ONT Re: Zeroth Order Ontology
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ZOO. Discussion Note 8
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MA = Murray Altheim
MA: Okay. I can breathe now a bit. For the past few days I've been snowed
under in getting ready for a presentation, which has now been postponed
since when I went up to give the presentation we couldn't get the PC
overhead display thingie to work. We cancelled the talk, and afterwards
I fiddled with it for about a half hour. Turns out it won't accept
even vanilla signals (like 1024x768 @ 60Hz) from a linux machine.
That same machine, booted up in Windows, will function even at
my widescreen, high res mode (1280x854). Urgh.
You gotta get yourself one of those Neapolitan I-stream Machines.
MA: So anyway, I'm back. You're back. You've been busy.
My head's been so deep in muck I have no idea what you've
been busy with, but in looking over the messages I've been
getting on both the SUO and ONT lists, you've posted a ton
of notes on Zeroth Order Logic. While I certainly want to
understand ZOL, I must say that I've had access to probably
hundreds of messages on various related subjects, and I'm
*completely* overwhelmed by all of it. You've had years
to digest this stuff. I had hoped we could take it a lot
slower, maybe tackle that LBase document since I understood
at least a bit of that, and I thought doing that might ground
the discussion here for the purposes of trying to formulate some
foundation documents for the SUO.
We can pick up the ELF bit on Lbase^+++ again if you want.
All the same issues rise again at every level, but the ZOO
stuff was intended to meet some requests for _|_-upitude,
and it's about as low as I go, logical spadewise and all.
There's also a lot of stuff here, the GSB-LOF connection
in particular, that has been carried on in the u-ground
folklore for the last 30-40 years or so, and it seems
that a lot of folks involved with the lore in question
are finally starting to demystify themselves, all about
the same time apparently -- must be the natural time to
germinate of the sporadic spores in question, I reckon.
MA: Is there some way to have a discussion that is more focussed on getting
somebody like me up to speed? Part of my difficult in understanding all
of this is that I just don't know what to do with something like:
JA: o-----------------------------------------------------------o
| Equation E_2 |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
| |
| o o o o |
| \ / \ / |
| o o o o o o o |
| \| |/ \|/ |
| o o o |
| \ / | |
| o---------o |
| | |
| | |
| @ = @ |
| |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
| ( (()(()))((())()) ( (()(()())()) )) = |
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Sure. The classical procedure is: (1) You ask the first question that
comes into your head, (2) I give the first answer that comes into my head,
(3) Rinse, (4) Repeat until both our brains are thoroughly washed. EOD.
MA: Honestly, I have no idea. Part of the difficulty is the abstraction
of it, part my ignorance of graphical language like this, and part the
fact that it's in ASCII (which is quite hard to read -- there's already
a high level of information without trying to decipher the codes).
And as I've said before, I firmly believe you've got something to
offer not just me, but this forum, so I hope you don't take this
as criticism but only a cry for help. I'm selfish and do want to
understand, but we've got to somehow meet in the middle.
Okay, nobody can read the parentheses in line like that, any more than
I can read HTML -- Sue typed my first paper on this in 1972, before we
had word processors or anything, and the words "mental cruelty" came up
a lot, but luckily we got through it -- later we can do pretty-printing
whenever necessary, but the graphs should be EZ on the eyes if you will
just use a well-tempered keyboard with constant-width character formats.
It's really a lot easier than having everybody in the world update their
wordware every couple of weeks.
The abstraction here is only 1 bit higher than so-called "abstract syntax",
and that's a must at any rate. I think that you are already pretty well
sensitized to scoping regimes, and that's all that we really have here,
indeed, in a vastly simplified form, without all the clutter of complex
labels and package contents.
If you look at Kauffman's pages, you will also see a connection
to hyperset (non-well-founded set) theory, but I would rather
put off getting into that type of hype for the time being.
MA: Is there some fundamental core of ZOL that could be put
into relatively plain English? In maybe just one document?
Somewhere to begin? I don't claim to understand everything
I read, but a number of books I have on logic and KR have say,
a section, on a subject. If ZOL is more like a chapter than
a section, is there maybe some way to break it into a small
number of sections (like three or four)? I'm just trying
not to get overwhelmed again (and lately with my Ph.D.
I'm feeling pretty fragile about overwhelmedness).
This is just venn diagram and truth table world, right now
just the bare bones skeletal infrastructure of it. These
graphs are strictly isormorphic to Peirce's Alpha Graphs,
which form the "connective tissue" of Existential Graphs
and Conceptual Graphs, so everything here is re-usable
in terms of comprehending the zeroth layer of anatomy
in those systems. The reasons why I developed this
particular mutation of syntax had to do with fixing
a few problems of efficiency and ease-of-use that
arose when I started writing theorem provers for
alpha graphs. But it will be best if I discuss
those issues as they arise in the development.
These are still the very earliest nanoseconds
in this particular cosmology. All in all,
this is just a new, demonstrably improved
manner of singing some old standard songs,
in such a fashion that they can lull both
humans and machines into logical nirvana.
Jon Awbrey
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