Re: lattice of ontology
John wrote:
''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,
The statements taste as a mixture of exalted romantic humanism seasoned with
a piece of propaganda. In my heart, I have the like beliefs in the uniqeness
and self-sufficiency of human beings, particularity of human personality,
its creative spirit, mental potentialities. But reality is rather such as
the fundamental science shows, and the state of things are quite different
from our predilections, attitudes, and expectations.
The ontologically justified belief that all natural forces are mutually
related and that they are instantiations of one fundamental power-force
drived Faraday to experimentally uncover the relationships between light,
magnetism, electricity, heat, and even gravity, and so to lay down the
empirical foundation for modern physics. The motivation to unify all
physical phenomena drived Maxwell to formulate the electromagnetic field
theory as a single set of mathematical equations. That the unity of nature
is the most fundamental ontological principle had been eventually confirmed
by Einstein's field theory, not mentioning recent achievements in
theoretical physics.
Regardles our mental attitudes, cultural values, intellectual orientation,
religious beliefs, or persuasive rhetoric, the Great Science is marching
into comprehending all the phenomena of reality under a few universal
structure laws. The basic reason why ''People have been successfully
understanding the world'' consists in the ability to construct integrative
models of things.
The logic of things, not formal logic, is here very and very simple. The
unity of nature implies the unity of the world, while the unity of reality
implies a unified framework ontology.
Kind regards,
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
To: "Azamat" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>
Cc: <standard-upper-ontology@listserv.ieee.org>; <velman@COX.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 9:09 PM
Subject: 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
>
>