2025-09-19, 1020h

So I've been using GnoponEmacs for a bit now and if I'm comparing my research method from before, when I was using Obsidian, to now, the method is so much better that it's hard to even compare. So, great. I'm doing a lot better than I was, and in a way that shows a trajectory toward improving. I'm saying just because it can be easy, when taking a stance of criticism, critique, in order to improve, to feel that position: cultivated negativity that's necessary for positivity.

To counter that, I'm explicitly saying, that by my own ethics, I'm doing good, and should feel good about it. If I don't, it's probably some subjectivation that means I can put the feelings aside for now. If they keep coming back up, and they aren't explainable by the critical position, then I'll give them some more thought.

Anyway, I've realized a simple enough shortcoming or issue with using Org-roam, or Obsidian, or any other system I've come up with so far: links don't have any information on what kind of link they are. It's all just... links.

So I can link this babble to Org-roam, but I can't define that link as a "mention" versus an "explanation."

I think wanting this, but for semiotics, might be why I keep looking toward homotopy-type theory out of the corner of my eye.

I can see a few hacky ways to approach this: in a few notes, for example, I've written /Unary conditions/ sections, that list out the paths to some structure, showing, this thing is that thing, or for this thing, that thing is true. I can't think of an example right now, but this post might have unary conditions of "a babble" and "written by emsenn" - expressions that I'm saying, this piece should test true for.

But that quickly gets very messy, and beside, doesn't make these paths available as any sort of first-class concept in my notes, and it does feel like they might be worth that, over time.

And often, if not always, I think things do something on their way to linking a path. If this babble could link to "a babble" with "self-identify" or whatever, it means that this babble should be able to try and do what a babble can do.

If I try and think about this stuff more abstractly, not in the constraints of Org-roam, but still about my research notes... it very quickly gets too confusing for my head to hold, at least right now.

But basically I see there being a, perhaps limited, set of paths between various relations - this is in fact central to my relational dynamics. I want to be able to link two concepts and specify what kind of link is happening: am I saying this is a part of that? That that is a part of this? That this, explicitly, is not a part of that? (Inclusion and exclusion from sets.)

There's inclusion and exclusion from sets, there's instantiation of unit: that's what saying this babble is a babble is, as a link: a babble is instantiated as this babble.

There's... differentiation, which is probably the most complex path - and I'm being very loose about this when I have derivations that estabilsh this more formally, but feeling things out can be useful.

Differentiation needs to be able to say ~X is different from Y~, and ~different~ is... a table of differences: what parts of X are different from what parts of Y, which would be, I think, a bunch of inclusion and exclusion statements.

And this reminds me of the thoughts I was having drifting off to bed last night, about doing something like my poorly formed Fennel library for semiotics, but where... ah! Where one path is ~X senses Y~ and contains which attributes of Y can be sensed (and, I guess, how they are sensed.)

Then when Y changes, it broadcasts what has changed to everything that can sense that change.

I was thinking about this in terms of deltas, and basically having a webby mess of things that have some way of letting their changes be known by other things, but only if those things have paths that would let it be known.