A lot of my writing recently has been focused on relational dynamics in the fields of sociology and psychology, and I thought it might be fun to look at something else: Physarum polycephalum. It’s a slime mold that’s been called the “many-headed slime,” that’s what polycephalum means. First described by Johann Heinrich Freidrich Link, a German naturalist back in 1833ce.
I should write a history of study of Physarum polysephalum and I’m tempted to but I actually want to explain how it’s been an object of study in other fields like mass transit and logic.
And through that study, led to things like the Tero–Kobayashi–Nakagaki equation, which is what I think might actually be useful in my studies of how social media platforms interact with imagination.
I got here specifically because I’ve been thinking of the concept of pressure, where I’ve been elsewhere describing change or input, especially in the context of relational dynamics.
I think the homotopy-type theory paths and P. polycephalum’s tubes might also relate to how edges/boundaries form with relational dynamics, but that’s… a vaguer shape.
And, it’s also, like, late, so I’m not really going to get into any of this tonight. I think I want to instead pivot toward thinking about how to get better about making more kinds of nodes in the database, so I can more easily make nodes for specific claims, questions, ideas, postulates, etc.
I recently added “field” and “instantiates” as two properties most of my GnoponEmacs nodes have (or should have), but I’m not… loving that. I’ve been thinking, as always, about theory of MUD design, and am wondering about bringing in a map of contemporary engine/systems jargon to see which are the most applicable for the kind of weird system that GnoponEmacs is, where it’s not automatic, but it ias autonomic: that is, it does internal processing, but only directly in response to input. (Maybe that’ll change down the line if I integrate a Fediverse client or something.)