The Dynamo and the Spime, part three
Metaphors grafted to science develop their own sort of force, an auxiliary ability to convey a message, albeit to an audience expecting the relative ease of journalistic minimalism.
This entry will be short; it's devoted to a metaphor that I want to address obliquely because it deals with something that's indirect: chaos.
Adams writes that he'd become convinced that the sequence of human thought is chaos. Sequence implies continuity, at least some connection between the first and last elements and a channel to navigate the way between. Final conditions in some way, whether the way is obvious or obscure, arise from initial conditions. The channel is all process, all participation: turning points, decisions, may seem arbitrary, their effects transient. Superfluity defines the experience.
According to Sterling, the Gizmo, the predecessor of the Spime, is "...delicately poised between commodity and chaos." Here an older definition of chaos is probably more useful than what we currently associate with the word: instead of disorder, chaos is empty space, a chasm. According to the dictionary I use, this latter definition is obselete. It's still accessible, though, and I think it applies.
There's another definition I'm underqualified to speak of in any way other than obliquely...in math, chaos describes a property of some systems sensitive to initial conditions. Whether we can find how a final condition is described by an initial one depends on the precision of our tools. To place Henry again between the dynamo and chaos: looking for a cause and finding only effect, he could easily invoke the "occult mechanism." As precision in cataloging and defining causes might be aided by Spimes and their ilk, the human thought process may remain occult.
As definers of experiences, Blobjects, Gizmos and Spimes aren't so unlike the Venus, Virgin and dynamo. Via intention, each renders something of the transience of its creation, making flux static. As metaphors for whatever happens in the channel, they're direct, accessible, and sometimes forceful. This, from Mork's comment at the end of the last entry, nicely concludes this topic by broadening it.
This entry will be short; it's devoted to a metaphor that I want to address obliquely because it deals with something that's indirect: chaos.
Adams writes that he'd become convinced that the sequence of human thought is chaos. Sequence implies continuity, at least some connection between the first and last elements and a channel to navigate the way between. Final conditions in some way, whether the way is obvious or obscure, arise from initial conditions. The channel is all process, all participation: turning points, decisions, may seem arbitrary, their effects transient. Superfluity defines the experience.
According to Sterling, the Gizmo, the predecessor of the Spime, is "...delicately poised between commodity and chaos." Here an older definition of chaos is probably more useful than what we currently associate with the word: instead of disorder, chaos is empty space, a chasm. According to the dictionary I use, this latter definition is obselete. It's still accessible, though, and I think it applies.
There's another definition I'm underqualified to speak of in any way other than obliquely...in math, chaos describes a property of some systems sensitive to initial conditions. Whether we can find how a final condition is described by an initial one depends on the precision of our tools. To place Henry again between the dynamo and chaos: looking for a cause and finding only effect, he could easily invoke the "occult mechanism." As precision in cataloging and defining causes might be aided by Spimes and their ilk, the human thought process may remain occult.
As definers of experiences, Blobjects, Gizmos and Spimes aren't so unlike the Venus, Virgin and dynamo. Via intention, each renders something of the transience of its creation, making flux static. As metaphors for whatever happens in the channel, they're direct, accessible, and sometimes forceful. This, from Mork's comment at the end of the last entry, nicely concludes this topic by broadening it.
posted by evelyn at 8:46 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home