black holes and I am thinking of including them as part of the design.

Concept: Colour to me is the dispersal of light. With regards to the Universe, it is the various elements and atoms that emit light that travel from far over the galaxy into our eyes to be perceived by us. 

It is the perception of light. 

Stars of various sizes and distances from us glowing brightly in to our eyes. The brightest being the Sun. 

And as a balance, Black Holes. 

They consume light. meaning they consume colour. They are essentially invisible to us as they eat away the very thing we use to perceive our surroundings. They are the only thing able to change the course of light with just its own gravity. Where the light disappears to is unknown but my favourite theory is the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory.

Welcome once again, and this is the End of the beginning.

References from left to right by row:

beautifulcloudyskies. (2018). Greg Universe Rose Quartz Aesthetic [Online image]. (Edited).

DAILY MINIMAL. No. 498 [Digital Art].

[Online image]. (Edited).

ThoughtWeaver. (2016). Vacillation [Digital Art]. (Edited).

JasonKewalt. (2018). ) [Online image]. (Edited).

[Online image]. (Edited).

[Online image]. (Edited).

[Online image].

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

@lavendroused replied to your post “@lavendroused replied to your post “Frank! I had a bad day at work. Can you tell me a happy story about a kitten to cheer me...”

ohh so it's a happy ending for the kitten? that's good! I thought the human in the story might not be very happy but maybe I was just looking at it from the wrong perspective

The story is more about a kitten who lives to be as happy as possible, at least sometimes, and ends by meeting a new friend who likes it when you talk to him and is a big softie at heart – i.e. a cat!

[kormyra]

Liferoot by ThoughtWeaver

[supertheoristking]

Operations Internship in Noida at Thoughtweavers Strategic Consultants Private Limited

Operations Internship in Noida at Thoughtweavers Strategic Consultants Private Limited

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[thenighteternal]

Evergreen

[thenighteternal]

Tidal

[thenighteternal]

Velveteen

[thenighteternal]

Wizardfire