I wanna like this stuff cuz snoz has good style and aesthetics and is into cool stuff, but, it just feels like the logic's grasping for straws
actually looking for a steelman, not trying to be snarky/petty/smarmy
what grapejuice are you reading thats heavy on numerology?
Reading about the Talmud is interesting on the worth of numerology. The problem with numerology is its a self referential system, a tautology, but the Talmud rather trying to hide that leans into it to whip up literary/creative/linguistic/whatever energy. Its joycean in that sense. If you dont mind a huge block of text heres a primer:
"Hebrew was in fact the very first phonetic alphabet, and all subsequent phonetic alphabets stem from it. Yet though it has been surpassed many times in its efficiency – the Greeks or Phoenicians added vowels, the Latins some letters – even today modern Hebrew in Israel lacks vowels. This absence of vowels gives rise to a comparatively extreme occurrence of ambiguity, much more so than English or any other Latinate language, which in turn makes the act of deciphering written Hebrew quantitatively more difficult and qualitatively different. For instance, try deciphering any simple sentence in English with the vowels removed and you quickly multiply possible meanings for each word which may not be resolved until you look at the whole sentence or even paragraph or consider the context of the text. Not only is decipherment slowed, but the reader must refer to the context more persistently than he or she would in reading a more efficient alphabet. The consequences of this simple inefficiency in Hebrew, as I argue in greater detail elsewhere, is an entire culture of literacy uniquely devoted to disambiguating difficult texts and at the same time uniquely tolerant of ambiguity. One can see how relying on Hebrew as the Talmud does (it is the compilation of dialogues among scholars often in different countries whose only common language was written Hebrew while speaking many different languages) would also induce an obsessive focus on the
potential meanings of individual words – paronomasia – and even on the meaning differences contained in individual letters. Over the centuries, reading Hebrew also gave rise to an enormous, even transcendental, sense of playfulness and punning. For the great Midrashists (Talmudists), punning on a word to reveal an association between two meanings was a legitimate source of knowledge, a way of revealing what was a hidden but an intended connection. To complicate the picture, Hebrew letters also stand for numbers (
aleph = 1,
bet= 2,
gimel = 3 and so on, through
taf, the final letter of the alphabet = 400). This promoted a parallel tradition called
gematria or numerology, in which rabbis look for correspondences between the values of related words and their meanings. Indeed, treating “mere” wordplay and numerology – their apparent coincidences and inessentiality – as legitimate epistemological systems, as essential to finding ou;the truth – is quite alien to the practice of Western reason since the Renaissance, and as much as anything explains the core differentness of Jewish thought. In fact, this essential difference in treating accidents of text as the source of metaphysical truth underscores the problem with explaining Western culture as “Judaeo-Christian.” "