Incidental learning

The American pragmatist Richard Rorty said somewhere that a university was a place where you could find any book on any subject and someone to discuss it with. I think that's a pretty neat idea; a similar point was made rather forcefully by the protagonist in the film Good Will Hunting. I think learning is something that happens (or doesn't) and like all good things in this universe can not be forced. Growing up in a house with many curious books and interesting magazines and stuff lying about learning came to me naturally. A true treasure came my way some time in my preteen years when my uncle moved to Canada to do his PhD in Biology. He left behind a large stack of records. Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Frank Zappa, Bugsy Malone.... and shyly I dove in and tried  listening to most of it. This profoundly influenced me and opened up a world of possibilities, to do with ways of making music, but also to ways of thinking and being hitherto unimagined.... and though the music per se was great it was also this feeling of being privy to something weird and wonderful, shared by me and the universe (and of course my uncle .... ) . I've (mostly) enjoyed being a student and then a teacher; but I find that the most important learning takes place in a personal way and incidentally - you follow a path where you meet your clues and build your self into something completely unique - you may choose to share some of it - other things you keep secret. My friend who is a historian once told me a story of a guy who kept a diary all his life, and on the day before he died he burned it; leaving all that information and history to blow in the wind. My friend is an unusual historian because he found this to be an intensely beautiful story, and I sort of get that, I'm not sure though....

Some are of the opinion that this sort of incidental learning is under threat with the advent of the net - but I am not. The way someone stumbles across something weird and interesting, like my blog for instance, can be part of something new in this person's weird and wonderful tale of being....

Second DM experience

I mastered a game today where I adapted DnD rules, translated a managed the first half of an adventure in a kind of Harry Potter in Iceland kind of environment, with my daughters and nieces as the play group. A very interesting experience - I was better prepared than last time and more confident but still I need to clear up a few snags. The main point is similar to my former thoughts on the connection between games and discussions is the need for focus. I also would like to work on skills in evoking atmosphere, I have had a bell and a djembe at hand, but not put them to use .... this will change.

I find the DnD system to be way to complex, but, at the same time inspiring and interesting. I'm looking at more varieties of game mechanics and find that I'm at the start of an interesting journey....

Philosophy as clarity

Oscar Brenifier has an interesting approach to philosophy and its practice. One of his basic tenets is that philosophy is about creating concepts; an idea he connects to Deleuze. To create concepts we need to think. In order to think we need to be clear. If we have an idea we can put words to it; a useful thought can be put in one sentence or one word. If you are unable to formulate your thoughts clearly your thoughts are confused. If you think you understand something but are unable to say it, find words for it, you have not understood it. Thinking is difficult so people avoid it as hard as they can, hiding behind feelings, authority and whatnot.

And taking it further; thinking demands that you abandon your self, that you die and move into the sphere of thinking. This actually works and working in this manner gives interesting and weird moments of clarity.

My next step will be to revisit philosophy texts with this methodology and idea in mind.

Philosophical facilitation and GM-ing

I tried facilitating a workshop in a demanding seminar on practical philosophy and it was alright but I lost it towards the end, not in the sense that I went crazy, but lost the focus and slipped out of the role. I am pretty confident that the role of managing a game, as DM or GM is similar, and I'm interested in mastering both arts. Now: I think the current method of training teachers is completely inadequate because they don't really instill this skill of taking real charge of an actual group of human beings for a certain period of time... like a facilitator or a GM does - without being authoritarian or 'strict' in an old fashioned boring sense....

Jung

Clearly a guy I need to learn more about - seems to me a lot of the stuff in positive psychology was already there in the early psychoanalysts, but now they've dressed it up with a lot of statistics and scientific dribble to make it seem acceptable. It seems to me that his work might be extremely boring so it's a question of approaching it differently, like with many a thinker and philosopher. The idea of the archetypes, of the urge to religion, the rejection of everything being about sex and the inclusion of mythology art and literature are extremely valuable. I'm also confident that this approach could be important in understanding the appeal of fantasy literature and can give us tools to approach works by crazy guys like Clive Barker (whom for some reason I haven't blogged on yet, but I truly admire, and am freaked out by) and Michael Moorcock. 

Embassytown

As I promised a 'blot' on Embassytown on Twitter recently - so here goes....

I'm profoundly grateful to my wonderful wife, Bryndís, for giving me The City and the City by China Miéville a while back, as a gift for the Icelandic 'holiday' - 'husbandsday' (Bóndadagur). Since then I've been working my way through his work; King Rat and Iron Council and now Embassytown. Miéville is the definite master of fantasy writing now, and with Embassytown he emerges as a fully fledged sf author too. In my mind he now assumes a position right up there with le Guin.

Embassytown is a true incredible absoloutely mind blowing masterpiece. It is a study in semiotics, frontier politics, colonialism, machine psychology and cyborg culture. His aliens are so wonderfully alien, and his mind blowing conception of the dual Language, 'cut and turn'. The basic idea is an alien race that speaks only the Truth. They cannot lie - these are the Ariekei, or 'Hosts' - the story takes place in Embassytown which is an outpost of Bremen and functions as a go-between for commerce with the Hosts. The humans have managed to create dual persons - 'ambassadors' who can actually speak Language, one of them speaking Cut the other Turn (confused yet?) .... they have such interesting names as EdGar, and SibYl. When the two have sex it is considered masturbation....

Then of course, as is wont in such tales, trouble arrives.... but I'm not going to spoil that.

To make it even more interesting this is the central idea, but it is framed by the concept of Immer. Now for example le Guin invented the 'ansibil' which is a device which you can use to communicate instantaneously from any two points in the Universe. The Immer is similar, except you can travel through it and arrive in places extremely far apart in the normal physical sense.... Embassytown is on the outskirts of the known Immer, and is thus a frontiertown and discoveries further of await at the end of the book, which could easily be followed up.

Miéville is fascinated by dual realities (The City and the City, omg) - and words like 'non-place' and 'cross-hatching' crop up all over his ouevre. I suggest to anyone interested in stretching their mind and imagination - plus anyone with a nerdy obsession with the philosophy of language to read Embassytown - the best place to start is The City and the City (no aliens there, and the weirdness is very very weird, while not supernatural or alien in nature, just, well really weird, I could do a little blog on that but not now.)

Experience - reading

Well, now I'm in France and then all the environment in Blogger turns French - c'est ci bon! Anyway, now I have two blogs to write and the first one is very simple. I find that development, personal, professional, whatever is achieved through experiences and challenges - well of course this is rather a platitude I suppose, but my idea is that these experiences can not be planned and organised, they arise as a kind of a, well, cooperative process of self and being - I can not express it more clearly - Feyerabend somewhere says that if address Being it answers - interesting from that profoundly atheist and materialist guy - .... a rather convoluted introduction to explain my presence in a house in Argenteuil outside Paris preparing to enter a few days of fierce introduction of Philosophical Practice with people from all over the world under the guidance of Oscar Brenifier and Isabelle Millon ....

I'll fill you in on this as we proceed....

Now on a different note I have a similar concept of reading. I for example went to the library to find a specific book (incidentally on Philosophical Practice) but decided to pick up a copy of Colin Wilson's book on Jung. A rather weird but highly readable book - I'm almost finished with it - I find Jung to be rather obnoxious guy, but I admit to being deeply intrigued by his thinking - and - as Wilson clearly makes the case and sentences Jung to be  a Romantic, I'm afraid am guilty of that same charge.

Part of what explains my lack of patience and even fear of the modern version of atheism ....

More, or not, on all these things at a later date....