in other news, adrienne is going to england. i was shocked to hear this, and i couldn't immediately place why. i think i've figured it out; i am egocentric enough (most people are; it's why our genes have survived) to immediately interpret every event in light of its impact on our own life. so the gut reaction was something on the order of "what does this mean?" we get caught up, even those of us who are non-religious, in conceiving of our life as a movie script where everything has a meaning, and i can't for the life of me figure out what this plot twist is supposed to mean. obviously the answer is that it doesn't mean anything because it is not designed, but the urge to fit it into a mosaic is overwhelming.
there is a lot of "accidental design" in nature, which feeds into this. like symmetry -- there are good reasons why symmetry has evolved, but on a gut level, it looks like everything is designed to fit nicely. humans don't understand time on the level of the epoch; we understand time (as far as change goes) on the scale of our lifetime. we don't understand what the effect of billions of years is on evolution, on a gut level; we understand that things only change subtly during our lifetime. this makes sense, of course, because that's all that matters: to comprehend and predict changes over a century, as opposed to a million years.
while talking to a. today, i made up a theory that i was unable to express well. each person has a set of people in their life they consider exquisite. it's hard to know what adjective to put there, but i could easily tell you my set of exquisite people, and it's a set which has not changed significantly over time with the exception of meeting new people.
the crucial point is that these people are exquisite for no specific reason. it's a general intelligence, a general understanding, being perceptive, this sort of thing. it's being a generalist, which i derided before as a tenable lifestyle, but which i value perhaps more than anything. it's not that these people are the same; quite the opposite. it's that these people are so heavily predicated on their circumstances that you get a butterfly effect where a small change in circumstances leads to entirely different people. it feeds back; you apply your creative versatility to whatever you're exposed to. perhaps there are universal interests that go along with this, but i don't buy it.
the theory is that this should be transitive. but the theory is obviously wrong, and i don't know why (from a theoretical perspective; i have many empirical counterexamples.) a. mentioned me and l. as an example, which works well. it's not that i can't understand or that i disparage or don't see the appeal of l. or her lifestyle. but i would not categorize l. as exquisite, and she would not categorize me as such. (i hasten to add that i have many, many friends about whom this is true.)
the reason the theory is plausible is that i think this is relatively symmetric. there is at most one person who i find exquisite who doesn't feel the same way about me, and that's really stretching it. there's no reason a priori why it should be symmetric; rather, i think it's symmetric because anyone like this is a splendid judge of character enough -- because finding friends is a process that everyone goes through regardless of circumstances -- to not make mistakes about this. so among the class of exquisite people we should have symmetry. and this theoretical argument should carry over into transitivity, except it doesn't. (there are many more examples.)
does this rationalist rant have a point? i'm not sure. there are several ways to disprove the theory from a more axiomatic standpoint: for instance, showing that common interests are more important than i think (probably j. 's viewpoint), or that the exquisite nature is not as complete as i think (so that exquisite people are not as generalist as i claim; a.'s viewpoint.) but i would counter both of these by saying that being a generalist is precisely what it means to be exquisite in the first place. there is a hole in this argument somewhere, though, and i'm not sure where.