EXCERPT ALEX WILLIAMS: I find this very interesting, the idea James puts forward of formal languages being a kind of technology, a technology which isn’t just a way of organising intuitions about the world, but instead has the potential to surprise us. Things could come out of them which are not simply reducible to the input, in the sense that you can learn from them, and that’s really intriguing. My question, given that abstraction of some kind seems to be at the core of this (in that it’s not just expressive of common sense) is how are we able to form these languages in the first place—formal languages that are not just an abstract system, are not disconnected from the world entirely to the point of just being a game. They have some degree of traction within the real and yet they still have abstraction…