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@cgranade
Created July 28, 2018 04:03
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As well as anything can be known, she knew three things about the world.
The first was the difference between syntax and semantics.
Syntax is that which can be named, reasoned about, understood, and reduced to its most fundamental form.
Semantics, on the other hand, is the domain of that which cannot be understood merely as the sum of its constituent tokens, but which must be understood as a whole — that which defies reduction.
Though as different as form and function, as void and vacuum, together syntax and semantics make everything around us.
The sunrise is beautiful not wholly because of semantics, but because we have a syntax to express that which happens every day, that which revolves around us, that which recurs into time immortal and yet has a quality beyond that mere quality.
This distinction, of course, is familiar not only to linguists who study how we convey meaning to others, but also to the programmers who cast magic (but I am ahead of myself here).
Keats' rainbow was not merely unwoven, but decompiled, stripped of its comments and its names, reduced to its merest instructions and presented back to its hypothetical viewer as though the assembly were the whole.
The second was Clarke's law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Taken with the first of the facts that she had committed to heart, this realization was profound: it placed beyond understanding exactly that which could not be reduced.
That which is syntactic is not just what is understood, but understandable.
That grand context which comprises semantics is not mere technology, not mere science, but is the magic that binds us through our undying passion to create meaning where none exists.
A blade of grass quivering in the wind is syntax — the spirit which moves that blade is semantics, whether or not such a spirit exists.
After all, existence is syntactic.
Navigating the transition from the understandable world of syntax to the that language which we so deeply desire despite not knowing its grammar — therein lies true power.
Magic is naught but a contract with a party we cannot name, writ in a language we cannot speak, with terms we cannot comprehend.
The third thing she knew about the world, however, was that she made it.
Not alone, of course, you and I both helped her, but she made the world.
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