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  • From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@g...>
  • To: Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@y...>
  • Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 11:25:39 -0400




On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 4:45 AM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@y...> wrote:
 
For me, "unit" is a Zauberwort (magic word). The emergence of Life, as well as its maintenance, requires the carving of *units* from apparently unstructured blocks, soups, streams.

Ah, yes.  "Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde. [...]  Und Gott sprach: Es werde Licht! Und es ward Licht. Und Gott sah, daß das Licht gut war. Da schied Gott das Licht von der Finsternis."  No mention of darkness being good too.

But today is Saturday, and therefore I am a Daoist, who believes that 樸 pǔ, the Uncarved Block, is the state from which we come and to which we return.  It is the human mind that does the carving, and "units" are something we impose on the data (Latin: "what is given" to us) for our convenience in thinking.  This is what I was trying to express to you at lunch in Montreal: there is no best way to do things (specifically, to express JSON in the XDM), only a good or bad way for one's present purposes.  But seemingly we were at cross-purposes.

--
GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures


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