SUO: RE: RE: RE: On the relevance of EXPRESS, EPISTLE, etc. to SUO -- RE: RE: RE: Some Procedural Suggestions
Dear Phil,
See (brief) responses below.
Regards
Matthew
============================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management
Shell Services International
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929
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E-mail: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com
http://www.shellservices.com/
============================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip Jackson [mailto:phil.jackson@computer.org]
> Sent: 13 February 2001 03:00
> To: West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK; Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: RE: RE: On the relevance of EXPRESS, EPISTLE, etc. to SUO
> -- RE: RE: RE: Some Procedural Suggestions
>
>
> Dear Matthew,
>
> > > PJ: It could be interesting and worthwhile in terms of
> understanding
> > > limitations and potentials for future development, to explore
> > > the question
> > > in terms of the component concepts "life" and "the universe":
> > >
> > > How would you represent the concept "Life" in EPISTLE? More
> > > specifically,
> > > how would EPISTLE represent the various senses of the word
> > > "life" that are
> > > defined, e.g., in WordNet?
> >
> > MW: Sorry I'm not familiar with WordNet. However, anything that
> > is living is
> > a spatio-temporal extent (a piece of space time). "Living"
> is a class that
> > some pieces of space time are members of, and any of the
> other senses of
> > "life" that WordNet has would be treated similarly. In
> essence it is the
> > population that defines the meaning, though there is no
> problem about
> > backing that up with axioms that apply to members of the class.
>
> PJ: WordNet is described at
> http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/. In case
> they are interesting in bringing out different aspects of
> EPISTLE, here are
> the definitions of different senses for the word "life" from
> WordNet 1.6:
>
> 1. a characteristic state or mode of living, "social life",
> "city life",
> "real life"
> 2. the experience of living, the course of human events and
> activities. "he
> could no longer cope with the complexities of life"
> 3. the course of existence of an individual; the actions and
> events that
> occur in living. "he hoped for a new life in Australia"; "he
> wanted to live
> his own life without interference from others".
> 4. the condition of living or the state of being alive.
MW: This is the sense that EPISTLE would give life. What we have is Class of
Organism. Life (or probably living object) would be an instance of this.
> "while there's life
> there's hope." "life depends on many chemical and physical processes".
> 5. the period during which something is functional (as
> between birth and
> death). "the battery had a short life". "he lived a long and
> happy life".
> 6. the period between birth and the present time. "I have
> known him all his
> life."
> 7. the period from the present until death. "he appointed
> himself emperor
> for life."
> 8. a living person. "his heroism saved a life".
> 9. animation and energy in action or expression. "it was a
> heavy play and
> the actors tried in vain to give life to it."
> 10. living things collectively. "the oceans are teeming with life."
> 11. the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from
> nonliving ones. "there's no life on the moon".
> 12. an account of the series of events making up a person's life.
> 13. a motive for living. "pottery was his life".
MW: I don't propose to go through all the other uses of "life", usually in
conjunction with other words. Enough to say that you would have to do the
analysis of what class the sense referred to, and which spatio-temporal
extents would be members of those classes. The EPISTLE Core Model does not
deal with linguistic niceties, it deals only with senses/classes. It allows
multiple representations of those senses with different character strings,
which themselves can be classified as to language etc.
>
> [...]
>
> PJ: Thanks very much for your discussion of my questions about
> representations for "universe", which I have elided since I
> have no further
> questions, at least for the moment.
>
> > > More
> > > broadly, how
> > > would EPISTLE represent the concept of a "multiverse" as
> > > postulated in the
> > > "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics?
> >
> > MW: I am not familiar with this, so either you can deduce how to
> > do it from
> > what I have already said, or you need to give me a more detailed
> > description.
>
> PJ: I think that you have indicated at least the direction
> for your answer
> to this with your discussion of alternate universes. For an
> interesting
> discussion of the concept of multiverse, see David Deutsch's
> "The Fabric of
> Reality" -- he gives a very persuasive argument for the
> existence of the
> multiverse, based on the two-slit experiment in quantum
> mechanics... It is a
> fascinating, thought-provoking book...
>
> PJ: It seems that the representation of concepts from quantum
> theory could
> (at least eventually) be an interesting area for ontology -- how to
> represent quantum interference between alternate universes,
> how to represent
> entities that are both waves and particles, etc...
MW: What I read of Superstring Theory suggests that unification is possible,
and interestingly comes back to objects that fit nicely (to my mind) in a
spatio-temporal extent model.
>
> Regards,
>
> Phil Jackson
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