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<p>I am much less experienced/intimate with logo/ideographic
languages I am sure than either of you (JZ, DW) but did once
indulge in a fascination with them (Hanzi in particular, though
Kanji is more broadly presented in Western contexts?). (nod to
Stephen's early/continued engagement with modern Tech-China as
well, and the myriad others with more first-hand experience here
who do not weigh in).</p>
<p>I think my reference works are by Franco-Sinologist Couvreur or
perhaps Weiger, a Lexicon, a Dictionary, a Grammar and a Syllabary
from the early turn of the century? They are in some dusty
corner I can't navigate to at the moment.<br>
</p>
<p>Nevertheless I was very taken with the conceit of the "kanji
character of such complexity..." referenced here. I was drawn to
it as a "holographic dual" (well distributed
one-to-many/many-to-one mapping?) of Borge's Library of Babel...
where it takes an entire/infinite library to explain
Life/Universe/Everything vs a single character which achieves the
same in it's concise elaborateness rather than perhaps elaborate
conciseness? <i><br>
</i></p>
<p><i>42 writ large</i> so to speak?</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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<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>
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<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"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">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>
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