Those of us who explore ideas on whim may find ourselves oscillating between the philosophical and the poetic. Often, the effect of one pushes us towards the other - why?
Katy Bohinc, a poet (and a data scientist??), has an interesting break down of the spectrum in her book 'Dear Alain', a compilation of fictional 'love letters' to the philosopher Alain Badiou.
But ideas may lose their intellectual quality as they are habitually used. When a child was first learning to recognize, in some hesitating suspense, cats, dogs, houses, marbles, trees, shoes, and other objects, ideas—conscious and tentative meanings—intervened as methods of identification. Now, as a rule, the thing and the meaning are so completely fused that there is no judgment and no idea proper, but only automatic recognition.
— John Dewey
I often find myself thinking about 'what I think about' and the irregular periods of intense engagement versus a general indifference associated with any given topic. I've tried to mentally model this dynamics in various ways (sinusoidal - maybe its just an up and down kind of thing?, diffusion - do I gradually bleed out from one idea to another?) but have never quite been able to put a finger on it. There are too many irregularities, too uneven of intervals between one engagement versus another.
Then I came across a piece by Paul Griffith that presented another analogy: falling in love.
Researching GDPR and its impact, I came across some elements of GDPR that piqued my interest for what they implied about our culture and paradigms around data privacy:
A. What is ‘free’ consent?
B. Data as an ‘object’ vs. data as an ‘experience of you’
C. To be forgotten by the network beyond the individual
Maybe one of the most tragic love stories is between language and the need for meaningful communication. Neither is completely capable of each other. Neither asks for help. Sometimes, in the middle of conversation, attempting to transfer our inner workings on to another, we are hit with the despairing realization, "It’s not working, I’m not getting through, I can’t". Suddenly, something gets caught in the gears of words and tones, and the heavy feeling of something noncommunicable takes over our limbs.
A Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to automatically detect connections through key entities and ideas across articles/documents. I analyzed a set of philosophy articles to see which Entities related them to each other and if this could guide our choice of reading.