A somewhat dreadful and slow day yesterday compared to the full Tuesday. A night of stomach pain meant no sleep until 6am, then waking late.
I read a lot of Time, Fate, and Language in the night, and I think this affected my mood in the day; it's a brilliant but dangerous book. Reading it seemed to make to clear to me, somewhat ironically, the inevitability of David Foster Wallace's suicide, my soul somewhat tainted with a strange analytical darkness. It seemed that Taylor's original essay was more of a challenge than a belief, that he knew its flaws and presented it to the world like a proud puzzle-master. Foster Wallace brilliantly exposes the flaws, at least one of the problems with the Taylor essay, without proving an end to fatalism.
David Foster Wallace is a man who will happily use ten words when one will suffice, but the essence of his argument appears to be that there are differences in truth/false evaluations depending on whether these occur in the past, present, or future, and that evaluations are invalid when they cross tenses; perhaps that what happens today can say nothing about yesterday's possibilities - but I am extending things with that statement. Taylor assumed validity across all tenses, hiding this in weasely words; reasonable for a universal view, but a universal view is impossible without omniscience - an omniscient universal view would necessarily be fatalistic, but the real world is a different matter.
One certainty about the real world is that knowledge is limited, even all agents in the universe connected can't know everything, and each agent is even worse off as it takes time to convey information through this network. It's amazing that we can infer anything from our tiny view. Not so much that I know that I know nothing as I know that I can't know everything, and know that nothing can. All agents in the universe are united by ignorance.
I sketched out the structure of Entwined in Infinity, mostly marking the basic parts in the MIDI sequence, and went for a walk to town, my first in months. Then I added a feature to Prometheus to merge events which are close, sort of a temporal 'median' filter. This is useful mainly to chop down bunches of MIDI notes, less useful musically (I could program it to make the remaining median note an average pitch of those it replaced, would that be useful?).
Next door's children harassed and annoyed me with five ball-over-fence requests in 40 minutes, I was completely unable to work with such interruptions.
I've added a few minor changes to Prometheus, so now it's updated to 2.89. I must get this music done as quickly as possible.
Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.
