From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jan 31 1997 - 19:14:35 MST
Omega writes:
>This subject of adjusting comprehensibility by shifting internal
>perspective precisely describes the kind of phenomena that would be
>expected from a cognitive process that operates by shifting through
>Fourier spaces in search of localized representations as I described
>in my response to Lyle last night. I find it an amazing synchroni-
>city that you would post something now that exemplifies this so well.
>Check out my post if you haven't yet!
Yes. What you said in that post about David Musick paying attention to
and matching the Fourier spaces of his devout Christian audience seems
right on the mark. I mostly got this stuff from wondering what Nietzsche
was going on about with his lauded method of "perspectivism". I suspect
that what we are talking about now is something close to what he was
talking about.
>Perhaps the one thing we most have to teach ourselves is the
>meta-memetic skill of how to shift through Fourier spaces in
>search of the comprehensibility needed for any given moment.
I'm working on it.
>That opposites like this can both be comprehensible is a no-brainer
>for a brain that operates by shifting though Fourier spaces. What
>is intuitively obvious in one space, would in a sufficiently dif-
>ferent space not simply be wrong, but complete nonsense. But by
>doing this in a general way, we none the less have at least some
>ability to bounce back and forth between these spaces.
Yes. Unfortunately, this leaves traditional logic, with its valuable
refusal to tolerate contradiction, out in the cold. The amazing
thing is that there is one *incredibly* powerful perspective
(developed mostly by a few ancient Greeks and postmedieval Europeans,
mostly men) built around noncontradiction and the scientific method,
which one hardly ever needs to shift out of at all when dealing
with non-persons. But this huge incredibly powerful perspective of
physical science gives no value guidance whatsoever: it leads to
something like Spock syndrome or Hinayana Buddhism (the
stepping-off-the-wheel variety of Buddhism... *not* my trip). Once
you start tossing in a bunch of different value-centered Fourier
spaces (necessary for dealing with persons productively) things
get messy fast. They get especially messy-looking to the people
who have grown up within and never learned how to leave the
value-neutral physical science model. (Actually, I don't think such
people exist. Such a person would be the epitome, the extreme, of
what is actually a mere tendency that I'm describing.)
Anyway, these are just thoughts.
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ http://www.pobox.com/~arkuat/
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