Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- I, Reader: A Nod to Asimov’s I, Robot
- Robots and Readers: A Tight Coupling of Container and Content
- Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- Machine Life: The Final Prejudice
- RB-34 Prefers Slushy Novels
- Creative Reading: A Golden String
- Creative Reading by anemone achtnich
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self
- Creative Reading: Thinking with Other Minds
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- Creative Reading: The Discovery of Other (Thinking with the Minds of Others, Take 2)
- Creative Reading: The Mathematics of Self, Other and Extension
- What Books Changed You?
- I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- Every Extension Breaks a Rule
- The Trajectory of Reading: Creative Contribution
- I Read, Therefore I Write
- What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So
- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
- Using a Blog to Draft a Book Idea: 9 Observations
- From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media
- Birth of the Reader-Writer
- To Read a Book is to Ignore 4000 Others
- Quantity has a Quality all its Own
- The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain
- How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections
- The Accidental Programmer
- Definitions of Hacking
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker II: Breaking the Rules
- Ways of the Reader Hacker III: Two Bright Ideas
- A Hacker’s Reading List
- Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- The Information Race and Pushing the Button
- How to Make an Elephant Statue
- Every Story Deserves a Good Ending
- Expressions of Offworld
- “Would I start to resemble a book myself?”
- Myth of the Reader-Hero
- Print is Digital
- Am I Still Chasing that First Reading High?
- Do Robots Read? Yes I Do (Conclusion to “I, Reader”)
- I, Reader: A Book Outline
- Reading List for Next Draft of I, Reader
Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 4
Creative reading has two directions: the path inward to expanded interiority, and the path outward to the discovery of ‘other’ in the philosophical sense.
The inner path is a journey into the poorly lit domain of the unconscious. Introspection is a limited tool. We lack the interpretive framework to make sense of what we see, the scaffolds to traverse the interior. We enlist stories and their symbols to help make sense of our inner experience.
The interior seems like a free space. It is a place of imagination and fantasy without judgement, for no other shares this space. It is a place of self-sufficiency. I once lived on a farm with no neighbours in sight. We drank wine while watching multi-layered sunsets in the big sky, setting around a great bonfire, my son beating his drums in the barn. I began reading back-to-the-land books, eager to give shape to this dream. It was a dream of sovereignty. It was the “I” in I, Reader.
This is reading with a fire the belly. It is cocaine. But it is also narcissism, a self-indulgence, ultimately failing. No space is truly free of others. We grow up internalizing the judgements of others. And self-sufficiency is lonely. Bliss, then perhaps hell. Reluctantly, we look for other stories, turn to other books to see what is new in the world. These people go into the world equipped with interiority, and it shows. People who lack interiority are creepy. More on this in the next post.
The inner path is full of contradictions. How does one make sense of thing without an external frame of reference, i.e. how does one bootstrap, pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps? Cognitive theorists play with these ideas when trying to invent computational models of consciousness. Remember Hofstadter’s popular book on self-reference: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid?
Further reading:
A Smattering of Back-to-the-Land Books
Suppose the Oil Ran Out: World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler (Book Review)
Schwitzgebel, Eric (work in progress). Perplexities of Consciousness. Eric writes excellent material on the limits of introspection. Link.
Didn’t make it all the way through the Hofstadter book.
“The inner path is full of contradictions.” But contradictions are just ripples in the river of life. The way that can be explained isn’t the true way.
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