**Links to**: [[Sameness]], [[Difference]], [[Equivalence]], [[Pattern]], [[Noise]], [[Mimesis]], [[Bizarre-privileged objects in the Universe]], [[Imitation]], [[Imagination]], [[Schema]], [[Analogy]].
### [[Postulate]]: Likeness is a _not-yet-formalized_ intuition of _pattern_, as in the _healing grid_ illusion below: the pattern is not there but we intuit it because we have experienced it elsewhere and otherwise. Postulate as it relates to [[Meaning]]: the “meaning” an interpreter experiences when reading a piece of text depends not only on their ability to imagine other minds, but more fundamentally on an intuition of [[Likeness]].
![[Healing_Grid, Ryota Kanai, Utrecht, 2005.jpg]]
<small>“Healing Grid”, by Ryota Kanai, Utrecht University, 2005. For the illusion to take place please focus your sight at the center of the image without moving your eyes. After a very short while the left and right sides of the grid should start becoming as regular as the center.</small>
>“We are called in to *know*, but what it is that we are to know is precisely the limits of our own powers with respect to and because of rhythm: it holds us and keeps us in check (an idea expressed through the verb *éxô*)." (Barletta, 2020, p. 3)
We know through _pattern_ (i.e., predictability), we know through what we have known knowing is like(ly to be). There should be better words for that. Or maybe these are it. Maybe to know in the sense just expressed should be termed “x-ing” because it is forever in the making as eternally-learning. But what is it that would drive us to compact a few words, with meaning (?) into a more reduced spatiotemporal _thing_? Instead, maybe, giving into the actual rhythm of words as words as they sound but actually with people not here on the page. Then, maybe, then, we understand there's no need to summarize, to reduce, but rather to expand and explore, sounds. This is one of the advantages of listening to and making language as music ([[Language is music]], [[Language-modulating]]).
We interpret likeness here as Paul North does, in the book [[Bizarre-privileged objects in the Universe]]. It is not the same as [[Sameness]], and not the same as [[Equivalence]].
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### Notes
[[Likeness]], [[Concept]], [[Metaphor]]
"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects." [[On truth and lying in a nonmoral sense]], p. 3.
p. 11 [[Bizarre-privileged objects in the Universe]]: "So it is with _Kallima_: a butterfly may be like itself and also like a leaf. This would be a [[Category]] [[Error]] if we didn't first tame the suggestion by giving it an official name, "mimicry," a purpose, "anti-predator adaptation," and an etiology, natural selection -- all of which purportedly belong to the butterfly and not to the lead, making the likeness into a semblance and thereby changing the category from a homeotic to an ontological one. A mimic is a semblance of another being, not its sibling or clone or child. Suspend, for a moment, however, the will to being, cause, purpose and name. Take the statement on its face. This is often the best way to find/make likenesses, to take statements on their face. Butterfly and leaf are alike; they enliken one another."
p. 11 "Between a banality of sameness and a delirium of difference likeness likes to hide. This may well have been the problem it posed to theory all along, from the time of the earliest European ontologies up to empiricism and current scientism."
p. 13 "An American philosopher attuned to nonsense, [[Donald Davidson]], once called likeness without further qualifications not exactly nonsensical -- or banal or indeterminate -- but "trivial," "because everything is like everything, and in endless ways" ("What Metaphors Mean," p. 254)."
p. 14 "Likeness wants to be understood, if only because without it, the empirical basis of much of our current thinking would turn into a loose, unprincipled gathering of sensations without resemblances by which to assemble them."
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### Footnotes