On 25/07/2011 4:00 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2011
8:54 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most classifications
are fuzzy)
On 25/07/2011 1:14 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
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.
Why?
What is here questioned? That there are higher cognitive
processes (as knowing, search, deciding, language,
intellection, predicition) and basic cognitive processes
(sensing/perception, motor actions).
I am questioning the necessity of drawing a sharp distinction. There
is much more evidence of a continuum. When progressing from crawling
and learning to cross a street in a busy city, at what point does a
child cross the line from basic cognitive processes (trial and
error) to higher cognitive processes (traffic pattern recognition,
street lights, validity of crosswalks (I live in Montreal where
crosswalks are just convenient landmarks for ambulances),
acceleration capabilities by type of vehicle, prediction of the
humanity of strangers ,etc.).
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.
You have got to be kidding!
AA: "The accuracy of economic forecasting has been reduced
by increased uncertainty in the global and national economies
snce the early 1970s... Some of the greatest contributions to
the economic forecasting ...come from economists who have the
insight to understand the changing economy of today"
(Britannica, Economic Growth and Planning).
One is in need to create a whole taxonomy of sources of
errors in economic forecasting, global and national: partial
theories, ideologies, personal judgments, biases, old or
manipulated statistics; no powerful machine is of any help
here.
The whole global crisis was just missed.
Only now a comprehensive/holistic approach, named as the
FCA and TBL, is getting recognition. Any economic growth and
planning economic changes requests accounting not only
economic factors, but also ecological capital and social
capital.
The fact that theories are validated and invalidated, extended and
updated or even abandoned does not mean that they are not theories.
----- 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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