Reply to comment

I'd like to preface my remarks here today (Sunday, 11 October 2009) by noting that my brain hurts today as much as it does in our actual meetings at Bryn Mawr. As Paul knows, I am constantly working in about three totally different fields at once -- philosophy, business consulting, art+design (I am teaching a grad seminar in industrial design this year... along with a course in Greek philosophy and another in Daoism... oowww, it hurts!), and so on. As I write this, I am getting ready to present some research at a conference on pre-Colombian voyages to the Americas...! So, my thoughts are a bit foggy. But Paul's presentation on "ambiguous images" is still in my mind, and actually the idea came up in today's conference, since I debating people who claim that certain rock carvings in the American southwest are Old World scripts. I say -- as Paul might put it -- that they are decoding or resolving external (visual) "noise" into something that makes sense to them, as observers. They are storytelling, too. The story that they are telling is defective, for various reasons that I won't get into here, but it fits with Paul's idea of pathology being when one's "story" is no longer working as a way of making one's way in the world...

But what I actually wanted to talk about was related more directly to our group's charge of looking at issues of "Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics". We've talked about how people see or create form and meaning out of "noise" or randomness, etc. We looked at some visual examples, talked about auditory examples, and so on. But the other day, I was re-reading some papers of a British physicist, Julian Barbour, who studies time, and believes that it does not exist. He presents an interesting model of a timeless universe, but never quite addresses the key question of why we perceive time. In short, then, I think that "time" may be another "story-telling" mechanism, but a very complex one, one even more complex than visual resolution, or auditory, or even linguistic resolution. This could lead to some interesting discussion, perhaps, in our future meetings. I will touch upon this in my "I Ching" workshop coming up...