Day One

This blog is ultimately about categories. Some posts will obviously be about categories, others less so. In the latter cases, my excuse is that I believe that ultimately many of our important experiences (thoughts, emotions, opinions) are underwritten by our habits of comparison and categorization. And thus many of our disagreements come down to unexamined divergences in these habits. We rely on general categories to structure what we believe, so the process of deciding what to believe in specific cases is a process of deciding issues of similarity and difference (this unquestionably happens, but not always, or even usually, in a reflective or self-conscious way). "Lumpers" are quicker to lump things together; "splitters" are quicker to split things apart. This method of dividing up the way people think is used in biology, linguistics, and other fields (see a detailed explanation here). I think we can extend this way of thinking to a more general effort to understand how we form beliefs, and how we argue with one another.

Calling attention to the fact that the way we categorize has important implications for how we think will make us more deeply self-aware of what we believe, and why we believe it, (or at least that's the hope). Tweaking the way we group things (in a direction of lumping or splitting) can bring about large changes in the way we view the world and can change our take on topics of passionate disagreement. The groupings we implicitly (and in many cases, unconsciously) reply on so fundamentally shape our thinking that the work of belief formation is mostly done by the time we consciously set about to do it.

I've long been enamored with Alfred North Whitehead, who said, "It takes extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious." I'm sure Whitehead had something in mind that goes beyond merely what motivates me to blog, but what motivates me to blog at least has a lot to do with what Whitehead meant. Here, I'll contemplate the obvious, and hope my intelligence is up for it.

I'll start the first day with something very impressionistic: A video by the band Washed Out. This clip makes me consider all the genres that come together in the video, in both sight and sound. It forms something whole, but I'm not immediately sure what it is (we could just say "Chillwave" and leave it at that. But that's just the name, not the parts). I hear some contemporary electronic sounds, some 70's stuff, some ambient singing. I see a old video with some snags in it. I wonder if this is more retro than anything else, or if it's the kind of thing we'll see more and more. My posts will not always be this impressionistic and holistic, but what better way to start than slow and easy? I won't have a particularly quick posting pace, so you get to sit back and let it all digest slowly. Think of it as "Lumping and Splitting, Slowly."