Friday 24 November 2017

Stochasticism, Not Scholasticism

The blogging process is stochastic. I have no more idea of what is to come than anyone else. (Stochasticism is a philosophical school in James Blish's The Triumph Of Time.)

While swimming here, I got what I thought were Two Good Ideas for posts. I eventually published these two posts, Class Warriors and Self-Reference, although only after thirteen other posts about Poul Anderson's Starfarers. (And, in fact, there had been an earlier Class Warrior.)

After "Self-Reference," there were, among other posts, five more about Starfarers. The fifth, "Jehovah And The Storm Goddess" (see here), compared metaphors in Starfarers and Three Worlds To Conquer, thus leading to, so far, two posts about Three Worlds..., Ganymede and Choice. And I will probably (not definitely) reread Three Worlds..., thus generating a few more posts.

And all this goes back to swimming one morning.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

"Stochastic" is a good word for how this blog! I agree that many of your blog pieces seems to be very randomly determined. And that is a good thing, in this case, of course.

Oddly, I had a stochastic moment myself just now and remembered how I would to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novels MARCH 1917 and NOVEMBER 1917. A recent review of the latter book in NATIONAL REVIEW magazine has reawakened my interest in Solzhenitsyn.

Sean

David Birr said...

Paul and Sean:
I first ran across the term "stochastic" in Blish's adaptation of a *Star Trek* episode, when Spock, in a bit of dialogue that didn't appear in the episode, compared the views of 20th-Century mission worker Edith Keeler to those of a future philosopher known as "Bonner the Stochastic."

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

David,
And Bonner the Stochastic is in THE TRIUMPH OF TIME although with a different version of the philosophy.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID and Paul!

Alas, I got bogged down in the third of Blish's Flying Cities books the last time I was reading them. Yet another reason, however, for persevering!

Sean