There’s a concept that Tor Norretranders (a Dutch physicist) brings up in his book The User Illusion. It’s called “exformation”, which is data that is intentionally left out.

It’s highly context dependent. Something unsaid can be a huge amount of information communicated between two old friends, but not so much between two strangers. Tor actually uses physics to describe this- something to do with entropy and maxwell’s demon-  and he describes “depth” in the intellectual sense as something with a lot of exformation.

so something like shakespeare, etc = a lot of depth

you can read very deeply into it
he gives this cute example of how, when victor hugo was on holiday and wanted to know how his book was doing but didn’t want to seem like he wanted to know he asked his agent and best friend “?” and his friend did one better and replied him “!”.

Anything more you say detracts from the message, because what you don’t say conveys a lot more than what you do say.

For this to work, it must be assumed that both people have the same groundwork.

Every person has their own thoughts experiences memories ideas synapses perspectives etc. From that rich inner world, they distill ideas. From these ideas they distill thoughts. From these thoughts they distill words. and then this summarizing process gets sent across. and then opened up and interpreted so the amount of information and thought that goes into one line- whether consciously or not- is massive.

i mean, the amount that can go. and then when the other person receives it, they interpret it, and the reverse process happens.

Effective beautiful communication is when you manage to transmit that huge amount of info across to the other party by choosing the right words, music, the right notes, right context, etc.
he calls the one side process the “tree of talking”
and describes how it’s easy to get frustrated with people who don’t try to follow this process because it’s hard to see where they’re coming from, where they just bombard you with information
but you get no exformation
nothing to read into
so it’s frustrating.

The act of unpackaging the package is extremely fulfilling, you might even say it’s a human need. That’s why we love good books, good conversation, good live music, maybe even religion, etc. Intuitively makes sense doesn’t it?

When there is a mismatch though, like your “ground” is different from mine (my analogy not his) then no matter how much effort you put in packaging your info, I will unpackage it in a way that is completely inappropriate. I will not get your depth. I will not get your message. So what is deep, say, to a lady gaga fan might not be deep to a tchaikovsky fan.

Because you need to have that shared experience/history/memory to appreciate it
i watched a video yesterday by an awesome guitar hero called guthrie govan who put it lovely.

so essentially: contextual communication is dependent on a shared relationship, which is in itself pre-established information–information on how to receive information.

not necessarily dependent. You can coincidentally meet someone who happens to share similar ground, that’s when you have chemistry.

i’m not sure about the information on receiving information bit but reading it i got a very real sense that you cannot separate art from context and audience

it’s the same argument we were having a few months back about sincerity and intrinsic value of art vs choosing your audience. was thinking about this the other day,
and i think the key major difference between your worldview and mine
there are many critical similarities,
but the fundamental difference is, i think
that i believe in intrinsic value and you believe in extrinsic value
which informs both our beliefs about art, religion, sociology and science

what do you mean by that

in the sense that
i believe murder is innately, intrinsically wrong because it violates absolutely morality, which is innately, ultimately right
and you believe murder is wrong because it violates the social compact which has evolved for mutual benefit
etc
you can see how this perspective informs my religious tendency and your humanist tendency?

hmmm yes but i wouldn’t use the terms intrinsic/extrinsic

would you consider your ethics utilitarian?

i don’t believe much in absolutes
(it would be too absolute to say I don’t believe in them ALTOGETHER… >_>)
there are too many grey areas
I guess yeah, you could call my ethics utilitarian but that feels a bit too mechanical even for me. I think the problem with most things for me is that people want to work within the given framework. I’m always looking towards developing/evolving/transcending the current framework in pursuit of the next

There’s where my worldview differs, i think. Like you, I believe most man-made frameworks can be transcended and further developed. And that most of what people hold as absolutes are rarely true. But i do believe ultimately when you boil down the mutual shared beliefs of humanity or perhaps all life, you will find… how do i put this?

a “tending”?
like you know how an equation tends to a curve life/humanity tends towards X whatever this X is.

Something like descartes’ golden apple. A certain absolute which holds true in and of itself, and from which humanity takes reference. I guess you could call that God.

You have a remarkably refined perspective of god

Not so much a tending as the scale of the graph itself. The x and the y by which we measure.

I actually have essentially the same thing (in my view) but I don’t worship it (in my view)
but I have a deep respect and admiration (and more words diminish the depth) for it
which I imagine is what you might describe to be prayer/worship
but in my case the thing is not a thing.

You know termites, they have a hive mind

uh…huh

And a lot of people intuitively think of a hive mind as something like the borg or the zerg
where there is an overlord at the heart of it. But there isn’t! Actually a single termite is random and confused and will die, two termites together get angry and aggressive and attack each other and stuff as you add more, and they touch each other randomly, they become strangely cohesive, they dont know why. They just sort of become more… sociable or something. Interestingly, it’s not touching others that makes them this way it’s being touched. And they randomly pick up stuff and drop it. There is no architect or engineer.

Then once in a random while, two pieces get stacked upon each other and this becomes like a focal point. And the process continues, at random, until they’ve built an entire hive without any planning. In a way I think humanity works like this, and life, and the universe at large. I “worship” the processes that make these things happen, in the sense that they humble me and make me feel honoured to be a part of it all and simultaneously immense and diminutively worthless.

the hive mind is the hive itself, not a mind seperate of it. when you look at a busy street there is a mind at play but it is defined by the billions of infinitesimal little relationships between them. Perhaps you might describe it as god. I don’t know what to describe it as and I kind of like it that way. So in the strangest of ways i see your perception of value as extrinsic and mine as intrinsic. as in, i say that for sake of contrast la lol. i don’t actually think in those terms regularly until you brought it up >.>

Interesting. it’s a random deviation but it reminds me of this book on neuro-sociology i was reading recently which looks at society and human communication from a neuro-anatomical perspective

isn’t it? isn’t the idea of intrinsic value that is independent of an individual kinda extrinsic by virtue of it being independent not to criticise your perspective in any way

i think we might be even more alike that we formerly realised
go on

i think the aspects of my worldview which you find discordant (i’ll get back to neuro-sociology in a bit) such as my personal relationship with God

i wouldn’t call it discordant

discordant with yours, that is

not really leh
actually very the same leh

they developed relatively recently

what is personal, what is relationship, what is god- don’t answer
you have an X Y with Z

i mean, my belief in absolute morality has always been around, for one

I also have the exact same X Y with Z
but i manifest them differently
hm

but it wasn’t until i was…what, 15 that i defined those in christian terms

when you say morality

yeah i guess rose by any other name

like i have certain near-absolute beliefs too but they’re a lot more long term
like i believe that complexity will always arise out of simplicity, given time
you can’t prove that
no scientist can actually prove that
it’s a matter of faith
you can show that it has happened in our case
and happens in a lot of cases
and that out of complexity arises complex relationships
and that complex relationships tend towards a sort of equilibrium
which you might describe as man being good to one another
absolute morality?
we can’t be that far off
just for the most part i feel that using terms like morality and god are kinda restrictive
but i suppose if you have in your mind
an idea where the two are limitless
whereas for me the notion of god is inherently self-limiting, by name, as a word
ok your turn

not that far off
i think we see the same processes and results
the same “what”
and attribute different “how”s to them

i put it to you that the how’s aren’t all that different either
just how we describe/look/call/name it

it’s a belief of mine that when you follow two ideas that appear to contradict each other to their core, you’ll find at the heart of it an innate similarity that creates the tension
(thus the name Gloria)

i can relate to that

okay i gotta get back to my article

tc, always a pleasure