<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">Jon: "Eventually, he mentioned a fictitious kanji character of some much complexity that it requires a lifetime to interpret. I started to wonder what could make such an object interesting, how to create an ideograph worth anyone's time to learn."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">It might not be that difficult to construct such a Kanji, because nuances of the character itself directly relate to a context. E.g., the old Chinese 'Civil Service' Exam contained questions, in Kanji, that required the test taker to recognize that a specific brush stroke was first used by X in the 14th century to convey a particular subtle perspective with regard the propriety of an Emperor's response to a petitioner of the Q caste. A correct answer to the question depended on the ability to recognize and take into account the context, not just the literal meaning of the character.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">In the movie, Hero, an assassin goes to great lengths to attain an opportunity to kill a warlord, but changes his mind when the warlord interprets a kanji and thereby reveals himself to be the opposite of the villain the hero had thought him to be.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I had a trip experience once where I was looking at a kanji and detecting every more minute distinctions leading to different interpretations of the character. It rapidly "felt" like my mind was getting trapped in an infinite regression, or a spiraling descent to an infinitesimal point, that scared me-felt like a trap I would not get out of-forcing me to will my mind out of the illusion.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Tue, Aug 13, 2024, at 1:35 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div dir="ltr"><div class="qt-gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana, sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51, 51, 51);"><div>Over the last week, I have had a chance to engage a few groups of friends in discussions about telos. In each discussion, I take it upon myself to puzzle out each participant's sense of the word and the nature of the problems that demand such definitions.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I remember my confusion the first time I had encountered the term stochastic kernel. Because my mathematical understanding of the word up until that point was solely in the context of algebra, where the idea is used to compress algebraic information rather than to generate distributions with a particular character, I struggled to understand both notions as aspects of the same thing. Of course, one *can* perform the mental gymnastics to do so, but in retrospect I am not sure that it buys anything profound. Worse, the relations are now so reinforced in my mind that they may be difficult to unclamp.<br></div><div><br></div><div>One of the conversations that moved me forward regarding telos was with a friend of mine yesterday. We discussed Timothy's idea (<a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2024-August/095934.html">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2024-August/095934.html</a>) and got to talking about how to best nourish our agential-selves. This got us talking about the speculative origins of reading/writing in animal tracking, and the ideographic nature of weiqi chunking strategies. Eventually, he mentioned a fictitious kanji character of some much complexity that it requires a lifetime to interpret. I started to wonder what could make such an object interesting, how to create an ideograph worth anyone's time to learn.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Some qualities that occur to me have a strong resemblance to what number theorists find interesting about the Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and what graph theorists find unsatisfying about the proof of the 4-coloring theorem, or what Conway found unsatisfying about the game of life, or what some may find unsatisfying about the mandelbrot set.<br></div><div><br></div><div>There is an appeal in knowing that such an algebraic structure is finitely generated, that the generators are statistically and computationally difficult to find (that is knowing one thing very well about the structure is not sufficient to know much more about the structure), yet there is structure (in the sense that the object is far from being incompressible). Here we have a wellspring, math that generates math.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Such an object has many of the qualities I want from profundity, not just a depth to the knowledge but also a breadth, a richness well beyond iterative application of any single tool. An object that in the struggle to reckon one inevitably produces fractal-like bullshit on the backs of fractal-like bullshit. I am not sure how without a paladin's devotion to humility and clarity that anyone traces a dharmic path to knowing such a thing. I find it telling that there are no known strong weiqi players living today except those raised by institutions.<br></div></div></div><div>-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .<br></div><div>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div>Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div>to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a><br></div><div>archives: 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a><br></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div><div><br></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div></body></html>