Re: Society of the Mind - by Eric L. Harry

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@factory.net)
Fri, 9 Aug 1996 01:20:34 -0700


>further. Generally, I'm attracted to books and things which were created by
>people who think similarly to myself, and I'm attracted even before I really
>know anything about the book. I just see it, and whammo! I want it, and it
>turns out to be just what I need. Do you guys have these type of experiences?

Happens to me all the time. I don't have time to read all the books that
call to me in this way. (When more good books are published each year than
were published in the previous year, there's not much chance of Achilles
catching up with this Tortoise.)

For instance, I finally got around to Kosko's FUZZY THINKING, which has
been on my reading list for a long time. It is exactly what I needed to
read three years ago, when I was fretting about multivalence and theories
of truth. It's great fun to read it now, but I've given up hope on catching
up with the right book at the right time. I expect the three-year time lag
to keep widening.

> Well, there's also the idea that people's minds are connected in subtle
>ways,
>and that we form some sort of collective thought space

This would be a difficult hypothesis to test. The subtler the ways of
connection, the more difficult. There's no question that people's minds are
connected in many ways other than the use of language, and if you leave out
the word "telepathy", then you're talking memetics.

Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com> http://www.c2.org/~arkuat/