You're still not talking about grammar :(

, it seems clear that even considerations such as the length of sentences, not to mention such formalities and informalities as the 'tu/vous' convention both establish and confirm social relations in subtle ways that relate to grammar. — unenlightened

Sure. Nothing I'm saying is incompatible with any of this so I'm not sure why the laboured histrionics. I even specified that human language works with reference and patterns of relationship. Perhaps it is a non-philosophical bias that leads to an underemphasis on comprehension. In any case, here is Bateson writing on just what you seem to say is missing:

"To use a syntax and category system appropriate for the discussion of things that can be handled, while really discussing the patterns and contingencies of relationship, is fantastic. But that, I submit, is what is happening in this room. I stand here and talk while you listen and watch. I try to convince you, try to get you to see things my way, try to earn your respect, try to indicate my respect for you, challenge you, and so on. What is really taking place is a discussion of the patterns of our relationship, all according to the rules of a scientific conference about whales. So it is to be human".

Closer to home, see here a human language that is 2 dimensional, rather than the linear strings in which we philosophise. I wonder if this conforms to the limitations described in the op's article? — unenlightened

Interestingly, adding or talking away dimensionality is another possible way to do what grammar does. Chemical structural formulas, for instance, have added dimensions that are impossible to reflect in linear writing, and function as a kind of grammar i.e.:

.

The added dimensionally provides more information by virtue of the relative positioning of the atomic elements, just as grammar tells you contextual information about a particular sentence. In principle, there is actually no difference between what a strucutral formula is doing and what a grammar does. If human language is grammatical rather than dimensional, it's probably only a matter of convenice. One imagines Ulysses written without grammar, and only with 'grammatical formulas': it would be even more of a nightmare than it already is.

I think you're right to see in art efforts of communication that go beyond what we can do with conventional grammar - I think J+L get at this with their discussion of diagrams which would instruct us how to tie knots. The anthropologist Andre Lehroi-Gourhan specifically speaks of how linear writing differs from early modern art precisely in terms a loss of dimensionality:

"The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely subordinated graphic to phonetic expression .... An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears with the narrator. This explains the profuse spread of symbols in systems without linear writing .... The contents of the figures of Paleolithic art, the art of the African Dogons, and the bark paintings of Australian aborigines are, as it were, at the same remove from linear notation as myth is from historical narration. Indeed in primitive societies mythology and multidimensional graphism usually coincide. If I had the courage to use words in their strict sense, I would be tempted to counterbalance "mytho-logy"-a multidimensional construct based upon the verbal-with "mytho-graphy," its strict counterpart based upon the manual." (Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech).

I suspect that lions are not great talkers. But whales and dolphins are. And we do not understand them. — unenlightened

Actually the passage I quoted above by Bateson on communication in cats was actually from a paper precisely on the topic of communication in dolphins! Bateson's thesis is that while cats communicate in terms of patterns of relationship (the 'meow' that means 'dependency!') rather than reference ('give me milk!' - see the passage quoted in my last post), dolphins, while also communicating in terms of such patterns, do so with a digital rather than analog system. That is, the cats meow for example is relatively undifferentiated: the same meow can aim to communicate different things. The dolphin's 'click' however, is far more differenticated - although it still 'speaks' in terms of patterns, it does so digitally. Here is Bateson:

"The vocalization of dolphins may be a digital expression of (relationship) functions. It is this possibility that I especially have in mind in saying that this communication may be of an almost totally unfamiliar kind. Man, it is true, has a few words for relationship functions, words like "love," "respect," "dependency," and so on. But these words function poorly in the actual discussion of relationship between participants in the relationship" ("Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").

So you have three different types of communication. (1) Cat: analog communication of patterns of relationships. (2) Dolphin: digital communication of patterns of relationships. (3) Human: digital communication of both patterns and references. Interestingly, Bateson insists on just how alien a mode of communication is both (1) and (2): "We therefore have no idea what it is like to be a species with even a very simple and rudimentary digital system whose primary subject matter would be relationship-functions. This system is something we terrestrial mammals cannot imagine and for which we have no empathy." - The Wittgensteinian ring here is unmissable.

So the last thing to do is to relate the above considerations to grammar. Now, the whole point of grammar, evolutionarily speaking, is to simplify communication. Grammar, as a marker of semantic categories, communicates a crap-ton of semantic content even in the absence of a specific word. If I say 'when was the...?', the grammatical structure of this sentence already points to the fact that the last word is most likely some kind of event. Grammar eliminates a whole swath of possibilities as to what the the word could be: it imposes a constraint. Languages without grammar have to communicate this information in some other way.

For analog languages, this communication must reside in the environment: it is the environmental cues, the kinds of actions I accompany my 'meows' with, that tells you the kind of thing that is trying to be communicated. Digital languages, on the other hand, have such cues built-in to the language in the form of grammar. Grammar is a way of internalizing context into language: it brings the environment 'in'. It's actually a marvel of 'technology', if you think about it. Anyway, the idea is that a cat or a lion might not even have any idea of what to do with grammar! A dolphin, having digital communication, might be at least far more understandable than a cat - and by extension a lion - which only communicates in analog terms.

Scott Wilson - The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment
Daniela Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas

Obviously not enough to disable relatively easy translation between languages. Are there human natural languages where, by principle, you couldn't formulate the idea of category? — Akanthinos

I'm not sure I'd call translation easy, or even familiarity with single languages for that matter. It may seem so to one practised in language(s), but I think it's easy to overlook just how much work must go into achieving that mastery. Consider that it takes most humans more than a decade and a half - at least - to master (somewhat) one's 'mother tongue', and that it can takes years or months to translate 'high level' literature from one language to another. Sure, 'street talk' can be translated fairly fluidly, but even then, any translator or bilingual speaker knows just how much goes missing when moving from one language to another. And even then it's not quite fair to focus on inter-language communication, insofar as even 'intra-language' communication can present the exact same challenges.

Same basic nervous system. Literally the same evolutive landscape. And we've already performed (in parts) backwards the bridging to their world (by developing a relatively healthy field of feline psychological study).

J+L points toward this. Lions probably already have categories broadly pointing to 'friend' and 'foe', practical utility (prob much more limited), not price, but probably risk (which is pretty similar). And I knowmy cat can see stuff as boring or interesting, according to her wise designs.

I don't think assuming these categories to be the same for most beings, especially similar ones, is *necessarily* chauvinistic or naive. These point to phenomenal markers which are common to species which play "the same games" in this world. And despite being vastly different, me and my cat, on many points, "play the same games", according to the same rules. I put more flourish around it, and she puts more grace. — Akanthinos

But we're not just talking about if lions or cat 'have' or 'do not have' categories: the question is whether or not such categories would be grammatically marked. Remember that there are plenty of semantic categories that are not grammatically marked (in fact the vast, vast majority of them). The point is that the exact same phenomenal markers might give rise to different grammatical markings - what would make the difference is nothing much else than evolutionary-historical contingency.

And we don't even have to turn to inter-species communication for examples. I mentioned declension earlier, and it's worth elaborating here: declensions are interesting because they are grammatical inflexions that convey certain information about a word. Modern English doesn't have many declensions meaning that it has to rely quite heavily on word-order to convey the same information. So in English object and subject are marked by position: 'John looked at Bob' is not the same as 'Bob looked at John'. However, languages with richer declension structures will specify subject and object by a suffix or prefix. So one might say: 'John-em looked at Bob-by', which would translate to 'Bob looked at John', despite the apparent word order: the idea is that 'em' and 'by' indicate subject and object, and not word order. Thus you can have weird Latin phrases (for example) where words might be in entirely different positions but because the declensions are all there the phrase would mean the exact same thing. German is notorious for this and is partly to blame for why reading Heidegger is nails on a chalkboard.

Now, declension isn't quite the same as having or not having grammatically marked semantic categories (as we've seen, the same semantic categories may be marked by word-order instead of declension and vice versa), but it provides a concrete, non-speculative example of how one could imagine a wildly different scheme of semantic and hence grammatical categorization. In fact, English is notorious for not having the metric crap ton of gendered markings that alot of other European languages have, and this despite the fact that the English did not have so very different 'phenomenal markers' than the German or the French.

Finally, if we are to look at intra-species communication, it might be worth looking to what the enthologist Gregory Bateson had to say about communication among certain mammals, and in our felicitous case, cats: "When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying “Milk!” Rather, she is saying something like “Ma-ma!” Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting “Dependency! Dependency!” The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. ... What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship." (Bateson, "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").

If one takes the not-too-wild leap in considering that lionese would not be too far off from cat-talk, one might imagine that the lion would speak entirely in this kind of idiolect, bearing on relationships. I made a thread quite some time ago about autistic communication which might be interesting to consider too, and how the language at stake was precisely this kind of relational language which looks very, very different from the kind we are used to. It is not clear that most anyone, for example, would 'understand' Amanda Baggs:



I won't comment on the video here - I've written too much already - but I hope you can see what I'm trying to draw from it. Read the linked thread if you're interested in more detail. I'll only say here that one can imagine a modifed line form Wittgenstein here: 'If Amanda Baggs could talk, we would not understand her".

Categories that could be grammatically marked could be literally anything. J+L provide their own examples: "Indeed, when we perceive the world, think about it, or have feelings about it, we use a very large, diverse and constantly-changing set of categories: we may, for example, categorize people on the basis of the categorical distinction between friend and foe; we may classify physical entities on the basis of their practical utility, or their price; we may categorize species as endangered or not; and so on and so forth. We usually classify events as interesting or boring; and we distinguish between events in which someone we know participated, and events in which only strangers took part." Given that grammatical categories aren't even the same for alot of human languages, the question really ought to be what good reason would there be to believe that a lion would employ broadly similar grammatical parsings as humans? It strikes me as the height of nativity to think that lions would, 'by default', as it were.

And agree of course that the further away you get from human morphology the stranger a language (to us) will be - I wrote about trying to consider kind of language a mountain would have in the OP, for instance.

I mean types as specified in the paper linked to and described in the OP.

Interesting. I had thought that to some extent Wittgenstein is using "grammar" in a broader sense than mere rules of syntax. — Banno

But I agree. The choice is not between grammar as mere syntactical rules or grammar-as-language-game. The whole point of Dor and Jablonka's paper is to demonstrate that grammatical categories are reflective of semantic categories. But the crucial point is that such categories always "belong to a very constrained subset of all the categories which we can use to think, feel and conceptualize about the world". The question then obviously becomes why this set and not another? And this is how D&J link language to evolution: the answer is that the subsets we use are the ones that pass through the net of selective pressures exerted by culture, biology and so on.

But of course such pressures are simply not universal: they act differently across different times, spaces, cultures etc. Not so differently that we can't translate, say Chinese into English, but enough that such translations will never be seamless, unproblematic (certiantly not algorithmic in any plainly ridiclious sense implied by a Lorentz transformation). Those who insist that we could understand a lion talking are like Augutine: they don't pay attention to kinds, to grammar, and think everything is just a matter of semantics without grammar. To be clear, I don't think Wittgenstein's stipulation is categorical: at some point, after alot of work and effort, we would be able to understand the lion.

But the point is that the grammatical types which are marked and unmarked in lionese would be so vastly different that it would be not just another lanaguge, but another kind of language altogether. There might be grammatical markings that exist that simply have no correlate in English - or in any human language - nor could they exist, even though we might come very close to reflecting the same meaning with some clever grammatical combinatorics.

That is, the lion would do very different things with words? — Banno

So to this, perhaps the answer ought to be: no, but how he would go about his 'doing things with words' might - most likely - be different.

I think to make things clear I need to talk about declensions, but I'm about to hop on a short flight. Maybe later.

Grammar here is adherence to a language game - would that be about right? — Banno

I don't think so. Grammar is more general than a language game. To be sure, both are governed by 'rules' (leaving aside the specificity of how a rule functions), but one can have a completely grammatically correct sentence that does not belong to a language game. This is why Witty says we can be 'bewitched by grammar': we can lay out what look like perfectly sensical (grammatically correct) sentences without them in fact making sense (the language game, the specific context regarding what we are trying to do with those words, is missing). 'Grammar' and 'language-game' are not interchangeable terms in Wittgenstein, and, I think, for good reason.

I suspect it's the lack of attention paid to the specificity of grammar that is at the root of our (maybe?) disagreement.

Hmm, I don't think you're really engaging with the argument here, which turns on grammar as a parsing of types. Talk of 'worlds' is imprecise and should be dropped I think.

Derrida was always clear that we could never 'escape' metaphysics, and that any attempt to do so would be all the more metaphysical for it. He definitely did not disavow metaphysics, as least not in any straight-forward way.

As for an ontology, the question is alot harder: it's perhaps more fair to say that Derrida sought to think the conditions of possibility of any possible ontology. Whether or not those conditions themselves resolved into any particular ontology is not quite an appropriate question I think - Derrida always struck me as a formalist and any attempt to draw 'an' ontology out of his work would seemed to be doomed to failure.

Yep, fuck Chomsky. He's so quick on his feet to call out so-called charlatanism when his own contribution to lingustics has been to essentially mystify the field for decades.

This question, along with other Humean problems of induction can be thrown out by replying that essences and the notion of necessity are normative notions pertaining to what we say and do rather than referring to independently intuited features that the individual sees.

Which I suppose is complementary to the empirical idea of epistemic selection. — sime

Exactly. The idea is that such kinds are naturally emergent, at is were, and not a function of any kind of pre-established harmony, if I can use that Humeian term. The question of necessity and contingency is an interesting one as well, insofar as I think there definately is a kind of principle of sufficient reason at work here: that some grammatical categories are selected over others is not simply arbitrary, but in some sense necessary: it is not an accident that so many of our grammatical categories just so happen to converge across so many different languages. In fact it might be entirely appropriate to invoke convergence in its properly evolutionary-theoretic meaning, as when different species independently evolve similar morphological features (like eyes or fins) despite great distances in space and time.

On the other hand, one can speak of these necessities themselves as contingent: the grmmatical categories we largely use could have been otherwise, had evolution taken different turns than it did, had the contingencies of social selection played out differently as a function of history and events, etc. The whole question of modality is given a very interesting twist insofar as neither contingency nor necessity alone account for the dynamics of grammatical evolution, but a curious blend of the two.

Huh. Never come across Halliday before, but his stuff looks really cool. I can't speak for him of course, but I suspect that what might distinguish Dor and Jablonka's work is that they insist upon language being a matter of genetic assimilation as much as much as social incubation, which I think is really cool. But that would be an extension and not a disagreement.

@Banno- here it is, I finally got around to it.
@Saphsin- This is why I can't stand Chomsky (read the paper!)

No, no, you misunderstand, that's everything I'm saying I find excised from the Davidsonian understanding of langauge...

I mean it - as it only ever should be meant - in its Platonic sense: language as uncoupled from practice, from it's 'bodily instantiation' in real use among living, fleshy, community-dwelling humans: as if all this was simply incidental ('accidental', in the Aristotelian), reduced to a formula that maps between languages. A quite literally inhuman understanding of language. But then, let me save this for later...

I dunno, I'm still very suspicious of what I see as the disembodied view of language that you/Davidson have. I think this is particularly apparent in your recourse - elsewhere and previously - to the Lorentz transform in analogizing between languages (clever as I think it is). I can't imagine a more idealist treatment of language than that.

The whole effort of learning, of inhabiting a life of language, of embodied practices of language-use is abstracted away in a bloodless manner where languages are treated as just so many idealizations able to be mapped upon one other painlessly. But then I think literally everything interesting in language happens precisely in the 'in between' of the transform.

I think I will start a thread inspired by this discussion, although it's been percolating in me for a while now.

Language games are not fixed. They can change, mingle and disappear to be replaced by novel games. Talking to lions would be a novel game. — Banno

Definitely - this is what Witty's account of learning emphasizes. But this is the problem with speaking of 'commensurability': the language of commensuribility bothers me because it's so binary: "X is or is not commensurate with Y". But the fluidity of language games and the dynamism of linguistic practice abjures such black and white vocabulary. I honestly think sometimes a ton of philosophers of language would hang their head in shame if they simply learnt another language other than English. To anyone who is bi or multi-lingual, I think the question 'are those languages commensurate?' would really come off as a dumb question, a question to which answers would be 'not even wrong'.

I should have said: he has a very thin and anemic conception of linguistic practice; at least, emaciated in comparison with Witty.

Sure, but that something is always a matter of more-or-less; more something, less something: and where we fall along that line is a matter of ingratiating ourselves with a form of life, or at least farmiliarizing ourselves with it; 'commensureability' is not given, it is forged, made, enacted. The entire sphere of action and practice is missing in Davidson: he is a linguistic idealist in this very strict sense.

Because the lion comment reflects what I take to be the entire point of the PI - that our understanding of language is grounded in shared (or rather, shareable) practices or 'forms of life'. The language of 'commensurability' is suspect for that reason too - it abstracts language from practice and treats it as though a ideal realm unto itself. Hence the oft repeated critique - entirely correct imo - that Davidson treats language as "frictionless spinning in a void".

I suspect he would have spurned the vocabulary of commensurability altogether; I'm not sure you can reject the lion comment without giving up Wittgenstein wholesale either.

Regarding that, has there been any progress between the coherentist view of truth and the correspondence theory? — Posty McPostface

I'm not the right person to ask unfortunately.

Mind you, I also suspect that if a lion could talk, we could use Davidson's radical interpretation to work out what it wanted. — Banno

You blasphemer you.

I dunno, I quite like wielding joy aggressively. It's a much underrated way of approaching things - very few know how to deal with weaponized joy. It also means I really don't have much to offer you, by way of your hysteria - I'm bound to disappoint your drives, and I'm perfectly okay with that. I like your provocations though qua provocations- they sharpen me, and are relievingly unformulaic, unlike certain others around here.

For what? For what???? — csalisbury

Joy, OCD.

Can you provide a summary of McKenzie's argument, in your own words? We will help with homework, but not do it for you.

I didn't get a chance to read everything, but in the case of thermodynamic systems, the evolution of any given system is determined toward a state of equilibrium, and ergodicity attempts to ascertain the averages of behaviour within a system (transformations, arbitrary convergence, irreducibility etc) and political systems are an attempt to order the nature of Hobbesian chaos. I really like this: — TimeLine

I think it's an interesting question to see where Hobbes might fit into all of this. I mean, the first and most usual criticism of Hobbes is that his so-called state of nature doesn't look anything like nature; or at least, it only captures an incredibly narrow slice of it, which is otherwise replete with myriad other possibilities of social relation. And in this sense I think ecology is actually incredibly well positioned to show exactly why approaching the political through a Hobbesian lens is so deplorably misleading, insofar as ecosystems do in fact have all these differing and interesting trajectories which are constrained and enabled by all sorts of various parameters.

I mean, this is the point of 'open systems', that, with enough energy flow and some constraints thrown in, you end up with order, or more specifically, self-organization. The social contract, insofar as it is imposed 'from above', is more or less an inversion of this view. Deleuze writes of how Hume, for instance, undertakes exactly such an inversion of Hobbes:

"The fault of contractual theories is that they present us with a society whose essence is the law, that is, with a society which has no other objective than to guarantee certain preexisting natural rights and no other origin than the contract. Thus, anything positive is taken away from the social, and instead the social is saddled with negativity, limitation, and alienation. The entire Humean critique of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract, amounts to the suggestion that the problem must be reversed.... This understanding of the institution effectively reverses the problem: outside of the social there lies the negative, the lack, or the need. The social is profoundly creative, inventive, and positive." (Empiricism and Subjectivity); I think this is exactly the model that ought to be adopted.

Or else there is Kropotkin's wonderful anarchist line that "accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices and absolutely unsound education and training to see Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage." (The Conquest of Bread).

Succession does not always lead to more complexity. It depends on the specific case of the environment.
For example in the post ice age landscape of the South Downs of England the tundra led to a range of scrub, bushes, heathland and trees. The species diversity increases in some instances, but can as easily become less complex by bearing fewer species.
Ash, elm, beach, hazel, will eventually succumb to the climax vegetation which in this case is oak woodland so dense as to make many larger herbivores seek life elsewhere; all the scrubs and less long lived trees will have to give way to the oak. — charleton

This is great! And my immediate thought is to relate this to the longer term dynamics of capitalism, in which certain established actors in the system co-opt resources and so deprive the 'smaller' actors of potential for growth so that they are either driven out or forced to live in what amounts to environmental ghettos. If I've been thought anything here it's that it might be interesting to map and taxonomize the differing trajectories of ecological systems and see what they might teach us about social ones.

Oh, right. Errr modship is great, you get to spend all your time thinking WHO WILL NEXT SUFFER THE WRATH OF MY BANHAMMER (while laughing maniacally) and HOW CAN I FUCK WITH THORONGIL. The stuff I know I really signed up for when joining a philosophy forum.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you come across as a bit of a hysteric (in the strict psychoanalytic understanding of it!), looking for the grand-plan behind it all that explains everything else - but... there really is no big Other here, I just genuinely like exploring these ideas and sketching connections where I can find them (if I can find them): this is bricoleur, not conspiracy - give me some credit for my innocence!

But still -

To get political: isn't not too closed, not too open, being self-regulating while allowing lines of flight - i mean isn't that, in a perfect nutshell, neoliberalism? — csalisbury

Again, I see where you're coming from - although come on, first I'm a conservative, now I'm a neoliberal? - but again, I think you're obscuring the specificity of neoliberalism, which yes, does promote a kind of 'sustained growth' narrative but - only along a single dimension: specifically, that of market values - efficacy, outcome KPIs, best-practices - being the only things that neoliberalism can 'see'/is sensitive to. I think one of the nice things about seeing the world in ecological terms is precisely the fact that it forces one to take into account so-called 'externalities' - but better, it doesn't/can't even discriminate between 'externalities' and er, not-externalities because the whole point is that everything belongs to an ecosystem.

And look, I also acknowledged previously that one ought to not confuse tactics with strategy: perhaps, if we want to build a new, better world, it's necessary to burn this one down. Perhaps this is not the society worth trying to make better. One ought to separate what needs to happen from what one ought to happen - this perhaps being a distinction between politics and ethics.

So all that being said, acknowledging I can't keep up with the math, I'm still confident enough to engage the OP on its own terms which are, I believe, metaphorical. Which isn't to say I think you think that self isn't literally an ecosystem - I believe you do, and I probably agree - but that I think the significance of this way of looking at the self ultimately relies on - and is motivated by- what can be drawn from it conceptually. It's about drawing on empirically-sourced models to the extent that they facilitate conceptual considerations. It's metaphorical in the literal sense that we're transporting some way of thinking from one level to another. — csalisbury

So yeah, this is a fair way to read the OP - I probably prefer it in fact. But then, I'd also say that this just is a kind of model of philosophy as such: drawing conceptual inferences, re-contextualizing the significance of empirical findings, etc, etc.

That said, yall should be warned against romanticizing what a modship entails - it's essentially forum janitorial work, and frankly the less one has to speak or act in the capacity of a mod, the better. TL maybe doesn't know it yet, but what she now has that she didn't have before is a dirty digital mop and apron.

*rolls up sleeves*

We all have the little Hypatia(?) symbol/face next to our profile pics on the top left. Or, if you click on our profiles, under 'site role', it'll list us.

What I do dislike is discussing these things. It seems as though some here secretly (or not so secretly) enjoy the drama. Well, I don't. — Thorongil

Did you type this with a straight face?

We made TL a mod and a bunch of snowflakes are #triggered

I see you jiggling with joy on the sidelines. SX and his man-crushes — apokrisis

Of course! Fdrake is among the best posters on the forum, and he most definitely has a cheerleader in me, especially in his apt charactrizsation of your posts - a loosely bound collection of regurgitated, empty buzzwords.

Organisms lay
Jumbled up yet striving for
Their own mouths to feed

Each cell binds a gap
Consuming a gradient
Where to find new food?

Digging in the weeds
An old domain of feasting
For new specialists

Symmetry broken
Entropy from exergy
Degrees of freedom — fdrake

Oh an Apo post!

I love this so much though.