(Inspired by Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Bourdieu.)
There are long stretches of human society that are very structural, predictable, ontic, etc. But when they end, we all get surprised. Or, if one belongs to the socio-cultural everything is unique camp, one may be surprised and offended at the big regions of predictability. I believe that these regions of structure occur with the same weird pattern (if "pattern" is right word) as the runs in the digits of pi; big stretches where 1 is repeated, or we cycle 1,2,3, etc, but fundamentally there is randomness. Or so it appears. Our world ("world" in the sense of Heidegger) is usually in a big run of regularity, but such regularity is not fundamental.
In pseudo-mathematics: For any region R that can be completely explained by a system of intelligibility I_R, there exists another region R+ which contains R and such that I_R fails to explain certain parts of R+. This gives us infinitely expanding context.
And then add in a being whose "raison" is its future possibilities, and who remembers its past, and even more chaos ensues.
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Hi demographer,
I have been wandering about looking at other people's blogs, and finally arrived here.
You may not notice this comment on your infinite expansion post - but it's a favorite subject of mine, and I think you have it pretty much right.
Furthermore, it's too important to leave these ideas to pure mathematicians. They are too close to see it. So I guess I would encourage you to keep prying along these lines.
I would claim that the background can be represented, but only by infinite datasets. That's where I see Dreyfus as wrong - he is certain we will never do computational science with infinite registers, irrational numbers - pi's if you will, that can "hold" an infinite amount of data, simply because, if you find an articulation in the world, and it's not there, we can just add it to the end of the expansion.
Of course, we can't change the deterministic choice of the next digits in the sequence, but we can simply exchange that irrational for one right next to it - with the same infinite string of realized data up front, but a slightly different ending, and do this as many times as it takes.
But even that won't work - it would take too long - an infinite time, in fact, and we know the brain does it nearly instantaneously. So it must be that we perceive the background in a non-serial manner, and my best guess is that the manner we see it is by coupling several strands of shaped infinitities. Like the tertiary structure of proteins. And that is just what you are getting at here, right?
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