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(I can't decide if this is going to be an Invisible Trade School entry or not. We'll see how it goes.)
I've been working my way through generative grammar at lunch during my work week for a while, and it's been interesting. Not so much because I agree with it (I'm inclined to say I don't, even though I'm still working through Chomsky's framing; I don't think I have to buy into a Cartesian dualism to resist the idea that language acquisition and use is strictly a function of genetics and biology), but because of what it makes think of adjacent to it, at least the way my brain organizes things.
Most recently, while reading his historical critique of structuralist analytic procedures I got caught in an eddy about potential, how it interacts with information and what that means for encounters with subsequent info. The image that came to mind was a vertical cloud of blue-white-grey, encountering information/stimulus as a spark or series of sparks at the base. As the idea took hold, the spark fired off a chain of sparks within the cloud, climbing and branching, forming structure in the formlessness. My question, which the vision didn't answer, is what happens to that structure after the stimulus is removed? Does it collapse or dissolve back into the structure of the cloud? Does it remain, all or in part, within the cloud core, serving as a preexisting pathway along which new information or stimuli are routed, regardless of how closely it maps to the trigger? Do these structures grow and connect to other similar structures? (Chomsky would argue that the structures preexist, and that it only looks/feels like creation). I could sort of "see" the collapse and reabsorption, how it could happen, but I could also see the structures linger as invisible potential, waiting to be activated by new sparks, could see them connecting to other crystalline structures and interweaving, and could see them remain as solid, visible objects, form out of the chaos of potential. My incipient synaesthesia is not good on giving me definitive answers on this one (perhaps because there aren't any; I could make a logical case for all of the above being correct at once, but I don't necessary feel it. Then again, I don't feel that it's not true, either.)
From there, strangely enough, I jumped to chaos magic, and how a friend recently described me as a chaos magician as a short hand to another lacking any personal (to me) context. My initial negative reaction to that, and to chaos magic in general, is the "cooler than thou, man" attitude. The lazy elitism seems both logically inconsistent and wholly without merit to me. But, that's a superficial rejection, and insufficient in my head, at least; part of my brain has been chugging away quietly as it ran other analyses without conscious thought.
A more accurate take, as I understand it, is to step into any tradition or path, treat the beliefs as true while engaged in their attendant activities, and work towards your end, stepping back out of the tradition/path/belief system when done. It seems to go beyond a mere suspension of disbelief and into a mobile, active set of potential belief that can be activated, localized, then deactivated and unmoored on demand. If I'm right about that (based on slightly deeper than cursory reading; I'm prepared to be wrong about it), then I don't do that, either (the mobile potentiality of belief is how I think this connects to generative grammar and what I got out of it).
From there, I had to wonder about tradition/paths in general, and my generally toxic reaction to them. I don't think it's entirely post-Freudian for me here, despite comically bad early experiences with rural protestantism (Southern Baptist). Even then, there seemed to be some evaluative process in play against which the children's dogma did not sufficiently measure up. Even with my later exposure to any flavor of Abrahamic 'assholes from the desert' religion/magic to painfully sexist/normative paganism/reconstructionism, the anti-canonical but never to be questioned Crowleyan stuff, near or far Eastern religion/magic or the African diaspora, none of it took root. Sure, there are lots of legitimate but superficial reasons it wouldn't go down easily, but surface discomfort isn't enough to make me abandon something (my problematic but longstanding crush on Tim Armstrong is proof of that). Which maybe takes me back to my initial position on the inarticulate refutation of Chomsky's (and Sapir's, among others) premise, that there is some preexisting structure in place, before the advent of any stimulus or information, that is used to understand and evaluate. I still don't believe that's necessarily true, but I can't say why (it's worth noting that I also don't think people are born tabula rasa, either; I haven't reconciled the two yet, obviously).
So now I'm in search of my evaluative criteria, but it's a tricky process. If I go at it strictly intellectually, I can easily create a structure that will hold these issues and competing thoughts in some constructed system of meaning, but that's a process of creation, not discovery, and it would likely be broad, solid, but surface and shallow, insufficient to get to the operative core of how I process. I can't just let the semi-unconscious tracks process this, either, because I want to know how they work, not just get results; I don't know that I can trust them to analyze themselves as they work, as that's not what they're for (or at least how they've been used). I'm not sure how to proceed, but it seems important, and probably importantly instructional. I'm also intensely curious as to how others might process or describe the process of encounter and evaluation.
(I think this could easily fit into ITS, but it seems also more generally applicable. I guess that means it's open for now.)
I've been working my way through generative grammar at lunch during my work week for a while, and it's been interesting. Not so much because I agree with it (I'm inclined to say I don't, even though I'm still working through Chomsky's framing; I don't think I have to buy into a Cartesian dualism to resist the idea that language acquisition and use is strictly a function of genetics and biology), but because of what it makes think of adjacent to it, at least the way my brain organizes things.
Most recently, while reading his historical critique of structuralist analytic procedures I got caught in an eddy about potential, how it interacts with information and what that means for encounters with subsequent info. The image that came to mind was a vertical cloud of blue-white-grey, encountering information/stimulus as a spark or series of sparks at the base. As the idea took hold, the spark fired off a chain of sparks within the cloud, climbing and branching, forming structure in the formlessness. My question, which the vision didn't answer, is what happens to that structure after the stimulus is removed? Does it collapse or dissolve back into the structure of the cloud? Does it remain, all or in part, within the cloud core, serving as a preexisting pathway along which new information or stimuli are routed, regardless of how closely it maps to the trigger? Do these structures grow and connect to other similar structures? (Chomsky would argue that the structures preexist, and that it only looks/feels like creation). I could sort of "see" the collapse and reabsorption, how it could happen, but I could also see the structures linger as invisible potential, waiting to be activated by new sparks, could see them connecting to other crystalline structures and interweaving, and could see them remain as solid, visible objects, form out of the chaos of potential. My incipient synaesthesia is not good on giving me definitive answers on this one (perhaps because there aren't any; I could make a logical case for all of the above being correct at once, but I don't necessary feel it. Then again, I don't feel that it's not true, either.)
From there, strangely enough, I jumped to chaos magic, and how a friend recently described me as a chaos magician as a short hand to another lacking any personal (to me) context. My initial negative reaction to that, and to chaos magic in general, is the "cooler than thou, man" attitude. The lazy elitism seems both logically inconsistent and wholly without merit to me. But, that's a superficial rejection, and insufficient in my head, at least; part of my brain has been chugging away quietly as it ran other analyses without conscious thought.
A more accurate take, as I understand it, is to step into any tradition or path, treat the beliefs as true while engaged in their attendant activities, and work towards your end, stepping back out of the tradition/path/belief system when done. It seems to go beyond a mere suspension of disbelief and into a mobile, active set of potential belief that can be activated, localized, then deactivated and unmoored on demand. If I'm right about that (based on slightly deeper than cursory reading; I'm prepared to be wrong about it), then I don't do that, either (the mobile potentiality of belief is how I think this connects to generative grammar and what I got out of it).
From there, I had to wonder about tradition/paths in general, and my generally toxic reaction to them. I don't think it's entirely post-Freudian for me here, despite comically bad early experiences with rural protestantism (Southern Baptist). Even then, there seemed to be some evaluative process in play against which the children's dogma did not sufficiently measure up. Even with my later exposure to any flavor of Abrahamic 'assholes from the desert' religion/magic to painfully sexist/normative paganism/reconstructionism, the anti-canonical but never to be questioned Crowleyan stuff, near or far Eastern religion/magic or the African diaspora, none of it took root. Sure, there are lots of legitimate but superficial reasons it wouldn't go down easily, but surface discomfort isn't enough to make me abandon something (my problematic but longstanding crush on Tim Armstrong is proof of that). Which maybe takes me back to my initial position on the inarticulate refutation of Chomsky's (and Sapir's, among others) premise, that there is some preexisting structure in place, before the advent of any stimulus or information, that is used to understand and evaluate. I still don't believe that's necessarily true, but I can't say why (it's worth noting that I also don't think people are born tabula rasa, either; I haven't reconciled the two yet, obviously).
So now I'm in search of my evaluative criteria, but it's a tricky process. If I go at it strictly intellectually, I can easily create a structure that will hold these issues and competing thoughts in some constructed system of meaning, but that's a process of creation, not discovery, and it would likely be broad, solid, but surface and shallow, insufficient to get to the operative core of how I process. I can't just let the semi-unconscious tracks process this, either, because I want to know how they work, not just get results; I don't know that I can trust them to analyze themselves as they work, as that's not what they're for (or at least how they've been used). I'm not sure how to proceed, but it seems important, and probably importantly instructional. I'm also intensely curious as to how others might process or describe the process of encounter and evaluation.
(I think this could easily fit into ITS, but it seems also more generally applicable. I guess that means it's open for now.)
