Organization and Collapsable Heirarchy

I have found the concept of collapsibility increasingly interesting, especially as it relates to networks of information.

It occurred to me yesterday that while we generalize, distort, and delete to experience the world, these three processes can be generalized to any set of information and any organizing structure. The best way for me to articulate this is to refer to the way we read handwriting. Handwriting that is readable (i.e. has an arbitrarily low level of noise) is read by identifying the idiosyncratic structure of familiar letters as interpreted by whoever created them. This rationalization of the squiggles and lines continues until we impose the nearest analog structure we have available to us (i.e. “t”.) We perform this task for an entire reference structure, generalizing on a number of levels (perhaps a short word). Once we have a reference structure, rather than repeat this process, we make a generalized version of semantic units- “the” something. As we move up in the hierarchy of generalized semantic structures, we begin to develop a limited concordance, we generalize the handwritten letter to whatever idealized letter we have stored in our mind, and then delete the messy scribble we are left to interpret. As we proceed through the process while we go through this process with the written letters (information) we are performing a highly analogous process to the information that the written letters represents, so that interpreting another person’s writing is a very personal process – we impose order and practice philosophical apohenia among other things, meaning we can never read what anyone ever wrote, we can only read what we put there.