I'd suspect that the strong association of 'plural' and 'losing time' probably comes out of pathological multiplicity.
Mmm. Could be; could just be that that's what I see as the extreme "separate" case; could be that looking at the extreme case amounts to considering the pathological case. I suspect part of it's that the sense of "otherness" vs. "self" is something that's really hard for me to see from outside, and so continuity of thought and memory is what I'm left with to measure by.
I am somewhat amused with the comment on supercooled liquid -- that's exactly the same mathematics that I was trying to get across with the lobes. (There's a fair section on it in your Mathematics of Humor book, incidentally; see the section on "catastrophes"....) And the bit about normal flow also sounds very much like what I was trying to explain as my guess from the simplistic splat-theory.
I conclude that mathematics is weird, but mathematics is _really_ weird when it works.
And I also conclude that it's late and I am brainfuzzy and so I'm not completely following your last paragraph. Expand, please? (Mostly on specifying which dialogue from what other, I think is where I'm lost.)
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Re: A thought and a question (not connected to each other)
Date: 2003-11-12 12:03 am (UTC)Mmm. Could be; could just be that that's what I see as the extreme "separate" case; could be that looking at the extreme case amounts to considering the pathological case. I suspect part of it's that the sense of "otherness" vs. "self" is something that's really hard for me to see from outside, and so continuity of thought and memory is what I'm left with to measure by.
I am somewhat amused with the comment on supercooled liquid -- that's exactly the same mathematics that I was trying to get across with the lobes. (There's a fair section on it in your Mathematics of Humor book, incidentally; see the section on "catastrophes"....) And the bit about normal flow also sounds very much like what I was trying to explain as my guess from the simplistic splat-theory.
I conclude that mathematics is weird, but mathematics is _really_ weird when it works.
And I also conclude that it's late and I am brainfuzzy and so I'm not completely following your last paragraph. Expand, please? (Mostly on specifying which dialogue from what other, I think is where I'm lost.)