[b]Ted Chiang
Experience is algorithmically incompressible.[/b]
Holy shit!!!
Right?
Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.
Hmm. What do your friends say?
The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.
This thing: languageconnections.com/blo … eptapod-b/
In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.”
Hell, any child knows that.
The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. Fermat’s principle sounds weird because it describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.”
Okay, but does it have free will?
[b]Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it’s appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That’s when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers.Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks–call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex–and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you’re no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You’ve got pharmaceutical grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.[/b]
Let’s call it the Elena Epaneshnik Syndrome.