Upon reflection, I have decided that it is worthwhile for me to respond to some of the objections you've raised in the "context" thread, but for several reasons I've decided that I'd rather do it here than there. [*]I think there's a good chance that any back-and-forth between us is likely to go long, and I don't want it to drown out the rest of the conversation or disincentivize other posters from staying up to date on that thread. [*]I also think it has the potential to imperil my forward momentum. I'm willing to spend a non-zero amount of effort defending what I've said up to now, but it is very important to me that I keep moving forward and breaking new ground without letting myself get caught up on early battlefield's. I'll get into the reasons for that in a moment.[*]My explanation needs to go to a meta-level; it looks like you perceive to be making more and stronger claims than the claims that I intend to be making; I'm hoping that this thread can serve in part as a guide to the interpretation of the other thread, so i'd rather they weren't commingled.[*]Finally, in this thread I'm going to have to get personal in a way that will leave me fairly vulnerable. I would prefer to keep the personal stuff segregated from my actual work output so that I can walk away from this if I need to, or at least choose when and how to engage with it.
How I Think:
As a thinker, I'm at my very weakest when I try to limit myself to dealing with one topic or idea at a time. I'm not good at working things out step-by-step systematically. I'm not good at finishing one task before moving to another. I'm especially not good at justifying my intuitions in the moment that they come to me. I do tend to be good at holding many ideas of options in my head at the same time. I tend to be good at spotting relationships and interactions that other people might miss. I tend to be good at rapidly shifting focus between tasks, at seeing connections between parts of a system, and at combining tools from multiple disciplines.
When I have a multi-step project I often like to follow a "thread" that cuts across what someone else would perceive the steps to be. If I needed to design a vehicle with 6 parts i'd start by writing down a few details about fuselage, then jump to working out what that implied about the engine, then go from there to what that implied about the drive system. Often I'll "spiral" through a sequence like that for multiple iterations. I also like "shuttling" back and forth. If you asked me whether I'd prefer to design my classes and then write a setting for them or write a setting and then design classes for it, i'd say, "Neither. I'd prefer to design a couple classes, then extrapolate an implied setting, then think about what other classes that setting would require and then how those classes would change the setting. . ."
My most exciting insights usually feel like glimpses into deep structures that relate 3 or more seemingly distinct spheres of action or inquiry. These are never easy to explain to anyone, especially since they don't come to me verbalized. The unit building blocks of my thinking are often verbal, but spatial metaphors do a lot of work for me also. When I say that I "see" "connections" between ideas, I often mean that I literally see a strand of webbing in an imaginary manifold between symbolic representations of a half-dozen topics. This can make the working-out of my own thoughts a somewhat convoluted process. I might start out by intuitively perceiving a systematic interaction between three parts, but it's only through the work of putting it down into words that I can start to gather the details which (I hope) will confirm the intuition and flesh out how it works. Explaining these insights to anyone else's satisfaction is a yet bigger challenge. If the insight is based on a synthesis of previous concepts drawn from multiple topics, I need an audience that is familiar with all of those topics and the way I approach them before I can expect them to be able to evaluate my new idea. Building up the vocabulary to even engage with the proposal is a non-trivial issue. So, when you say things like
orYou should have titled this "ideas Orion has about stuff" . . . it's your bizarre fantasy that they fit under the roof of one label.
All I can say in the moment is that I'm sure it looks that way to you now. I've been going around getting all the pieces on the board so that I can go on to do what I actually want to do, which is to show my audience that all these things are connected to each other in non-obvious ways. I'm working out some of those connections as I go, and I know from the outset of these projects that the vaguest/most "umbrella" terms that I use probably won't survive to the end. Words like "embedding" were never intended to make it into anyone's permanent lexicon. They are intended to tip my hand and show you which topics I intend to link together and act as place-holders for the more useful & specific concepts that will hopefully emerge from this project. Obviously, you do not at this moment have any particular reason to take my word for it when I tell you that all these things really are connected, but I think the best I can do is to push forward on that thread into some applications. I am talking about it here because I expect this to be a recurring tension. Most of my future projects will be about convincing people that seemingly-unrelated things are actually connected by deep structure, and I will probably have to spend some time setting up the board before I can reveal the connections. I can only hope that in the future I will have merited a more charitable reception.I'm sorry but this is basically nonsense, especially the choice and repeated use of "embedded" as jargon utterly unrelated to the plain meaning of the word, and then having it change in meaning to suit whatever you are saying as you progress.