Today I stumbled upon this most amazing article, written by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html
This was a wonderful find, truly a gem in the mine of philosophy that I dig every day for things that apply to games. It's about thinking, how we make cognitive decisions, etc. It amazes me just how much this field applies to games. Maybe games have more philosophy in them than anything else? Practical science, not theoretical science, though. That reminds me of something my friend Lars wrote on Game Design: http://fadupinator.com/design111.htm
I haven't read the entire article yet, but here are some conclusions and thoughts I drew from it so far:
-I talk and write because it expands my mental RAM and helps me make connections. Even if I'm talking to someone who's not responding, phrasing it as if I'd talk to a person is important for some reason. Perhaps people share brains to think with, that the human mind is a somewhat distributed thing.
-Changing habits changes your mind. Your worldview is based on your beliefs, which are based on your experience. Your day-to-day experiences shape the way you see everything else. This includes vocabulary and concepts transmitted by others you communicate with. This is why people nowadays see "aliens" and "UFOs" instead of "angels and demons," and why they chalk up sickness to bacteria instead of demonic activity. Language affects the way people think about things.
-Language is a compressed version of thought. To communicate well, you must choose words that will connect with your audience. I've always seen communication as a contract, where both parties seek to find common ground and then build on that. It's really a completely different medium than thought. That's why you can communicate with images also, nonverbally. All things are equally translatable, i.e. they have to be equally translated into text for verbal communication. This gets into semiotics quite a bit, in how the signs we use are different in form than the things they signify. ("This is not a pipe.") This is why I believe a "prototyping" method works well for communication (at least verbal communication), try and see whether it works, then modify it to work better.
It also reinforces the idea that all art is communication. It reinforces my personal belief that my thoughts and inventions are not really my own, but are formed out of the fabric of my own experience. There was this great conversation on the topic I had a while back, I should post that sometime.
That's all I've gotten so far. Perhaps more later.
