Re: [Fis] Discussion on INFORMATION THEORY--Karl
Dear Pedro you write: There is a large risk of becoming subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable against chaotic, unpredictable, varied. Is it really like this? or is it like this as seen from the perspective you give a priority by qualifying the other perspective as subjective? Is not not much more the case that what seems subjective is the primarily experience of the singularity of being in the world, this eery experience? The predominance of the common experience as described by you is what metaphysics (and later on science!) has been saying for centuries. Some days ago I sent this text to Joe that I forward it to the other FIS members Let me quote Octavio Paz El mono gramático (The grammatical monkey) (Mexico 1974, pp. 97-98; 100) first in Spanish then in a free (with a lot of mistakes!) English translation Por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido; por la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi inmediatamente, lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo primordial. La arboleda no tiene nombre y estos árboles no son signos: son árboles. Son reales y son ilegibles. Aunque aludo a ellos cuando digo: /estos árboles son ilegibles/, ellos no se dan por aludidos. No dicen, no significan: están allí, nada más están. Yo lo puedo derribar, quemar, cortar, convertir en mástiles, sillas, barcos, casas, ceniza; puedo pintarlos, esculpirlos, describirlos, convertirlos en símbolos de esto o de aquellos (inclusive de ellos mismos) y hacer otra arboleda, real o imaginaria, con ellos; puedo clasificarlos, analizarlos, reducirlos a una formula química o a una proporción matemática y así traducirlos, convertirlos en lenguaje - pero /estos/ árboles, estos que senalo y que están más allá, siempre más allá, de mis signos y de mis palabras, intocables, inalcanzables, impenetrables, son lo que son y ningún nombre, ninguna combinación de signos los dice. Y son irrepetibles: nunca volverán a ser lo que ahora mismo son. [...] La noche me salva No podemos ver sin peligro de eloquecer: las cosas nos revelan, sin revelar nada y por su simple estar ahí frente a nosotros, el vacío de los nombres, la falta de mesura del mundo, su mudez esencial. Y a medida que la noche se acumula en mi ventana, yo siento que no soy de a quí, sino de allá, de ese mundo que acaba de borrarse y aguarda la resurrección del alba. De allá vengo, de allá venimos todos y allá hemos de volver. Fascinacion por el otro lado, seducción por la vertiente no humana del universo: perder el nombre, perder la medida. Cada individuo, cada cosa, cada instante: una realidad única, incomparable, inconmesurable. Volver al mundo de los nombres propios. With writing we abolish things, we transform them into meaning; through reading we abolish signs, we accelerate meaning and delete it almost immediately: meaning goes back to the primordial chaos. The small forest has no name, these trees are not signs, they are trees. They are real and one cannot read them. Even when I refer to them and say: 'these trees are not readable' they do not care about what I am saying. They say nothing, they do not mean anything: they are there, just there, nothing more. I can throw them down, burn them, cut them, turn them into masts, chairs, ships, houses, ash; I can paint them, carve them, describe them, turn them into symbols of this or that (including of themselves) and I can make another small forest, a real or an imaginary one. I can classify and analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or to a mathematical proportion and in this way translate them into lenguage - but /these /trees, that I now mean and that are beyond, always beyond my signs and words, untouchable, unreachable, impenetrable, are what they are and there is no name, no combination of signs that can say what they are. They are unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are right now. [...] Night brings deliverance to me. We cannot /see /without the danger of getting mad: things reveal themselves to us without revealing anything, just with their pure being there in front of us, the void of names, the lack of measure of the world, its essential dumbness. And as night comes closer and closer to my window I feel that I do not belong to here but to there, to that world that just disappeared and waits for the resurrection of the morning. I come from there, all of us come from there and must go back there. Fascination on the one hand, being seduced by the non-human slop of the universe: loosing name, loosing measure. Every individual, every thing, every moment: a unique reality, uncomparable, unmeasurable. Go back to the world of the proper names. The world of the proper names is the paradise in which there is a name for each thing. The small forest is not such a proper name, then there can be a lot of small forests that
Re: [Fis] Discussion on INFORMATION THEORY--Karl
On 5/4/2011 3:56 AM, Rafael Capurro wrote: Dear Pedro you write: There is a large risk of becoming subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable against chaotic, unpredictable, varied. Is it really like this? or is it like this as seen from the perspective you give a priority by qualifying the other perspective as subjective? Is not not much more the case that what seems subjective is the primarily experience of the singularity of being in the world, this eery experience? The predominance of the common experience as described by you is what metaphysics (and later on science!) has been saying for centuries. Some days ago I sent this text to Joe that I forward it to the other FIS members Let me quote Octavio Paz El mono gramático (The grammatical monkey) (Mexico 1974, pp. 97-98; 100) first in Spanish then in a free (with a lot of mistakes!) English translation Por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido; por la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi inmediatamente, lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo primordial. La arboleda no tiene nombre y estos árboles no son signos: son árboles. Son reales y son ilegibles. Aunque aludo a ellos cuando digo: /estos árboles son ilegibles/, ellos no se dan por aludidos. No dicen, no significan: están allí, nada más están. Yo lo puedo derribar, quemar, cortar, convertir en mástiles, sillas, barcos, casas, ceniza; puedo pintarlos, esculpirlos, describirlos, convertirlos en símbolos de esto o de aquellos (inclusive de ellos mismos) y hacer otra arboleda, real o imaginaria, con ellos; puedo clasificarlos, analizarlos, reducirlos a una formula química o a una proporción matemática y así traducirlos, convertirlos en lenguaje - pero /estos/ árboles, estos que senalo y que están más allá, siempre más allá, de mis signos y de mis palabras, intocables, inalcanzables, impenetrables, son lo que son y ningún nombre, ninguna combinación de signos los dice. Y son irrepetibles: nunca volverán a ser lo que ahora mismo son. [...] La noche me salva No podemos ver sin peligro de eloquecer: las cosas nos revelan, sin revelar nada y por su simple estar ahí frente a nosotros, el vacío de los nombres, la falta de mesura del mundo, su mudez esencial. Y a medida que la noche se acumula en mi ventana, yo siento que no soy de a quí, sino de allá, de ese mundo que acaba de borrarse y aguarda la resurrección del alba. De allá vengo, de allá venimos todos y allá hemos de volver. Fascinacion por el otro lado, seducción por la vertiente no humana del universo: perder el nombre, perder la medida. Cada individuo, cada cosa, cada instante: una realidad única, incomparable, inconmesurable. Volver al mundo de los nombres propios. With writing we abolish things, we transform them into meaning; through reading we abolish signs, we accelerate meaning and delete it almost immediately: meaning goes back to the primordial chaos. The small forest has no name, these trees are not signs, they are trees. They are real and one cannot read them. Even when I refer to them and say: 'these trees are not readable' they do not care about what I am saying. They say nothing, they do not mean anything: they are there, just there, nothing more. I can throw them down, burn them, cut them, turn them into masts, chairs, ships, houses, ash; I can paint them, carve them, describe them, turn them into symbols of this or that (including of themselves) and I can make another small forest, a real or an imaginary one. I can classify and analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or to a mathematical proportion and in this way translate them into lenguage - but /these /trees, that I now mean and that are beyond, always beyond my signs and words, untouchable, unreachable, impenetrable, are what they are and there is no name, no combination of signs that can say what they are. They are unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are right now. [...] Night brings deliverance to me. We cannot /see /without the danger of getting mad: things reveal themselves to us without revealing anything, just with their pure being there in front of us, the void of names, the lack of measure of the world, its essential dumbness. And as night comes closer and closer to my window I feel that I do not belong to here but to there, to that world that just disappeared and waits for the resurrection of the morning. I come from there, all of us come from there and must go back there. Fascination on the one hand, being seduced by the non-human slop of the universe: loosing name, loosing measure. Every individual, every thing, every moment: a unique reality, uncomparable, unmeasurable. Go back to the world of the proper names. The world of the proper names is the paradise in which there is a name for each thing. The small forest is not such a proper name,
