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Data-Mining In One's Own Head - Sifting Thoughts As Evidence by Joshua Gray
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Data-Mining In One's Own Head - Sifting Thoughts As Evidence |
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Education
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Rather than discard old ideas that don't work, one can treat them as flawed evidence. One can sift these pieces of evidence, solemnly treating them as if they were unreliable manuscripts which nevertheless contained a germ of truth. Tolkien admitted to doing this, and I suspect many fantasy and science-fiction authors do likewise. What follows is an example from my own experience with the Ooranye Project. I began inventing the world Ooranye over thirty years ago, in 1977. For a long time I imagined that world as having 26 historical eras, one for each letter of the alphabet. I therefore called them era A, era B and so on. Some of the eras acquired histories as I began to fill in more and more detail of that world's story. But as the years went by, I grew less satisfied with the alphabetic arrangement. Although one might imagine another world evolving an alphabet with 26 letters like ours, the letters would of course not sound the same, and so their resonances would not really be validly translated by our A,B,C, etc. Then - I can't remember when - I had the idea of naming the eras not after letters of the alphabet but after the elements in the periodic table. This was a much more "independent" arrangement as of course the periodic table is universal. The translation problem disappears: the names of the elements would be different but this would not matter as the names referred to real substances and the characters of those substances would be the same on that world as on this. So now there were 92 eras instead of 26. But by this time the idea of the 26 Uranian eras was rooted in my mental furniture - to mix a metaphor! How to keep the 26 and yet have 92? Answer: there must be 26 Great Eras and 66 minor ones. It's the only way to reconcile all the apparently conflicting evidence! But why are some eras so long (typically tens of thousands of our years) and others so short (days, or even minutes)? Evidence is evidence, and it must make sense. But how? This in turn got me thinking about how eras were measured; how the people of Ooranye decided when one era was over and another had started. This would have been a problem anyway, but it became more of a problem when some of the eras lasted only days or minutes. There had to be some way that was objective - something that forced people to recognize a change of era - and yet was also caused by their own selves, for eras are historical phenomena. In the end, this led me to the idea of the eomasp. The world of Ooranye has a day/night cycle based not on its axial rotation but upon the pulsating lights of its atmospheric micro-organisms. These organisms are sensitive to strong etheric vibrations caused by mass outpourings of human emotion. Hence if something drastic happens to society - an invasion, a disaster, a triumph, a rare fantastic discovery - millions of people emote, and this disturbs the day/night cycle of the planet, making a day may last longer or shorter than usual, and when this eomasp happens, people know that a new era has arrived. (It happens in "The Open Secret".) I doubt whether I would have thought of the concept of the eomasp if it hadn't been for my attempt to reconcile the out-of-date idea of the 26 eras with the more recent idea of the 92. Despite what Sherlock Holmes says to Watson about the need to keep the brain-attic from getting over-full, I think all the old junk up there can and should be used for something. buy essay
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