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Talking Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at One Another
- teddyh 7y agoGiraffe pimp. https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/aafawp/giraffe_pimp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/aafawp/gira...
- yetihehe 7y ago> We’re born with human brains, and human brains see the world in particular ways and not in other ways. We can’t hear things that dogs can hear, we can’t see things that bats can see. That's beginning to change[0][1]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5523951/#S24title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5523951/#S24tit... [1] https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/ https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/
- ben_w 7y ago”See” has two meanings, the sensory input of photons and the recognition of an object or event. “Hear” likewise, which is why people argue if trees falling when nobody is around make a sound (is sound the vibration of air molecules which can be recorded by a microphone or is it the experience you have when that happens to you?). There are things I cannot see or hear even though my eyes and ears are good enough — the appeal of football, which key music is playing in, or (to the surprise of friends who like that sort of thing) if certain images are ”consensual BDSM” or ”assault”. There are thoughts that I am incapable of thinking. Given the problem of induction and its relation to the “no free lunch” theorem in AI, I believe that this is not merely an imperfection of my mind, but an inevitability.
- vincent-toups 7y agoI'm in favor of outfits like Nautilus, to a degree, and I felt like their debut deporting was often interesting. But I feel like the relentless pressure to produce "stimulating" or intellectually serious material has led to a lot of superficial, TED-talk style, articles where the matter of fact or banal is dressed up as the profound. I think we ought to admit that true depth of thought is just about incompatible with the non-stop, clickbait oriented, demands of the internet.
- dwaltrip 7y agoThe mundane, banal aspects of life are drenched with profundity. The problem is that it is usually very well hidden right in front of us. It takes a lot of life experience and careful thought to get a sense of it (exposure to ideas of others certainly helps as well). It isn't easily communicated or understood. We have no rigorous tools for working with it. We are like the blind men and the elephant. And then of course, doing something meaningful with it is another question entirely. It happens, certainly, but it is non-trivial. Art, in all its forms, is perhaps the easiest example (another is writing HN comments :p). Some people take these difficulties as reasons to largely dismiss it or spend no time thinking about it. I think that is a mistake. The elephant still exists even if we can only perceive a piece of it. However, it does seem that because of all this, much of the time there are better things to do (unless you are a philosopher or some other specialist!). Fortunately, we can slowly explore this profoundness as a background task, with the occasional punctuated intensive investigation as life demands, while going about our daily lives.
- vincent-toups 7y ago"The mundane, banal aspects of life are drenched with profundity." I agree with this, but I don't think Nautilus routinely hits the mark.
- dwaltrip 7y agoFair enough :) My comment wasn't only directed at you. I used the opportunity as an excuse to ramble a bit.
- ozzmotik 7y agoit's nice to see someone who shares my opinion that there is intense complexity that lies underneath the surface of what appears to be superficially simple. it seems to be a pretty rare opinion to spot in others, as a lot of people seem to see simple and complex things as diametrically opposed rather than seeing a more hierarchical relationship between the two. you can easily simplify any complex interaction or concept, but that doesn't make the level of detail that goes into it any less vivid, it only hides it for the sake of communication.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoThis being HN, I interpreted the headline as an entertainment startup named Talking, doing some innovative crossover of literal fictional universes in new works of art.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- emmelaich 7y agoI'd like to use this opportunity to ask a question of the HN community. I remember someone (philosopher perhaps, scandinavian I think) who had a paper / rant on the utter impossibility of understanding one another. From memory it was in a form of a list, with one of the items being something like "If something can be misunderstood, it will be"