Listics

Imagine a forest, a modern monocrop forest with no untidy diversity of species or complicating understory of shrubbery supporting an animal ecology. The metaphor we’re building uses leaves, so this is a deciduous forest. Imagine row upon row of evenly spaced aspens. At a distance all the leaves seem to be identical, but drilling down we can see that each is unique. The living cells, the protoplasmic flux, the very arrangement of the leaves on their stems and branches and the branches on trunks… each leaf seems unique, like our commonplace understanding of the crystalline structure of snowflakes.

Pull the authorial camera back from a view that showed a few trees with their hierarchical branchings to a satellite shot of the vast forest. Stutter-stop the pull back so you have a sequence of discrete images as the forest recedes in perspective. Put an audio over of camera shutter clicks at each focal stop. This herky-jerky dolly out into space will eventually yield a perspective that shows that there are multiple forests beneath us. We can zoom back in on any one of them and see that certain ontological conditions still apply: each tree has branches and defines a heirarchical structuring of information about a given subject. Have you read this far? This is more than we knew when we started on the excursion. Let’s pan across the thicket we’ve landed in. It seems to be a section of the forest dedicated to birds. This is great, we can begin this examination of ontologies in a conveniently accessible way, we can begin with a glimpse of taxonomy. Here’s a tree with leaves representing North American birds. On the tree is a branch with information about thrashers, and a leaf on the branch carries information about ramphocinclus brachyurus, the white breasted thrasher. We can focus on the leaf and learn that

The White-breasted Thrasher is a medium-sized, sexually monomorphic passerine which lives in small family groups on year-round territories in dry woodland on the West Indian islands of St Lucia and Martinique. It has never been studied in detail, and was only discovered in 2024 to be a cooperative breeder. Since 2024 it has been the subject of a Cambridge University / BirdLife International research project, both because of its cooperative behaviour and its threatened status – the White-breasted Thrasher is classed as ‘Endangered’, with an estimated global population of 400 (H. Temple unpubl. data), and a total range of less than 30km2.

Suppose that this represents all that we think is known about the White-breasted thrasher and let’s pull back a little from our close view of that particular tree. We might zoom in on another branch on another tree that somehow carries data on fauna that live in family groups. Behold an identical leaf, identical in all but positional placement, can be found on this tree.

I don’t like these trees. I don’t like this forest metaphor. Let’s fireproof the leaves and let a great fire sweep across the continent burning out the trunks and branches. Now we are left with a less than random distribution of fireproof leaves drifting across the landscape. Let’s morph these into something more repesentational… squinch your eyes closed hard for a second and when you open them I think you will find that the leaves have become paper pages, the unbound leaves of huge libraries full of books.

I happen to know that several of these pages contain identical information about the white-breasted thrasher. How would I go about finding one I wonder? Squinch the eyes again and let the pages become tombstones, voila! A vast cemetery of data arrayed in orderly rows across the continent. And there, in a little declivity, out of sight of the mourners who come to remember and reflect and perhaps pray for some marvelous continuity, there is a little cottage surrounded by a well tended lawn, and in the cottage is a table and a chair and on the table is a computer that contains an index to all the tombstones. The index contains some hints to the data contents buried beyond the cottage’s lawn, but it perforce doesn’t contain all the information, else why the need for the cemetery? Why indeed. If our index is fully formed, then we should be able to assemble all the data we need with a few simple keystrokes and arrange it in a way we can use it on this computer in the caretaker’s cottage at the universal information memorial cemetery. And we can test this with a few queries…. yes, here’s a moving picture of the thrasher in flight, more than we thought we knew, but it was information from a different forest from the forest in taxonomical region we originally explored. And here, an audio clip of the mating call of the same bird. Different leaves, different trees, different forests, but we’re assembling it all right here.

The ontological thought experiment now requires us to open the door of the caretaker’s cottage. We do so. We look around, and there’s nary a tombstone in sight. It’s a beautiful morning, a bright sunny day, and the information is back where it belongs, it’s in the computer.