Re: Directions For SUO: Monolithicity & Cyc
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Christopher Spottiswoode wrote:
>
> Jon, and the list, if they will pardon my sudden re-eruption into their midst ...
>
> Bravo on this (and also for insisting -- so engagingly too --
> on your MAT/TIR conundrum, relativity and other essential matters): ...
Christopher,
I got my reward
in this success:
drawing you out
of mists beyond
into this midst.
With so many Ptolemies,
Re-eruption is welcome,
At least, periodically!
Cheers,
Jon
P.S. I had been planning to add to the brief below.
I had clean forgotten about Rawls and his use
of the very same Gedankenkreis from manifolds,
in his notions of "overlapping consensus" !!!
J.A.
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> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jon Awbrey" <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
> To: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
> Cc: <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>;
> "Christopher Spottiswoode" <cms@metaset.co.za>
> Sent: Tuesday, 13 March, 2001 20:45
> Subj: 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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