Semantic satiation (“a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener”) is the tip of a very big iceberg. Much of what Lewis Carroll was trying to do was turn it into a martial art.
Conversation
Verbal experience is so central to all experience that disrupting it with higher-order semantic satiation —with good poetry or Carollian absurdity — is one of the most powerful ways to alter the experience of mind without drugs or meditation.
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TIL Carroll’s White Knight poem in Through the Looking Glass
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks%
is apparently a parody of Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer bit in Resolution and Independence, which I’d never heard of (and am now biased to think of as bad)
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It is vicious as a parody, and relentless in its use of every trick in the book to drive a verbal derealization, which makes Wordsworth’s inability to actually see past his own failed expressionism very clear (though I needed Harold Bloom to point it out)
Replying to
Elsewhere in the collection of Carroll-scholar essays I’m reading, one essay explores his obscure work on puzzles and word games, which bridge his work as a mathematician and fiction writer. The craziness in his works is not free association nonsense. It is carefully constructed.
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Constructed to what end? To break down your stream of consciousness at the verbal base layer through a kind of gentle torture based on the same principles as semantic satiation.
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For example, his endless use of indirections in naming and pointing is not an early anticipation of C programming pointer chase interview questions. It’s not meant to test your ability to reason in convoluted ways, but to make you abandon the attempt.
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Basically he was trying to get the effects of good poetry through mathematical means. Creating a verbal reality that dismantles its own verbal foundations even as it evolves, leaving behind only the felt world. Like the grin without the Cheshire Cat.
All 50 years before Godel.
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I previously lazily assumed that as a mathematician Carroll was likely average, but now I’m not so sure. Seen as math-poetry of verbal derealization, Alice is almost a premonition of Godel. And looking at some of his puzzles, there was definitely a very live connection.
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Like, he played a lot with rewrite rule puzzles (like connecting two 4 letter words via a series of transformations), recursion etc. Ops that play a major role in Godel. It almost feels like he was to Godel (via Alice) something like Frege. Just via a much more scenic route.
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