SUO: RE: Lifecycle Integration Schema
Dear Jon,
See comments below.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
> Sent: 05 September 2003 14:10
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE; SUO
> Subject: 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,
MW: Agreed.
> 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.
MW: Not sure what this means.
>
> 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.
MW: Sure, we never (well at least rarely) have all the information
about anything.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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