Re: Ontology and Physics
On Wednesday 21 June 2006 08:09, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Rob,
>
> There is no conflict whatever between those goals:
> > I know you want a collection of low-level microtheories
> > John. And you must know I want a different perspective
> > on the problem, an emergent perspective.
The solution I am suggesting is more explanatory. By Kolmogorov/Chaitin it
will also be the most compact (because it only enumerates what is
incompressible.)
If more explanatory and compact are better, then your statement that "there is
no evidence that anybody else has a clue about how to do any better" is not
true.
> First of all, engineers and scientists have been using
> mathematical theories for centuries. And they work fine.
> All I'm saying is that there's a good reason why they work:
> they are good approximations to important aspects of the
> world for important applications.
No enumeration of cognitive (or linguistic) structure has been complete enough
to "work fine" in any meaningful sense of the word. The problem is bigger in
AI. That is why our Newtonian aeroplanes are useful, but our AI isn't.
> Second, emergent phenomena are also described by theories.
> Whatever new theories are discovered, there is one fact
> that is guaranteed to be true: they will all be in that
> infinite lattice of all possible theories.
>
> Remember that it's infinite. And it has all possible
> combinations. Anything that can ever be discovered or
> ever will be discovered is already there.
The theory I am suggesting doesn't try to be a way of describing the world. It
limits itself to describing ways of finding ways of describing the world. As
a result it is not limited by the same completeness issues.
That is better than trying to hunt down necessary incompleteness by the brute
force of enumerating infinities (not possible anyway, because the heart of
incompleteness is that many theories represent contradictory perspectives,
and it is thus not meaningful to imagine them existing at the same time.)
-Rob