# Stories of Your Life and Others ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/reader/parsed_document_assets/145664116/GnlH21Ch4bdAms1wYDdM1mu1o7iXHtc0ccpOZBfey7A-cover-cover.jpeg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Ted Chiang]] - Full Title: Stories of Your Life and Others - Category: #books - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Document Tags: [[favorite]] [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] - Summary: Amazon.com ReviewThis marvelous collection by one of science fiction's most thoughtful and graceful writers belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in literary science fiction.Collected here for the first time, Ted Chiang's award-winning stories--recipients of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Campbell, and Asimov awards--offer a feast of science, speculation, humanity, and lyricism. Standouts include "Tower of Babylon," in which a miner ascends the fabled tower in order to break through the vault of heaven; "Division by Zero," a precise and heartbreaking examination of the disintegration of hope and love; and "Story of Your Life," in which a linguist learns an alien language that reshapes her view of the world. Chiang has the gift that lies at the heart of good science fiction: a human story, beautifully told, in which the science is an expression of the deeper issues that the characters must confront. Full of remarkable ideas and unforgettable moments, Stories of Your Life and Others is highly recommended. --Roz Gen... ## 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/01hs38mmanpvrdv6ztd6gg53cn)) - Tags: [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] > 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/01hs3872vrce2dtd5h1wmq5bpv)) > As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I'm blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that'll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I've ever wanted before. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs387jw5mzfx1dzhepvseb06)) > Moreover, my powers of concentration make biofeedback techniques very effective. After comparatively little practice, I am able to raise or lower my heart rate and blood pressure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs38wcfsd4zts5jqkkxdmw8d)) > 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. > Having realized this, however, I won't build such a device, or any other. It would require many custom-built components, all difficult and time-consuming to procure. Furthermore, actually constructing the device wouldn't give me any particular satisfaction, since I already know it would work, and it wouldn't illuminate any new gestalts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs391zjp1mte6hw1tr18wk5x)) > Pattern recognition again, but this time it's of a mundane variety. Thousands of pages of reports, memos, correspondence; each one is a dot of color in a pointillist painting. I step back from this panorama, watching for lines and edges to emerge and create a pattern ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39gbg76p9e9tm3dxqfkg8z)) > 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/01hs398m9k4aqj6g4ka670jpcx)) > I'm designing a new language. I've reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. > Existing linguistic theory is useless; I'll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent. However, mathematics will be only a small part of the language, not the whole; unlike Leibniz, I recognize symbolic logic's limits. Other dialects I have planned will be coexpressive with my notations for aesthetics and cognition. This will be a time-consuming project, but the end result will clarify my thoughts enormously. After I've translated all that I know into this language, the patterns I seek should become evident. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39avyh0wqheh2hdwj5nyd0)) > My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt-oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn't be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. Such an ideogram could convey, more deliberately than a picture, what a thousand words cannot ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39kj2sr58np30c9y3qqqx4)) > 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." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39nx8s2d1z1b6vfdd6vssa)) > 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39qtzw2v88pjz5jdstw1dx)) > What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition. Now that I understand the mechanisms that were operating when I attended to two tasks at once, I can p class="indent"ide my consciousness, simultaneously devoting almost full concentration and gestalt recognition abilities to two or more separate problems, meta-aware of all of them. What can't I do? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39sz6za08mad8gd278nbq1)) > I have somatic awareness of kidney function, nutrient absorption, glandular secretions. I am even conscious of the role that neurotransmitters play in my thoughts. This state of consciousness involves mental activity more intense than in any epinephrine-boosted stress situation; part of my mind is maintaining a condition that would kill a normal mind and body within minutes. As I adjust the programming of my mind, I experience the ebb and flow of all the substances that trigger my emotional reactions, boost my attention, or subtly shape my attitudes. > • • • > And then I look outward. > Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I'm closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos. > I seek enlightenment, not spiritual but rational. I must go still further to reach it, but this time the goal will not be perpetually retreating from my fingertips. With my mind's language, the distance between myself and enlightenment is precisely calculable. I've sighted my final destination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs39w3jdaa4wxmn9z7agzzyf)) > What about the beauty visible from enlightenment? Doesn't it attract you?> ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3jvm5pvqeach069pnaydfy)) > Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3kb8w0133x5ravzxr6z7cw)) > I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3kb04xcvdr6f3apjbpfye7))