Well, I would guess the “contradiction-friendly” aspect you see, is that fp can flexibly generate contradictions. So you don’t notice they are contradictions. They are just the right structuring of the data for the problem being addressed.
I’m sure I’ve seen a statement attributed to Rich Hickey, “It’s the data, stupid!” Emphasizing that only the raw data can express its own full complexity. Compare this with thread of “embodiment” in AI.
My ideas about grammar are also “embodied”. They say that grammar is only fully “embodied” in the body (corpus) of text.
The contrast between my argument and yours might come down to an interpretation of the word “contradiction” as being something you notice or don’t notice. If it’s only a contradiction when you notice it, then you might associate it more with OOP. If you’re forced to resolve your code into objects, the contradictions will be clear in the object. If you’re not, they will just be different ways of ordering the data, and you might see that as fp having fewer contradictions.
I wish I could find the first talk I heard by Rich Hickey on this. It really struck me at the time that he was saying no resolution of code into objects could be complete. That struck me hard, because it was a theme I had come to myself for natural language grammar. I recall the Hickey talk being one contrasting “simple” and “easy”. That “simple” was hard, and “easy” too often led to complexity. But he may have given many talks on that theme.
Nice.
无名天地之始﹔有名万物之母, as “The named is the mother of everything under the sun”?
I hadn’t seen that. I like it. It’s an interesting continuation I wasn’t aware of.
It reminds me of something I came across in a Twitter thread about Hindu philosophy the other day. The self as removal from “undifferentiated oneness”:
“…for Abhinava, the act of categorizing something is the ultimate act of freedom. It is an invention, an artistic act, an act of play - of creating and separating things as an act of will. It is Shiva freely creating the world out of undifferentiated oneness.”
Maybe that is what is being said with 无名天地之始﹔有名万物之母, “The named is the mother of everything under the sun”, too.
Which might be seen as a contrast with the “cannot be named” idea above. But seen in another light it emphasizes the creativity of the naming process, the process of resolving the world into objects. So you can say the process of resolving the word into names, or objects, cannot ever be complete. But is always a creative act, and the very incompleteness of it is the well of that constant creativity.
That makes the Daoist statement about naming as perhaps more of a positive act than Translation 5 does. Naming must always fail to be complete. But it is not a failure. It is the very act of creativity. The “ultimate act of freedom” in the Abhivana statement. No less important for the fact of always being fated to be incomplete.
The Abhinava comment struck me, and stayed with me, because I saw a parallel with what I was saying about sources of creativity coming from indeterminacy in ways of structuring natural language.
I think these are important insights about creativity. And that they relate to the limitations on “learning” I’m seeing, firstly when trying to learn language grammar, but applied more broadly to cognitive categories.
We must see that “learning” can never be complete, but that this is a good thing. I’m guessing that it will turn out to be at the very core of what will come to be our understanding of creativity (and also actually freewill, and consciousness.)
But let me emphasize again that while I find these philosophical parallels encouraging, and motivating, they are not necessary to the practical problem which presents itself!
The practical details from the point of view of building a better language model, can be very simple!