Notes on slow reading
July 23rd 2010 09:19
There are limited hours before we die -- we're all of us time-deprived. So, if it's just the ideas you're interested in, why bother reading a book or an article in full, rather than just the summary of it, or skimming over it?
Do any MPs -- can any MPs -- read in entirety the laws that they vote on?
Is there any need to sit through two hours of a movie in order meaningfully to discuss it?
Perhaps the best way to answer this question is with a website: "Book-A-Minute Classics".
Consider the following: --
Don Quixote
Ultra-Condensed by Scott Kvizdos
Don Quixote: Chivalry demands I destroy that evil thing.
Sancho Panza: No, master. It is something ordinary and harmless.
Don Quixote: (falls down)
THE END
The Collected Work of Virginia Woolf
Ultra-Condensed by Annie Berke
Virginia Woolf: Life is beautiful and tragic. Let's put flowers in a vase.
THE END
The Confessions of St Augustine
Ultra-Condensed by Annie Berke
St Augustine: I was a bad boy. Damn, was I a bad boy. Not anymore, though.
THE END
There are differences of experience and pleasure between abridged version and full; and there are issues of affect -- for instance, whether you like or dislike a thing, and whether it feels foreign or familiar.
But putting these aside, there are still differences between:
-- flying from Sydney to Brisbane and walking -- the unexpected discoveries along the way;
-- ingrained knowledge and knowledge quickly-forgotten -- crammed study vs paced study;
-- easily-accessible knowledge and knowledge buried in recesses of brain;
-- intellectual and embodied -- knowing how to bicycle vs reading the how-to manual;
-- vagueness and specificity, gloss and detail (a five-year-old might know "the Allies won WWII", but could they tell you what that involved?);
-- recognizing a fact in isolation, and appreciating its exceptions, ramifications, and contextual importance ("The Commonwealth has legislative power with respect to bills of exchange" -- but what does that really mean, what are the implications, and how does that interact with other Commonwealth and State powers?);
-- and holding an idea in isolation and connecting it to your experience, beliefs, knowledge (often with the result of generating new ideas).
This last point might to some extent differentiate organic brains from silicon.
I suppose the broad idea is the shortcomings of broad ideas. -- What does it mean to really know or to understand something?
What does it mean to understand that "6 million Jews died between 1939 and 1945"?
Is there a sense in which that sentence "doesn't do justice"?
The whole as more than sum of parts. If someone crazy starts crazy-talking to you, hear them out first. Sense might emerge.
If I speak to you a worldview, piece by piece, you might piece-by-piece reject it. But if I present you the worldview in all its glory, all-together, with all of its assumptions in place -- about language, knowledge, science, God --, then, as a whole, it may have an internal, self-supporting consistency. One on-the-face-of-it-ludicrous claim might make perfect sense in the light of other claims that are less ludicrous, and so on. After all, you can make any belief true, come what may, provided you're prepared to make drastic enough changes to the rest of the system.
If one of the goals of a piece of writing is description of self, well, perhaps it's sometimes not possible to express a personality or psychological state shorter than novel-length.
Similarly, one professor (Sellars, I think) required his honours students to read all of a writer's writings, to appreciate the force of the whole.
A final thought...
The sorts of differences I'm thinking about are more acute with an example like watching a movie vs reading its Wikipedia synopsis.
We can speak, crudely, of "the same information conveyed by different media" (in this case, movie and Wikipedia), just as we can talk about the same word in different languages. But, perhaps, if people examined in fine-grained detail, they'd admit the impossibility of perfect translation for either scenario.
Translation of language: -- Is "la lune" the same as "moon"? Doesn't every word have consequences, connections, echoes within a language and a culture? And are all of these things ever reproduced -- aren't they only ever approximated?
Translation of media: -- Doesn't every sensory experience (including the experience of reading a word) have different consequences -- different from each other, from person to person, and from time to time? Doesn't every sensory experience spark different neural and bodily reactions in you? So how is it possible ever to translate some same thing from one medium to another?
("Translate" is metaphorical in origin -- "transferre", to carry across.)
The suggestion is that there is no thing, no "content", "fact", "information", "knowledge", "proposition", that is carried across from one sensory realm to another. So you might talk about how a Wikipedia synopsis gives "less factual information" than watching the movie, and this might well be a useful shorthand way of talking about similarity of relevant behaviours. But in the end it's an improper way of speaking, it's imprecise -- if there are no facts, no same things transferred, but only responses.
Do any MPs -- can any MPs -- read in entirety the laws that they vote on?
Is there any need to sit through two hours of a movie in order meaningfully to discuss it?
***
Perhaps the best way to answer this question is with a website: "Book-A-Minute Classics".
Consider the following: --
Don Quixote
Ultra-Condensed by Scott Kvizdos
Don Quixote: Chivalry demands I destroy that evil thing.
Sancho Panza: No, master. It is something ordinary and harmless.
Don Quixote: (falls down)
THE END
The Collected Work of Virginia Woolf
Ultra-Condensed by Annie Berke
Virginia Woolf: Life is beautiful and tragic. Let's put flowers in a vase.
THE END
The Confessions of St Augustine
Ultra-Condensed by Annie Berke
St Augustine: I was a bad boy. Damn, was I a bad boy. Not anymore, though.
THE END
***
There are differences of experience and pleasure between abridged version and full; and there are issues of affect -- for instance, whether you like or dislike a thing, and whether it feels foreign or familiar.
But putting these aside, there are still differences between:
-- flying from Sydney to Brisbane and walking -- the unexpected discoveries along the way;
-- ingrained knowledge and knowledge quickly-forgotten -- crammed study vs paced study;
-- easily-accessible knowledge and knowledge buried in recesses of brain;
-- intellectual and embodied -- knowing how to bicycle vs reading the how-to manual;
-- vagueness and specificity, gloss and detail (a five-year-old might know "the Allies won WWII", but could they tell you what that involved?);
-- recognizing a fact in isolation, and appreciating its exceptions, ramifications, and contextual importance ("The Commonwealth has legislative power with respect to bills of exchange" -- but what does that really mean, what are the implications, and how does that interact with other Commonwealth and State powers?);
-- and holding an idea in isolation and connecting it to your experience, beliefs, knowledge (often with the result of generating new ideas).
This last point might to some extent differentiate organic brains from silicon.
***
I suppose the broad idea is the shortcomings of broad ideas. -- What does it mean to really know or to understand something?
What does it mean to understand that "6 million Jews died between 1939 and 1945"?
Is there a sense in which that sentence "doesn't do justice"?
***
The whole as more than sum of parts. If someone crazy starts crazy-talking to you, hear them out first. Sense might emerge.
If I speak to you a worldview, piece by piece, you might piece-by-piece reject it. But if I present you the worldview in all its glory, all-together, with all of its assumptions in place -- about language, knowledge, science, God --, then, as a whole, it may have an internal, self-supporting consistency. One on-the-face-of-it-ludicrous claim might make perfect sense in the light of other claims that are less ludicrous, and so on. After all, you can make any belief true, come what may, provided you're prepared to make drastic enough changes to the rest of the system.
If one of the goals of a piece of writing is description of self, well, perhaps it's sometimes not possible to express a personality or psychological state shorter than novel-length.
Similarly, one professor (Sellars, I think) required his honours students to read all of a writer's writings, to appreciate the force of the whole.
***
A final thought...
The sorts of differences I'm thinking about are more acute with an example like watching a movie vs reading its Wikipedia synopsis.
We can speak, crudely, of "the same information conveyed by different media" (in this case, movie and Wikipedia), just as we can talk about the same word in different languages. But, perhaps, if people examined in fine-grained detail, they'd admit the impossibility of perfect translation for either scenario.
Translation of language: -- Is "la lune" the same as "moon"? Doesn't every word have consequences, connections, echoes within a language and a culture? And are all of these things ever reproduced -- aren't they only ever approximated?
Translation of media: -- Doesn't every sensory experience (including the experience of reading a word) have different consequences -- different from each other, from person to person, and from time to time? Doesn't every sensory experience spark different neural and bodily reactions in you? So how is it possible ever to translate some same thing from one medium to another?
("Translate" is metaphorical in origin -- "transferre", to carry across.)
The suggestion is that there is no thing, no "content", "fact", "information", "knowledge", "proposition", that is carried across from one sensory realm to another. So you might talk about how a Wikipedia synopsis gives "less factual information" than watching the movie, and this might well be a useful shorthand way of talking about similarity of relevant behaviours. But in the end it's an improper way of speaking, it's imprecise -- if there are no facts, no same things transferred, but only responses.
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Comment by Michaelie Clark
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