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In some languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is less strict than in English, and even in common English, the distinction is not so clearly defined as we were taught to think in elementary school. For instance, take the noun "house;" well "house" is also the "thing the house does;" you can easily get away with saying "my housing is housing me," and to say "I would like to drink a drink" would not strike anyone as remarkable.

There is one such duality in particular I would like to draw attention to: exhibit, is both a noun, and a verb. For instance, a museum may host exhibits, and the exhibits themselves can exhibit some properties. I would like to play on this duality further.

By virtue of existing in physical or conceptual space, each and every item (or process) is a museum, which individuates itself through a process of selective revelation over time. An exhibit, we shall say, is some behavior or innate, observable property, which is indicative of an overarching pattern of behavior, or in the case of humans, a lifestyle.

I first developed the idea of a theory of museums when I was 18 years old, and I shared it with two of my closest friends. I had no knowledge of formal philosophy, but was an ardent fan of Alan Watts and Carl Jung, so in a way this is a Wattsian theory of individuation. The key Jungian idea here, is that each archetype is both a subtype of a larger motif, and a supertype of its individual exhibits and relationships between those exhibits.

The number of exhibits, number of visits, and number of relata assigned to each museum, are the key units of archetypal analysis in this program. I had initially posited (based on a loose hunch), that when the ratio between these numbers is 1:1:1 in a person's psyche, then the mental representation of any given type is more-or-less a perfect synonym for the type itself. However, as certain exhibits are disproportionately visited, or too few items are chosen to relate the concept to, the "cognitive prism" formed by these three dimensions becomes distorted, and the mental representation becomes a caricature of the entity's true being or essence - to use the technical word - its quiddity.

Now, the relata are formed through the unconscious assignment of "meta-tags;" basically mental or cosmic hyperlinks, which serve as cognitive shortcuts to other, related data. The difference in quiddity, or in other words the distance in concept space, of two data or sets of data, represents the amount of work required to coherently integrate the two items into a unified framework; in other words, the failure of analogy or metaphors between the two items to suffice. The less this distance is, the more their individuation leads them towards synonymization with one another; the technical way of phrasing this is to say that, the greater the intersection of meta-tags across two data-sets, the higher the propinquity between them becomes.

Now, each type, subtype, and supertype is representable as either a museum, exhibit, or meta-tag. In principle, meta-tags could be anything, and in principle we are unconscious of the majority of them. In addition to these entities: museums, exhibits, and meta-tags, there is another important key to the puzzle: stereotype. A stereotype, broadly speaking, is a semiotic version of the cognitive prism idea; rather than in the mind of an individual though, they represent the consensus-level representation of the relationship between a subtype and a supertype of a given type. I.e., if we think of the exhibits of a museum as tokens, then the supertype of the museum is the larger mereological structure in which it is embedded - for example, a community, hierarchy or heterarchy, network, geographical or cosmical space, etc.

The thesis here is that any conceivable object or process is representable as a museum, and sentient systems - organisms with what Freud would call a "superego," seek to curate the exhibits of museums unconsciously or otherwise. Humans, in particular, seek to perfect the stereotype of themselves, by either modifying their behavior, or by using various tactics to engineer and control the visitation of outsiders or modify the publics' processes of affiliation. Thus, the human situates itself in a social, theatrical, political, physical, cybernetic, and cosmic context either voluntarily or otherwise, and once it becomes self-aware of this tendency, it will seek control over the narrative surrounding itself.

Now, the notion of a "stereotype" is a bit of a loaded word, so let's unpack it a bit here. It is generally associated with persecution of various kinds; racism, sexism, etcetera. However, by a "stereotype," I mean an abstract archetype which marks an entity as distinct from rest of the universe/collective-unconscious, and thereby allows one to grasp its attributes and predicts its behavior by restricting attention from the set of all things to just the one thing. Stereotypes, in this case, are neither "true" nor "untrue;" they are transjective, and constantly evolving abstractions of concrete data points. Everything that allows one to reason about and generalize types is a stereotype; for instance, "cats have fur" is a stereotype; "guitars have more strings than ukeleles" is a stereotype. Typically, stereotypes that do not hold in the face of evidence are refined and replaced with more precise stereotypes; for instance, "men have XYY chromosomes" would become something like "a subset of men with [condition] tend to have an extra Y chromosome," and the stereotype can be as precise as pinpointing a single person.

However, when a specific entity no longer exhibits a property it once did, the stereotype changes entirely. It either evolves slowly, over time, or rather suddenly. It depends on the statistics we mentioned earlier.

Now, if you humor me for a second; I posit that museums with a relatively proportionate visit:exhibit ratio are more likely to be treated as stereotypes, whereas museums with a disproportionate ratio are more likely to be treated as meta-tags. I.e., meta-tags are more "vague" or "generic" than stereotypes. For instance, "bad" could be a meta-tag; it is so vague, as to be applied to nearly anything. We could even have different types of bad, "bad taste," "1bad" "badghqhrqwer," etc. The name doesn't really have to be coherent, and we shouldn't expect it to be, since the vocabulary of any given spoken language is, in all reality, vanishingly small in comparison to the number of stereotypes that sentient organisms actually form about the world around them. But, when you begin to dig in and get more specific, i.e. by saying "bad smell coming from a bin in the kitchen at 9:01 PM at [address] two days after taking out the garbage," the closer you get to specifying an actual, concrete entity rather than just some property that anything may or may not have. Now, it's entirely possible that the specified entity does not, in all actuality, exist; but, it exists in concept space; if it is specified verbally, it must inherently be both conceivable and conceived of, and thus it could potentially be common among more than one mind.

Selective revelation, then, in analogy with natural selection, is the process by which truth comes to be. It is the process by which fiction is erased, and the possible is made real, and the real is made actual. Without time, the idea of selective revelation becomes meaningless; revelation necessarily requires animation, which necessitates the passage of time. If the state of being of an entity does not change, and everything has been observed about it, then it cannot possibly be seen to exhibit new properties, and thus it is arguable that no new stereotype may form of it.