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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