SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 14
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
I am going to graft this bit back into the LIS thread,
as I am by nature a 1-track mind and all these issues
are already too entangled for me to track them apart.
JA: So I think I have a way of understanding the statement that
a state is just a complex property of a system. Some people
will call that system-thing the "reified system".
MW: It is that which takes on the state.
JA: Yes, the picky point that I think some people are trying
to make is that the data of experience or the results of
measurement are what we really have on hand, whereas the
system-thing is in the bush, as it were, at some remove
from immediate impressions, the object of possibly many
competing hypotheses that we form to explain why the
data are as they are.
MW: I'm not one of them, as you have probably guessed.
As noted below you can have any individual object
you want as long as you can demonstrate it has
a spatio-temporal extent.
JA: Yes, I have no qualms about pretending a hypothesis here
and there, but the question is whether the specifics of
a given hypothesis explain the data better than the many
competing alternatives. This is a stricter test than
demonstrating mere consistency or the projection of
a possible extension in space and time.
JA: Morever, data can vary widely with changes among different bases
or frames of reference, whereas real objects are associated with
functions that remain invariant through transformations from one
frame to another, so it is a non-trivial step to relate the data
to the object.
MW: You seem to have some idea that there are some "real" objects.
What do you consider these to be?
JA: I am working on the hypothesis that there is a reality.
I have not always been so realistic, but reality is
a persistent, if not always patient teacher, and
a sequence of recurring impressions of the type
that is commonly referred to as brute reactions,
the "dent" or "dint" of recalcitrant experience,
or just plain "hard knocks", have willme, nillme,
conduced me to adopt the hypothesis that there is
some kind of objective reality that produces these
impressions on my sphere of pathic, felt experience,
and which Reality or Nature ought to be my objective
to know better, if I have a clue what is good for me,
and so I am following out the consequences, practical
and theoretical, of that hypothesis, at least, until
some more viable alternative commands my attention.
MW: OK. I agree there is reality. I was thinking in terms that
the objects we discriminate relate to our theories of the world,
and they might be different, but they are still what we extract
from reality.
It is always a bit tricky to say this right. If we say "reality is just a concept",
that all of its objects are "concepts" or "constructs" or "fictions" or "hypotheses",
that is a scion of colloquy, a slip of loose talk that will eventually get us into
trouble if we, or most likely others, take it too literally. Better if we say
that our knowledge of things is conceived, constructed, pretended, preposed
to refer to a substance beneath the superfices that appear in experience,
moreover, that a great many of the signs that we use to convey and store
this knowledge are of an artificial proxy, in stead of a natural kind.
JA: After that, pretty much everything is up for grabs,
where to draw the boundaries that mutuantly define
the terms of "self" and "other", or more remotely,
"organism" and "environment", whether the spaces
of the boundary, the exterior, and the interior
split into many "objects" in the conventional
acceptance of the word, all that stuff I've
wondered about at different times, doing
my best to suspect the usual suspects,
and also to grill a few novel perps,
but things muddle up very quickly
after such clear beginnings,
as everyone is well aware.
Look, in my everyday life I operate on pretty much the same set
of "un-reflective folk assumptions" (URFA) that we all know and
love and hate under the dublious mis-monicker of "common sense".
But when it comes to research oriented scientific ontologies or
your average upper-level technical ontologies, especially of an
order that we'd like to get computers to obey, then a different
regime and a whole new order of regimen succeeds on the scene.
In that setting, one is well advised to look back on how things went
at similar sorts of critical junctures in the lifecycles of numerous
other sciences that have already run this gauntlet in auld lang syne.
Just by way of an object example from systems engineering,
you know that the problem of "system identification" is a
non-trivial wicket, that the "object system", in the bush,
is in general sorely under-determined by the data on hand.
Still it moves, and we have to keep track of it somehow.
Jon Awbrey
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