JS: "The next step beyond predicting how to place your foot on a slippery
slope is to design a wakway or a bridge to provide a more secure footing.
Primitive societies learned how to develop that technology by a few steps of
cognitive reasoning beyond just trial and error. Humans did it by
thinking, and spiders did it by genetic learning over millions of years.
But the fundamental principles are *exactly* the same."
Indeed. We learn to do things by doing things: we learn how
to perceive by perception/sensing, how to walk by walking, how to communicate by
communicating, how to read by reading, by trial and error. You can
draw some analogies between doing physical actions by trial and error and
problem solving by way of theories, where the hypotheses are a sort of
trial.
Still it's critical to draw a distinction between the intellectual
processes of predictions or anticipations or forecast and the physical
interactions by stimulus-response coordination mechanisms.
Remember the mental "eye of the soul" with intellectual intuition, and your
unique capacity to see ideas, to grasp the essence of things. For
instance, more reliable economic forecasts are done not by various statistical
methods, supported by various theories, but by the intellectual insight of
prevision.
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2011 6:15 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles
(was RE: Why most classifications are fuzzy)
Azamat,
No. I gave examples of short-term physical predictions just to
illustrate the point. But every one of those examples can be extended at
any length of time whatever.
> IMO, moving in the physical world, interacting with the world,
manipulating with the world's objects, processing the world's instant
representations, are hardly about predictions, in the strict sense.
Predicting your next step on a walkway is of *exactly* the same nature as
predicting the weather. Both of them depend on the same laws of
nature: gravity, the behavior of physical objects in a force field, the
relationships among multiple competing forces acting on matter, etc.
The next step beyond predicting how to place your foot on a slippery slope
is to design a wakway or a bridge to provide a more secure footing.
Primitive societies learned how to develop that technology by a few steps of
cognitive reasoning beyond just trial and error. Humans did it by
thinking, and spiders did it by genetic learning over millions of years.
But the fundamental principles are *exactly* the same.
The fact that the short-term interactions are learned by trial and error
rather than formal lectures in a physics course is a trivial difference
from the point of view of ontology. There is a continuum between a child
learning how to maintain balance while walking and engineers using physics to
predict how the International Space Station will interact in the gravitational
fields of the earth, sun, and moon.
As far as ontology is concerned, the child and the engineer are learning
about gravity and how to maintain a desired position within its range of
influence. They're making the same kinds of predictions for the same
reasons -- but at different levels of complexity on the continuum.
John
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