2023-10-02

• I wonder why I have such a difficultly saying goodbye. Something something thinking a lot about death.
  
• Revisited some of my highlights from a book I love: Finite and Infinite Games. One of the highlights is about the relationship between stories and experience. In standard logical analysis, experience precedes stories, and in a causal way. First you eat breakfast, then later you tell people the story about it. FIG proposes that this gets the relationship backwards. Stories define the experience. If you told a different story, it would be a different experience. I’m not sure how much I buy this, but it’s an interesting idea. I think I would get behind stories causing the memory of an experience to take a certain form. And through this control of memory, you control the meaning of an experience. But the idea that a story about food could conjure food to experience is too big a leap I think. Furthermore, the idea that without a story to tell about an experience you would not have experienced anything is just too bold. Stories are, of course, important and powerful, and discovering new stories or ways of telling a story will often result in people making a different meaning of their lives. For example, a compelling model for converting to Christianity is that people learn the story of the gospels. This story will offer them a way to reconceptualize the experience of their lives in ways that mimic the experience of Christ. If they choose to center the story of Christ in understanding the experience of their own lives, they become Christians. So the important causal pathway is: experience -> story -> meaning. Still, interesting thing to flip and explore. Big part of what I enjoyed about the book is this kind of thing.

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