Observe

I already have a blog, Out Not Up, where I post alternative perspectives.  I've deliberately kept that relatively sterile, devoid of personal data or details.  Frankly, those aren't appropriate there.

However, I find myself wanted to spout nonsense, hyperbole, or sheer randomness periodically.  Life is chaotic, an infinite series of potentialities that don't resolve themselves into a here and now until, well, here and now.  We never know what's going to happen, often even after it already has, without more than a brief glimpse at the structure and a few irrational hopes that somewhere, somewhen, it'll all make sense.

Abandoning those hopes, this is where it happens.  This the point where tomorrow becomes today, where the wave function collapses and what could be becomes what is.  So, there's no telling what may come - abandon all pretext ye who here enter.

In more practical terms, this is likely to end up just being random comments, photos, or musings.  No guarantees, though: something serious may slip in periodically.  According to multiverse theory, everything happens somewhere, so why not here?  But it takes observation to collapse the wave, so you're partly to blame for anything that happens.

Keep that in mind, and we should be fine while we're lost out here.

--Austin

3 comments:

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

I find I'm observing you - I hope your wavefunction is OK.

More seriously, I'm glad you've started this blog - while the Austin who muses on philosophical and scientific matters at "Out Not Up" is interesting (a quality I value highly), I'd like to know more about the Austin who deals with the real world as well.

While I'm here, I think I should thank you for the idea of going away on one's own for a birthday: I'm now contemplating doing exactly that for mine, in a few weeks.

Take care

Mark

Austin said...

The two blogs are two sides of the same coin, cast in the mint of causality and ready to be spent on... well, we'll just have to wait and see.

I don't think you should think of them as separate aspects - they aren't. They used to be, but that's a different issue for a later post. I just find that I'm better off presenting them separately, for the benefit of my audience.

It's like the HDR pictures JD taught me about... A standard photograph has a range of luminances available that is a subset of the real world, and as such, most pictures generally have burnt-out highlights and pitch-black darks. You simply can't capture the full variation of reality in a single photo.

So, we do HDR, which allows us to create images with the full range of potential - but, still, there are limits, as monitors are also restricted in the luminances they have available. So we tweak and we tamper, and we take a set of values from the HDR that roughly resembles the reality we want to present, and dump those to a graphic. The result isn't really more than what a normal photo can see, but certainly different - expanded in directions that simply aren't possible in normal photography. We create the illusion of something that sometimes looks more real and sometimes looks more fantastic, even when it's just as limited.

And so, here we sit. Human consience, human thought is an HDR image - full of the total spectrum of reality, far more than can ever be related simply because our languages, our arts, even our minds, aren't built to handle such. So, we tweak and we tamper, and what comes out is a piece, a filtered image that approximates what we want to present.

I'm simply using two different filters. In day-to-day life, I can't help but see random shapes in clouds at the same time that I'm pondering the climatic forces that create them. Each eye sees the world differently; one can close one or the other, but you see best when you use both.

... As for the birthday, well, if it's an idea you like, you're plenty welcome to take ownership :) I hope you find it useful.

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

I had hoped to respond to your comment rather earlier, but various other things got in the way - I'm sorry.

I'm not familiar with HDR photography as such, but I see your points exactly, both the general one about the impossibility of fully describing human experience and the specific one about your blogs presenting different filters of the total you. I didn't intend to imply any connection to aspects of your personality (I seem to recall some mention of that in the discussion on Planetx_123's blog a few months ago). I can also see why you started this blog, when the audience at "Out Not Up" started to go in a different direction than you had intended. On which subject, I am still hoping to get back there and make a serious response to at least one of your posts - I just never seem to find the time to do the thinking required :-(

Meanwhile, I will probably meander around, collapsing other bits of wave function that catch my attention...

Take care

Mark

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