There is a place, like a black hole, where everything I could ever write resides. Sometimes, due to the complex and barely-understood interaction of ideas and not-ideas, small fragments escape the supposedly impenetrable event horizon. Everything you read on this page is one such fragment.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

From the Library Inside the Event Horizon

I have been to the library inside the event horizon.

There is a book there, the text of which reconfigures the reader's language processing center so that, instead of normal text, he or she perceives the truth behind what is written in everything that he or she reads afterwards (what the author meant rather than what the author wrote -- the "deeper" meaning). If this book existed in a work of fiction, the author might signify text that a reader might perceive (i.e., not what is actually printed on the page) by placing it in italics to make it obviously different from the "actual" text. A more opaque author might not differentiate between the text and the truth, and leave it up to an astute reader to figure it out. This book consists entirely of a description of itself and what it does. It is a short book.

There is no way to discern the truth behind what an author writes. The reader constructs the meaning in collaboration with the author. Without the reader there is no meaning.

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