Bad evening
Feb. 17th, 2003 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julietAlthough now I have Luthien-rat on my shoulder, so life is a little better.
So, I went off to a talk at the ICA by Daniel C Dennett & Jonathan Miller, about political & moral freedom. Which I was really looking forward to, cos Dennett has been one of my philosophical heroes ever since I read this article when doing Philosophy of Mind (& lots of other stuff; but that was my favouritest).
However, what had escaped my recollection is that I can't take in information through the ears. Not for any length of time. Conversations are OK, because they're all broken up in short chunks, & also because I'm taking part & thus, I dunno, it sharpens the focus or something. But I've always been dreadful in lectures without a fairly detailed handout showing me the structure etc. I try and concentrate; but about 5 minutes in it just all stops making any sense, and then I lose track altogether & stop being able to fit what's being said now into what was being said 30 seconds ago, and the argument falls apart in my head... And that's when I'm concentrating hard. If I stop concentrating at *all*, I'm away for the next 5 minutes & miss *everything*, & then don't know where they are when I return.
So. The talk, unsurprisingly, didn't go so well, from my point of view. The Q&A session was a little better (small focused chunks), but unfortunately half of the questions were stupid.
The trouble is, I *know* that different people have different learning styles, & I just do better *reading* stuff. Visual focus (other than for music. Ears work fine for that. Go figure). But it makes me feel so *stupid*, especially tonight when I came out of the theatre & everyone else I was with had got stuff from this & was saying things, & I didn't dare say stuff even about the things that I *had* caught, in case I'd missed something somewhere & wasn't making sense. So then I felt stupider, of course. And I was *hungry* which is never good (leads to floods of tears, as a rule)... Wound up cutting my losses & heading home, via 3 different shops in order to acquire the substances necessary to make refried beans for tomorrow's lunch.
Having said all that: I am reasonably sure that the lecture/talk wasn't that great anyway. They didn't seem to cover much of the freedom stuff which I was particularly interested in; and they spent about half an hour going on about memes & memetics, which I find a monumentally uninteresting & unilluminating theory. So *that* perception depressed me as well - not only did I feel like I'd missed much of what I was after, but I think maybe it wasn't even there for me to get (this ought to be better, I suppose, than going to a brilliant talk which I missed half of due to being bad at information-via-ear; but it's not, because it means that what I *did* get wasn't worth it).
<sigh>
update: Spoke to Pete when he got back from the pub, & it seems that they did cover some of the interesting stuff, & I did just miss it. But talking about it did bring back some of it, so that was vaguely useful. I'd like to read the book (I'd also like to reread, & even to own, Consciousness Explained, which is another of his); but I doubt Paddington Library, whilst quite good, will have it, & philosophy books come expensive. Maybe another month - this one is being a bit poor currently.
Must go swap rats, now, in case the others feel neglected.
So, I went off to a talk at the ICA by Daniel C Dennett & Jonathan Miller, about political & moral freedom. Which I was really looking forward to, cos Dennett has been one of my philosophical heroes ever since I read this article when doing Philosophy of Mind (& lots of other stuff; but that was my favouritest).
However, what had escaped my recollection is that I can't take in information through the ears. Not for any length of time. Conversations are OK, because they're all broken up in short chunks, & also because I'm taking part & thus, I dunno, it sharpens the focus or something. But I've always been dreadful in lectures without a fairly detailed handout showing me the structure etc. I try and concentrate; but about 5 minutes in it just all stops making any sense, and then I lose track altogether & stop being able to fit what's being said now into what was being said 30 seconds ago, and the argument falls apart in my head... And that's when I'm concentrating hard. If I stop concentrating at *all*, I'm away for the next 5 minutes & miss *everything*, & then don't know where they are when I return.
So. The talk, unsurprisingly, didn't go so well, from my point of view. The Q&A session was a little better (small focused chunks), but unfortunately half of the questions were stupid.
The trouble is, I *know* that different people have different learning styles, & I just do better *reading* stuff. Visual focus (other than for music. Ears work fine for that. Go figure). But it makes me feel so *stupid*, especially tonight when I came out of the theatre & everyone else I was with had got stuff from this & was saying things, & I didn't dare say stuff even about the things that I *had* caught, in case I'd missed something somewhere & wasn't making sense. So then I felt stupider, of course. And I was *hungry* which is never good (leads to floods of tears, as a rule)... Wound up cutting my losses & heading home, via 3 different shops in order to acquire the substances necessary to make refried beans for tomorrow's lunch.
Having said all that: I am reasonably sure that the lecture/talk wasn't that great anyway. They didn't seem to cover much of the freedom stuff which I was particularly interested in; and they spent about half an hour going on about memes & memetics, which I find a monumentally uninteresting & unilluminating theory. So *that* perception depressed me as well - not only did I feel like I'd missed much of what I was after, but I think maybe it wasn't even there for me to get (this ought to be better, I suppose, than going to a brilliant talk which I missed half of due to being bad at information-via-ear; but it's not, because it means that what I *did* get wasn't worth it).
<sigh>
update: Spoke to Pete when he got back from the pub, & it seems that they did cover some of the interesting stuff, & I did just miss it. But talking about it did bring back some of it, so that was vaguely useful. I'd like to read the book (I'd also like to reread, & even to own, Consciousness Explained, which is another of his); but I doubt Paddington Library, whilst quite good, will have it, & philosophy books come expensive. Maybe another month - this one is being a bit poor currently.
Must go swap rats, now, in case the others feel neglected.
