[Tim Love]

I like it too. I too think that experimental philosopy, psychology, AI, etc are becoming increasingly useful to literature. Here are some more Incidental Notes

• 's page is useful - e.g - "Disruption Theory: Mental susceptibility to disrupted text" (don't be distracted by the terminology).
• "As a form of human behaviour, experimental writing clearly belongs with play: immature members of the group dress up in eccentric clothing, walk in eccentric ways (on one foot, for example), paint their faces, make non-linguistic noises, refuse to speak in words, make up imaginary languages. In developmental psychological terms, games serve to rehearse people (or monkeys or cats) in complex behaviour patterns, needing practice; ... Young animals play the games most suited to their inner state and developmental needs at any time; games are not arbitrary but pre-selected by innate self-organizing learning programs. ... What the avantgarde seem to be playing at is practice making up rules and telling other people what to do and disapproving of them if they don't comply. " - Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust 9
• <A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/order.html>Literary Order and Chaos has refs and quotes (but not much else) which might be of use.
• has stuff about layers, tangled hierarchies, etc.
• <A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/obscurity.html> Obscurity has bits about layer-collapsing.
• "The human brain is an amazing organ, one that's developed through evolution from being able to clobber mammoths to knocking off sonnets. However, evolution never does any more than necessary. As sight evolved, there was no survival advantage in being able to deal with situations that didn't happen in real life - our eyes might be able to help us distinguish friend from foe at a hundred yards, but they're easily tricked by optical illusions. Thought and language processing is even more complex than visual processing, so perhaps it's not surprising that poetry can create an illusion of depth and meaning by short-circuiting the normal routes (much as stereograms give the effect of depth though they have none), exploiting a loop-hole that evolution has left open. As with stereograms, surface obscurity may be necessary to produce the effect, and there's a lot of skill involved in producing an effective illusion. Indeed, I'd say that not merely skill is involved; it's an art." - Tim Love