Nobody else will ask. [grin] Everyone knows I'm a wacko; so rational people steer clear. Your strength is your ability to wade into the irrational. ;-)
Anyway, what's to expand? We have a list of recommended literature. I'm inclined to do this by definition: 1) to commend - To represent as worthy, qualified, or desirable. com-mend, put your trust in. 2) credible - Capable of being believed; worthy of confidence; reliable. Robert asked for recommendations from a group of people he, if not exactly "trusts", knows fairly well, which is a type of credential. He then ranked them by the number of hits each recommendation got. More recommendations means more credibility. Of course, one could do that with anything, coffee makers, gasoline vendors, art vendors, etc. He chose literary fiction, which is mostly considered to be highly literate _stories_ with some psychological depth. All those components (literacy, story-telling, psychology) are usually considered uniquely human. So, it's fair (but arguable, of course) to say that literary fiction is mainly about what it means to be human. Someone in the thread even made the comment that good literary fiction transcends many cultures, time, and space more so than, say, non-fiction, which I take to mean that those transcendent works capture something essential about humans. So, this list is simply a collection of friam-accredited works about what it means to be human. There are many other works that might be ... oh, SFI-accredited works ... or Nobel-accredited works ... or *-accredited works. And there are probably many more that aren't accredited at all! I end up listening to lyrics and reading short stories written by friends of mine all the time. Nobody recommends them to me except the author, which is just about the minimum credibility something can have... other than finding something arbitrary in the street. Yet, these uncredited works often carry (what seems to me) a lot of insight into what it means to be human. Since I'm a big fan of wackos (being one myself, of course), I tend to turn to extreme people to circumscribe what it means to be human. That means people like LaVey (humanism), Crowley (exploitation), RA Wilson (enlightenment), Feyerabend (rebelliousness), Lima-de-Faria (testability of evolution), Thomas Gold (testability of fossil fuels), Richard Lindzen (testability of AGW), etc. This is why I recommended "The Magus" by Fowles. The teacher in that story plays a role similar to Don Juan in Castaneda's stories and, with a series of complicated mind games, tricks the protagonist into a more synoptic view of the world. I hope that large bowl of spaghetti-sentences helps clarify what I meant. ;-) Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 10-10-13 01:43 PM: > Wow, Glen. If somebody else doesn't ask you to spell this out, I will. > Oooops, I just did! > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of glen e. p. ropella > [...] > No. What we have are credible (etymologically and semantically related to > the other thread about expertise) hooks into what it means to be human. > > There are plenty of other hooks, some much less credible but no less > insightful (e.g. Crowley's "The Book of the Law" or Anton Lavey's "Satanic > Bible"). > > What we engaged in, here, is an exercise in credibility and reputation. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
