The Silent Buzzing of Self-Reference
My father was an electrical engineer. To make extra money during the harsh conditions of the long Lebanese civil war, he had a side project making UPSs (Uninterruptable power supplies) with an electronics engineer who was a friend of his. At the time, gasoline based power generators were not convenient since one could not put them outside and turn them on while bombs where whizzing around.
As a kid, I used to meddle with the electronics parts I would find on his desk. I was enamoured with a small low voltage relay. A relay is basically a switch that can be turned on and off 'programmatically' by passing a current through it. One day I wondered if it would possible to wire the relay such that it would control itself, turning itself off when it was on and on when it was off. I worked out a possible idea and before I linked the last wire, I wondered what would happen. My bet was that nothing would. To my surprise, something did happen. The relay turned itself on and off at the speed its mechanics allowed, resulting in a buzzing sound. It had become a buzzer by self-reference. I knew buzzers because I also had one. I never looked, but I guess that that's how buzzers are made.
My father was a busy man, like many fathers at the time, struggling for safety and survival. He did not have the luxury to tinker with me. But the best thing that could have happened at the time, was for someone to realise that what that boy just did was show an interest in the topic of self-reference, and as a result, give them a book that talks about the subject. This did not happen, and I had to wait two decades until I rediscovered that what I was really interested in was pure mathematics and logic. But then again, who knows, it might have been counter-productive, for by now I know that intrinsic motivation works in mysterious and uncontrollable ways.
Nevertheless, if you notice any such signals from your kids, please, subtly lay a math book on their table, full of pictures. Maybe even better, a philosophy book. If possible, one treating the history of some science. Physics would be a reasonable choice, for that is quite palpable, less abstract, allowing the kid to relate. After that, a book on logic could do well...
Poetry Editor at _Light: A Journal of Photography and Poetry_
7 年Jad, your prose English style is becoming effortless, zesty, moresome. You'll have to give up your dayjob and become a Post-postmodern essayist. But--By Cixous!--I won't have any child of mine experimenting with systematic *logical* analysis of self-referentiality! No, I'll take little Mercurochrome aside and admonish, "What did we say about critical thinking that begins to clarify social conventions rather than sew the confusion and despair and compulsion to worry about one's sexiness that Uncle Michel teaches? --That's right! Clear thought _is_ a racist, misogynist fallacy of the historically convoluted hysteresis of hegemonic surveillance, violence, and print publication. What's that *child-entity*? Yes, how true!--"Les mots et les choses sont des erreurs du cauchemar dont nous ne nous réveillerons jamais." *Mummy-entity* will be so ambivalent if I seek to destabilize our spousal detente by relating that you confided in *me*-construct! Now why don't *we* meretriciously reward *your* always-already epistemically depleted repetition compulsion with another--a *children's meal* from the nearby globally destructive franchised purveyor of genetically-modified, starch-and-salt injected palliatives for pretending middle-class *status* with consummate redundancy. You can have one of the Chinese-manufactured petroleum-extruded *toys* designed to enforce compulsive awareness and compliance with North-American cinematic conventions of fantasy-heroic entrepreneurial Manicheanism and rape culture. Come-on, little ego-surrogate burdened with my enduring apprehensions of *personal* inadequacy and barely sublimated propensities for purposeless infantile rage! Let's make like the phallocentric supposition of an ontologically coherent, self-revealing Weltanschauung and tropologically *split*!" As American hermeneut and *country-singer* Aaron Tippin has play-posited, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." *I* cannot but admire his profound skill in evoking the inescapable condition of Postmodern redactive *becoming* that, by standing for *something*, we are always already 'falling' [Aufhebung] for *everything*.
Li-ion Cell: Process Operations & Technology. Physicist.
7 年Back in NZ, my daughter at eight-ish was a whizz at building things in the garage out of bits of leftovers, many Kiwi kids are I have to say. I was sure she was on her way to Engineering, mechanical or civil or some suchlike. I encouraged her natural maths talent when I could and she has recently qualified as a Geophysicist happy as the proverbial "sandboy". Knowing you from your writing only, I reckon your dad did just fine.
Biophysics Technology Transfer - Central Nervous System (EEG) Thermodynamics
7 年Hello Jad Nohra, I seek attention for my research by using self reference on posts such as this. For example in your simulation of kinetic processes do you use the Eyring Equation? If so, do you treat the temperature as the quotient of the ambient kinetic and potential energies?
Former multi-site venue owner now CEO/ Founder @Peiso | President AWCC
7 年I had fallen in and out of Math to only come a courting in later life. I always had great logic and grasped math, but the impact of the right or in my case wrong teachers is considerable. I am deeply interested in statistics. I did a subject in my MBA and as a precursor for a one-day PhD and loved it. Both my little ones dig math though my 5 YO takes to it like walking. He maybe teaching me..