Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.
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The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details. — apokrisis
A bit fractal'ish I suppose, infinite in depth where the map maps itself. — jorndoe
Sorry -- this just seems like the worst analogy for what you're after. — Srap Tasmaner
In fact I can't think of any kind of map that isn't based on selecting certain accidental states of affairs to mark and the rest to ignore. There's never any essential/accidental distinguishing such as you describe. — Srap Tasmaner
My thought here was that the usefulness of a map is showing you what roads happen actually to exist connecting features you're interested in that also happen to exist, and it shows where the features and roads actually happen to be. You could abstract away location, distance, and so on, and just show the connections -- but this town and that city and the road that connects them are still matters of accidental history. — Srap Tasmaner
Constraints would only show you what connections could exist, where they could be, etc. We need to know which ones actually obtain. — Srap Tasmaner
Granted some features are considered essential to a map, in the sense that they're included when others aren't or needn't be, but it seemed to me those included features are still historical and accidental -- this town might not exist, there might not be a road between these two, etc. — Srap Tasmaner
Sure history is full of accidents. But if these accidents can accumulate, then they become the constraints that act in the present to limit the accidents of the future.
They are no longer accidents once they become part of the constraints that prevail — apokrisis
So you are simply attempting to make an analogy the worst possible by abusing it in the worst way you can imagine. — apokrisis
That makes nice sense. Yesterday's chance is today's necessity. I understood your project to be pushing back or outward to ever greater generality, to the "purely" necessary. I guess if that's only an ideal, you'll be mapping the ossified accidental just like the rest of us. I suppose that's the sense of mapping "from the inside", as you put it. — Srap Tasmaner
Your response helps. I still don't quite get the big picture, but I'm good for now. — Srap Tasmaner
The "map" is of the very fact that accidents accumulate to form the regularity of habits — apokrisis
But since we're talking metaphysics, do you have any qualms about the word "fact" here? What kind of fact? Are we forced to call such accumulation itself either accidental or necessary? — Srap Tasmaner
Chance and necessity make a nice pair of terms in which to explain everything, but I would imagine you could tell a similar story with other pairs (or mores) of fundamental somethings. They all make me uncomfortable, but that's my problem. — Srap Tasmaner
Is chance real?" We can posit it, or not, but it will always be in the model either way. And this would be Peirce's pragmatism, yes? — Srap Tasmaner
Oddly, this matching up makes me even more uncomfortable than the Big Theories do on their own. If the big theories already seem to hang in the air (the way a brick doesn't) on the buoyancy of their own internal coherence, this version seems more like jumping and forgetting to hit the ground. — Srap Tasmaner
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