Re: lattice of ontology
Azamat,
This has *nothing* to do with the nature of the human
mind, and *everything* to do with the problems of mapping
any kind of discrete symbols by any kind of intelligent
agent -- human, chimpanzee, angel, or extraterrestrial --
to a continuous world.
> The particularity of human minds is our damnation....
Please dismiss that thought from your mind because it
confuses the issues.
The infinite lattice of theories, which is a purely abstract
mathematical structure, is the simplest kind of discrete
structure that has a prayer of a hope of a chance of being
adequate to capture the infinity of possible frames of
reference on a continuous physical system, such as the world.
The knowledge soup is mathematically inescapable whenever
you have a language made up of finite symbols that is being
related to a continuously variable world. There are an
uncountable infinity of mathematical structures that could
be used to describe the world, and the lattice of theories
is the simplest.
> Without a single unifying theory of reality organizing
> human knowledge, we can understand neither complex
> natural phenomena nor human minds nor emerging complex
> social and technological systems, including the Intelligent Web.
That is pure BS. People have been successfully understanding
the world and one another for thousands of years -- in the sense
that they have grown from a population of about 10,000 around
70,000 BC to over 6 billion today.
And they've done that without a single unifying theory.
The only people who have tried to enforce single unifying
theories are the fundamentalists -- Christians, Jews,
Muslims, Communists, Fascists, etc.
May God protect us from single unifying theories.
John