| >To what end though? How would you even begin measuring success in such a vast context? Well, so far it's just mindgames, so while these are very valid questions, I never thought of an exact goal... But I'd recognize it when I'd see it. The best answer I can come up with right now: First, I'd want to understand what components are necessary and sufficient to make up "a system". From there, these components and their relationships would need to be understood from a mathematical perspective (maybe graph theory, but I'm not 100% sure). Then, one could look for patterns in nature that reflect such components, and rule out which of those patterns are valid components of such generic systems, and which not, based on heuristics that were developed/explored in the previous step. The following step might be to investigate how the interplay of a given systems components is mapped in human language, and how similar or topologically identical systems differ in spoken representations with respect to the different parametrizations of the aforementioned scopes [...] (Etc.) - is this a satisfying answer, or does it just lead to more open ends? Anyway, that's the process as far as I've mapped it so far. |