timelets

timelets @ 2024-03-02T19:40:00

2024-03-03T04:04:46Z

...dynamic processes give rise to particular growth patterns: branching out whilst foraging (to maximize coverage of territory) and forming networks once nodes have been established (to strengthen connections and facilitate the transfer of information). Branching is a fundamental strategy within myriad biological organisms and physical phenomena, from the bifurcation of river deltas, lightning strikes, tree roots and branches, to mycelial networks and in our own bodily systems including blood vessel networks and the cross channelling of neural pathways. Branching facilitates ‘the transmission and parsing of information, no less than the transfer and dissipation of energy’ and, according to philosopher Stephen Shaviro, ‘is an essential process of Nature’ (Shaviro, 2016: 220).

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

Again, branching and consolidation can be represented as critical points in Morse-Smale theory. https://timelets.dreamwidth.org/1568281.html

In a narrative, a character can create a branch, thus diverting the flow of events to their advantage or disadvantage. For example, in the LRRH fairy tale the Wolf diverts the girl's attention to beautiful flowers and gains power over her future. It takes magic to undo his villainy.
An example of a positive diversion would be Царевна-Лягушка, where the ugly frog bride tells the prince to get some sleep while she takes care of the king's challenge.

In social theory, topology-based approach to agency can help model the difference between democratic elections and sociological polling for potential course corrections in authoritarian regimes, like the Putin's (see, e.g. Spin Dictators, by Guriev and Treismann).

M&A narratives and consequences can be treated the same way.

upd. Kan extensions/lifts can be used to represent branching/consolidation patterns.

upd 1. Does it apply to Lawvere's Hegelian Taco?

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timelets @ 2023-11-14T18:14:00

2023-11-15T02:22:04Z

He[Ricoeur] derives this initial ethical understanding of institution from Arendt’s concept of “power in common” that is contrasted with domination (“power over”) and that is realised by a plurality of people acting in concert. ...

Because acting in concert with unknown third parties needs time to unfold, institutions are needed. Institutions thereby provide the neces- sary temporal dimension for the power in common to endure, which lies at the basis of any political community. ( Read more... )

--- Reijers, Coeckelbergh. Narrative and Technology Ethics.

In this respect, good institutions bridge time, i.e. form social infrastructure the same water reservoirs form physical infrastructure. Need to find a related quote from Hegel that good judges/courts represent infinity.

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timelets @ 2023-06-06T16:08:00

2023-06-06T23:10:04Z

...the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute stubborn fact.
...
There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.

--- A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1979, 2nd ed.

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timelets @ 2022-10-30T18:27:00

2022-10-31T01:41:00Z

“Social learning. Our species is the only one that voluntarily shares information: we learn a lot from our fellow humans through language.

“ In our brains, by contrast, the highest-level information, which reaches our consciousness, can be explicitly stated to others. Conscious knowledge comes with verbal reportability: whenever we understand something in a sufficiently perspicuous manner, a mental formula resonates in our language of thought, and we can use the words of language to report it. ”

One-trial learning. An extreme case of this efficiency is when we learn something new on a single trial. If I introduce a new verb, let’s say ”

“To learn is to succeed in inserting new knowledge into an existing network.”

--- Stanislas Dehaene. “How We Learn.”

The combination of the two modes of learning creates a cascading effect.

We can model this as a change of state, e.g. learning-by-doing by a pair of individuals, wherein the first one is doing, while the second one ("the soul") is learning. That is, TLRRH starts naive and dies while going to her grandma. At the same time, we, the observers, learn from her one-time misfortune and pass this learning to future generations.

Also related: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

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timelets @ 2022-10-12T11:37:00

2022-10-12T18:43:16Z

This is an important insight: comma categories always have a terminal object. Now, I can relate it to Lawvere's interpretation of Hegel's logic.

"If X is any application of the graphic G , then the "comma" category G/X (whose objects are the elements of X and whose morphisms determine the action via the discrete fibration property of the labelling functor G/X -> G ) is again a graphic. Thus each particular application X of G provides one way G'-> G of expanding the graphic G into a more detailed graphic G' " -- Lawvere, Hegelian Taco.

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Post-truth ca 19 century CE.

2022-10-04T04:44:07Z

Turned against reason, this understanding behaves in the manner of ordinary common sense, giving credence to the latter’s view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, that is, that only sense perception gives filling and reality to them; that reason, in so far as it abides in and for itself, generates only mental figments.

In this self-renunciation
of reason,
the concept of truth is lost,
is restricted
to the knowledge of mere
subjective truth,
of mere appearances,
of only something to which the nature of the fact
does not correspond;
knowledge has lapsed into opinion.

GWH Hegel, The Science of Logic.

Hegel was extremely successful in his project to rediscover truth and put on a solid foundation of new logic. I wonder whether something like that would be even possible in today's world. What would it take to overcome the post-truth attitude in our society?

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timelets @ 2022-10-02T22:52:00

2022-10-03T05:58:35Z

...inasmuch as philosophy
is to be
science,
it cannot
borrow its method
from a subordinate science,
such as
mathematics...

On the contrary,
it can only be
the nature
of the content
which is responsible for
movement
in scientific knowledge,

for it is the content’s
own reflection
that first
posits and generates
what that content is.

--- GWF Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge U Press, 2010, p 10.

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timelets @ 2022-09-19T19:01:00

2022-09-20T02:04:10Z

Hegel's concept of limit: "it's got to be the point where the other stops."

https://youtu.be/o87U-O2LNmE?t=2248

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timelets @ 2022-09-19T10:21:00

2022-09-19T17:26:18Z

When we apply Hegel's (co-)concepts of determination and constitution to the Little Red Riding Hood narrative we can see that the best of LRRH is brought out (revealed) by the worst in Wolf. I also wonder how Heidegger's concept of technology as a revealer plays out in this context.

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timelets @ 2022-09-18T16:08:00

2022-09-18T23:11:02Z

No rational disagreement for Hegel/Spinoza.

https://youtu.be/OyADyt1O1V4?t=399

"The whole point of thinking rationally is not for us to try approximate for reason but to determine what reason makes necessary. ... no special intuition is needed [b/c] as Hegel says it, Philosophy is exoteric, it's a public exercise."

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timelets @ 2022-09-13T10:48:00

2022-09-13T17:50:13Z

( Read more... )

"you don't need time to understand change."

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timelets @ 2022-09-08T15:02:00

2022-09-08T22:13:43Z

By a graphic we will mean any finite category each of whose endomorphism monoids satisfies the identity xyx = xy ; in particular, a graphic monoid is a graphic category with one object.
By an application of a graphic category we will mean any right action of it on finite sets (i.e. any contravariant finite-set- valued functor on it).
-- Lawvere, The Hegelian "Taco", 1989.

I think social networking satisfies this requirement, e.g. Make Use Make = Make Use (a user to Make a new user).

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TIL: Vanishness!

2022-08-29T06:44:57Z

( Read more... )

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Putin delenda est

2022-04-08T06:05:36Z

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Quote of the Day: on non-binary logic

2019-04-22T00:03:58Z

“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see the one or the other in any explanation about such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.”

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. “The phenomenology of mind.”

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