The assembly of the whole from fragments -- from "pieces"

• we don't know what the final picture looks like, so we have to guess by experimenting with the pieces, or follow other holistic intuitions

• there may be many "pieces" that are essentially repetitious -- or something like "synonyms" -- meaning something similar or related if not identical

• So, we beginning to build lists of such synonyms -- how are these terms "the same" -- and how are they "different"?

• Can we replace and generalize the entire structure by defining one term that can substitute for them all -- or do we lose too much nuance and fluency/flexibility/accuracy by doing that?

What is "the whole"? Why do we presume there IS a whole that can be constructed or converged or "fused" from "the pieces?

Why?

• Because we see high concordance or commonality among functions and processes and methods that today are discordantly incommensurate, in ways that seem destructive or dangerous

• Because we can develop exploratory hypotheses that appear to address this issue in constructive ways

• Because this seems to be an increasingly significant and probably dangerous problem in the world

Tue, Jul 30, 2019