[FRIAM] 42 Writ Large

Wed Aug 14 18:28:45 EDT 2024

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).

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.

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? /
/

/42 writ large/ so to speak?

> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024, at 1:35 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> 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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>
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