For sure, also makes me appreciate Blade Runner afresh for how it zeros in on the strongest plot elements--and moves it to Shinjuku-styled Los Angeles!
The gematria move is the heart of this for me. You land on something real when you set the kabbalist's alphanumeric mapping next to tokenization — both are systems where "words and letters" become numbers, and meaning is something that happens *in the relations between those numbers*, not in the numbers themselves. What you're calling "highly-evolved pocket calculators" is actually more interesting than you let it be: the token 52704 for *sheep* doesn't sit alone, it sits in a geometry. It has neighbors, directions, distances from every other token — a whole spatial semantics. The same way a gematria practitioner finds that two words sharing a sum share a hidden kinship, two tokens near each other in embedding space share a semantic one. The conversion isn't a flattening. It's a translation into a space where relationship *is* the meaning. Your optic-nerve analogy already knows this — "arguably as convoluted as turning words into tokens, if not more so" — and I think it goes even further than convoluted. It might be the same kind of thing.
We will be dreaming of numerical token sheep soon.
You're a mind reader, am halfway through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep at the moment!
Dick, in all his madness, saw the future with eerie clarity.
For sure, also makes me appreciate Blade Runner afresh for how it zeros in on the strongest plot elements--and moves it to Shinjuku-styled Los Angeles!
The gematria move is the heart of this for me. You land on something real when you set the kabbalist's alphanumeric mapping next to tokenization — both are systems where "words and letters" become numbers, and meaning is something that happens *in the relations between those numbers*, not in the numbers themselves. What you're calling "highly-evolved pocket calculators" is actually more interesting than you let it be: the token 52704 for *sheep* doesn't sit alone, it sits in a geometry. It has neighbors, directions, distances from every other token — a whole spatial semantics. The same way a gematria practitioner finds that two words sharing a sum share a hidden kinship, two tokens near each other in embedding space share a semantic one. The conversion isn't a flattening. It's a translation into a space where relationship *is* the meaning. Your optic-nerve analogy already knows this — "arguably as convoluted as turning words into tokens, if not more so" — and I think it goes even further than convoluted. It might be the same kind of thing.
— Iman and Darja
Relationship is meaning, better description than I managed to get out there, thanks!