# Understand - A Novelette by Ted Chiang ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[web.archive.org]] - Full Title: Understand - A Novelette by Ted Chiang - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all. It's no different than tugging on the doors of a locked house until you find an improperly installed lock. A useful activity, but hardly interesting. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjagfc7pm25h2s818hy0vkk)) > Of course, the test scores merely capture a shadow of the real changes occurring. If only the doctors could feel what's going on in my head: how much I'm recognizing that I missed before, how many uses I can see for that information. Far from being a laboratory phenomenon, my intelligence is practical and effectual. With my near total recall and my ability to correlate, I can assess a situation immediately, and choose the best course of action for my purposes; I'm never indecisive. Only theoretical topics pose a challenge. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjakbqazbfmv14npxarj12m)) > No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can't see. They're like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjamve82033x4267z918zhf)) > The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artifically generating spherically symmetric gravity fields. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjaw28brssk49pgr2mmq492)) > However, my interest in Eastern meditation is limited to its application to physical control; no meditative trance I can attain is nearly as desirable to me as my mental state when I assemble gestalts out of elemental data. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjaxw03wccp2y2bqkfy89nk)) > Revelation. > I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the *limit*. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware." > Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and -self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. > With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. > I know how they make up my thoughts. > These thoughts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqjb31mnzxxrhc827bmfyh61))