Thank you for thinking about this. I hear the criticisms: 1. I vacillated a bit between choices like *the locus* vs *a locus* and criticality versus just about any other mechanism that, in my opinion, exposes differences between models and their referents. I have concern for the delta between what one can read about the future from the grit and what, in fact, happens next.
2. Language (especially finitely sampled) is both strongly objective and ill‑fit for talking about what possibly is. You point out correctly that incompressibility (for instance) relies upon, and to my argument’s detriment, countable alphabets, well‑defined mechanisms of unfolding, and other such idealisms. In an attempt to be clearer, I agree that criticality (i.e., some privileged fixed point in a classifying space of dynamics) is just some arbitrary reference point in a generalized space of models. The thought I hope to convey is a skepticism that critical points tell us anything useful at all. Some of the problems seem terminological. To say that some dynamics are *universal* rather than to say more simply *scale‑free* makes it seem as if something about the dynamics is *True* everywhere in our world, rather than a break from our idiosyncratic unfolding to something fundamentally simpler and asymptotically less informative. I suppose I am trying to argue that observing that forest‑fire dynamics operate near the *edge of chaos* is fine (model), but that it is better to know what you are doing (actuality). By imagining the world as unfolding in a Chaitin‑like sense, we are confronted by a thoroughly *singular* unfolding, explicitly not anything like a *universal* unfolding. The fact of operating near criticality is little more than an existence proof: that on some time scale a forest is likely to catch fire, almost nothing more. Further, I would argue that this lack of prediction is deeply related to the reindexing problem, which to my mind appears ontologically worse than an instability problem. Canonically, many of our kin seem content to imagine the world unfolds as effectively deterministic chaos with a certain amount of quantum fuzz. That is, it is infinitely productive to progressively build measurement tools to uncover how the world is, recalibrating but ultimately getting nearer the actuality and ultimately bracketing the fuzz. I hope to point out that in a world driven by proper randomness and finite memory, it is not a question of better and better measurement tools. It is not a question because it is the case that the world is not infinitely rich, there is no possibility of infinitely and progressively reindexing/recalibrating; the past eventually enters a condition of never having existed in the first place. That is, the space of evidence is so thin that we are likely to build the best possible tools and the scientific project will simply be over without anything remotely like a complete or even statistically relevant view of the future. It will not be because our tools could be better, or are not good enough. One thing I like about this thought experiment is that, on the one hand, it reframes metaphysics as a richer theory of inaccessibility than I typically hear expressed by those glassy‑eyed Abrahamic types. On the other hand, it is a non‑totalizing metaphysics. That is, it is not the case that there is a coherent notion of the One, there is no specifying the initial conditions and turning a crank, no Mahavishnu or any other conversation‑ending bullshit. There is just the boringness of the discussion to end the discussion. <apophenia> Yeah, I am distressed that math education is perceived as anything but rhizomatic (arborescent?). The *most people* I hear you referring to is one I tend to think of as some pedagogical median. My concern is that mathematics is culturally overloaded, being one of the only modes of reasoning we can think to test for. Sarah suggested that maybe social studies was in some way closer to memory. I guess I think that the problem with math is that it reminds people of the game, that at the end of the day even the ostriches must estimate their expenses. To me, mathematics remains an exploration and classification of sense. Yesterday, in Mt. Vernon, I bought one of those woke philosophy books that I like. The bookstore owner was very sweet about it, but could not help making a joke about how he got a masters in philosophy and was very shocked to hear that he was made of machines plugging into other machines. A woman near the counter inquisitively jumped in. The owner flushed with embarrassment. I know that what he really wanted to say he could not, that Judge Schreber had sunbeams in his ass that he called his "solar anus". All of this is to say, "Of course it does not make any sense to require three years of calculus before introducing experiences with the consequences of division over the integers, graphs, symmetry, or any of the other meaningfully rich senses categorized by the beautiful project we call math" </apophenia>
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