We Now Go Over To Sally Swumpley In Peafog.

Listening to – Instant Message alerts – Almost musical they are today – not like that blinking duck.

Well into GEB now. I have to admit that some of the formal system definitions are quite difficult but I am able to read everything without getting completely lost by it like I was the first time. I also begin to notice many more of what the author calls Isomorphisms between the dialogues, the music, the pictures and the maths. (Word tells me that Isomorphism cannot be plural but like the friends of Blue Cow – we know it can don’t we). This I take as a sign of one of two things – either a gradual increase in formalism in my thought processes which means I am able to look ahead as it were without any of the glossing-over of inconsistencies in understand that is the result of youth or the fact that my brain is slowing down and forcing me to rethink things over in order to understand them. As the development of Automatic and Human intelligence is a main theme of the book then this is quite exciting, being an isomorphism between the book as read at two different times and the capabilities or, more likely, limitations of by mind.

Anyway, having got passed the drier chapters which define the formal systems essential for a full understanding of the book, I am into the wide-open expanses of the stuff that suggests to me the phrase “narrative verdict”. While formal systems give you “Guilty/NotGuilty” or any one of a number of stock phrases, a Narrative verdict might not come out with such a clear-cut result, instead requiring an understanding of the situation without actually laying blame in any definite way. The chapter I am about to start is called “The Location of Meaning” which has a picture of the Rosetta Stone and lots of strange alphabets. When I read the book the first time, these exotic typefaces were very strange but now I regularly see them in web-pages – I’ve even solved coding problems by teasing out the western scripts from pages of Japanese or Korean. I really should keep that notebook by the bed because yesterday I managed to think of huge amounts of things to write about in terms of isomorphisms (Down Bill – Leave that “s” alone) with my own experience but as usual a night’s sleep has rendered these ideas as the lingering scent of Summer in Autumn breezes. Do you like that?

Well goodbye for now and remember :- Meaning is intrinsic if intelligence is natural – whatever that means.