Pi ask weared
Saturday, September 15, 2007

I just watched Pi, the first film by Darren Aronofsky, and loved it. Essentially it's all about a dangerous quest for "ultimate knowledge" and that attempting to Understand It All is ultimately too proud and foolhardy, like trying to become a god, something from which only bad things can come. Also tied in the idea that in order to simulate or accurately represent something, you need something bigger than the thing itself. Could a brain really understand a brain- to think about thoughts you're thinking, to think about the thoughts you're thinking about the thoughts you're thinking... it's recursive. A thing perceiving itself uses 100% of system resources by definition. It sounds like the steadily accelerating hard drive whirr that accompanies Firefox crashing. No wonder the protagonist gets migranes. Although I doubt I'll end up [SPOILER REDACTED] in a quest for inner peace. It also reminded me of the satisfying neatness of math - its purity, in that there are clear statements of fact that represent things, when more and more I find that the truth resides exclusively in dense mid-gray fog between whatever extremes you care to name, and also the nature of discovery, that all the patterns and systems therein already exist a priori, and its just a matter of figuring out what they are.

Labels: sleep deprived blogging

2 Comments:

shrinkwrapped said...

Pi is an excellent film - one of my favourites. Every time I watch it I decide to learn Go, but I never have...

9:59 PM  

Guy P said...

To me it's up there with "being fluent in Medieval Icelandic" or "knowing how to kill a man silently in seven different ways" - something I'd like to able to say I can do without that bothersome actual doing-of-it.

11:04 AM  

Post a Comment

  <$BlogBacklinkTitle$>  

<$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$>

Create a Link

back to the main blog...