Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Indexing Things to Other Things

I use sentences like "People are indexed to their culture and not to God", but I realized that this isn't a completely common term, and lightweight search engine use may not give a clear answer as to what I mean by "indexed to".

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly where I got that term from or the (I think) illuminating specificity of how it was used in that original context or in the definition given there. But I can say how I understand it, and that might help readers of this blog.

Indexing has to do with reference points. One meaning that I may use is "linking yourself to another reality, on a literal one-to-one correspondence, or a correspondence which resembles a literal one-to-one correspondence". On some level you automatically follow the reality of the other thing, perhaps because you choose to be linked that way, or you chose it and it has become a habit, or without realizing it you developed or inherited the habit. Sometimes though the intention to be true to it is a habit, to actually be true to it requires conscious thought and volition, to successfully execute the intention.

You tend to have to update yourself to new knowledge about the reference reality. You aren't necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the thing as it is, but you are with the thing as it has revealed itself, and your intention, or habit, is to correspond with the thing as it is.

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A meaning similar to this (probably the source of me knowing about it) is found in math and related fields (economics/finance). If I recall correctly, Kurt Gödel used indexing in developing his Incompleteness Theorem.

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