Re: lattice of ontology
hear hear!
On Jan 3, 2006, at 11:09 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> 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