Congruence
Sep. 13th, 2010 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davvI think I've managed to express congruence, but it's tricky - a different way of approaching things, but very useful perspective - so if anything seems unclear, just ask!
Now that I've shown the Vasai idea of integrity, let me build upon it, to something that I call congruence.
Integrity is an ideal concept. The Vasai may reason about whether reality lies to them, but they are faced with the same limitation as any experiment: when one observes or acts upon reality, what one gets is not a measure of reality, pure; it is a combination of the nature of the universe and of the device being used to do the observing.
The same logic applies to the senses. In reasoning about integrity, the Vasai are limited by the eye of the beholder: if it cannot discern, or if it cannot represent the difference in a way the observer can understand, he cannot know if the universe has integrity. The senses effectively translate between reality and another domain.
What is that domain? The logic above can be repeated with anything that is sense-like: looking through a telescope involves both the telescope and your eye. If we continue in this manner, at some point there will be some part of the being that cannot be categorized as a translator. Let's call that part, the core being: what remains once we've excluded everything that pertains to observation (or action, as the case may be).
Narrowly, congruence is then the quality of the translation between reality and the domain of the core being. It can be applied to a sense, which may lack congruence because it focuses on something that is largely static, or because it translates wrongly; to a mechanism of action, like a limb, which may lack it if what's feasible is very hard to actually do; or further, to a device, which may extend either observation or action.
In broader terms, I also use the term for "congruence of being", which involves the qualities of the being on the one hand, and its mechanisms of action and observation on the other. The congruence of being is how well the parts that translate between reality and core being manage or is able to express the nature of each to the other. If the being is, as a core quality, "nimble", yet finds itself as a turtle, its means of action would not have very good congruence of being, because there's no way for it to actually exhibit that property of being nimble.
I may also, albeit more rarely, use the term for congruence of a device. A device may extend action or observation, and can, by doing translation of its own, lead to greater congruence. In that case, the congruence of the whole system (with the device included) may be compared to that without the device.
It is however usually the case that each additional step or translation is lossy.
Now that I've shown the Vasai idea of integrity, let me build upon it, to something that I call congruence.
Integrity is an ideal concept. The Vasai may reason about whether reality lies to them, but they are faced with the same limitation as any experiment: when one observes or acts upon reality, what one gets is not a measure of reality, pure; it is a combination of the nature of the universe and of the device being used to do the observing.
The same logic applies to the senses. In reasoning about integrity, the Vasai are limited by the eye of the beholder: if it cannot discern, or if it cannot represent the difference in a way the observer can understand, he cannot know if the universe has integrity. The senses effectively translate between reality and another domain.
What is that domain? The logic above can be repeated with anything that is sense-like: looking through a telescope involves both the telescope and your eye. If we continue in this manner, at some point there will be some part of the being that cannot be categorized as a translator. Let's call that part, the core being: what remains once we've excluded everything that pertains to observation (or action, as the case may be).
Narrowly, congruence is then the quality of the translation between reality and the domain of the core being. It can be applied to a sense, which may lack congruence because it focuses on something that is largely static, or because it translates wrongly; to a mechanism of action, like a limb, which may lack it if what's feasible is very hard to actually do; or further, to a device, which may extend either observation or action.
In broader terms, I also use the term for "congruence of being", which involves the qualities of the being on the one hand, and its mechanisms of action and observation on the other. The congruence of being is how well the parts that translate between reality and core being manage or is able to express the nature of each to the other. If the being is, as a core quality, "nimble", yet finds itself as a turtle, its means of action would not have very good congruence of being, because there's no way for it to actually exhibit that property of being nimble.
I may also, albeit more rarely, use the term for congruence of a device. A device may extend action or observation, and can, by doing translation of its own, lead to greater congruence. In that case, the congruence of the whole system (with the device included) may be compared to that without the device.
It is however usually the case that each additional step or translation is lossy.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 05:22 am (UTC)Thank you for this; now I fully understand something I've only partially understood since high school(-equivalent) psychology classes, which is to say, observer influence. I always thought that it simply meant "the presence of an experimenter in the room changes the way subjects act", and there's that, but there's something much more comprehensive behind it: the observer themselves, no matter how neutral or impartial, is not remotely a pure vessel for the information they take in! The information is shaped by the inherent qualities of the vessel: human interpretations of the migratory patterns of egrets, for example, contain as much information about and influence from humans and their perceptions as they do from egrets.
One of those things you can only understand when you start looking up a meta-level from how humans normally think of the world, and questioning what data different species might take in-- leading to the obvious conclusion that any species would take in a data-set biased towards its kind, and thus the only unbiased data set is free of any observer.
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Date: 2010-11-08 05:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
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