ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard, Mishtu, Stan, ...
Just for fun, let's throw the following ideas
into the mix of our epistemic embroglio, with
all of its prismatisms and prisonisms intact.
A recent discussion elsewhere reminded me of those themes
of how information and control, thought and action, were
intially born intertwined and were always meant to be
integrated in the ends of any agent or community.
Here is what we were talking about:
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I always used to call it the "controllability versus observability" trade-off.
But people also call it the "identification problem".
Arbib, in 'The Metaphorical Brain' (page 82):
| In other words, the "brain" (controller + identification procedure)
| interacts with the "environment" (which includes the body as well as
| external objects) on the basis of an internal model (the latest set of
| adaptation parameters), and 'its interactions must be designed to update
| its internal model as well as to change its relationship with the external
| world in some desired way'.
There are really three problems, "control", "estimation", and "identfication".
You can think of the last two as the short-term and long-term model of the world.
Arbib, in 'The Metaphorical Brain' (page 82):
| One would then have to design a strategy to trade off the loss of optimality
| we get by not having a very accurate estimate of the state parameters against
| the loss of optimality we get by having the controller relinquish control to
| the identification procedure from time to time.
|
| Arbib, Michael A.,
|'The Metaphorical Brain: An Introduction to Cybernetics
| as Artificial Intelligence & Brain Theory',
| Wiley-Interscience, New York, NY, 1972.
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So let me pull on that clue from Ashby about "intellectual amplifiers"
and twist it together with these notions respecting "adaptive control".
And then let us see how all of these ideas might bring us to transform
our epistemic diagrams, images of modeling, and conceptions of inquiry.
| If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified,
| it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be
| amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns
| do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better
| than the gene-pattern could have specified in detail. What is new is
| that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.
|
| W. Ross Ashby,
|'An Introduction to Cybernetics',
| Chapman & Hall, London, UK, 1956,
| Methuen & Company, London, UK, 1964,
| Section 14/7, Page 272.
Sounds like a plan to me!
When I try place these dualities within a 3-adic sign-relational framework,
I come up with the following, very provisional analysis -- okay, more like
a collection of associations:
| Determination
| (in 2 senses)
| o
| / \
| / \
| / \
| Observation o o Design
| / \ / \
| / \ / \
| / \ / \
| o o o
| Identification Estimation Control
| Identification Location Management
| Identification Instantiation Interaction
So, once again, I am led back to Peirce's notion of "determination"
as being the linchpin of it all.
Jon Awbrey
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