Tzimtzummim

"Recognize this: orality is a mode of transmission in intimate contact with the world. It draws its meaning from the sensible. Literacy, on the contrary, draws its meaning from an increasing depth of distance from the world. It builds off of text, building off of text, building off of text. But text stops at the threshold of the sensible.

The modeling of ideas and idea networks as hollows (Tzimtzummim) lends itself to the generation of deeper and deeper spaces, all of which proceed from the elemental logic that informs the initial departure from experience into abstraction. The letters of the alphabet are the basic elements of meaning construction. Those first few “moves” and subsequent hybridization with other abstract domains causes abstraction to progress through imagination and towards reason. Reason is imagination self-corrected, and imagination is sensation, presented para-optically, in the space of memory. In the depths of abstraction likeness is no longer necessary for the shapes and contours of abstract thought to be manipulated in and of themselves. Thought can be hosted on geometric rather than geographic figures. Where sensuous content has been distilled into mathematical form, there can be a pure structural metamorphosis of meaning, which only affects our visible world indirectly, by subtly altering the frames through which we parse it. In this deep space we can conceive of a mathesis universalis: a code of pure mathematical manipulation of thought."

-Peter Duchemin, "The Art of Hidden Causation"