Yes! And playing that same note (along with cargo cults, mnemonics, and the specialness/detail-preservation of narrativity), I committed to posting that I was wrong and Jon's *epiphenomena* are appropriately named (based primarily on the oracle-sort idea (I like "oracle" better than "key") [⛧]. But near the end, I asked EricC whether or not evolutionary biologists have a typical way of speaking about contingency/ancillary/contextual causation as opposed to, for lack of a better word, driven causation. I think I asked that as a result of Jon's suggestion that *mystery* isn't fundamental, here. I've forgotten how EricC actually responded. But while responding, the concepts of "critical path", polyphenism, and robustness was what came to mind. And now I think I'm wrong about being wrong. [⛤]
It often seems that such folk tales exhibit some universality (e.g. virgin births or Jungian archetypes). But it's difficult for someone like me to a) guess at their cross-culture applicability and b) guess at which contingent causes have to be dragged along as the narrative moves from one detail-rich context to another ... like so many privileged post-yuppies saying Namaste after their Hot Yoga. [⛧] That idea being to shuffle a list, you place the items to be shuffled into a key-value map where the keys are drawn from a [pseudo-]random or arbitrary number source, then extract the ordered values and toss the keys. There's structure there, but it would have to be *reconstructed*. [⛤] My dad used to be accused of never admitting he was wrong. So, he often told the minimalist-for-him joke: "I was wrong once. Then it turned out I was right." On 8/3/20 2:44 PM, David Eric Smith wrote: > This is where folk tales are wonderful. Out of all the complex clutter of > daily life among all the different people, they recognize a big question and > put a marker on it by wrapping it in a small story or metaphor, which turns > out to have staying power as a meme, because it resonated with what really > was a big question. > > Are the Celts (or even more specifically, the Irish?) the only ethnicity > that had a specific meme equivalent to a pot of gold at the end of the > rainbow? Or did it convergently evolve in several cultures? -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
