[FRIAM] actual vs potential ∞

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

Yes! And playing that same note (along with cargo cults, mnemonics, and the specialness/detail-preservation of narrativity), I committed to posting that I was wrong and Jon's *epiphenomena* are appropriately named (based primarily on the oracle-sort idea (I like "oracle" better than "key") [⛧]. But near the end, I asked EricC whether or not evolutionary biologists have a typical way of speaking about contingency/ancillary/contextual causation as opposed to, for lack of a better word, driven causation. I think I asked that as a result of Jon's suggestion that *mystery* isn't fundamental, here. I've forgotten how EricC actually responded. But while responding, the concepts of "critical path", polyphenism, and robustness was what came to mind. And now I think I'm wrong about being wrong. [⛤]

It often seems that such folk tales exhibit some universality (e.g. virgin births or Jungian archetypes). But it's difficult for someone like me to a) guess at their cross-culture applicability and b) guess at which contingent causes have to be dragged along as the narrative moves from one detail-rich context to another ... like so many privileged post-yuppies saying Namaste after their Hot Yoga.



[⛧] That idea being to shuffle a list, you place the items to be shuffled into a key-value map where the keys are drawn from a [pseudo-]random or arbitrary number source, then extract the ordered values and toss the keys. There's structure there, but it would have to be *reconstructed*.

[⛤] My dad used to be accused of never admitting he was wrong. So, he often told the minimalist-for-him joke: "I was wrong once. Then it turned out I was right."

On 8/3/20 2:44 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> This is where folk tales are wonderful.  Out of all the complex clutter of daily life among all the different people, they recognize a big question and put a marker on it by wrapping it in a small story or metaphor, which turns out to have staying power as a meme, because it resonated with what really was a big question.
> 
> Are the Celts (or even more specifically, the Irish?)  the only ethnicity that had a specific meme equivalent to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?  Or did it convergently evolve in several cultures?

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