Of a Faig Ahmed carpet, huzzah!

[ by Charles Cameron — a perfect visual example of linking between similars across distance ]

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Double Tension-Dark edition. Faig Ahmed, 2011. Image Courtesy of Faig Ahmed Studio

This is a magnificent carpet from among the magificent carpets of Faig Ahmed. It also reminds me..

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In March 1998, during an online forum with the computer scientist David Gelernter, I formulated my sense of how a move in Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game would function in these terms:

My own hunch is that an aesthetic sense is *the great sorting principle*, that it has to do with pattern recognition, and specifically the recognition of isomorphisms parallelisms in deep structure. So an AI that recognized deep isomorphisms across wide topic distances would be the ideal web navigator as an AI that recognizes deep isomorphisms across wide topic distances is a creative mind. It would also be playing Hesse’s Bead Game, no?

To which Gelernter responded:

I think basically, that’s exactly right. I wrote a book about this issue of what you call recognizing isomorphisms in widely different domains, a tremendously important issue in how the human mind works.

Some years later, in a post here on Zenpundit, I rephrased my original insight more precisely, thus:

The leap that intuits similarities, particularly rich similarities between rich concepts in widely separated fields, is the most powerful tool of the thinking mind.

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I mean, the two ideas — one purely visual, deriving from the creativity of an artist who works in carpets, and one theoretical, from my own work in creative juxtapositions — are themselves richly parallel across a wide disciplinary distance..

Differently said, you can DoubleQuote ’em.

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For reference:

The DoubleQuotes board linking two ideas, before —

and after play —