[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

[Jon Zingale]

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.

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.

One of the conversations that moved me forward regarding telos was with a
friend of mine yesterday. We discussed Timothy's idea (
https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2024-August/095934.html)
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.

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.

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.

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.
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