CinéBref
causation
When I was a child I lived for three years in Geneva. My father was employed at the UN; we lived in a part of Geneva called Champel; I went to the local school and hated every second of it; and my grandmother came to live with us from Buenos Aires. She used to take me to a movie theater called CinéBref1 that showed news, documentaries and comedy in a continuous 1-hour loop. You could enter anytime, sit through the hour, and leave at the point where you came in.
This was 1960. CinéBref was on the main drag, Rue du Rhône. I loved going there. The news in those days was mostly black and white footage of ceremonial things, with an enthusiastic male narrator attempting to counter the crepuscular tedium of watching the Swiss president cutting a ribbon, all against a background of orchestral music that got louder when the speech stopped. Even then I wondered who had troubled to write the score, gather the musicians and record it.
The main pleasure for me was the effort of mind involved. When I came in and sat down I had to immediately make sense of what was on screen, and my conjectures rapidly converged to a plausible narrative: ribbon, Swiss president. Whatever I saw when I came in was the cause of what followed. After an hour, when the reel came back to that point, it always took me a while to understand that I had seen it before. This was not because I had forgotten (I had a prodigious memory in those days) but because the repeated segment had become the effect of the previous hour. The same image had switched roles, from unexplained beginning to inevitable end, and as a result become briefly unrecognisable, belonging to different worlds.
I have no talent for the sustained thought required by philosophy, but I remember feeling impressed each time by this demonstration. My job as a scientist is to occasionally succeed in turning conjectures into certainties. When that happens, I get a brief flashback of ribbon-cutting and martial music, because a puzzling fact has been reduced to just making sense.
ciné = cinema; bref = short
I too 'have no talent for the sustained thought required by philosophy' but I can read later Nietzsche with pleasure. I am sure there is something in your parable of the repeating newsreel and the shifting meanings but alas it will require someone with a better brain to excogitate it.
Writing and executing software code is a continuous process of conjecture and confirmation.