I’ve been reading a large — and I mean LARGE — book on the history of Political thought. Like, all of it. “from Herodotus to Present”, so the cover says.

In all this political writing, naturally we cross paths with Plato and the associated & adjacent works.

I’ve never read Plato in any serious manner aside from college classes. What I do enjoy, thought, is this whole thing about Forms.

I think the Forms are certainly a thing. a tree is a representation of some fundamental compression of space or something that results in a tree. same way for an arm or an eye or a brain or a rock. the world around you is the compressed stratifications of the fabric of reality.

this is kind of easy to think about at low levels. a rock is a rock. a branch is a branch. a car is a car. there’s really nothing notable about these things. but Justice, Goodness, Hope, Love, and conversely, Corruption, Badness, Despair, and Hate; these are also Forms, and they are much harder to have conversations about.

I don’t have a good answer here and now, so don’t expect one.

one thing I have been thinking about through this context is the connecting fabric between these forms. like nodes and edges in a graph, that kinda vibe.

again, I don’t have a good answer here and now, but I suspect that’s going to be a tab in the back of my mind for some time going forward.

tangentially, there’s also maybe a conversation to be had about something I’ve been calling behavioral topology, where two seemingly unrelated things are the same Behavioral Form because they existentially-mechanistically operate the same way. the original idea for this started when I made a joke about “a man taking TRT makes him trans”. Why? because in both cases, one is manipulating their hormonal system for what they think to be a Good Reason. two completely different intentions being channeled through the same behavioral actions. this is behavioral topology.

I am aware people are not really ready for the take represented by the joke above, but alas, it had to be made.

anyway, I think behavioral topology might be something that could be used to further understand the nature of Forms. even if things don’t look the same, if they mechanistically operate the same, that linking of disparate Things could shed new light on the nature of their Nature.