Saturday, December 13, 2008

terest, the undifferentiated potential for interest or exterest

A sphere of interest is a representation of a function of information, rather than a representation of information itself. The information which is the argument of the function certainly has a distribution which itself is a function of physical space--two memory locations in a computer have different locations in space and both contain specific information--but this information is not modeled by the picture I have given of interest and exterest, nor is its distribution in space. the persons who populate, so to speak, each sphere of interest, produce the effect of a setting off of a region of information as argument which does stimulate interest, and a region of information which does not, relative to a motile atom of essence, as I am somewhat archaically calling it, of any particular person. suffice it to say that information produces an extensiveness which produces this effect, irrespective of its nature in any other sense.

We have used the term "omniterest" to refer to the union of the region of interest with the region of exterest. It is dependent for its significance on the reduction of references to one center of a sphere of interest at a time. Omniterest may effectively summon up as its referent all of the space we are discussing, but it does so with the necessary division of that space into interest and exterest, and therefore it assumes one or another center of a sphere of interest is invoked to give that division meaning. We will refer to the space which holds this omniterest as terest, the undifferentiated potential for interest or exterest.