How can the objective view on the painting reveal that what it's trying to convey? I can give you an objective description of the letters in the word "PHYSICS", first letter, a small vertical with a semi-circle attached right above, second one two parallel verticals with a small horizontal in the middle, etc. but what does the word mean? And even the objective description needs an agreement about what's an objective feature. — Raymond
Then you can look at a painting as a painting too, if you look at a word as a word. But what does it mean? Is every painting devoid of meaning? — Raymond
The notion of freedom is looked at from the oppressed. Freedom is only meaningful if there is something to be freed of. If there is freedom for every one, like the figure on the rope, freedom is not something to desire for anymore. That's why the painting is called "A look at freedom". — Raymond
3. Doubts regarding traditional analysis/reviewing: the way we talk about music, and how analysis/reviews talk about it, are not how we experience music. What is this gap? The natural extension of this line of questioning is the development of our awareness for medium-specific narratives. — thaumasnot
5. The promise of a different type of sensations/payoff. Very roughly, it will lead you to something like big Eureka moments. In metal, you can superficially spot where these moments tend to occur. Traditionally, it’s in the form of “riff breakdowns” that are announced “theatrically”: the vocalist sometimes emit a distinctive exclamative roar, there’s a big break in the drumming, or there’s a striking aesthetic transition (for example, Metallica’s Master of Puppets when it switches to clean-sounding guitars). In the context of “great” medium-specific narratives, these kind of moments gain a whole dimension of significance. In other genres like classical music, these moments are not so much theatricalized. For example, in Vivaldi (who is my go-to when it comes to medium-specific narratives) the moment can aesthetically look like any other moment, and someone with no awareness of the narrative will just not hear anything different. — thaumasnot
No meaning is fundamentally better than the other. — thaumasnot
but was this meant by the writer of the word PHYSICS? — Raymond
I'm trying to gasp exactly what you mean by "medium-specific narrative" — Metaphysician Undercover
Is comparing narratives acceptable and useful in reconstructionism? — Metaphysician Undercover
I really do not think that this gap can be closed in this way. I think it is a gap fundamental to the way that the human mind works, and we ought not even try to close it. — Metaphysician Undercover
The artist did something completely contrary to intuition, something seemingly impossible, suddenly transcending the story. — Metaphysician Undercover
But if you cut it loose from being a conveyor of meaning, then what use is there in art at all? — Raymond
So the gap between passive and active is only really closed in the experience itself, where the presence of the unknown causes a real need for an active sort of affection. — Metaphysician Undercover
Is comparing narratives acceptable and useful in reconstructionism? — Metaphysician Undercover
So medium is music, the same for both Metallica and Vivaldi. I say "medium-specific" because for another medium, painting for example, obviously it won't be about melodic motifs, but visual patterns. — thaumasnot
Well, it's still part of the story. In the case of medium-specific narratives; obviously, motif M can be used in unexpected ways. How this is achieved exactly is the interesting part, and this is the whole medium-specific narrative. — thaumasnot
So, about this active thing. What I mean by active consumption in the context of reconstruction is the activity of correlating things (the basis of any narrative). As you can see from the "copy" aspect of reconstruction, reconstruction is a little replica of the experience. In fact, the property of "pure referentiality" almost means it is the experience itself, except in a guided way. Ultimately, the reader of a reconstruction can ditch the reconstruction, and live the experience the way the reconstruction suggested. — thaumasnot
The medium used by the musician is sound, and there is distinct aspects of that medium, rhythm and pitch for example. Notice that aural narrative, referring to the act of telling a story with words, uses the same fundamental medium, sound, but it doesn't have refined (or defined) rhythm and pitch. Because different forms of artistic expression might use the same fundamental medium, and also one form of artistic expression might be presented through a number of different media, I think it's best to maintain a distinction between "medium" and "art form". — Metaphysician Undercover
But motifs are not medium specific. There are visual motifs as much as there are sound motifs. — Metaphysician Undercover
It appears like you want to talk about particular motifs as if they a part of the medium — Metaphysician Undercover
But don't you think that being "guided" takes away from the experience? — Metaphysician Undercover
I use medium roughly in the sense “perceived physical manifestation”. Even if we don’t agree with that definition, the only thing that matters is that I mean by “medium-specific narrative” a narrative whose elements are things you perceive in the content. So they’re visual, audible, readable, etc. things. It’s important because it contrasts traditional interpretation, which goes beyond these things. — thaumasnot
In most cases, the viewer will see PHYSICS as a word, and I think that’s enough for most purposes. — thaumasnot
When I'm reading, I don't see the things I am reading as words. So I do not see "physics" as a word, when I come across that word in a piece of writing. I talk about it now as a word, but when I'm reading I see each particular word as the word it is, and read it as that particular word — Metaphysician Undercover
This is the difference between your conception of "medium" and mine. The motif, you see as part of the medium, a physical manifestation, I see it as something created by the artist. — Metaphysician Undercover
How does it help in interpreting political and pseudoscientific talk? — Raymond
That’s quite confusing. “When I'm reading, I don't see the things I am reading as words” followed by “I'm reading I see each particular word as the word it is”. — thaumasnot
It’s not something that matters to reconstruction (as a hedonistic endeavour). If you care about this, you can even use your definition. The medium could come from an artist, a UFO, or be generated randomly by a computer. You can also try to reconstruct anything you experience in real life (quite useful when interpreting political discourses or pseudo-scientific debates for example). — thaumasnot
Reconstructing how pseudo-scientific conclusions can be reached is quite amusing and enlightening. — thaumasnot
I know it's confusing, but I thought I explained it well enough to dispel the confusion. When I'm reading I don't see them as words. But when I reflect on what is written, or talk about it in any way, not reading it, I see them as words. I only see them as words when I'm not reading it. When I'm reading it, I'm not thinking 'that's a word, that's a word, that's a word' etc., because I am too busy reading. And reading does not consist of seeing things as words, it's a matter of deriving meaning, not a matter of judging things as words. I cannot do both at the same time, read the material, and also count the words. — Metaphysician Undercover
Unless there is some attempt to try and understand what the artist is doing, how can you call this a type of "help"? Take a politician's speech for example, you'd say, look at the cool patterns in the way this guy uses "make America great again", in relation to some other phrases used by that politician, but how is that supposed to be helpful? — Metaphysician Undercover
Isn't this something completely different though, something called logic? — Metaphysician Undercover
Correlating phrases helps to spot things like contradictions, omissions, fallacies, babbling, etc. Obviously, people didn’t need reconstructions to spot these already, but it can be argued they were sort of doing reconstruction before it was called reconstructionism. At a small scale (short political discourses for example), reconstruction of discourses is basically the same as traditional analysis. — thaumasnot
Great question. Logic is focused on the errors or false statements. It’s a pinpointing thing. Reconstruction makes you focus on the whole reasoning that led to the error/false statement or was built on the error/false statement. The “help” here is not in establishing that the reasoning was wrong. Logic can do that. It’s to make you appreciate how the reasoning was “constructed”. You’ll surely remark that in doing so, reconstruction uses logic, and that’s true. In that case, the “content” considered by the reconstructionist is the combination of that logic with the pseudo-scientific text. In reconstructionism, the process of defining the content is a formal step that I call “conventional medium delimitation”. It’s just a convention, not a profound statement of truth. — thaumasnot
It could be argued that it’s more interesting to see how errors are made than how a perfect scientific text is constructed. The empirical argument is that there are millions of ways of making errors, and only one way to be correct. And learning how we make errors is quite interesting, not only theoretically, but also as a lesson. So reconstruction is not primarily about finding errors, but rather about discovering reasoning patterns, and that’s a fun endeavour (hedonism). — thaumasnot
I see a problem with this sort of thing, because the same word in different contexts has different meanings. So when you remove phrases from their contexts and say look, here's a contradiction, when it's really not a contradiction at all, because of the difference in context, that's being disrespectful to the author. — Metaphysician Undercover
So any time that you remove a part of a narrative from its context, you cannot assign any meaning to that piece, because all its meaning is derived from its position in the narrative. — Metaphysician Undercover
then all of a sudden the person will start to do things right outside of one's character, seeming to undergo a significant change in character. From my perspective, I would say the person would never do something like that, the act is out of character for that person, so I see it as unrealistic, and I'm pissed off that they tricked me into thinking that the person was otherwise. — Metaphysician Undercover
And with good editing they can even do this with "reality" shows. They show numerous, very particular types of actions, by the person, to make you think you understand the person's character. But they've actually created a false representation with crafty editing. — Metaphysician Undercover
There are many ways to be correct because correctness is determined in relation to the end, if the end is achieved. — Metaphysician Undercover
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