i've.....understand very little of it. however, the fact that you wrote all that must have a very deep meaning to how one could write a story. so i'll do what i can to understand this...alien language.

Quote: Original post by G-Irregular
i've.....understand very little of it. however, the fact that you wrote all that must have a very deep meaning to how one could write a story. so i'll do what i can to understand this...alien language.

Well, this essay builds on a bunch of other ones I've written, so to understand it you might have to read those. You might want to try shatrting here, my first few chapters of a book on how to design games including their stories.

Well, I did finally get to reading this. And now I will take pot-shots at it, based on some extra knowledge that others do not have, but missing what may have come from earlier things written. I do not intend to be nasty, but few things survive the peer-review process - at least I don't review like a cryptographer.

In spite of that you did in fact spend a great deal of time last night explaining the approximate level of mathematical rigor in this system to me (so much so as to make pizza-eating difficult for us both), I still find it misleading. Especially, you make reference to "multiplying" goal and method. Given that you are not using arithmetical methods here, I think you must define such terms for this context, before this can be useful to others. How can we apply your methods if we do not know what they mean?

Your example of the wizards (apart from reminding me of L. E. Modesitt) makes the system look much more trivial than it appears from its description. I hope that it's the example that's at fault - otherwise the method contributes nothing particularly surprising, but instead takes an almost subconscious mental process belonging to the narrative instinct, and makes it more difficult than otherwise.

And I would be wary of accepting anything that comes from John Searle. He is the one who created the "Chinese Room" argument, which D. R. Hofstadter destroyed so nicely. (I do have Searle's essay on my shelf - it is in the book "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett. Pull it down if you want - though I am sure you don't want.)

Taking the subconscious narrative instinct, identifying the particular mental processes made out of them, and bringing them to a conscious level is precisely what I want to do. Instead of going "Wow that's surprising." the audience of my theory including this esay should hopefully be going, "Wow that's so true." Like that Meme book by Blackwell or whatever her name is. (Remind me to look for another copy of that next time we're at the used book store.)

As for the multiplying, I meant that in the sense that any two dimensions multiplied by each other will give you an array or graph. Like a Punnett square which shows how dominant and recessive genes are inherited, or how an independent and a dependent variable will give you a graph of a science experiment, or the way all the possible Kiersy temperament types make a quad of quads, and Dramatica also has quads of quads (not that they make any particular sense).

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I'm taking a look at these links and they are tangentially relevant to what I mean by 'dream logic' or 'social calculus'. In the last link in that list, it says:

Quote: [Searle's] ontology of social reality thus rests on four components:
1. certain physical objects

2. certain cognitive acts or states in virtue of which such physical objects acquire certain special sorts of functions

3. these functions themselves

4. contexts in which the given cognitive acts or states are effective.

What I am interested in here is point two, or more specifically the logic according to which functions are evaluated as 'appropriate' to be assigned to particular objects. Or to phrase it a different way, our subconscious evaluation of what behavior is 'appropriately' expected from a particular object. What I am looking for is a theory of psychology/sociology, not ontology.

Well, it seems to me that the ontology can't be divorced from the sociology. For example, point #2 requires the physical objects from point #1. I presented that approach to describing the construction of social reality because it seems to me that the social calculus it describes lends itself well to computer modeling and games. For example, it seems typical of those articles to discuss constitutive rules in the context of the rules of chess. At any rate, I would agree that those papers focus too much on Searle and that they are tangential to your project. They were the best discussions of constitutive rules that I could find on short notice.

Quote: Original post by Kallisti
And I would be wary of accepting anything that comes from John Searle. He is the one who created the "Chinese Room" argument, which D. R. Hofstadter destroyed so nicely. (I do have Searle's essay on my shelf - it is in the book "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett. Pull it down if you want - though I am sure you don't want.)

I think it's extreme to dismiss everything that comes from an intelletual simply because one of his arguments was supposedly destroyed by someone else. Dennett has critics too, but that doesn't automatically invalidate everything he writes.

Quote: Original post by LessBread

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I'm taking a look at these links and they are tangentially relevant to what I mean by 'dream logic' or 'social calculus'. In the last link in that list, it says:

Quote: [Searle's] ontology of social reality thus rests on four components:
1. certain physical objects

2. certain cognitive acts or states in virtue of which such physical objects acquire certain special sorts of functions

3. these functions themselves

4. contexts in which the given cognitive acts or states are effective.

What I am interested in here is point two, or more specifically the logic according to which functions are evaluated as 'appropriate' to be assigned to particular objects. Or to phrase it a different way, our subconscious evaluation of what behavior is 'appropriately' expected from a particular object. What I am looking for is a theory of psychology/sociology, not ontology.

Well, it seems to me that the ontology can't be divorced from the sociology. For example, point #2 requires the physical objects from point #1. I presented that approach to describing the construction of social reality because it seems to me that the social calculus it describes lends itself well to computer modeling and games. For example, it seems typical of those articles to discuss constitutive rules in the context of the rules of chess. At any rate, I would agree that those papers focus too much on Searle and that they are tangential to your project. They were the best discussions of constitutive rules that I could find on short notice.

Hmm. I suppose I usually think of them as separate because I think of the dream logic/social calculus to be a fundamental property of the human mind, kind of like the platonic idea of possible types of objects and their behavior, and not dependent on any actual objects to exist. But you're right, it would be hard to talk about rules of object behavior without having some objects to talk about.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Hmm. I suppose I usually think of them as separate because I think of the dream logic/social calculus to be a fundamental property of the human mind, kind of like the platonic idea of possible types of objects and their behavior, and not dependent on any actual objects to exist. But you're right, it would be hard to talk about rules of object behavior without having some objects to talk about.

And I don't think of them as seperable. For example, the very idea of social calculus presumes a pre-existing society. I think there is something about the human mind that produces various dream logics/social calculii, but I don't think particular dream logics/social calculii can be divorced from the environment particular people live in. For example, Inuits aren't very likely to dream about lions and zebras, they are very likely to dream about walrus and caribou.

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I don't think particular dream logics/social calculii can be divorced from the environment particular people live in. For example, Inuits aren't very likely to dream about lions and zebras, they are very likely to dream about walrus and caribou.

I strongly disagree - the basic tenet of structuralism is that people everywhere think the same. That there is a universal human language instinct, a universal human narrative instinct (as Kallisti mentioned), a universal underlying structure to all fiction froduced by all humans in all places and times since we gained the basic ability to tell a story. For example, it doesn't matter whether the big predator tribespeople are scared of is a lion, a jaguar, a wolf, a coyote, or a bear, unrelated cultures all over the world fear the archetypal predator in the same way and tell the same myths about is (such as that of the man-beast, e.g. the werewolf).

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I don't think particular dream logics/social calculii can be divorced from the environment particular people live in. For example, Inuits aren't very likely to dream about lions and zebras, they are very likely to dream about walrus and caribou.

I strongly disagree - the basic tenet of structuralism is that people everywhere think the same. That there is a universal human language instinct, a universal human narrative instinct (as Kallisti mentioned), a universal underlying structure to all fiction froduced by all humans in all places and times since we gained the basic ability to tell a story. For example, it doesn't matter whether the big predator tribespeople are scared of is a lion, a jaguar, a wolf, a coyote, or a bear, unrelated cultures all over the world fear the archetypal predator in the same way and tell the same myths about is (such as that of the man-beast, e.g. the werewolf).

And that's why structuralism is often criticized as Eurocentric. I don't think people everywhere think the same, I think people everywhere have the same capacity for language, narrative and so forth, but clearly people from different parts of the world think differently, their languages have different grammars and different words for describing the various objects in our world. And for that matter, some objects can only be distinquished in a particular language. The typical example of that are the 50+ something words that eskimos have for snow and ice.

Now, I recognize that there are archetypes, for example, the predator archetype that you mention, and also that for the differences I mention above people everywhere share some of the same primal fears (eg. crossing the divide back into animality), but I think the different details of the predator do make a difference as far as story telling goes. A story about a polar bear on an ice flow wouldn't make sense to a Masai warrior and a story about a giraffe wouldn't make sense to an Inuit. This doesn't mean that they couldn't tell each other stories that would make sense to each other, but simply that they both have different stories to tell, stories that depend on a familiarity with a particular natural environment in order for certain aspects of those stories to make sense. And from those aspects different cultures develop, a lion cult here, a bird cult there - each with different myths, each with different understandings of what it means to be a human being, an adult, a productive member of society and so forth. This doesn't mean that we couldn't look at the various myths and identify which are coming of age stories and which aren't, which is to say that coming of age stories are ubiquitous, but different cultures are going to define the transformation differently.