ONT Re: Sequential Interactions Generating Hypotheses
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
SIGH. Note 7
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
While we are reflecting on hypotheses that we run on,
many of which are so refractory that we may not have
reflected on them for a very long time, if ever, we
might reflect that a biological species is, in its
own right, a kind of hypothesis, a bit like this:
I guess that this code is fitted to this niche.
Now I do not think that anyone would imagine that
the "co-response" between a genetic code and its
environment is anything like the correspondence
between an object and its mirror image, so let
us not tie the word "correspondence" down to
such literal and 2-dimensional reflections.
In seeking to model the human mind, I have become convinced
that we must find a way to integrate empirical and rational
faculties, my senses of which I will explain as we go, but
I am sensitive to a paradox in saying this, as I would not
want to say that our empirical and rational faculties are
ever yet as well-integrated as we might hope them to be.
An empirical faculty must deal with experience as it comes,
toeing the line of the continuously updating data stream,
and hewing closely to realtime processing constraints.
A rational faculty has tenure, as it were, and can afford
to kick back and reflect on episodes beyond the immediate
crisis, and even to speculate on images of things as they
never were.
In their bearing on the present example, these reflections
tell us something about the sorts of methods that will tend
to be more fitted to the empirical versus the rational tasks.
Formal language theory, taken at the full, is generic enough
to cover just about everything that we are thinking of here,
but formal languages can also be used in a more literal way
to code sequences of occurrences as they happen, and this
way of using formal languages is very well suited to the
constraints of the empirical task. By "literal" I mean
that the codes in a formal language L can be read in a
one-to-one or "injective" fashion as icons or indices
of the objective occurrences that they thus denote.
The next order of business will be to describe this more literal
application of formal languages as an IDM (intermediate data model)
for the kinds of QT data that we find in the family interaction study.
Jon Awbrey
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o