Re: Fwd: SUO Quo Vadis
> ... while some other human concepts may be contradictory
> to that reality (or "softly" saying, - inconsistent
> with the reality).
There many very complex issues buried in that statement,
and I'd just like to recommend some reading material that
begins to scratch the surface of some of them:
1. Regarding physical reality, I recommend the book
_The Road to Reality_ by Roger Penrose (available for
$40 at Amazon). That is an 1100-page tome that covers
the full range of modern physics without leaving out
the math. For anyone who studied math and physics many
years ago and forgot most of it, this is an excellent
refresher and a highly stimulating synthesis of the
whole field. Penrose's conclusion, in short, is that
we are very far from a complete "theory of everything"
and whatever reality may be, it's not likely to be
anything like anything that anybody has ever imagined.
2. Regarding our deepest "human" nature, my best recommendation
would be to study animals. They exhibit "human" nature in
its most basic form -- in both its good and bad aspects.
The two species most closely related to Homo Sapiens, which
reflect our best aspects (empathy, altruism, kindness) and
our worst (aggression, revenge, cruelty, and even murder),
are the chimpanzees and the bonobos. There's a highly readable
(no math) book, _Our Inner Ape_ by Frans de Waal, which has
many good stories and insightful comparisons of human behavior
to the chimps and bonobos. It presents two views of how
humans without language might behave -- probably somewhere
between the highly aggressive chimps who have a competitive
patriarchical society and the "laid back" bonobos who live
in a matriarchical society where they "make love not war".
So if you want to know what humans without logic would be like,
I suggest that you study the chimps and bonobos. They are very,
very human in many ways. But they have no math -- nothing remotely
resembling the achievements discussed in Penrose's book -- and
they have no computers, no machines, no literature, no religion,
no government, no corporations, no banking system, and no taxes.
But they certainly do have war, and de Waal quotes Jane Goodall,
who said that if chimps had knives and guns, they'd use them.
In short, all our emotions and feelings are very ape-like, and
logic enables us to pursue our emotional inclinations -- for
both good and evil -- far more efficiently than any ape.
With regard to ontology and its applications to computer systems,
I'd also recommend two of my papers:
1. A review and analysis of the limitations of logic and the
various attempts to implement and use logic-based ontologies:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf
The Challenge of Knowledge Soup
2. A summary of various issues related to logic, ontology, and
their applications to reasoning and language:
http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/theories.htm
Theories, Models, Reasoning, Language, and Truth
Both of these papers are written for apes like us who have language
and logic and are trying to find ways of using them effectively.
John Sowa