Chopping cauliflower with a potato technique leads to a lot of waste for a target size. Imagine “dicing” cauliflower into half-inch cubes using knife strokes that follow a cuboidal grid. You’d get unpredictable fragments. But the smaller your target size, the less it matters.
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At the limit, to get to “riced” cauliflower, the technique kinda doesn’t matter: recursive chopping, dicing, and grating, all lead to roughly the same results: a cauliflower-insulting state good only for mushy potato or rice substitution. Structural destruction is path agnostic.
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That’s what pure hedgehogs do: getting very detail-oriented by reducing the cauliflower to limit where fractal geometry gives way to the next lower level of organization (cellular). They destroy what they can’t grok, to reduce to a perfect “one big thing” lower-level idea.
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Pure foxes otoh get attached to maintaining the integrity of the loose “floret” primitive to the point where they can’t recursively chop at all, since every cut, whether fractal or dicing, causes “non-floret-like error” to accumulate. There Will Be Crumbles. And stemmy bits.
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Because there’s no “flat” (1 level/size band) approximate breakdown with no “errors” (ie only floret shapes and within a size band with non-trivial upper and lower limits), the fox is tempted to deep fry the whole, holistic cauliflower so to speak. Or more likely, do nothing.
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(More technically, every reduction to a size band between 0 (riced) and 1 (whole cauliflower) either introduces new “fake” primitives like weird “stem junction cubes” that are artifacts of decomposition technique, or violates a lower size bound).
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Because the fox “knows many things” (the florets in their analogical variety, across sizes and parametric shape variations), *any* chopping is too destructive and they freeze into inaction. This is one failure mode induced by fractal realities.
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Because the hedgehog “knows one big thing” that won’t tolerate fractal variety, they destroy the whole thing and tame it with brute force. This is another failure mode induced by fractal realities. Both are driven by fear of incompleteness of existing knowledge.
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In both cases the solution is to accept that *any* action will change reality in a way that makes your previous knowledge incomplete. So you either have to destroy the reality entirely or accept that creative destructive action creates bits that don’t fit what you know.
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Basically the only error-free map is the entire territory. Hedgehogs forcefully tame it into “rice”, foxes leave it untouched, representing the “floret gestalt”. Destroy the territory through reductionism, or treat it like a holistic map with no agency for you.
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The Awakened Hedgehog practices Mahamudra. Through investigating boundaries between all phenomena, it recognizes the essential emptiness of phenomena and boundaries, thus realizing Empty Awareness.
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Replying to @_StevenFan @vgr
The Awakened Fox practices Trekchö/Tögal. By holding the view that all phenomena arising in awareness are whole and complete, it recognizes the spontaneously present, perfect nature of phenomena, thus realizing Awakened Awareness.
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Replying to @_StevenFan @vgr
The Ground (territory) was indestructible and there was no separation from it the first place. Although the Fox and the Hedgehog investigated from different ends, because it was the reality-fractal, it lead to the same place.
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"Nasty little Buddhist"
Seeking via neuroscience and psychology informed dharma.