SUO: Re: Proposed SUO Content Outline
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Fred,
I extend my reply to your note of a couple of days ago.
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Fred Chase wrote:
>
> Thank you, Jon and Chris, for working with my posting.
>
> Below I'm expanding a little on what I said, in light
> of your comments. (And no doubt further exposing the
> unevenness in my understanding of our subject.)
>
> I was trying to further affirm the notion that, distasteful and
> complexifying though it may be, it will be essential for us to
> provide a place for theories, causal bubbles, axiomatizations,
> alternative courses, views, domains of interest (DOIs), viewpoints,
> or whatever they be termed which offer some sort of isolation one
> from another. (I recognize that some of these may be fundamentally
> different from others.)
"Point of View" (POV) was always good enough for me --
I will just leave Bobby McGee to speak for her self --
Perhaps you missed all my onetime sloganizing about:
"What is the geometry of the space whose points are views?"
Some how the image of a lead zeppelin comes to mind.
But here are some of the languishing links, any how:
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I am wondering if it is possible to embody our ontologies
within a conceptual framework in which, just for starters,
the maximal number of the following sorts of relationships
among interpretive options and ontological/conceptual terms
are permitted and supported by the system:
<Option 1> : "activity" -<- "process"
<Option 2> : "process" -<- "activity"
<Option A> : "activity" -<- "activity class"
<Option B> : "activity occurrence" -<- "activity"
By "maximal number" I mean that each agent, interpreter, user,
or whatever is constrained only by the requirement of logical
consistency among his/her/its choices.
I think that something like this, at least, will be required
if we want to realize that old dream of Leibniz that started
this business -- to devise a common medium for resolving our
disputes and our misunderstandings through a computationally
effective means.
Anyway, that's what I rechnen.
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00728.html
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The theme running through the last two subsections, that associates
different interpreters and different aspects of interpretation with
different kinds of relational structures on the same set of points,
heralds a topic that will be developed extensively in the sequel.
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00729.html
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I would like to follow up on the earlier remarks
that I made along the general lines of this thread:
[Quote First Note]
Now, I know that this seems like a hopeless task, bound to lead
to all sorts of confusion, but I think that most of us already
function in the midst of a similar chaos, and yet, over time,
we do learn to sort it out reasonably enough, more or less,
and so there is hope that we can devise similar capacities
in formal terms and even implement them in computer media.
For example, I refer you to the cases of the "sign relations"
A and B that I outlined at the outset of the "Sign Relations"
thread. Rudimentary as it is, this is a germinal example of
a very important property of certain linguistic expressions,
one that is exhibited by all "natural languages" that I ever
heard tell of, and one that is very relevant to our present
circumstances. This is the "interpreter-indexing" (I-I)
property of certain signs, expressions, texts, theories,
corpi, oeuvres, works, lives, or whatever, where one has
to know who's talking in order to know what's being said.
Thus, we commonly have situations like this:
A : "i" = "A"
A : "u" = "B"
B : "i" = "B"
B : "u" = "A"
And yet, short of being caught between the bases
of a "who's on first" routine, people seldom get
confused at all by all of this I-I business.
It is in respect of this I-I property that we can expect
each particular person that is participating in the activity
of a discussion to maintain a sensible "point of view" (POV),
as critiqued internally, without requiring everyone to speak
the same "languange" (even within the same natural language),
or even to share the same conceptual/syntactic framework.
So, the Big Questions are:
1. How do we manage to do this, and can we teach it to a rock?
2. What is the geometry of this space, whose points are views?
[ A glossy etymology on the theme of a rock:
| 'silicon' <- Latin: 'silex' = flint, quartz, pebble; akin to
| 'shell' <- Greek: 'skallein' to hoe, to rake, to scrape;
| 'Scylla'? -- Nah, now I'm just guessing ...
]
Happy Peirce's Birthday, Everybody! [September 10]
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00731.html
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I am still in the process of trying to figure out
what Adam's view on "higher-arity relations" is,
and so I will reserve my comments on that until
such time as I come to understand what it is.
I had thought that my analogy with different
numeral systems for the same set of numbers
was pretty apt -- or so I reckoned at the
time. I am at a loss what to say next,
so I will wait for furher information.
Just as a hypothesis -- you understand --
I am beginning to think that I detect a slight
difference in attitude toward notational systems,
representational frameworks, and syntax in general.
For me, when the syntax gets in the way
of thinking clearly about the objects,
then the syntax has to change.
I used to be a fan of frame'n'slot systems
back in the days when I could recognize them
as revivals of some really good ideas from
both Frege and Peirce -- anything that these
two could agree on has just gotta be Good! --
namely Frege's "poly-unsaturated sentences"
and Peirce's "rhemes or rhemata". However,
the ways these representations have fallen
into lately I just no longer see much trace
of the originally good ideas left in them.
Some of the earliest projects that led me into AI
had to do with finding default fillers for frames --
but the many years that I spent on this led me into
other approaches, other directions, other solutions.
From my present point of view, one of the chief and
the most adverse factors that just keeps on killing
"artificial intelligence based on logic" (AIBOL) is
the "circumstantial and inescapable nuisance" (CAIN)
of the fact that the real world just has to keep on
changing, and, partly as a consequence, that agents
of interpretation just have to keep on enterprising
to view it from many diverse perspectives. Hence,
the main theme of the work that marked my transition
into Systems Engineering, "the problem of dealing with
change and diversity in logic-based intelligent systems".
Having spent the last decade or so working to resurrect AIBOL
from that early grave, the one to which the "frame-problem" --
no relation, or is it? -- seemed to have consigned it long ago,
and, incidentally, having seen the necessity of working out the
form of this geometry whose points are views, I feel that I have
learned one or two things in the meantime, if nothing else, about
a host of approaches that I have tried before and found wanting.
I will not pass that way again,
End of Lecture (EOL),
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01541.html
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Was sind und was sollen die "TWEAKSen"?
I did not like the sound of my own ceration, at least, not at at first,
so much sibilance at the starts and the suffixes of the sounds to suffer,
but I am beginning to get used it, bit by bit, and pershap there is even
some sort of subconscious sophistication that is being insinuated within
the aspect of its circumstantial declension, that is to say, a case for
its inflection that makes even the sense of its singular sound plural.
Still, I had some further reservations. I confess to being just a little
bit suspicious of any story that invokes the "elements", as if by way of
some pathetic fallacy, to shore up its caissons for what must be, in any
case, already underwater when it sets to its "work on foundations" (WOF).
But then I remembered that a topology is just a collection of sets that
are called "open" by stipulation -- or "shut", if you force the case --
and so this interval of reflection has restored my equanimity about it.
And yes, I will go with this e-notion,
And let the chips fall where they may,
For prolonging that inevitable schism
May yet be the dedekindest cut of all.
Up until now, I have been accustomed to asking this question in the form:
"What is the geometry of those spaces whose points are views?"
But geometry is so earthbound that it conveys a distorted impression,
and the overwhelming gravity of the euclidean catechism -- that all of us
suffered, in our most formative years, to have dinned into our suppleness --
well, it impedes the subtle "form of levity" (FOL) and the demi-urgent EMF
that we need to get off our axioms, and to leave the ground, which means to
loose the surly bonds that bind us to our seeming need for ceratin grounds.
Exercise for the Reader:
Try to imagine that -- just fora while -- we leave off trying
to decide the "one right way", as Goethe put it, and just try
to describe the current situation as it is, I mean, the state
of affairs in which everyone has his or her or its pet theory
of the world, and just try to muse about what it would demand,
what kind of language would it require to represent this very
sort of situation? This is just the "Dream of Leibniz" (DOL),
deja vu all over again, but still, you have to ask yourself:
"Why are we still so vastly far from its actual realization?"
"Why do I have to ask myself that!?", you ask? It is a part
of the exercise. You may, as always, choose not (not choose?)
to accept the assignment. That's an axiom for all it's worth.
But I would not disavow all knowledge of your actions,
that is, if I were you.
More, Later,
Jon Awbrey
Incidental Musings:
[ ceration?
| cerate = an unctious preparation.
| L: ceratum = wax salve; cera = wax.
]
http://www-math.sci.kun.nl/math/werkgroepen/gmfw/bronnen/dedekind1.html
http://www.thoralf.uwaterloo.ca/htdocs/scav/dedek/dedek.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01873.html
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Questions that have arisen lately, on the themes of development,
differentiation, and diversity among our ontologies, not to mention
disagreement, dispersion, and discord among our perspectives on them,
lead me to replay this note that I sent to John Sowa early last summer,
thematizing an approach that I have been endeavoring to develop, a little
something that I like to think of as "analytic differential ontology" (ADO).
> Subject: Ontology & Process
> Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 14:30:33 -0400
> From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
> To: John F Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
>
> #%%THIS%%%#%%%IS%%%%#%%%NOT%%%#%%%%A%%%%#%%FRAME%%#
>
> To John Sowa:
>
> Recent mentions of "process ontology" on the CG-list
> have brought me back to related questions that I have
> been working on for some time, from a slightly different
> perspective, perhaps. I am concerned with the questions
> of "difference in ontology", or "differential ontology",
> including as special studies the issues of diversity and
> change in the ontologies that different observers adopt.
> Some of these questions are:
>
> Is there a reasonable framework or a language for talking
> about "the geometry of the space whose points are views",
> including the working ontologies that go with each and
> every observer's/interpreter's "point of view" (POV)?
>
> Can we put the "chiasmatic commutator" to work on the
> issue of process ontology -- turning the question around,
> from asking about the "ontology of process" to asking about
> the "process of ontology" -- that is, asking what sorts of laws,
> if any, govern the dynamics of change in people's ontologies,
> in other words, in the conceptual frameworks that people use
> to posit their various ontological hierarchies?
>
> My personal approach to these sorts of questions, since the
> complexities of the overlaid and shifting meta-perspectives
> are enough to overwhelm a person at first, has been to stake
> out an initial base camp at that simplest level of ontology
> and conceptual framework that I can imagine, without being
> completely trivial, the world of "zeroth order logic",
> propositional calculus, truth table semantics, venn diagrams,
> in short, the "alpha" part of Peirce's Existential Graphs.
>
> This has certainly been a big enough bite to chew on for a while,
> given the difficulties of the NP-complete satisfiability problems
> that arise, but I have been able to devise an efficient and powerful
> enough extension of Peirce's basic syntax, along with a workable enough
> implementation of basic computational tools for using this representation,
> that I have been able to begin contemplating the "differential extension"
> of propositional calculus -- in fact, one of the surprises of the whole
> development is that not a few of Peirce's original ideas almost seemed
> to demand this sort of extension.
>
> [ Note: I think that the most general name for this in mathematics
> | is the "De Rham Extension", and I have begun to look into this,
> | but it is really just what you do when you add differential forms
> | to analytic geometry. All in all, I am just exploiting the analogy
> | betweeen Propositional Calculus, as a study of functions B^n -> B,
> | and Real Analysis, as a study of functions R^n -> R, and asking:
> | What is the proper form of differential and integral calculus that
> | goes with Prop Calc (Sentential Logic)?
> ]
>
> I guess I could be taken as posing the thesis here that one way to
> approach the problem of talking about change and diversity in these
> logical, ontological, or qualitative realms might just be to start by
> looking at what worked in the more quantitative domains of analysis and
> physics. Of course, it is not likely that everything will turn out to be
> exactly the same, and one must be willing to tolerate a number of surprises.
>
> #%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%%%%#%%%%%%Jon#Awbrey%%%#
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg00072.html
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I could go on, and on, but then, you already knew that about me.
> The kinds of DOIs I had in mind include the following examples,
> though I'm not sure all all of these are suitable for an IEEE SUO,
> or for a chunk that can be merged into an IEEE SUO.
>
> 1a. The Euclid/Hilbert geometry including the
> uniqueness-of-parallels postulate.
>
> 2b. The Bolayi/Lobachevsky/Hilbert geometry which
> postulates that through a point not on a line,
> there is more than one line parallel to that line.
These are good catalysts for inspiring analogical thinking,
much in the way that I take projective geometry as a basis
for my own thinking about "theory as point of view" (TAPOV),
but if you take the geometry literally then all of it is
pretty well-worked-over, with a favorite way of proving
relative consistency being to construct a model of each
geometry inside each of the others, and so on. Still,
all of this classical gas can be extremely suggestive.
> Of interest here is that these DOIs
> are variants with a large common corpus,
> including
>
> | For any two different points,
> | there is exactly one line
> | containing these points.
You have probably observed, that when it comes to points of view,
an unlimited number of lines can be spun between any two of them.
> It probably isn't a good idea to
>
> a) use a slew of separate ontology terms
> to create two versions of the elements
> of this common corpus nor to
>
> b) use a quantifier on all of the common corpus.
>
> 2a. The law of the conservation of momentum in an
> inertial (non-accelerated) frame of reference.
>
> 2b. The lack of conervation of momentum stated with
> respect to a non-inertial frame of reference.
Again, physics is a prolific source of many suggestive analogies --
we can get a lot of mileage by cranking the chiasmatic commutator
or the exchange relation between the "Theory of Dynamics" (T(D))
and the "Dynamics of Theory" (D(T)), and this is precisely why
I have been pursuing these very figures of speech so doggedly
in my "Differential Logic & Dynamic Systems" work.
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> 3a. The current-but-classical biological/organism hierarchy
> of Kingdom/Phylim/Class/Order/Family/Genus/Species.
>
> 3b. A putative competing DOI based on genetic "distance".
>
> For example, it may be that, in a genetic DOI,
> the notion that a Fish is a Gilled, Finned,
> lives-in-the-water subclass of cold-blooded
> vertebrates will need to be modified.
>
> 4a. One reality.
>
> 4b. An alternative reality.
>
> I was not suggesting that paraconsistent logic or
> probabilistic reasoning or non-demonstrative forms
> of inference be used. (I've not read about them.)
With respect to what various people have their "habits and traditions" (HAT's)
of calling "approximate", "contingent", "empirical", "inexact", "non-apodictic",
"non-demonstrative", "probable" kinds or modes or styles or types of reasoning --
not to mention several other choice names that I have chosen not to list here --
well, you most likely know a little bit more beyond not having read the names,
as "abductive reasoning" is just another name for "diagnosis", "guessing",
"hypothesizing", and so on, while "inductive reasoning", having abdicated
the Arthurian Siege, the Damocletian Throne, and the Promethean Resort,
the very plancks and platforms of initiative and risk, to those pluckier
knacks of the abductive guild -- at least, this is how Perseans set their
schemes upon that Chair So Perilous -- this leaves induction to clean up the
mess that is left behind, in that conscientious and dutiful Epimethean manner,
after the party and the shouting and the shooting is over, wearily to count the
crumbs and to reckon up the fit thing to say when it comes time for the Epilogue.
In brief, inductive reasoning, to some, is just the art of the post hoc summation.
> I was rejecting the "Into the Sky"/"Into the Ground"
> dead-end that Jon Awbrey and Chris Menzel describe.
We all enjoy ceratin habits of thought, inborn or inbred, that lead us
to read some intrusion of our thus-borne automatic beliefs into a text --
we could not avoid this short of shying away from every ever-risky act
of interpretation itself -- but I believe that you have been a bit too
automatic in your reading of what I wrote last time. The point that I
was trying to make is precisely that, in order to deploy our deductive
reasoning, mechanized and modified and mortified and motivated, or not,
within that greater context of scientific inquiry -- what Peirce noted
as a three-phase cycle of inquiry that enjoinered abductive, deductive,
and inductive plancks of reasoning, most proto-typically in that order --
we cannot avoid these very sorts of crashes. It is the stratagematics
of approximation, error-correction, estimation, iteration, reiteration,
eternal recursion, and so on, therefore, to try and make these crashes
happen when the ground and the sky are still near enough by us that it
all just seems like a whole lot of dancing and jumping and skipping or
just plain walking. That is the way of the Peripatetic; get my drift?
> Rejecting it in favor of some sort of hack involving an
> isolation-of-consequences or scoping-of-names notion and
> implicitly asking that anyone who has some idea of how to
> do this step in and give the idea additional legitimacy
> (if it deserves it).
>
> -- Fred Chase
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Let me know if any of this is beginning to make sense
to you -- scary as I know that the very idea might be!
Jon Awbrey
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