SUO: Encapsulation Versus Entanglement (EVE)
#%%THIS%%%#%%%IS%%%%#%%%NOT%%%#%%%%A%%%%#%%FRAME%%#
Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:
>
> In John Sowa's post of 24 Aug with the above subject-line
> (in response to Mike Uschold and posted under James Schoening's name)
> he wrote:
>
> > Oh, no! I wasn't thinking at all about formalizing the
> > SUO purpose statements. I considered them to be at a very
> > high metametametalevel where natural language is necessary
> > because it is "sufficiently vague" that people can discuss
> > plans and projects at a level where no one really knows
> > what the likely outcome will be.
>
> In my post of 24 Aug (as also repeated by James Schoening),
> with subject-line "SUO: A fabric of many threads", I introduced
> a SUO-like project which has already advanced, via what I described
> as a lengthy "demand/supply dialectic", considerably further than that
> "vague" state and much more clearly indicates the "likely outcome",
> to the extent that it has already formalized a "SUO Scope and Purpose"
> to a considerable degree.
>
> Thus that post rather abstractly described "MACK",
> the "Mainstream Architecture for Common Knowledge"
> (as at present being implemented in the "Metaset"
> boot or seed product), and affirmed as follows:
>
<...>
Christopher,
I apologize for fraying your many-threaded text this way,
but until I can get a chance to catch up with my reading,
this MACK the Nice that you speak of will still be a bit
of an opaque box to me, and if it is destined to be your
propriety product, then it may once and future remain so,
like the tech-style of that Old School TI that I once had,
that the Texicans wanted to keep secret, and so they did.
But I did want to try and tease out a number of threads
that sound a bit familiar to me, if I pluck them aright.
One of them that I can almost grasp seems to start about here:
> A truly generic technology to help formulate and meet the needs of others
> should be able to address its own needs. It would thus provide for the
> gradual process of those needs' formalization, refinement and elaboration
> in reliably-usable architected terms.
>
> Thus, as mentioned above, the Metaset/MACK project has already advanced
> considerably along that path, to the extent that the present formalization
> is the integrated driver of Metaset.
>
> That also largely explains why the initial Metaset product is called a
> Boot or Seed product. It is designed to be self-leveraging in that way,
> exploiting for its own evolution the creativity, energy and eventual
> directedness, in so many ways, of the wider market.
Now here you seem to be talking about system within a system,
a play within a play, that mimes to scale the scene at large.
What comes to mind here is that other Max, the World Wide Weber,
who wrote of the way that our accounting systems function like
icons of the world that they are designed to help us deal with,
right up to the point where they get set up as en-graven idols,
and, consequently, cease to work, effectively or transparently.
So, I am led to wonder: How can we avoid these forms of idolization,
ossification, and petrification in the cybernet images that we design?
> Technologically, self-leveraging requires self-referencing, or what is
> often called reflectivity, and MACK, as related in the above-mentioned
> post, has that quality (along with many other qualities!) in terms of
> an effectively axiomatized logical construct that this list would call
> an ontology.
What is the relation between (1) reflecting on our practical conduct,
(2) becoming to that degree able to critique it, correct it, and even
disengage from it, (3) creating an image of that conduct that we might
treat very like an indifferent object system, (4) entering into one of
those propositional attitudes toward it that enables us to call it "it",
(5) taking up an intentional stance that all the world knows as "meta-"?
> The Uschold/Sowa dialog continued:
> >
> > > These are more interesting points and examples. However, they do not
> > > shed any light on the question of whether you are arguing for the SUO
> > > purpose statements that we are discussiong to be formalized.
> >
> > What I was talking about was something like the lattice of
> > all possible theories, in which each theory would have something
> > like the Java beans reflection information so that both people
> > and machines could check the assumptions about how the theory
> > is intended to be used.
>
> MACK goes further than that in its reflectivity. But possibly
> in rather a different way. I know Java is only used as an example
> there, but as it happens I have often found it necessary to distinguish
> MACK's reflectivity strongly from that of Java Beans or Java's so-called
> introspection. Reflectivity has to assume that it is looking at something
> relevant, but from the MACK point of view, Java'a application decomposition
> and recomposition approach all too often produces a very poor "equivalent"
> of reality.
This is beginning to look like where I came in ...
enough to make me go back and refine the title ...
> More generally, my long-standing criticism of classical OO's "island class"
> approach (the latter being Grady Booch's words) is that it often very poorly
> provides for the interconnectedness of reality that semantic webs or conceptual
> graphs are trying to capture.
Ay, there's the rub ...
And now I can dub it with a name of my own:
It usually arises in the guise of a trade-off
between the "modular architectronic tile" (MAT)
and the "triadically irreducible relation" (TIR),
between the sorts of chunkiness that we wish all the
world would fall into, for the sake of making the job
of programming all that much easier, and the un-sorts
of tangles that the real world un-cysts to tie us into.
Now here is where I know very little -- except that, whatever it is,
I run into this problem all of the time while working in a Peircean
framework, where it seems like most of the generically interesting
and genuinely useful sign relations are almost all TIR's and no MAT's.
But it may be just that I have so little experience with the proper
forms of composition for triadic relations that I cannot see where
the joints ought to be.
Does anybody else run into a problem like this?
> The problem is even inherent in conventional OO's encapsulation
> imperative, and there are other ways of achieving the always-necessary
> "complexity-hiding" that encapsulation aims for. Such criticisms - and
> associated predictions - have long been proven very valid, as I related
> in my earlier post. Now, in such complex areas as we are treading with
> the very concept of a SUO, bold yet confirmed predictions may be regarded
> as probably quite significant, and at least partly indicative of a correct
> high-level view.
>
> I apologize for such smugness (and I admit again that I am not
> taking John's reference to Java as he had intended it), but I do
> think that we must see that the reflectivity that we are looking for -
> which of course goes far beyond an integrated and canonically-expressed
> Scope and Purpose! - has to be very much better than some current models
> of reflectivity seem to allow.
It might be helpful, to me anyway, if you could "compare and contrast"
the features of the available or current models with the features of
the desired or ideal models.
True story: I was sitting onetime in my Model Theory class
when the prof asks, "Now, where do these models come from?"
My answer was, of course, "The modeling agency."
> I think I can even go further and assert that MACK's reflectivity is
> more pertinently useful than that of conventional Higher-Order Logics.
Once again, I think that a "compare and contrast" exercise might be of use.
> So I have made the opportunity (albeit rather twistedly...)
> to try to emphasize once again that MACK is something very
> different and could well be worth this list's more serious
> attention. And that is despite some aspects in my proposal
> that will at first sight seem rather way-out.
Yes, but are they way-out enough?
> So at this stage may I recommend another consideration
> of my earlier post? And since it went out when there was
> a problem with the list-server, it is also possible that
> some of you may have missed it. So I repeat: it was on
> 24 Aug, under James Schoening's name, with subject-line:
> A fabric of many threads.
>
> Best regards,
> Christopher
Ditto,
Jon
#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%Jon#Awbrey%%%#