Tag: meaning

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Making Everything Awesome Again

Mark Davis1 Comment

Yeah, everything is boring. Streaming video, books, art—everything. It is the opposite of “everything is awesome” and, once again, it came about as a result of the internet attention economy. Or at least that is what Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times tells us, rounding up some thoughts from a literary critic as a first step and then jumping into some new social criticism that suggests the internet has ruined snobbery.

I was thinking back to the 1990s after I read the piece. I was a working computational linguist who dabbled in simulated evolution and spent time at Santa Fe Institute studying dreamy artificial life concepts. In my downtime I was in an experimental performance art group that detonated televisions and projected their explosions on dozens of televisions in a theater. I did algorithmic music composition using edge-of-chaos self-assembling systems. I read transgressive fiction and Behavioral and Brain Sciences for pleasure. I listened to Brian Eno and Jane Sibbery and Hole while reading Mondo 2000. My girlfriend and I danced until our necks ached at industrial/pop-crossover clubs and house parties. An early “tech nomad” visited us at one of our desert parties. Both in my Peace Corps service in Fiji and then traveling in Europe and Japan, I was without a cell phone, tablet, and only occasionally was able to touch email when at academic conferences where the hosts had kindly considered our unique culture. There was little on the internet—just a few pre-memes struggling for viability on USENET.

Everything was awesome.

But there was always a lingering doubt about the other cultural worlds that we were missing, from the rise of grunge to its plateau into industrial, and of the cultural behemoth cities on the coasts.… Read the rest