Students in Mark Lord's 2013 ENDGAMES course share resources and thinking here.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Recursion

I reckon there's something to be said for recursion.

Dictionaries say this:

Recursive -
[Computing] relating to or involving a program or routine of which a part requires the application of the whole, so that its explicit interpretation requires in general many successive executions.

I fancy our sensory experience of existence, beyond which there is arguably nothing else (for ever and ever, Amen), gets a wee bit more engrossing and attractive when one has ready access to varying levels of awareness of this experience.  If I were bold I'd say "To exist to exist wholly [holy?] necessitates an intuitive or deliberate perception of an infinite series of perceptive levels beginning [perhaps] at the level of physical phenomena."

Slugs.

A slug, slugs along. 
A [lucky] slug has slug-sex and eats slug-food. 
This slug-sex and slug-food is probably damn good if you're a slug.  [Maybe there's bad slug-sex and food too]. 
There is also the off chance, if you lead a slug-existance that some punk-kid will empty the contents of Papa's table shakers all over your glorious-slimy slug anatomy, sending you into a world of biblical-level suffering. 

The ability to step outside of our immediate experience of pleasant and unpleasant, visceral attraction and aversion to environmental and psychological stimuli adds another layer of cognition to our dealings with the sensuous world.  Claiming the agency to decide [intuitively or intentionally] to sense one's sensing or appreciate one's appreciation of intense attraction, aversion, boredom, pride, elation, etc., I'd say, fosters a depth of perception which, when enjoyed in moderation can be very appealing.  

Once one adds the first layer of recursive appreciation, there logically (whatever that means) is no clear end to the number of layers one might add:

One could feasibly appreciate the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation of the appreciation ...
[ad nauseum]. 

Whether this be a logical asymptote with little to no appreciable significance in your daily experience, or the intersection of Earth St. & Nirvana Blvd., the Truth is, its curious as all hell to ponder 'bout. 
I dig it. 

I read [allusions to] something of this [maybe] in Beckett. 

1 comment:

  1. I'm having some trouble parsing this out.

    From what I can tell, you're advocating for an awareness of our conscious processing which necessitates empathy for others' conscious processings (ie. our experience with the world can only be appreciated if we take into account the experiences of other beings, particularly those whom we consider to process things on a lower level than us, ex. slugs). I'm not sure, however, what this has to do with "recursion." An experience of an experience/of others' experiences? Is this different from empathy? Is it the same thing?

    I'm also curious where you read this in Beckett. Maybe an example from the text would help me figure out what you mean?

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