[FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

[Jon Zingale]

Glen,

I very much agree that questions of a *formality-informality* spectrum will
weave
itself throughout *the work*. It seems to me that the informality ought to
provide a
*place* for birds to make a nest, a *bellybutton* for lint to collect, and
a *place* for
rust to never sleep. To my mind, it is not necessarily the formality that
chokes
development. Rather, I think of formality purely as description and one
among
many valid and possibly incongruous descriptions. Here is a place that I
would
again emphasize Rota's take on eidetic variation. For Rota, the eidetic
variation includes all of the counterfactuals, contradictions, and messiness
that we develop/uncover as we vary in our minds an object of interest. It is
not necessary that we cut away* babies from bath waters*, but rather
recognize
that the concepts are complex. I believe that the development of a concept
can
especially choke when we fail to recognize that a concepts formal
description
has a *combinatorial explosion*. A good example is a way the concept of
random
number can be used, ironically enough, *informally* to mean a number I can
name.

When in a conversation the concept of the random number is invoked, it
evokes for
me a complex. I can sense within a *single complex: *frequentist randomness and
Chaitin
randomness and even an ephemeral feeling/non-symbolic experience. Comparison
of
these complexes with others provides the opportunity for new pivots and
jumping-off
points, for the serendipity of missed connections and false juxtapositions.
There was
something of this in my experience listening to the podcasters. At times I
thought
that one had completely missed the other's *point*, but really *I had
missed the point*,
namely that the discussion was *not about a point*. They were in play,
constructing
common complexes and variations which they could share.

When I compare or attempt to describe my sense of this in terms of varieties
and free module constructions, I am not saying that concepts *are* these
things.
I am appealing to varieties (say) in terms of its *conceptual* content. If
we found
that the language was flexible enough to do calculations, well that would
be a
pleasant though unintentional corollary.

Jon
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