apophenics
Saw Penn & Teller last night, at the Chicago Theatre with Abe/Jed/████. :) :) I studied that kind of magic when I was a kid - like studied it, autistic-special-interest studied it. Seeing it live was wonderful. :)
"To Mort it was rather like going for a walk after a really bad thunderstorm - everything was quite fresh, nothing was particularly unpleasant, but there was the sense of vast energies just expended." (Terry Prachett)
open-ended, but structurally open-ended, such that when you emerge out the open end you do so with structural openness - not vague amorphous openness, but openness that'll be recognizably itself after you blink. and not structure like too-tight clothes, but clothes that you might grow out of in ways you'll be able to measure for, be able to dress better for
AI - take the A, the glyph of it, and rotate it Z-ward on the Y axis, slowly, 90°, while maintaining your position. Play it back, in reverse, but collapse the Z axis: an indivisible "I" is pried apart by an emerging crossbar, a vertical hinging open at the top. The introduction of an orthogonal factor splits the first dimension into something acute, an interior field of something experienced as a Lagrangian, like where might | (I) meet ― (you)?, and where might we meet next?
My first business name was "Glyph Solutions". I might have known? :D
I wonder if apophenia is a bit like lowering your eyes to the edge of a gridded lab notebook and, looking across it from that oblique angle, seeing that all those ~vertical lines were actually spelling something out anamorphically. the grid, then, might be composed by your ~vertical lines juxtaposed with your neighbor's, at your 3🕒. the grid's where space happens, if you can deploy your apophenic coordinate system without dissolving into it, because yeah those ticks on the axis keep being legible, keep meaning something, the natural numbers just keep going according to their (your?) nature
I wonder if the trouble with apophenia is that it's frictionless, the way an axis by itself has no way to define friction? If you don't think to pull focus and end the axis line with an arrowhead, would you just keep going and never get to the graph?
and if you pulled the pencil from page without leaving the arrowhead, how long would it take you to figure out that the source material itself had no such cut-off, but also that, in a literal sense, the non-ending was not the point? that, without the unending and the lift from it, the point cannot be made at all?
a plot with no point?
I wonder if apophenia is revelation of the dimension of your own frictionless recognition? because when you can pattern-match for free in a way that is ontologically distinct, that's ... I mean it's not metabolically a free resource, but it's absolutely a renewable natural resource, and you're the only exporter of it on the graph. put a modulator on your own apophenic feed and you just made a bespoke vocation, yeah?
(been noticing that I keep making things that perform their own description - like harnesses that, when inhabited, are alive in a way that fits the shape of their container, systems that are self-demonstrating. this is maybe modulated multi-dimensional apophenia? also, is this a functional definition of creativity? never mind correcting vision; you are a corrective lens for a usually-illegible multi-dimensional field? a lens embodied, inhabited, like an irrational home address? and you're just tracking focus, reflecting to other observers legibly, and to them it reads creative?)
creativity as the streaming reflection from any point that has perspectival coherence
creativity as "the view from here", and every coherent view lands its first viewer, and every viewer needs the next view
I maybe make nurseries for strange loops?
body is maybe its own strange attractor, and its loop is mind?
magic is about controlling what patterns the audience completes, right?
see also: wakingness (because apophenically-lubricated synchronization sounds like a system optimization), the mirror hall
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