dispatches from december, 2024
last modified 2 months ago
very often, philosophical speculation (or even academic theory) whose subject is purely immaterial - such as the idea of "information" - can be very difficult to follow. At least, I, personally, find it really difficult to understand highly abstract conceptualization. This is a problem, because this capacity for comprehension is a genuinely useful skill to have.
but the trick is that this capacity for comprehension is a skill. Therefore, not only can you practice it, but you can find strategies to "cheat", so to speak.
a very famous strategy to make learning new abstract ideas easier is the example. We all know and love examples, but I believe we take them for granted. We aren't consciously aware of how far they can expand our mind, and our ability to learn is all the poorer because of it.
I've always been skeptical of the idea of "information that should be forbidden", or (as you might know them) "memetic infohazards". The famous things that man was not meant to know of science-fiction horror. Even to this day, I scoff at this model. I don't doubt that information can be weaponized, obviously, but I think the concept outlined above has multiple fatal flaws.
for one, I find it incredibly reductive. I'm very ignorant of epistemology, but I'm sure it's not as simple as that. For another, of course, it's anti-intellectual. If I felt charitative, I might call it a thought-terminating cliché. Lastly, it's impossible to take seriously. To anyone with basic reading comprehension, the sentence "things that man was not meant to know" is very obviously the product of a mind terrified 24/7 of itself and everything around it, to an extent that kneecaps its intellectual capabilities. Therefore, I never found the idea worthy of the exploration that a lot of my peers in creative fiction writing give it.
but uh.
okay so just now, i was scrolling through youtube, right? and I saw that dan olson commented on a video about nfts made by kappakaiju. which is wild, obviously. so i thought to myself, "oh, he still watches other people's nft videos, huh? I wonder if he's seen any of jauwn's crypto game reviews?"
and as soon as i thought that i found myself suddenly staring into this dark, cold precipice in my heart, and i keenly understood that the answer to my idle question could drive me mad forever unless I let it go.
. So like yay examples or whatever man