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Stephanie Beavers

~ Always be yourself. Unless you can be a dragon. Then always be a dragon.

Tag Archives: meaning

Everything Ever Said

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Stephanie Beavers in Thoughts

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author, epistemology, everything that has and will be said., library of babel, meaning, philosophy, Stephanie Beavers, thoughts, words, writer, writing

Have you ever heard of the Library of Babel? Check it out. It came to my attention through the VSauce video below (starting around 16:58, you can watch it or no, but it’s definitely interesting.)

The Library of Babel “currently authors everything that has been or could be written. Seriously.”

Don’t believe me? Go here. Type in any sentence that comes to mind, nonsensical or otherwise. Then hit search, and the library will show you where in its “pages” these words reside. I tried, “how do you spell that melon cantaloupe, cantalope kantaloop” and it found that no problem. I tried a line from my WIP novel: no problem. You’ll get the same result.

VSauce explains the logistics behind it (math), but it does raise some interesting questions. VSauce asks, “Did you really invent that thing if it already existed?” Does the fact that what you said came into existence when the library was created undermine your “invention,” or is it more important that it had meaning when you said it, rather than being a product of an algorithm?

VSauce frequently asks interesting questions, and I recommend checking out other videos of his too.

What do you think, readers? What sentence did you make up to test out the library?

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Dreams, Dreaming, Dead Flies and Bits of Fluff.

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Stephanie Beavers in Thoughts

≈ 2 Comments

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author, dream, dreaming, dreams, life, meaning, omens, portents, Science, Stephanie Beavers, writer

Dreams. No one really knows why we dream, but everyone has an opinion. Do they mean something or are they just garbage our brain is trying to process and throw out?

Here’s a nice summary of scientific thought on dreams:

Honestly, I’ve always thought dreams are more like garbage. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re incoherent and nonsensical. And yet… every so often I’ll have a dream that I find myself wanting to attribute meaning to. Friday night I had a dream that I packed a bunch of stuff into my Jeep (including my cat) and drove off. I wound up visiting some relatives on their farm as my first stop to driving across the US.

Now where did that come from? I have a little turbulence in my life right now (some good, some less good), but I haven’t been giving holiday or travel (or even running away) any kind of thought lately. And yet the feeling of wanting to move, to just pick up and go, stuck with me powerfully for a few hours after waking up. I found myself wondering what it meant.

Why do we do that? Why do we try to attribute meaning to dreams? As I mentioned before, most of my other dreams are “dead flies and bits of fluff,” garbage that my brain is filtering out and throwing away.

And of course, not everyone shares my “garbage” view of dreams. Historically speaking, all kinds of meaning has been ascribed to dreams across all kinds of cultures (think oracles and prophets especially). Is this just a sign of human beings desperately trying to make sense of the world around us?

What do you think, readers? Have you had any (or many) dreams that you’ve sought or found meaning in? Do you think dreams are meaningful? Share your thoughts!

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Two brothers with magical abilities seek to stop an evil mage only to find the fate of an entire race in their hands.
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