>which is to say "the collection of all ways to relate an object to other objects is isomorphic to the object itself".
That reminds me of the time someone explained attributes in terms of relationships, using Magic: The Gathering as an example. In MtG, you have a player's creatures attacking the other player. Some of the flying ability, which means they can only be blocked by flying creatures. You can express that as "may only be blocked by creatures with this ability".
There are also (a few) creatures can that can only be blocked and can only block flying creatures (which is not as good as flying), which you can express as "my only block or be blocked by creatures with the ability A", where A is the self-referential description of flying.
I imagine you can stack it further and replace "player", "attack", and so on with some other relational/self-referential definition.
That reminds me of the time someone explained attributes in terms of relationships, using Magic: The Gathering as an example. In MtG, you have a player's creatures attacking the other player. Some of the flying ability, which means they can only be blocked by flying creatures. You can express that as "may only be blocked by creatures with this ability".
There are also (a few) creatures can that can only be blocked and can only block flying creatures (which is not as good as flying), which you can express as "my only block or be blocked by creatures with the ability A", where A is the self-referential description of flying.
I imagine you can stack it further and replace "player", "attack", and so on with some other relational/self-referential definition.