Reading diary.
Jul. 27th, 2004 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentia1. I decided to skip chapter four of Bohm's book. It is heavily mathematical -- which doesn't scare me (math is one of three things I will actually claim that I am good at) but the amount of time and energy it would take to digest it was not worth the payback in terms of how much I was getting from it that is relevant to my current interests. I can always come back to it and I am developing a queue of things I want to read.
I'm detecting in Bohm's thought a kind of neo-Pythagoreanism that reminds me of Bucky Fuller. He asserts, for example, that what appears to us to be randomness is simply order of indeterminate degree. Quantum uncertainty is not true uncertainty, but demonstrates the workings of hidden variables which we have not recognized or understood. Following this to its logical conclusion, reality is made of nested sets of structures that go "all the way down" (and "all the way up"). This flies in the face of conventional interpretations of quantum theory which hold that uncertainty is a inherent part of quantum reality.
On the whole, I am sympathetic to this kind of thinking. I go one step further and say that there is a kind of order or pattern that exemplifies all that exists -- this is implied by my idea of the cosmeme. The cosmeme, in turn, is proposed based on the idea that nature is frugal and parsimonious -- and will therefore utilize a good idea to the fullest extent possible.
I'm tempted to read Fuller again, but, my gosh, that requires such an investment of time and energy...
2. Along another line of thought, thinking about memetics has made me want to read Marshall McLuhan again. His theory of media as extensions of human senses kept popping into my mind. I'm going to try to track down a copy of Understanding Media and put that on the reading queue.
3. On the fiction front, I'm reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alobar recommended. Bear's prose style is a little lurid for my taste, but I'm enjoying the book and I like the direction it goes in. Bear's way of incorporating unorthodox science into his story is not unlike Greg Egan's.
I'm detecting in Bohm's thought a kind of neo-Pythagoreanism that reminds me of Bucky Fuller. He asserts, for example, that what appears to us to be randomness is simply order of indeterminate degree. Quantum uncertainty is not true uncertainty, but demonstrates the workings of hidden variables which we have not recognized or understood. Following this to its logical conclusion, reality is made of nested sets of structures that go "all the way down" (and "all the way up"). This flies in the face of conventional interpretations of quantum theory which hold that uncertainty is a inherent part of quantum reality.
On the whole, I am sympathetic to this kind of thinking. I go one step further and say that there is a kind of order or pattern that exemplifies all that exists -- this is implied by my idea of the cosmeme. The cosmeme, in turn, is proposed based on the idea that nature is frugal and parsimonious -- and will therefore utilize a good idea to the fullest extent possible.
I'm tempted to read Fuller again, but, my gosh, that requires such an investment of time and energy...
2. Along another line of thought, thinking about memetics has made me want to read Marshall McLuhan again. His theory of media as extensions of human senses kept popping into my mind. I'm going to try to track down a copy of Understanding Media and put that on the reading queue.
3. On the fiction front, I'm reading Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, which
alobar recommended. Bear's prose style is a little lurid for my taste, but I'm enjoying the book and I like the direction it goes in. Bear's way of incorporating unorthodox science into his story is not unlike Greg Egan's.
