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Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. (for the opposite direction, see https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.i

Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. (for the opposite direction, see https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ )

ryanjshaw 2y ago
> Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. Can somebody explain this or is it one of the generated sentences in question?
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  It could be one of the generated sentences, but I composed it via wetware, in order to get a more-meaningful-than-average utterance: Meaninglessness (because a product of a random process) is liminal (because it's betwixt and between, neither meaningful[0] nor meaningless[2]) because the context is shared (the vocabulary for the generator —the context shared between we meaningful creatures and the stochastic parrot program— are constraints, especially chosen by the artist to be evocative no matter how they are combined) [0] compare SLN: Just like the white winged dove Sings a song Sounds like[1] she's singing Ooh ooh ooh [1] there are many references to animal sounds sounding like human speech; here are two: Ajax in the Little Iliad —having turned Athena's grey eyes green by managing to tank without asking her for buffs— is driven mad[2] by her shortly after he loses a prize to Odysseus: he interprets the greek cows, instead of saying "moo", as saying "μου" (mine), each claiming the prize for herself, not for him ... and so he kills them all. In a less sanguine vein, Pechkin the Postman also has a nervous breakdown after thinking Khvatayka the Jackdaw is continually asking him "kto tam?" (both a fairly corvidesque sound and "who's there?" in russian) despite his efforts to explain that he's the postman bringing a magazine. [2] in The Eden Express (1975), Mark Vonnegut points out that maybe he could've figured out he was going schizophrenic, if only he'd stopped to notice that everything had suddenly become meaningful.
thomastjeffery 2y ago
Inform looks very interesting, though I will apparently have to do a lot more reading before I can totally grok what it is and why. I've been working on an idea I am calling the Story Empathizer. The struggle I'm having is that my idea is so abstract, it's hard to write an instance of it. story = meaning + expression In the world of computing, context is liminal. We write explicit answers to "what?" and "how?", and call them "data" and "algorithms". Those answers are entirely meaningful: defined. Context, on the other hand, is ethereal: untouchable. Context is the answer to "why?". It exists in our code like the waters of a river exist in the walls of the Grand Canyon: only present at time of writing. We encode our intentions into software just like a river carves time into earth. There is no inverse function: no intention decoder. When we communicate with natural language, we start without shared context. If I want to be understood, I must share my context. I do that by writing a second story: a backstory. The reader uses that backstory to define the meaning of my expression. With shared context, we aren't limited to reading. We have all the parts of the equation, and can use them to read, write, and empathize. read: meaning = story - expression write: expression = story - meaning So what if we could move this process out of our brains, and into a computer? Well, that's the dream, anyway..

Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. (for the opposite direction, see https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ )

ryanjshaw 2y ago

> Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. Can somebody explain this or is it one of the generated sentences in question?

082349872349872 2y ago
It could be one of the generated sentences, but I composed it via wetware, in order to get a more-meaningful-than-average utterance: Meaninglessness (because a product of a random process) is liminal (because it's betwixt and between, neither meaningful[0] nor meaningless[2]) because the context is shared (the vocabulary for the generator —the context shared between we meaningful creatures and the stochastic parrot program— are constraints, especially chosen by the artist to be evocative no matter how they are combined) [0] compare SLN: Just like the white winged dove Sings a song Sounds like[1] she's singing Ooh ooh ooh [1] there are many references to animal sounds sounding like human speech; here are two: Ajax in the Little Iliad —having turned Athena's grey eyes green by managing to tank without asking her for buffs— is driven mad[2] by her shortly after he loses a prize to Odysseus: he interprets the greek cows, instead of saying "moo", as saying "μου" (mine), each claiming the prize for herself, not for him ... and so he kills them all. In a less sanguine vein, Pechkin the Postman also has a nervous breakdown after thinking Khvatayka the Jackdaw is continually asking him "kto tam?" (both a fairly corvidesque sound and "who's there?" in russian) despite his efforts to explain that he's the postman bringing a magazine. [2] in The Eden Express (1975), Mark Vonnegut points out that maybe he could've figured out he was going schizophrenic, if only he'd stopped to notice that everything had suddenly become meaningful.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

Inform looks very interesting, though I will apparently have to do a lot more reading before I can totally grok what it is and why. I've been working on an idea I am calling the Story Empathizer. The struggle I'm having is that my idea is so abstract, it's hard to write an instance of it. story = meaning + expression In the world of computing, context is liminal. We write explicit answers to "what?" and "how?", and call them "data" and "algorithms". Those answers are entirely meaningful: defined. Context, on the other hand, is ethereal: untouchable. Context is the answer to "why?". It exists in our code like the waters of a river exist in the walls of the Grand Canyon: only present at time of writing. We encode our intentions into software just like a river carves time into earth. There is no inverse function: no intention decoder. When we communicate with natural language, we start without shared context. If I want to be understood, I must share my context. I do that by writing a second story: a backstory. The reader uses that backstory to define the meaning of my expression. With shared context, we aren't limited to reading. We have all the parts of the equation, and can use them to read, write, and empathize. read: meaning = story - expression write: expression = story - meaning So what if we could move this process out of our brains, and into a computer? Well, that's the dream, anyway..