Sounds like a real life Invisible Cities. Any good pics?sometimes when you read a story, it's helpful if you can envision a path of imagination that could have led to its being created. over quarantine i've been skimming through an old architecture textbook i found at a university book store years ago, and some of the claims it makes about the worldviews of ancient civilizations are so strange. you wonder if people could really have practiced those customs, or if what you're reading is merely the product of some historian's overactive imagination. i can almost envision reading a paragraph about Tlön in it.
oh that is good
in the invisibles, there's this recurring thing going on with someone who's got a photograph of some clouds and it turns outIn Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie talks about clouds that you can't see in the sky, something about light, they're only visible in the reflection of pools and ponds. You look up, there's nothing there.
Yeah, that one's bloody good. It is in Labyrinths, though.
I was going to quote the concluding paragraph of this story because it's the Borges-bit that always haunts me, but I don't want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it. I don't think it's in Labyrinths.
As nice of a thought as this is, I don't think it bears out—there are some good studies of how various isolated or indigenous tribes "carve" the natural world up, and they're all pretty similar. Nature doesn't have joints, but it has dense similarity clusters, and people pick those out pretty predictably, culture irrelevant. The images in Tlon of these idealist, adjectival non-objects is beautiful, but probably impossible.That there are a billion ways to dream the world.
Oh yeah, big time. I'd say it's virtually the canonical example.Is Tlon Uqbar a precedent of hyperstition?
whats hyperstition?Oh yeah, big time. I'd say it's virtually the canonical example.
Very broadly, it's the idea that myths or other stories can in a sense become true through people's belief in them.whats hyperstition?
whats hyperstition?
As nice of a thought as this is, I don't think it bears out—there are some good studies of how various isolated or indigenous tribes "carve" the natural world up, and they're all pretty similar. Nature doesn't have joints, but it has dense similarity clusters, and people pick those out pretty predictably, culture irrelevant. The images in Tlon of these idealist, adjectival non-objects is beautiful, but probably impossible.
I suppose the space of Possible Minds is large enough to imagine some big differences w/r/t another species... I guess I could imagine an intelligence that entertains purely pragmatic distinctions, rather than (like ours) being dominated at low levels by property features, and at higher levels by pragmatism.