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CIRCLES

                                            July 2, 1992

Roe-Sham-Bo, Scissors-Paper-Stone.
        
Circular Power Structures.
        
Hierarchies with a glitch, a link in the 
chain of command that connects back up       
above...                                     An old story idea, which
                                             I don't think I'll get  
                                             into here.              

And loops.  Recursion?  
        
            Just free associating.  Don't mind me.
        
            If there's a point to this, it's probably this:
            When you consider indirect links, the structures
            (of the self, of the world) get complicated (knotty?)
            I influence A which influences B which influences me. 
                                                                  

                                              May 13, 2003

The traditional expectation is to expect 
knowledge/logic to be a hierarchical edifice.
                                             
Definitions are assumed,                     
other definitions are                     Induction formulates  
based on those                            principles,           
definitions.                              deduction works down 
                                          the tree, producing   
  If you trace back a chain               conclusions that are  
  of definitions and find that            always correct, or    
  it loops back, and you have             else the inductively  
  something defined in terms              determined principles 
  of itself, that's supposed              must be discarded.    
  to be a glitch, a failure. 
                             
    It's not tolerated in    
    mathematics, however 
    common it may be in 
    dictionaries. 
                  
      But it seems to me that 
      there are at least two 
      other possibilities, cases    
      where circularity might not 
      be a catastrophe: 
                        
      (1) You may have uncovered  
      something that's true-by-definition, 
      just stated in a slightly odd form.
                                         
      (2) You may have hit a 
      recursive definition.                    RECURSIVE_DEFINITION
                           
      Logical structures need not be 
      easy to follow in order to be 
      correct.             
                           

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