Skip to content
Ecce Signum

Ecce Signum

Immanentize the Empathy

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Published Works and Literary Matters
  • Laboratory

Tag: memetics

Hunkering Down

2002-04-03 John Winkelman

Me again. My life is still mad busy, and I am plugging away at the design for the new ECCESIGNUM, launching May 1, or thereabouts.

I got all I could out of the Memetics book. After the first six or so chapters it becomes Applied Memetics, which is less interesting to me than the concept of memetics. So I have set the book aside, just in time to dive into AI Game Programming Wisdom, which shipped today and should be here early next week. Yes, I want to program games.

Updates will (obviously) be infrequent until the relaunch.

Posted in ProgrammingTagged memetics comment on Hunkering Down

Frames of Reference

2002-03-09 John Winkelman

I was rearranging my bookshelves today and came across one of my old college texts, a small novel called Flatland. The story takes place in a two-dimensional world, told from the point of view of A Square. At one point A Square is visited by an extra-dimensional visitor: a sphere. The sphere takes A Square on a tour of the dimensions, from 0 up through 3, and maybe even 4. I forget; I last read the book almost ten years ago.

One concept which I still find fascinating is one of the incidentals to extra-planar travel (as described in Flatland) — namely, that from the point of view of dimension n+1 , an observer can see into the middle of a solid which resides in dimension n . Consider: from the point of view of the 3-dimension world in which we exist while traveling through 4d space, we can see into the middle of a 1d (line) or a 2d (plane) object. A square, seen from within it’s own dimension, is a line. A line, seen from within its own dimension, is a point. And a point(0d) is the only thing which exists within its own frame of reference.

So an observer in 4d space would be able to see into the middle of a 3d object. This intuitively makes sense. Assuming time to be the fourth dimension, pick a point at a particular location in space and time, and watch: When a 3d solid intersects that point, the part of that solid which occupies that point will be visible.

And, as these thing go, I have been reading more on memetics, and the points of view of the inhabitants of Flatland, when encountering an occupant of Sphereland , correspond with a concept I studied briefly in college — memetic engulfment .

Memetic engulfment is that which happens when you get so caught up in your your self-reinforcing world-view that you forget that what you see and experience is not the entire world. I studied this in the context of The University, and the idea that the what was taught — the experiences and information imparted to students — was becoming more and more removed from what was actually necessary for existing in “the real world”. The University Meme slowly crowds out the rest of the world.

But all of that was a long time ago, and now I wonder if, given the appropriate metaphors and practices, a person could perceive, with 3d sensory apparatus, the 4d world from the point of view of a 5d frame of reference. In other words, perceive the flow of time, from outside the flow of time…

And if you managed it, how would you get back?

Posted in LifeTagged memetics comment on Frames of Reference

Personal website of
John Winkelman

John Winkelman in a diner in San Francisco

Archives

Categories

Posts By Month

April 2021
S M T W T F S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  
« Mar    

Twitter Feed

JohnWinkelmanJohn Winkelman@JohnWinkelman·
9 Apr

Yeah, that would have been a totally different movie.

Alex de Campi@alexdecampi

Clockwork Orange, hat test, 1971

Reply on Twitter 1380494051548487681Retweet on Twitter 1380494051548487681Like on Twitter 1380494051548487681Twitter 1380494051548487681
JohnWinkelmanJohn Winkelman@JohnWinkelman·
9 Apr

5 of 5 stars to How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi https://www.goodreads.com/review/show?id=3914846425

Reply on Twitter 1380333038945591296Retweet on Twitter 1380333038945591296Like on Twitter 1380333038945591296Twitter 1380333038945591296
JohnWinkelmanJohn Winkelman@JohnWinkelman·
5 Apr

4 of 5 stars to How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy https://www.goodreads.com/review/show?id=3922597309

Reply on Twitter 1379031329006833664Retweet on Twitter 1379031329006833664Like on Twitter 13790313290068336641Twitter 1379031329006833664
Load More...

Links of Note

Reading, Writing
Tor.com
Locus Online
The Believer
File 770
IWSG

Watching, Listening
WYCE Electric Poetry
Writing Excuses Podcast
Our Opinions Are Correct

News, Politics, Economics
Naked Capitalism
Crooked Timber

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© 2021 Ecce Signum

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: x-blog by wpthemespace.com