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I won a thousand euros on a game show by being able to tell what book and chapter any random line in the Harry Potter corpus is from. Also I call it "The Harry Potter corpus". Earlier today I attended a symposium with literally the biggest name in my field (Daniel Dennett) and told a room full of people I sometimes have dreams about playing text adventure video games (to make a point about the phenomenology of dreams). Last week I started preparations to construct a taxonomy of imaginary beings. All of them.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:11
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PierreTheMime posted:I would be extraordinarily interested in reading this if you felt like sharing. I'm curious to know how in-depth you plan to take it, as in whether it would simply be a listing of potential dream constructs or whether you would associate them with mental states, disorders, and other factors. It is going to be a while before it's done, not in the least because I have no formal training in systematic biology. Basically I had the idea that it would be really cool to have a book on my shelf that looked like a biology textbook if you weren't really paying attention to it but that's actually just about imaginary beings. With that in mind, I mean to make it as in-depth as possible (within the bounds of sense; there are going to be more and more detailed entries for different kinds of vampires than for different kinds of pokemon, despite there probably being more pokemon). Rather than sorting them chronologically I've been thinking about creating higher-order "idea groups" that share a family resemblance (in the Wittgenstein sense), but not in the D&D sense. I think it would be too easy to just go "undead, shapechangers, magical beasts," etc.; instead, I want to sort them by what sort of societal factors gave rise to stories about them. Skinwalkers and wendigos for example are very obviously cautionary tales against the evils of cannibalism (vampires might be as well); pokemon on the other hand just exist to make money. What I intend to do first is take 2 or 3 paradigmatic cases, trace their histories, and see what kind of groupings suggest themselves. Once that framework is established it'll be much easier to place everything else. But as I said, it's going to be a while, and the project came into being to make procrastination easier, so I'm not making any promises about how far it'll go. edit: of course, within a single idea, the different versions of a certain creature would be ordered chronologically. Again, what would be interesting is to see how ideas change over time. reflir fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Nov 13, 2012 |
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Nov 13, 2012 21:55
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Minimalist Program posted:I'm doing a Ph.D in philosophy of social robotics. Where and with who?
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Nov 17, 2012 21:51
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