Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 415.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 06:16:52 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Logic-based probability (LBP) in the Metamorphoses
Dear Colleagues:
My earlier comparison of Beethoven with Ovid in terms of Logic-Based
Probability (LBP) may have been an understatement. In looking through the
historical literature, I notice that Ovid came to manhood simultaneously
with the change of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire under Augustus,
that he lived under Augustus, and that he was sent into exile by Augustus
for a mysterious reason that has been speculated to be political, moral, or
both. Since Beethoven lived in the tumult of Napoleonic Europe and refused
to play for Napoleon, we are confronted with the scenario of two geniuses
(Beethoven and Ovid) who lived in times of acute political crisis in which
very systems of government changed in forms that seized the emotions, the
very psychological foundations of these geniuses for whom creativity and
the ability to avoid externally imposed mediocrity and patterns was or can
be conjectured to be essential. It is tempting for some to dispose of such
relationships by noting that some geniuses were sedentary family men living
in relative comfort and with no known stresses. Perhaps there is more than
one road to genius. The Beethoven-Ovid road is built on rare and
influential events: cognitive, political, emotional, socioeconomic,
cultural clashes and system-shattering revolutions, and in Beethoven's case
there was also the trauma of the alcoholic father who was nevertheless a
royal musician. (Ovid's father opposed his going into poetry, which may be
a hint of some deeper conflict.) These are probability 0 extremely rare
influential LBP events. They are also events involving boundaries, which
in LBP are also maximally influential events: geographical boundaries of
empires, individual boundaries of the personal lives of geniuses which were
endangered by "benevolent dictators", boundaries between political systems
and concepts. Do we not have the beginnings of a handle here on
conceptual as well as physical boundaries? The fact that they are
intertwined may provide us with a Rosetta Stone as well. So many
conceptual boundaries and clashes have no clear linkage to physical
boundaries and clashes. Here they do.
In one of my earlier descriptions of LBP's ability to handle rare events, I
mentioned assassinations. A few days before the birth of Ovid's brother,
Julius Caesar was assassinated ninety miles away.
The very influential events of the world form entities or sets of
interlocking rare-boundary-internal and/or lower dimensional events. In
this, my early study of the Metamorphoses, I see the Metamorphoses as
unified not by any future continuation or past continuation but by the
expression of massive influence beyond any ordinary measure in the
universe.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 17 2000 - 06:39:02 CUT