Editing User:Reversedragon/Wavebuilder/2505-17 intro

{{BopCSS}}<div class="bop top bottom"><h3><time datetime="2025-05-17T02:00Z">25-05</time></h3>
<div class="bop-text">so. the ontology project wiki. tentatively named LithoGRAPHica.
it takes a little bit to explain, but I'm going to try my best.

The basic concept is that it's kind of one big bank of propositions and literary motifs, as well as "real" things
that are building up to a kind of evolving Marxist ontology of the world and of history
(and also of how fiction reflects those two things)

I did say this was going to be a lot.

It all started when I was messing with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Craft  this LLM game where you could combine things]
and I was like, there's definitely a better way to do this

the combinations on Infinite Craft were like, not even good
a lot of times they didn't make sense
so the puzzle became working <em>against</em> the AI to get to things

and I said to myself,
the problem with this is language models don't model physics.
but a "model of language" honestly could do physics if it wanted to. humans can say a physics equation in a sentence, etc.
so what if one made a game like this but it was based on physical things and concepts instead of words

and this led to wavebuilder

Wavebuilder was this:
an ontology game, not too complicated, where you could combine Things two at a time, and there would be a dictionary text file of all the combinations leading to different things.
there was meant to be this dynamic where anyone could make their own dictionaries to suit their own creative projects or puzzle ideas and explore different results things could produce.

it was all in Lisp on a terminal, and I was trying to make the code as simple and as straightforward as possible

there was also something called a [[User:Reversedragon/Wavebuilder/2410-22 wave-score|wave score]] where when you combined elements it'd do arithmetic to give you a proxy of how complex or hard to make the concept was

There's only one reason I talk about Wavebuilder in the past tense: it's on hiatus
like many coding projects I was working on part of it and hit a wall and just couldn't get back to it
but when I have this wiki fully set up, I do want to return to it

So
I had Wavebuilder bouncing around in my head
I was really thinking about the concept that any linguistic sign was like a kind of mathematical equation, of z = f(x,y)
and that you could describe many simple interactions of physical objects as math problems: [[Philosophical Research:MDem/4.3/6951 plus|apple + knife = apple slices]]

Then one day I was like
what if there was a TV Tropes
but for Marxist philosophy
so you pick out motifs like "magical universe became depressingly non-magical" or "galactic empire"
or propositions, as in general philosophical statements
but instead of just naming motifs you actually try to analyze them a bit, so people learn something

and I discovered that dovetailed really well with the concept of Wavebuilder elements and wave scores
as a kind of basic default Wavebuilder dictionary

you could combine two concepts and it could be a proposition
or combine two propositions and get a concept using them as assumptions

it also opened the floodgates for silly and unlikely combinations of academic and normal things
kind of [[:Category:Alfred Jarry ontology|Alfred Jarry]] style

but while it could be silly and fun it could also be serious
the proposition pages could be used to present parallel hypotheses or different parallel ideologies and investigate which statements were "truer", or at least easier to substantiate

I started this thing as a tool for understanding what's true in order to write [[Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy drafts|my "serious" Marxist philosophy book]]
to help me and others cut through capitalist bullshit in existing philosophy texts.
but it's almost as much an educational game as it is that
</div></div>

<div class="bop-foot">

<dl class="bop-meta">
{{BopRev|Philosophical Research:Main Page}}
<!-- ; -->{{BopComment}}
{{BopCreated|2025-05-17T02:00Z}}
{{BopHandle|2505-17_intro}}
</dl></div><!--
-->[[Category:Wavebuilder]]  __NOTOC__