So at some point -- think after I kicked my second, and thus far last, $100 donation to Scarleteen -- that pompous prick Gray said I was sending "mixed signals."
Which could have been a brilliant insight on his part, or a sign of a complete and utter lack of comprehension.
He proceeded to demonstrate, conclusively, that it was the latter.
Luckily for him, I've decided to make him my pet project.
This is not an act of kindness on my part.
Quoting from Marvin Minsky's paper JOKES and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious:
But Freud's theories do not work as well for humorous nonsense as for humorous aggression and sexuality. {0} In this essay I try to show how these different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we make certain observations about the nature of commonsense reasoning.Here is our thesis:
- Common sense logic is too unreliable for practical use. It cannot be repaired, so we must learn to avoid its most common malfunctions. Humor plays a special role in learning and communicating about such matters.
- It is not enough to detect errors in reasoning; one must anticipate and prevent them. We embody much of our knowledge about how to do this in the form of "censors" that suppress unproductive mental states. This is why humor is so concerned with the prohibited.
- Productive thinking depends on knowing how to use Analogy and Metaphor. But analogies are often false, and metaphors misleading. So the "cognitive unconscious" must suppress inappropriate comparisons. This is why humor is so concerned with the nonsensical.
- The consequences of intellectual failure are manifest in one's own head, while social failures involve other people. Intellect and Affect seem less different once we theorize that the "cognitive unconscious" considers faulty reasoning to be just as "naughty" as the usual "Freudian" wishes.
- Humor evolved in a social context. Its forms include graciously disarming ways to instruct others about inappropriate behavior and faulty reasoning. This deviousness makes the subject more confusing.
Our theory emphasizes the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable. {1}
This is an act of kindness, although I'm fairly certain it won't be recognized as such.
This is where the entertainment value comes in.
Bit worried about people who read this who don't "get" my humor. Think it goes back to that whole manichean thing; in their personal narrative, they're the hero, making me the villain, they're the victim, making me the victimizer, blah de fucking blah.
Bored now.
Director's commentary/bonus footage:
Couldn't work this in -- bit heavy, and I was going for a light tone with the entry: How is Understanding an Advertisement Possible?:
Anyone who reads this essay will routinely accomplish the identification, understanding and criticism of advertisements encountered while watching TV, listening to radio, sitting in the cinema, reading a magazine, walking past billboards, and so on. In this essay I offer an analysis of some neglected conditions of possibility of this routine accomplishment. I do so because it seems to me that failure to undertake such an analysis or to realise (even to deny) its significance is a serious limitation upon the value of the hermeneutics and critique of advertisements which has been produced within broadly structuralist and semiological paradigms, say from Barthes' essay, 'Rhetoric of the Image' (Barthes 1964a) through to Williamson's book Decoding Advertisements (1978). These tend to take for granted important conditions of possibility of the routine accomplishment, proceeding directly to a hermeneutics or critique which consequently has an unnecessarily hazardous character, inviting the question 'How do you know?' Specifically, they tend to ignore those conditions of possibility which distinguish instances of speech or utterances (parole) and their comprehension from the or a language (langue), to recall the Sausurrean distinction (Saussure 1959; Barthes 1964b, Ch. I), and so analyse utterances as if they were languages, which they are not.
Also, need to do more of an intro for Minsky and his theories, for those unfamiliar with 'em. This is, well, again, a bit heavy: Frames and Scripts in Artificial Intelligence:
As an attempt to equip computers with the necessary world knowledge, the notion of frame was introduced into artificial intelligence. Thus the computer scientist Marvin Minsky defined a frame as "a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation" (Minsky 1975). The idea is that in our plane example the cognitive category PLANE would activate a whole bundle of other categories which belong to the same [FLYING ON A PLANE] frame, for example PILOT, FLIGHT ATTENDANT, LIFE VEST, SAFETY BELT, FIRST CLASS, ECONOMY CLASS, SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS and so on. All these categories and the specific relations that exist between them (e.g. X has a Y, X is on Y, X is a part of Y) are part of the frame and must somehow be fed into the computer. In addition to this rather general frame there are many so-called subframes which capture the knowledge of still more specific situations of a flight, e.g. [EATING], [WATCHING THE MOVIE] and [GOING TO THE TOILET]. In view of the complexity of many everyday situations, Minsky suggested that our knowledge should be represented in complex "frame-systems" in which the frames are interconnected. The processes working on such frame systems are supposed to match a frame to a specific situation, to use default values to fill unspecific aspects, and so on.
And since the linguistics seminar went over so well, figured delving into Artificial Intelligence is just asking for trouble.
Oh, and I recently (attempted to) join the blackblogz ring.
Somehow, I doubt some of this material is gonna help my chances of getting in. . .
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