Let the record show that on August 27th, 2008, at approximately 7:13 AST (Azzy Standard Time), one Beck aka The Beck aka Fisto Ferro said, "You have to write on your blog."
Um, okay. The record, as it were, now shows that. Imperative and response, accomplished simultaneously! Ha ha, Beck, I just doubled my productivity!
So yep, the first three official on the clock days of Nyetian grad school time have passed me by, so I now feel somewhat comfortable in making some kind of cohesive statement on the experience. The time itself has been dominated by reading a variety of articles, ranging from semi-dense analytic stuff (Causal Decision Theory, essentially a logic-coded evaluation of how rational decisions are made, involving sentences like V(A) = P (C|A) * V (C & A) and the like (rough translation: the value of an action equals the probability of a particular outcome C given that action multiplied by the value of both the outcome C and the action A) ) to USA Today articles on how many scientists are selling their souls to become patent lawyers. Cool stuff, and at this point in the game I have a lot of freedom as to what to pursue, so I finished a book that I had been reading anyways (The Mind's I, a collection of essays / fiction pieces on the brain, mind, self and artificial intelligence, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennet). I've also been quickly accumulating a list of "Oh crap, I need to read that" articles and books, and in a very short time I think I've scheduled the remainder of my time on earth. What is excellent about this is that while it is difficult / challenging and all that, I would be hard-pressed to call it work. Which I think is like, the meaning of life or something. (Licks finger, touches self on shoulder, makes sizzling sound to signify own hotness). So that's sweet. I'm sure things will shift gears a bit as my time becomes more structured and papers need to be written and such, but for now, I'm in a la-la land of "pursue what you will").
As a consequence, though, I'm having a little bit of what I'll go ahead and dub "The Tetris Effect." If you've ever played Tetris, or Rattler Race, or any game that involves pattern recognition for hours on end, you start to see the patterns outside the context of the game. The walls start crawling, and every set of bricks turns into a Tetris block or a maze. This weird-ass phenomenon also happens with games like Grand Theft Auto, incidentally, where you don't exactly see blocks in groups of four, but you do have a creepy desire in the real world to steal cars and murder prostitutes. I may have mentioned a similar academic phenomenon with chemistry - I specifically remember driving around Jamaica Plain during our intensive summer of chemistry up at Tufts, seeing a sign that said "NO PARKING" and thinking "Nitric Monoxide Parking? What the Hell?" It's happening again here, only the consequence is that after reading in a very critically intense fashion for hours on end, you start to pick up on all the little logical flaws and lack of rigor in people's everyday speech. For example, when one of the many scantily clad fleshbots* that ASU seems to celebrate walked by and said, "I don't know if she's like literally a bitch," I immediately start questioning whether it is even logically coherent to be literally like something, like some kind of literal simile.
Ha, ha, "like" some kind of literal simile. That was cheesy, I know. But it kinda wrecks your every day and/or academic experience - a more realistic example is when listening to a law lecture, I can't help but notice all the biases and assumptions going into every claim - for example, while we were talking about fundamental aspects of science, the professor stated that "Sometimes when a scientist encounters data that challenges their hypothesis, they'll just change the hypothesis. That can be a pretty slippery move. Of course, sometimes that's legitimate." The problem there is that we're talking about science, a process wholly geared towards proving what's legitimate and what isn't, and we're more precisely determining how exactly that process makes claims toward being legitimate - so you're invoking a kind of mysterious, external legitimation process when you claim that an act is sometimes okay and sometimes not. At the very least you need to define criteria for that. On some common sensical level, it's clear when a scientist is changing their hypothesis within bounds that seem "legitimate," but science is not supposed to be rooted in common sense - in fact, much of the business is challenging common sense. Anyways, this stuff gets particular and maybe boring really quick, but it's a pretty solid demonstration of how I'm starting to hear ideas right now.
* - Quick aside for the Fleshbot Failures: Oh Toto, we are not at Rice any more. For one thing, Toto has a pink tote bag and Ralph Lauren sunglasses on. Damn. Rice was extraordinarily laid back w/r/t style and fashion, a phenomenon that I know aggravated the few on campus who preferred to primp for class. The basic "t-shirt and shorts" uniform was constant, boys did not gel their hair and girls did not where heels to class. Etc. Tufts (undergrad) was a bit of a change from that, as the look at me I'm pretty factor was slightly amped, but really, when a lot of the year is spent in freezing weather, there's still a fair amount of "screw this, I'm going hoodie today." Of course, when the sun came out in spring, the nice clothes (and, er, lack thereof) popped right back out. So imagine, if you will, what it's like to walk around in a place where it's 105 all the time. Where walking to your next class necessarily involves sweat. The strategy appears to be to wear as little as possible, presumably a complex social statement against Victorian norms and/or a sociopolitical effort to help factory workers in Malaysia work fewer hours (because they need to produce significantly less fabric).
I mean, egads, seriously people. And the girls are bad, but the boys are no better, as the posturing and incidental flexing and etc. goes on all day long. It's like a gigantic club scene for a large portion of the student body (I, incidentally, now finally understand where the expression "student body" comes from). I mean, to each his or her own, but given the sweat, the lack of clothing, the high fashion and the general air of asunder looks and howyoudoin, walking around campus is like macheting my way through a phermone jungle. It's intense.
This is all enhanced by the phenomenon of "ASU, brought to you by" that understandably goes on. It's a semi-captive audience with quite a bit of time and disposable income, and the hawks - be they the banks or the clubs or the Burger Kings - descend accordingly. You can't walk ten feet in the general vicinity of the Memorial Union without encountering some kind of corporate booth, free handout, game where you can win a car, and on. I was trying to just get a drink yesterday - a coke zero, you know, just for the taste of it - when a pretty aggressive fleshbot tried to get me to play Plinko to win a free mp3 player with a t-shirt and a bank account. Wha? Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives; I declined.
I've gotta get going here (this post bridged the night and it's now time to get going down to campus again), but this is just the start of the account. I'll write a bit more about the actual goings on of the last week tonight. So you have "Orientation: The Musical" to look forward to. Warning: as you may have guessed, grad students, particularly grad students with any kind of phil bent, can be a little weird. As a consequence, my musical is going to have a selection called "four hours and 33 minutes of awkward silence," which sums up at least the subjective experience of one of my first orientation meetings. Details later.
Have a groovy day, folks. I'm off... to the Ethics Lab!!!
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