But I want to just put into your mind the notion that this may be the
prejudice of a certain personality type you see in in the history of philosophy
and poetry and art we always find the interchange of two personality types
which I call prickles and goo the prickly people are advocates of
intellectual tokenism they have one a rigger they want precise statistics and
they have a sudden klipse attitude in their voices and you know this very well
in academic circles oh and they accuse other people are being disgustingly
vague and miasmic and mystical but the vague miasma can mystical people accuse
the prickly people the mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones and they
say to you you just rapper you're not really a human being you know the words
that you don't know the music and so therefore if you belong to the prickly
type you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles if
you belong to the gooey type you hope it's waves
if you prickly your cat assists and if your gooey you're a romanticist and
they're going back into medieval philosophy if you're prickly or a
nominalist if you're gooey or a realist and so it goes but we know very well
that this natural universe is neither prickles nor gooey exclusively it's
gooey prickles and prickly goo and juicy here
it all depends on your level of magnification if you've got your
magnification on something so that the focus is clear you've got a prickly
point of view you've got structure shape clearly outline sharply defined the
little out of focus is going to blur there and you look good but we're always
playing with the two because it's like the question is done is the world
basically stuff like matter or is it basically structure
well we find out of course today that in science we don't consider the idea of
matter of just there being some sort of stuff because supposing you wanted to
describe stuff in what terms would you describe it
you always have to describe it in terms of structure something comfortable
something that can be designated as a pattern so we never get to any basic
stuff it seems to me that this way of thinking is based on a form of
consciousness which we could best call scanning the capacity to divide
experiences into bits is somehow related to a physical facility which corresponds
to sweeping a radar beam or a spotlight over the environment the advantage of
the spotlight as it gives you intensely concentrated light on restricted areas a
floodlight by comparison has less intensity but if you examine say this
room were in total darkness and you use the spotlight very thin beam and you
scan the room with it you would have to retain in memory all the areas over
which it passed and then by an additive process you would make out the contours
of the room and it seems to me that this is something in which civilized man both
in the east and in the West has specialized in an inhale method of
paying attention to things which we call noticing and therefore it's highly
selective it picks out its punctus it picks out features in the environment
which we say are noteworthy and which we therefore register with a notation be it
the notation of words the notation of numbers
or such a notation say as algebra or music so that we notice those things
only those things for which we have notation when a child very often child
will point at something and say to its terms what's that and they're not clear
what the child is pointing to the child has pointed to something which we
consider is not a thing the child has pointed to an area say of
funny pattern on a dirty wall and has noticed a figure on it but the child has
never worked for it and says what's that and the adults is oh that's just a mess
because that doesn't count for us as a thing so you can't see this to the
understanding what do you mean by a thing say fascinating to our children
what do you mean biasing and they don't know because it's one of the unexamined
sub positions of the culture what do you mean by an event well everybody knows
what an event is but nobody can say
because a thing is a think it's a unit of thought like an inches the unit of
measurement and so we sing the world edit to say in order to measure a curve
you have to reduce it to point instance and apply the calculus so in exactly the
same way in order to discuss or talk about the universe you have to reduce it
to things that each thing or think is as it were one grasp of that spotlight
thank you Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe like this you see so we reduce the infinite
wiggliness of the world to grasps or bits we're
getting that biting you see the idea of the teeth to grasps of thought and so we
thereby describe the world in terms of things just as that fishermen could
describe his view by the number of net whole / through which the view was
showing and this has been the immensely and apparently successful Enterprise of
all technological culture superbly emphasized by also be emphasized by also
be emphasized by
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