Characters > Words > Keys > Names > ... "ToInfinityAndBeyond!": BuzzLightyear

[HansWobbe]

I think it's time I started to at least collect my insights regarding Characters, Words, Keys, Names, and Categories as they appear to me to collectively form what mathematicians call "an N-Dimensional Array".  Please consider my interest in this area to be a peculiar Quirk (which is why I use that tag). 

Everyone is welcome to chip in questions, ideas, perceptions, and perspectives.  Hopefully that will lead to a better articulation of what I've been rambling about at intermittent times.  This is likely to be a long and drawn out process, so: first, as a jump off point ...

Hans,

When you say 5 dimensions do you mean in the same key?

That is inspirational, but what do you mean?

I feel we should have a way to register a unique id for any tiddlywiki we make, then that can be part of a compound key to get an universal serial wiki/tiddler. Would that be 2 dimensional?

Then we could have a third for our self eg wiki/my "brand"/tiddler?

Regards

Tony

then: ...

• Once upon a Time: (actually in the early 1990's), WardCunningham gave us WardsWiki ( a.k.a. the PortlandPattern Repository, c2:, ... )
• Interestingly, that spawnedL
• WikiPedia.
• ...
• TiddlyWiki 1. Classic and 2. TwFive
• ...

• Ti a_tag HwWvW
  

... more ... later ...

[TiddlyTweeter]

Interesting!

Couple of comments ...

1 - At render level are some "single characters" (even if compound at bit level---

     I think that's a fragment too far) items also, in a sense ICONS?

     My point being that "characters" as "icons" have SEMANTIC VALENCY that transcends a mere part of a whole (letter in word).

    The embrace of EMOJIS widely on the net indicates its highly significant. 

2 -  What about HIEROGLYPHICS? Lol :-)

Best wishes

TT 

 

[TiddlyTweeter]

The OED ISSUE is an interesting one in English speaking countries. The thing is vast. 

One is somehow obligated to acknowledge some peasant in 1734 mentioned that "a gnome by twilight" is a "gnomo".

TT, ;-)

On Monday, 8 June 2020 16:39:20 UTC+2, HansWobbe wrote:

[springer]

Hans,

I'd love to hear more about what you're *doing* with this idea of a dimensional array.

As my prior post hints, there's a great deal of resonance between your big-picture musings and Charles Peirce's logic.

However, Peirce argues that the conceptual structures you end up needing will be triadic, and whenever you're tempted to find 4 or five "dimensions" you're probably looking at triads within triads. ;)

Here's some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce)

It's important to note that to function as a "character" in the Peircean sense is to manifest a recognizable and repeatable quality that is not *experienced as* compound — in just the way that the letter and numeral forms do for people who are familiar with them. To think of something as a character is thus to abstract away from any aspects of the thing (such as its font) that is irrelevant to this repeatability. (Chinese characters aren't actually "characters" in this sense for those who aren't fluent with them, though; for most of us, we're just like kids who don't see p and b and q and d as anything but vaguely similar shapes. Even Chinese and Japanese people sometimes have to "parse" an unfamiliar character into its component parts in order to go look it up.)

The distinction between "character" and "word" however is an artifact of some languages rather than others; it shouldn't be baked into your logic that characters are *only* building blocks and words are *always* a combination of characters. In Chinese (and hieroglyphics) every character is a word. And some characters even in English can function as words. (I have a speed-typing program such that any single letter (other than a and i) expands into the most easily-associated common word.) Still, treating someting as a character is different from treating it (functionally) as a word.

I would like to hear more about why "key" and "name" would be seen as separate dimensions from each other in your scheme... But here's a Peircean starting point that resonates with your word - name - category sequence:

possibility-by-itself 

pointer-to-something (what Peirce calls an "index" as in "index finger")

regularity or field of connection

These correspond, roughly, to zero-dimensional point, one-dimensional line, and two-dimensional plane figure.

I wonder whether what you might want, then is something like...

(a) identifiable building block of meaning considered AS independent of whether it can be considered to have its own semantic content (The character "I" is not excluded, but we bracket its ability to function as a word)

(b) word-AS-semantically meaningful unit (usually a string of characters in English, but that's a coincidence)

     but then there's further division between words that name ...

          qualities ("green") and other relations ("beside") 

               [all qualities are relations, with simple qualities being 1-place relations]

          actualities ("Hans") and other locatables (via reference-index pointing relations)

          kinds / types ("human") (categories)

(c) word-combinations as *affirmed* (or as open to affirmation) 

And then it turns out that there are lots more triads that open up from this one. Among the things we can do with an assertable is: (a) simply entertain it, discuss it as a proposition; (b) accept it; (c) build with it, in connection with other claims (meaning, getting it into inference relations, arguments, proofs, etc.). Among the kinds of propositions we can affirm, meanwhile, there's another triad: possibilities, actualities, and necessities. 

The triad-talk may sound mystical at first. But once you get the hang of it, it's pretty powerful. For example, Peirce was able to prove that the robust structure of triadic relations is irreducible (you can't express a 3-place relations in 2-place languages), but all 4+-place relations can be expressed as (reduced into) 3-place relations. 

-Springer

[TonyM]

Springer,

This sounds interesting but the language is a little too academic for me, without looking up and reading other sources. Perhaps you could expand a little in future for a more general audiences,

Not withstanding that, you triggered me to mention my long term goal of building a database system where all objects (say tiddlers) are defined, but the tiddlers attributes (fields eg color,description,icon, status), are only defined by relationships to other objects. For example colour as an attribute, would have a relationship to all or a specif colour object rather than a specific colour value. 

Thus every time you create an new attribute, that may contain values, you first have to build a set of objects to which you can relate this instance of the attribute. It makes for a slow start but you can see how you will have back links to every attribute, forced to explicitly define everything in use within this data universe.

If you were building a set of colour objects they could be arranged according to different colour theories... but then you would need a structure of colour theories.

Critical to such a structure is to provide fuzzy values, ie if you do not know the colour, or if has not be defined yet, to be able to give it a value that will eventually be resolved.

However the ultimate goal would be for the system to be complete one day, but the reality is it will possibly only ever approach completeness, if not more each time new information is captured.

Regards

Tony

[HansWobbe]

Springer:

Thanks for the Triad and Pierce references.  It will take some time and a bit of experimentation before I can appreciate this enough to contribute comments. At first glance, the approach appears well-suited to a Subjective classification of attributes that are Qualities.  If so, that might be a useful addition to what I've been working on recognizing that a simple Matrix (a two D array) of 2 rows and 3 columns, containing the first 6 integers, can be (un)"raveled" into a vector of 1 2 3 4 5 6 from its structured form of

 1 2 3

 4 5 6

In the structured form, the value 5 can be accessed by its co-ordinates row=1 column=1 (using 0 as an index origin).

This trivial example of a two D array leads to the much more interesting coordinate system used to fill the Unicode "position" array of 128 groups, 256 planes, 256 rows, and 256 cells which is effectively a 4 D array that accommodates a very large number of characters.  The Unicode assignments can be thought of as the Names for each of the cells in that 4 D array.

I have been engaged to Experimental Development on two particular aspects of this.

(1) I can vastly increase the size of my "alphabet" beyond the usual ten digits and 26 letters of the English alphabet to more than 2,000,000 characters to achieve truly dense encodings

(2) TiddlyWiki's dynamic nature makes if possible to use a subset of the Unicode values in any dimension, without having to allocate memory for the entire structure.  This enables the use of what my Math associates refer to as Sparse, Ragged arrays that can be indexed using a MixedRadixPositionalNotation.  If this sounds too theoretical, there are examples of how this is use as the basis of Canada's PostalCode system, for example.

(2a) I can even add my own (or shared) dimensions to the Array, effectively using the Unicode characters as just one   position in the resulting Index value.

One thing I've noticed as I've experimented with all of this is that I inevitably recognize many of the Unicode characters I use frequently.  With practice, they become the short words I read, much like reading the meanings referred to by the ChineseTelegraphCode.

Finally, coming to Tony's points about a permanent Key, I usually place a string of two or three such characters in a field.  This gives me the ability to search a field to find the tiddlers (or the unique one) that I have associate with any of my 5 dimensions.

On Monday, June 8, 2020 at 3:00:13 PM UTC-4, springer wrote:

...

I'd love to hear more about what you're *doing* with this idea of a dimensional array.

As my prior post hints, there's a great deal of resonance between your big-picture musings and Charles Peirce's logic.

...

Here's some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce)

...

I would like to hear more about why "key" and "name" would be seen as separate dimensions from each other in your scheme... But here's a Peircean starting point that resonates with your word - name - category sequence:

...