having multiple “touchpoints” with reality improves your understanding of reality
Last modified on July 18, 2022
(emphasis mine.) In his article Why People Think Computers Can’t, Marvin Minsky talks about this – while numbers can be defined in formal systems, it’s difficult to pin down what numbers really mean to us in one solid definition. Very related to: “The meaning of a word is its use in language” Rather, we can sort of “define” a number (say, the number Three) in a more oblique way, by connecting it to various concrete concepts – “[Three] is a web of different processes that each get meaning from the others.” It’s like…the “common thread” between all of these real-life instances. The real-life instances, the “tricks,” form a set of constraints, from which emerges “Three.”
Hmm…one thing I’d add to this- the tricks are probably generational too. Or certain tricks upon which the meta-tricks of quote-unquote ’supergenius’ are built, those tricks are generational. Some people have access to them, and others don’t.
Interesting to note that the multiply-connected meaning of Three is resilient.
Related: Holding a Program in One’s Head
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Everything happens in a certain context
And when that context is lost, when things are isolated from their original context, we often get big problems.
having multiple “touchpoints” with reality improves your understanding of reality. Thus, when trying to understand some object, historical event, piece of technology we have today, it’s important to understand the context that surrounds that thing. Because in fact, the “thing” and the “context” aren’t really two fundamentally separate things; they are one reality, and we are drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.
That seems like a glaring problem in the way that modern information systems are set up– things are stripped of their original context. Things must be compressed into textual language. Interactions between people are stripped from the original context that existed in the two people’s heads, and displayed for millions of twitter users to see.