Sunday, August 12, 2018

Symbolic Reasoning as an Outgrowth of the Natural World

This blog keeps orbiting around the relationship between nature and symbolic reasoning and language in general, and formal language like math or computer software. Here's one of my older posts on this topic.

Symbolic language is an outgrowth of the natural world. It's a form of lossy compression. The word and concept "tree", for example, is a generic stand-in for all trees and is devoid of information on any particular tree in all its specifics and its relationship to its place.

Cities and civilization seem to be an attempt to simplify the landscape so the stunted representational version of nature comports with external man made reality. That is, the limited mind of man gets projected onto the natural landscape--making map lines into streets and paving over all. The riot of a natural setting gets replaced with empty voids.


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