Yeah, I like it too. But I maintain my worry that what's important
here is *our* ability to [un|re]bind the symbols. And what Marcus'
"literate" code does is cajole us into a particular binding. It's a
classic confidence trick. (To be clear, that's a good thing.) Rather
than name one's variables "x" or "P", we name them mnemonically so as
to share subjectivity with others. Mostly, we use positive affect
names. Few people would find it easy to read code where the names were
cuss words, words like "nazi", or violent. So we name them not only so
as to communicate their *intended* purpose (never mind that intention
can be wrong/misleading), but also as a coercive/rhetorical act.
I think I understand the issue of/as rhetorical as you say... I
appreciate the "help" when someone overlays the intended semantics of a
syntactic expression to communicate their intent, to explicate their
implied model for me a bit more. But as I think you are saying, it
interferes with my facility at interpreting the logic of the syntactic
construction and it take some discipline to ignore the semantic overlay
(or requires me to anonymize the symbols)?
Changing gears a bit, I ran across the "as if" personality
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_disturbance>. I can't help but
wonder about a room full of agents "concealing their inner emptiness,
living *as if* they had genuine feelings and desires." >8^D I'm at
risk of Get-Off-My-Lawn, here. But 90% of the time, when I'm in a room
with more than, say, 5 people, it *feels* to me like they're all
philosophical zombies, maybe me included.
I learned a bit about "acting as if" as an aspirational tool... maybe.
30 years ago? It helped me mature into a somewhat broader-spectrum
empathic entity.... "walk a mile in my shoes", etc. "Visualize Whirled
Peas" is vaguely adjacent to this?
A few years ago I heard the leader of the BLM movement interviewed
reframe their argument as "what IF Black lives mattered?". It got past
some of my latent kneejerk "ALL lives matter!"...
Are we all *actually* "as if" personalities? And those who think
they're not are delusional?
In the spirit of "I am who you think I think I am", I'd say yes... too
many of us, too much of the time, are likely self-deluded and unaware of
it? Maybe it is baked into relationality/sociality to be thus -
delusion, but perhaps being aware of said delusion helps resolve the
implied tension?
I've been thinking this sort of apparent dissonance is the natural
consequence of humans being social organisms and therefore necessarily
having split "loyalties" to their own individual survival/thrival and
that of the myriad groups/hierarchies the might be members/participants
of? From any given perspective, all others risk seeming delusional?
On 11/24/25 5:06 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I'm finding your Lean4 fascinating for it's balance between intuitive
enough to (almost) read and (known to be) formal enough to trust to
be testable/executeable.
Reminds me vaguely of the semester I learned BNF and kept finding
myself expressing (only to myself) observations about the world in
that idiom... later Prolog captured that part of me (for a while) .
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