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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
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.
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!
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 ➳ More posts about Readings
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.
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
I met up with Miriam and Jon last night to go see The Shirts. This time they were playing Cha Cha's, on the Coney Island boardwalk, and they were completely in their element. A very different experience from watching them at Arlene's Grocery on the Lower East Side -- the crowd was a Brooklyn crowd, probably half of the audience was made up of a big extended family whose yearly reunion at Cha Cha's coincided with The Shirts' date... Listening to the crowd sing along on the chorus of "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" warmed the cockles of my heart.
It's been a long time since I've been at Coney Island at night. That is the best time there. The crowds of tourists thin out, the gray dusk of evening and the darkness of night settle over the beach and the water -- the few people still out walking on the sand are black silhouettes against the dark water. Then you turn your gaze back inland and get a fever of brightly colored neon shapes and hawkers yelling, rides sliding past and spinning around, smells of fried food and sunburnt bodies...
Miriam and Jon and I had dinner at Tatiana's in Brighton Beach and walked down the boardwalk in the gloaming. When we got to Cha Cha's, we were happy to find Bill and Brian of Shanghai Love Motel and their S.O.'s, Lisa and Maia rocking out to The Shirts' pop beat. A great way to spend a Saturday evening.
posted morning of August 14th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about The Shirts
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 
probably half of the audience was made up of a big extended family whose yearly reunion at Cha Cha's coincided with The Shirts' date... Listening to the crowd sing along on the chorus of "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" warmed the cockles of my heart. 
Then you turn your gaze back inland and get a fever of brightly colored neon shapes and hawkers yelling, rides sliding past and spinning around, smells of fried food and sunburnt bodies...
