Posting an entry in a new blog that I haven’t really told anyone about yet feels distinctly like talking to myself. Fortunately, that’s never been enough to discourage me.

It seems that I’ve accidentally (read: subconsciously passive-aggressively) let my domains & hosting from high school lapse some time in the past few months. I vaguely recall getting emails to that effect, and ignoring them because it was preferable to acknowledging them. In any case, the clean slate is refreshing.

I spent most of Friday compulsively tweaking this thing to my liking. I’m not really interested in publishing the sordid, angst-filled details of my life anymore. I’ll chalk that up to living, learning, and being post-adolescent.

My new domain name was chosen for a few main reasons: first, because forests and trees (particularly viewed as a single entity– as “forestrees”) are the focus of my academic and occupational ventures, which account for most of my time and energy expenditures. Next, given my great appreciation for puns, double-entendres, and their ilk, the fact that “forestrees” sounds like the plural of “forestry” amuses me to no end. Lastly, getting to the name I’ve given this thing, I’ve always enjoyed the idiom “can’t see the forest for the trees”. From bartleby:

An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole…

Details are the bane of my existence. Generally speaking, I don’t give a damn about details except when they illustrate concepts or are vital to understanding concepts. I am, by nature, a big-picture, conceptual sort of person. This is why my lifelong love for the natural world has ultimately manifested itself as a love for ecology and evolutionary biology. I was recently able to utilize this to help me get a job by relaying in an interview, when asked why I wanted the job, how intensely fascinated I’d been by insects as a child, but how volunteering counting aquatic indicator-species insects in grade school had pointed me away from entomology and toward ecology. Sure; I still love insects. But I’ll leave the painstaking specimen-collection and identification for detail people. I care more about what insects can tell me. If I can’t apply it– as a vast overgeneralization– then it doesn’t interest me.

Reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop this year has been fantastically useful for me. The book, regarding human consciousness/self-awareness, is extraordinarily readable, and more awesome than most books for this reason: rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of neuroscience and whatever else that I don’t have time to care about, it provides a series of metaphors that help the reader to understand– by means of providing ways to think about in terms of more easily-understandable things– how “I” can arise from the extremely complex physical nature of the human brain. Minds and Brains‘ summary is excellent. The careenium metaphor provided by Hofstadter is particularly useful. From the above link:

The point of Hofstadter’s metaphor is relatively simple. He wants you to imagine a scenario where the brain (Careenium) could be seen in two different perspectives. One perspective, which comes naturally to scientists, is reductionist. That is, one could in principle view all the activities of the Careenium in terms of the tiny simms bouncing around, acting in accordance with well-known laws of physics. On the other hand, one could take could the high-road, and view the system in terms of the larger simmballs and their macroscopic, representational properties.

To summarize myself, I am a scientist who cares more about the simballs than the simms, while maintaining a profound appreciation for the simms. As a Discordian, I thrive on viewing things from as many (often seemingly-conflicting) perspectives as possible.

I can see the forest for the trees. But I can also see the forest for the forest, see the trees for the forest, and see the trees for the trees.

One last quote, and I will end my rambling [see header] introductory post. I encountered this years ago through Discordia, though I know it has origins elsewhere. I feel it accurately sums up my view of everything. (Or not.)

“All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”

And with that, I’m going to make myself some lemonade, scratch behind my cat’s ears, and read a book.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 11:28 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.