multi-intention
- date: 2026-04-30
- tags: cognition, nexus
- identifier: 20260430T084706
the idea that well designed systems tend to treat every part as maximally valuable, unique, and connected to every other part of the whole. this applies to evolved and designed systems.
a novice designer crafts each part optimally for its narrow purpose. an adept broadens the notion of purpose and adapts each part to its neighbors. an expert curates each part for the whole, seeing more clearly how each parts design invites and forestalls nonlocal possibilities.
a novice chess player moves according to immediate, visible danger. an expert is always building several frameworks and strategies as once, with each move. we might measure a move's quality by the number of strategies is defends against and pushes forth at once.
a fugue astounds by living more deeply into this concept over time. it begins as a simple melody. once imposed against itself, a pleasing 2-fold relation is apparent. Bach's genius was to (rapidly) conceive of such a melody that visits harmonically upon itself in over a dozen ways. see Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach".
elaboration of the concepts makes me reel with a feeling like the chicken-and-egg problem, infinite recursion, or a circular dependency. the maximal realization of the concept is to align every part or movement with the entire infinite set of others, which, for we who can understand infinity only as continual process and not realized state, evokes a seething mass of intercommunicating, self-adjusting components. (is this not the vision that inspired the programming languages Smalltalk and Erlang?)
see also
poetry is overlapping layers
role of knowledge among non-human life