Directions For SUO: Monolithicity & Cyc
John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> We are now in the position of the snake
> that has swallowed the elephant. A lot
> of digesting must be done before the snake
> is able to move. The first task is to analyze
> the current Cyc upper ontology in order to decide
> what it means, whether it is appropriate for our needs,
> and how it might be used.
>
> John Sowa
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Just another random comment to everyone in particular,
but I just feel that we are about to become victims
of our own ill-chosen meatphors. Even besides the
fact that I can scarcely pronounce "monolithicity",
I think that it is a bad idea to get so fixated
on the rock, and whether it is, or ought to be,
One or Many -- now there's an original issue!
Many, not all, of the voices that I have been hearing lately --
I mean the ones that come from the direction of the SUO source --
seem to be confusing what ought to be recognized as two questions,
and thereby recycling a lack of resolution into a reverberant howl:
1. How many monoliths do we gather around, almost as if to worship?
2. How many tribes of essentialist apes are admitted to the church?
Just because we acknowledge the necessity, in the physical sciences,
of putting the "frame of reference" and "participant observer" back
into our picture of the world, that did not split the cosmos itself
into just so many manic fragments, and it does not lead to any sort
of infinite regress just because the picture that we associate with
the phrase about "putting the picturer into the picture" appears to
mislead us into thinking that's what we are talking about sometimes.
It was exactly for this reason that thinkers such as Michael Polanyi,
a generation ago, adopted the formalism of "overlapping neigborhoods"
from the theory of manifolds as a metaphor to depict the overlapping
domains of concern, duty, expertise, interest, reponsibility, and so
on, that are seen in any reasonably complex and cosmopolitan society.
http://www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi
http://www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9601/philo.html
http://www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9601/contents.html
I think that we ought to think about this just a little bit,
and quit confounding a diversity of perspective -- is there
any perspective at all without at least two eyes? -- with a
very different issue, the vastening variety of being itself.
Also Sprach Zerothustra,
Jon Awbrey
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