Re: CHAT: Re : Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Ed Heil scripsit:

> It could be that Charles Sanders Pierce was right after all, and
> there are three ultimate categories of experience: Firstness,
> Secondness, and Thirdness, and that any relation involving more than
> three participants is reducible to relations among three participants,
> but that trinary relations are not reducible.
As C.S.P.'s intellectual descendant (Peirce taught Edgar A. Singer, who
taught Thomas A. Cowan, who begat John Cowan), I agree.  There is support
from graph theory: graph nexi with more than three edges can be
reduced to more nexi with fewer edges, but not further.  (Informally:
if you have many ropes, and are only allowed to make knots in 2 ropes
at a time, the best you can do is one big rope or a loop; if you are
allowed to knot 3 ropes together, you can make an arbitrarily complicated
web; knotting 4 or more together doesn't make it more complicated.)

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin