Some nuggets from Viola

Reading “Condominiums in Data Space?” one of the nuggets that got me thinking the most was actually at the very beginning. The piece about us living in a continuum, it has been the same moment since we were conceived. We only perceive distinct stages through memories and sleep. It might be sort of off topic, but it made me start to think about how we have kind of created “days”. We separate each day as different from the previous and separate from the next. We make each day a new beginning, when really that is the only thing that makes them separate: our decision to. Because in reality, time just keeps running as one long moment. Here is me being nerdy, but in the Twilight series, vampires can’t sleep. The characters then describe their lives as one long day, there is nothing qualitative that really separates their hours. There is not a set beginning and end. It’s weird to think what it would be like without a distinct beginning and end. I like to be able to end a bad day and have a fresh start the next. Sure my problems may follow me, but somehow with the “new day” comes a new perspective.

Another nugget that I particularly liked, was comparing life to a jigsaw puzzle. We make our own our carve our own realities. We base knowledge on an idea of starting at the bottom and building up. Slowly, or quickly, we are adding more layers of knowledge. As we do this we find connections between the things that we have learned. I always find it extremely cool when I can start connecting something from one class to another. When something I learned at once place, helps me to understand something new, I feel as if my knowledge base is growing.  Being an observer to life is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. When doing a jigsaw puzzle, we feel as if we are building something out of nothing. When in reality, it started out as something, and we are just putting it back together. We aren’t building up something from nothing, we are simply fitting the pieces together of what is already there so that it makes sense to us.

The last nugget I really like was at the very end. He said “development of self must precede development of technology or we will get no where”. It is true, we must work on and depend on our curiosity and growing imagination in order to get to new tools. A tool helps us, but it can’t exist before we thought it up. An object is just an object until we put use to it. A rock could be a paper weight, a door wedge,  a stepping stone or a game piece. What makes something what it is is our use of it. Our imagination has no limitation, and the more we imagine the more we can create.