Tuesday, July 25, 2006

articulation vs codification

To articulate something is literally to give it joints. We say, "he articulated his idea well" to mean he clearly explained the details of the idea and their relationships to one another.

Imagine a shapeless blob. It has essentially no internal dimensions. Add a skeleton with joints. Now there are many internal dimensions, or degrees of freedom. The possibility space of the blob's movement has been compartmentalized.

I like to think of all development as a kind of articulation. Wilber says evolution is a combination of differentiation and integration. Differentiation creates new parts or details, and integration combines those parts together into a system. That's like giving a thing joints. Each detail is a compartmentalization.

The way I think about articulation, it's a process embedded in the context-dependent, scale-invariant fabric of reality.

Codification, on the other hand, is translation from non-formal to formal. You start with "an idea" (a fractally fuzzy entity nested in holarchy) and generate an algorithm or a set of propositions.

In a sense, the codification itself isn't actually articulation, because the original idea isn't getting jointed; it's getting projected into a flat space. However, the process of codification probably causes an articulation of the idea, because you have to understand it well to formalize it. This is sort of like epiphenomenalism, or a backwards version of Platonism. The real world has a dynamic flat mirror of "perfect forms" or formalisms.

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