[Fis] Also spoke Pythagoras

[Karl Javorszky]

Also spoke Pythagoras    2024 06 24



*Captatio benevolentiae*

This here excellent assembly of learned friends is as cooperative as they
can get. They bring superb examples and common experiences we all can refer
to, like being immersed in the music, in the beat or the swing or process
or whatever we call the idea (remembering the experience) of being well
synchronized within. In the interactive process, this is a positive
transference of cooperation, even if snortingly.



*Example clock*

Let's imagine that in front of us is a huge clock the size of a building;

On the back there is a door through which we can get inside the clock.

Once inside, we can observe, measure, compare all the parts of the clock,
as well as their combinations and imagine different configurations of them.

We will know all about the watch from the inside.

We see the cogs and the belts (permutations and partitions). You only refer
to the cogs, avoiding the subject of the belts. Your opinion that the cogs
determine the state of the machine is *grosso modo *correct. Let me drive
your attention to the belts. Careful recalibration of what the belts do
shows that there is an ever so slight *slippage *between the two
constituents of the mechanism. The idea is to use the extent of the
slippage as a natural unit. The inner inconsistency within the huge clock
is roughly *10-92 %, *an extremely small value. Would you like to discuss
this fine point of building clocks? The best entry is by reordering 12
books.



*Biology is a collection of circular processes on a limited number of
diverse elements*

I think we can agree that the elephants Karl mentions could not be sliced
into steaks. His cycles would seem to have little to do with cycles in
nature, which are ontic and involve energy changes. Accordingly they never
purely circular.

Wittgenstein was bloody right about the eye being unable to see itself.
Fish can establish no concept of water. Integrating one’s physiology with
one’s philosophy would make it impossible to write that biology is not
circular while breathing in and out, having heart and other processes
running. There are additions, variants, embellishments on the organism, but
the organism itself is subject to periodic processes. If there is no
breathing and no pulse, the periodic processes are no more periodic and the
organism ceases to be an organism.



*Are we talking about facts or are we talking about our beliefs*

It should be clear that information science includes epistemological as
well as ontological components. One can "play" with the epistemological
ones, but it quickly becomes a “Glasperlenspiel” in which the links to
messy energetic reality (including emotion) are lost. I suggest that some
reference to the domain on which one is focusing might be very helpful in
the debate.

This very cooperative remark repeats the statement

There is an inner system of relations among the natural numbers, and there
is an inner system of relations among the ideas of the spectator.

As repeatedly pointed out in the last few years, the person who tries to
sell you a nontrivial update on a+b=c, this person has no messianic urges
long repressed. It cannot be more explicitly announced that the role of
Mendel is to draw attention to facts than it has been done.



*What to do if the picture the numbers show is different to that what you
expect them to do*

Pythagoras was of the opinion, that music, numbers, relations, intervals,
accords, harmonies show that Nature is built up on the simplest facts. If
we decipher the relations among the simplest facts, we will have understood
the rules Nature follows. In his opinion, one can and should learn from the
inner harmony that regulates music.

Pythagoras still remembered some of the urban legends relating to the
heroic people of Akkadia, who suffered radical cultural extermination by
the Sumerians, at least in that version of history which was common
consensus at the time.



*The Akkadians and their strange way of counting*

The Sumerians were producers, the Akkadians traders. The former lived in a
world of more or even more, the latter were victims of market forces. While
the Sumerians believed that they can produce whatever in an endless amount,
given the stuff is standardized, the Accadians were worried about what part
of the whole delivery is in which quality class and is influenced by
vagaries of fashion or seasons. The Akkadians have invented a closed system
of calculations, with an upper limit above which it was agrammatical to
think. You know what name have they chosen for their unit and upper limit?
You won’t guess it. They called it *100 %. *Like the Mayans with their *Long
Count Calender, *the Akkadians hat a precise concept about what are the
relations of the parts to the whole and to each other.

They were not too much interested in the numeric amount of what the
industrious Sumerians have delivered, they rather thought in terms of
percentages, what part can be sold immediately, etc. etc. etc. Their
individual business optimization strategies had one thing in common: what
are the relations of the parts among each other? The know-how relating to
logistics and supply management is identical, whether you deal with barley
or fish.

As they sat together many balmy evenings in Akkadia, they worked out a fine
system of insider knowledge, because they have developed words for the
experience *“average in aspect A, good in aspect B, for hobbyists in aspect
C*” for the diverse forms of typical wares of their trades. This mightily
irritated the Sumerians, those straightforward noble savages of production
ideology, so the Accadians got killed. If you are a honest producer, come
to the market and there the traders speak in a slang of thieves, you will
also want to make units to be of unit size and the unit of distance is the
length of one unit. Don’t obfuscate the main idea, that unification means
that the units are one like the other. These Akkadians have deserved what
they got coming to them, by all this fancy limited assembly and types of
units. No such talk where a Sumerian is present.



*So what has this to do with me*

If a new idea breaks upon you like a tsunami, find a halt in something you
are familiar with and you can keep it in your hands.

Why don’t you take 12 different books and stick little yellow markers on
them, abbreviating author and title. Do the reordering exercise. Do it with
the attention of a Zen monk.



*You find out for yourself*

One should not influence the probands in what they are expected to
experience and learn from an experience.



*Good vibes*

The freedom of this intellectual club is that you can express your opinion
about information up to twice a week and people are sympathetic because
they also do not know what information is. For reasons of space, the
interesting debate about meaning remains for the next post. Very
encouraging is the following:

It is important to understand context, and such understanding asks for an
understanding of "the whole".

There are examples in mathematics that I find illuminating where we have a
structure that can be regarded as a continuous whole in a certain context,
but it can also be projected into a structure that consists of interacting
parts. This happens in topology quite naturally, and much of the
topological discussion is devoted to a kind of mathematical metrology of
wholes and parts.



… wholes and parts in relation to knots because it is not so well known in
this light. On the one hand we have a whole form in the shape of a closed
circular knotted rope or mathematical closed knotted curve. On the other
hand, the simple act of projection divides the knot into an interrelated
collection of pieces. We can study how these pieces interact and how they
change when we move the knot or change the projection. The pieces are
circularly interconnected and so are susceptible to a self-referential
description. Knot theory and algebraic topology more generally are devoted
to understanding wholes as best we can, either from the wholes as given, or
via an analysis of parts AS CONSTRUCTED relative to the wholes. Projection
is a form of such construction.

All of this mathematical work leads to many thoughts about cybernetics,
information theory and the positions of radical constructivist thought

Just a terminological detail. The process of discovering something that is
there is archeology. To have a whiff that here might be something to be
uncovered is the result of thinking. Projection has to do with the subject.
Archeology has to do with the object. This is what you are asked to do.
Learn how 12 books have inner relationships among each other. Their
relationship is objectively existing. By no means projections of you. After
this introductory exercise, we shall use no more physical books.

*Poseidon, Ulysses and a Marine sergeant*

To the end of this verbal symphony, hopefully some thunder and tutti is in
order. Who among your inner conversant personalities (by whose voice) could
seduce you into ordering 12 books on a table? Could it be that you need a
*forte* and an inner commanding voice to get up and do the bloody
initiation rite? If so, enjoy the inner conflict. Come on, get a courage!



Karl
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