If you read the Hanson piece prior to this, I’d be surprised if it didn’t factor into your ability to spot that particular feature about acceptable targets. I suspect most of my original ideas are that way. Not that I’m complaining you didn’t reference him. Just idle chat.
I agree about benign surprise.
There’s also the old essay on humor by Bergson about how humor derives from depicting people as behaving like simple automatons. The Garfield characters would be shifting into that mode of mechanical operation. This would be like a character that is drinking coffee and reading his paper: the coffee is replaced with hot sauce, and the character just keeps on drinking.
I’m gonna followup on that computer theory later. I find it interesting to speculate that we have a humorous response whenever we have some inference about something that is about to reach conscious level of perception, and then it suddenly gets reversed in an important way and the brain has to speed it up so that it catches up and overtakes the other one. In that process, there are side-effects.
If you read the Hanson piece prior to this, I’d be surprised if it didn’t factor into your ability to spot that particular feature about acceptable targets. I suspect most of my original ideas are that way. Not that I’m complaining you didn’t reference him. Just idle chat.
I agree about benign surprise.
There’s also the old essay on humor by Bergson about how humor derives from depicting people as behaving like simple automatons. The Garfield characters would be shifting into that mode of mechanical operation. This would be like a character that is drinking coffee and reading his paper: the coffee is replaced with hot sauce, and the character just keeps on drinking.
I’m gonna followup on that computer theory later. I find it interesting to speculate that we have a humorous response whenever we have some inference about something that is about to reach conscious level of perception, and then it suddenly gets reversed in an important way and the brain has to speed it up so that it catches up and overtakes the other one. In that process, there are side-effects.