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.
1
9
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)
1
5
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.
1
3
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.
1
5
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.
1
5
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.
Replying to
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.
1
6
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.
6