I don’t know how the title of The Matrix was chosen, but it’s an interesting title. I mean, I know it’s named after the matrix in the movie, but I don’t know how that name was chosen. Most people know the term matrix from math, where it refers to a 2D array of numbers. In…
Tag: fiction
Possibility, necessity, and imagination
In philosophy, specifically in metaphysics, we often speak of what is “possible” or “contingent” and what is “necessary”. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot possibly to be false. An example of necessary truth might be mathematical theorems. If something is contingent, then it’s true but possibly could have been false. We often talk…
Stories in the history of written language (part 7)
The origins of literature To define narrative formally is to accept, perhaps dangerously, the idea or the feeling that the origins of narrative are self-evident, that nothing is more natural than to tell a story or to arrange a group of actions into a myth, a short story, an epic, a novel. (Genette and Levonas…
Fictitious reality in live action and animation
What’s the difference between live action film and animation? Well, a lot of things. A difference I’ve been thinking about lately is how each relates to reality. Live action is meant to depict a fictitious reality but actually presents a true reality (the performance) out of context (the film’s production). There is a suspension of…
Stories in the history of written language (part 6)
Writing systems in fiction Back in part 2, we looked at some writing systems that were invented rather than developing naturally over a long time. There are many more invented writing systems, namely those invented for fictional languages. J. R. R. Tolkien was a pioneer of fictional languages, being a real-world language expert himself. His…
thoughts on mind 