RE: SUO: Re: World's largest individual organism
Bill Burkett wrote
>It would make sense only if it were to be helpful in >communicating what
>our goals were. Surely that would be the
>only role of making the purpose formal.
When we are trying to formalize anything about the physical
world, the choice of representation always depends on some
stated or unstated purpose. Do you represent a chair as
a construction of wood and metal? Do you represent it as
an enormous buzz of interacting atoms? Do you represent it
as an object for human beings to sit on without considering
the details of its construction?
You can't represent any physical object without making some
choices for some purpose. That choice doesn't have to go
into the axioms at the lowest level, but it does have to go
into the metalevel. The only question is whether that metalevel
is an English comment that can only be understood by humans
or whether it is stated in some formal language that the
Kn. based system can also understand.
John Sowa