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More More Layers....


A reader of even greater perspicacity will be wondering about the stress on the physicalness of the previous discussion. Communication is indeed King, but The Point of communication is to communicate to, whether that to be an other or one's self.

And that too is indeed an interesting distinction to make. For instance - this conversation here, as one sided as it might seem on the surface - who is talking to whom? Ostensibly I am talking to you. But where exactly is that conversation taking place? And when? When you read these words, whose voice is speaking?

Even the medium of the conversaton is in question. For instance, while it appears that you are reading letters in the Latin alphabet, strung together in small chunks of (hopefully sensible) semantic import, there is an additional, or somewhat underlaying layer as well. As you are reading this on a computer screen of some sort, everything I type in is surrounded by a mark-up language, HTML, that formats and makes what I write communicable not to you, but to the web page I am constructing. Am I pissing in the wind with only a computer to witness my folly? For instance take to first paragraph from the previous page. This is what it actually looks like:

<p>The even more discerning readers will of course, scoff, for obviously the discussion at hand isn't technically about physical divisibility, but more a conceptual argument about <i>language</i>, which is perhaps the heart of the heart of <a class="tree" href="treehome.html">The Tree</a> <a href="about3.html">*</a>. "The Universe was created by Number, by Letter and by Speech" is not the raving of an over-enthusiastic Rabbi of Antiquity, but an astute observation of the nature of reality, or our perceptions of reality, or the manner in which we interact with reality, if indeed that distinction can be made.</p>

Am I talking to a computer, or to you?