Original Seeing

::applauds::

I'm not quite sure what that meant, but it sounded great! ;)

Ouch.

Watching myself trying to write (or speak), I am coming to realize what a horrendous hack the language processes of the brain are. It is sobering to contemplate what sorts of noise and bias this introduces to our attempts to think and communicate.

Next time I need inspiration I'll just stare at a wall then.

Thanks!

There is much to be said for looking at the super-specific. All the interesting complexity is found in the specific cases, while the whole often has less complexity (i.e. the algorithmic complexity of a list of the integers is much smaller than the algorithmic complexity of most large integers). While we might be trying to find good compressed descriptions of the whole, if we do not see how specific cases can be compressed and how they relate to each other we do not have much of a starting point, given that the whole usually overwhelms our limited working memories.

Staring at walls is underrated. But I tend to get distracted from my main project by all the interesting details in the walls.

So let us find very concrete examples of disagreements close to us and see if we can identify the key biases.

Was the girl trying to say something about the US, or say something that nobody said before?

A I understand, narrowness is very useful in the latter case, because it gives you a topic about which others haven't already said everything. And Antony van Leeuwenhoek would agree that you could find details that are otherwise hidden.

Still, school essays rarely require you to write something truly original. I could write 500 words about "the United States" right now. So I feel that this is a sort of a bad example.

There's your disagreement. Get to analyzing.

Anders wrote: All the interesting complexity is found in the specific cases, while the whole often has less complexity...

I would offer that it's not the algorithmic complexity, but the interconnections that are "interesting", and any (perceived) relationships in a block universe necessarily entail an observer. This is the "zen" running through Pirsig's book about the meaning of meaning.

Addendum (Out of concern for appearing too vague and mystical):

What is interesting about a brick wall?

Is is in the texture of a brick or its color or its cracks? Is it in the alignment pattern of the rows, or the deviations within the rows? Is it in the statistical regularities of the rows and columns forming the wall? Is it in the demonstration of rectangular tiling in the plane, properties of containment and division? Is it in the ecological aspects of the wall in relation to it's environment? ...

What is interesting in Borges's Library of Babel, in all it's vast algorithmic complexity?

What's commonly lacking from scientific accounts of the world is the essential role of the observer, not in the world itself, but in any accounting of it.

The benefit of staring at a wall is to become aware of the observer, beyond that it's relatively pointless.

There was an interesting exercise for overcoming writer's block somewhere, which said to pick a word, any word at random. After you did that, you were told to write a sentence which included that word. After that, a paragraph which included that sentence.

It felt surprisingly effective.

Most of what I see is what other people have already written... I don't get out of my house much, being a job-free Internet addict. When you live a life in which words are almost all there is, what does that do to originality?

Hi this Marty again, this story defines a very open way of thinking. compared when I write I think of a word to describe what I'm thinking If the word is not the correct fit the word has no meaning in my mind. And I find a better thought to fit the word. Is this a good way to translate what is in my mind to English? Or, do I need to think in English before using the word. What still puzzles me is what is a troll? Please remember I have only studied English for maybe, a half a year so your help is greatly appreciated.

Regarding the first reply here (a year later...): perhaps there is another problem visible here, the problem of when advice is too plain. The story advises in a fashion so transparently evident that even SHRDLU could get it: the poor student quite literally wasn't looking at anything, so Pirsig/Phædrus gave her a topic so mundane that she had to go down and see for herself. If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were a math textbook, the rule would be clear: "if you examine something, you will have something to say about it." But because writing is a mysterious art, it is assumed that the moral of a story about writing must be mysterious as well.

(Oddly, I never fell prey to this with the visual arts. I thank whoever told me about the negative-space/outline trick - that worked so well that I cached "drawing is seeing" instead.)

Fucking hell, that completely and instantly worked. I looked at the first object in the room, determined to come up with something interesting about it- the corner of three planes in the wall, over by the foyer, which makes a 3d platform about 7 feet off the ground. Instantly I was thinking about its structure and what it concealed and what was on top of it. I would not have been thusly inspired to think about that wall had I not set out to see it that way. Nice.

This happens to me every time someone asks me to explain what I believe. I say "uhhh..."
I try to ask people to be more specific (what do you believe about this particular topic)
If they don't, I just tell them I believe human rationality can come to an understanding of everything, and can at least attempt to account for the things it doesn't understand. I may be wrong, but it's so damn hard to start from nothing, even if you do know everything (which I don't).

I think this video says it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAoJsS9Ix8

Betty Edwards encountered the same problem when teaching students how to draw.

She made a still-life with a ball infront of a vase. But the student drew the ball beside the vase. When she said "Look the ball is in front", he replied "Yes but I don't know how to draw it that way."

Like the essay writer the student was trying to replicate symbols he had already practiced instead of seeing with fresh eyes. She gave the students an image upside down and they were able to replicate it accurately because it forced them to look instead of draw learned symbols.

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0874774241

This is powerful.

-

yep, nothing I can do about it.

Title according to https://web.archive.org/web/20120929212839/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAoJsS9Ix8 was "Chimpanzee vs. Human child learning (1/2)", and is presumably this video.

When I first read this, I didn't take it to mean that it's easier to think of something if you narrow your focus. Instead, I took from it the lesson that in order to actually think about something, you should prepare your mind by temporarily deleting/quarantining everything that other people have said about that thing. When you're thinking about what other people have said about a thing, you're not thinking about the thing itself.

Of course, testimonial evidence is very useful and shouldn't be dismissed, but I found this piece enlightening because it pointed out the not-intuitively-obvious difference between thinking about testimonial evidence and thinking about the thing itself.

Reading it for a second time, I understand that this piece can also teach the virtue of narrowing your focus to find more to say about something. For example, I could think that by saying "I survived the teletransportation" I would have proclaimed an irreducible truth, while, really, there's so much more to say about the event if I use concepts with a higher resolution.

I'm not sure whether the explanation at the end was right, but this is a very powerful technique nonetheless. I observed a similar problem many times, but couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Imagine explaining subjectivity to someone, a person, with only an objective sense of self. A hypothetically purely rational being.

Or, again, imagine explaining subjective intuitions to somebody who somehow supposes their subjective intuitions to only be objective reasonings.

When I became aware that others lack or are incapable of accessing or perhaps are unwilling to access these apparently normal ranges of human experience, subjective and objective, I became far more cautious to express my sentiments of quality. Indeed, I mostly stopped expressing them, because they were met with simple incomprehension.

So original seeing may be as Pirsig says a direct experience, or indeed that direct experience may simply be an inexamined presumption.

It seems to me the phenomenological subjectivity itself is the fundament. But who knows?