Dear Azamat,
I agree fully with your statements
below. I have no expertise in that area, so I can only speculate without
foundation – but that won’t stop me from doing so.
I have a hunch that what we need is some
kind of mechanism that aggregates individual self interests in groups that are
optional to all participants.
One way to do so is to somehow have all
government agencies be optional to participants, including who pays taxes or
fees to support the groups, who gets payouts and services, and who gets paid to
implement the government project plan. In Jefferson’s
day, it was called fee-for-service, but now everything is taxed to pay for
whatever crazies like Dennis Kucinich come up with.
Criminal behavior (i.e. violent crime) enforcement
should not be optional, and should be paid from the common funds. But all
civil legislation, and all charitable functions of government, should be aimed
at creating groups of self-interest that pay the way for the group, letting the
group act in concert where economies of scale apply. There used to be
lots of charities, before taxes began approaching 90% in the fifties, still
over 50% today when all taxes, fees and tolls are taken into account.
As a founding principle, citizen A shouldn’t
have to pay for citizen B’s self interest unless A herself declares that
it is also in her (A’s) self-interest as well. Only A should be
able to so declare without pressure from B or the government. That way
market forces can be free to operate, even when big companies band together in
their own self interests, such as they can without using government force to
make their wills obeyed by the rest of us.
Unfortunately, that formulation may not
allow for charitable help which government very rarely occasionally provides –
at least by its own account of what your representatives claim to be charitable.
The problem with government being “charitable” is that special
interest groups effectively define who is to benefit, who is to pay, and who
regulates the process while crushing whom with taxes and regulations. It
isn’t charity if A has to pay for B even when she disagrees with the
government mandated solution, so she should be able to opt out. But what
about poor B? How do we take care of the disabled, the mentally ill,
children and the infirm aged?
I certainly don’t know the answers
to that conundrum. I do know that having one law for fitting all citizens
is absurd, and leads to exactly what Jefferson
said – that government will grow to fill every crevice with every excuse at
the expense of individual freedom. It clearly has in the US, in Europe,
and my limited knowledge of politics causes me to speculate that it occurs in
every government. Wiser commentators may know exceptions.
When one prefers a specific tool
(subjectivity analysis in my case), one is tempted to think that tool is the
right one to use for every problem, so take my thoughts with a ton of salt, but
if we could use an internet mechanism to have each citizen, without being
forced, choose how to represent his individual self interest in an internet
database, and then have government bound (somehow inescapably) to implement the
optional groups of common self interests for each participant specified
in the database, that might be the outline of a solution.
“One size fits all” doesn’t
work in government any more than it has in ontologies. Regulatory bodies
not only specify what is solely acceptable, but also that no other path is to
be tolerated. They enforce their regulatory regalism ultimately with
guns.
Government, as someone wise once said, is
inherently evil (because it uses force to have its laws and regulations
obeyed), yet absolutely essential (because we don’t play well together
without supervision). That is why I except criminal laws, by which I mean
laws forbidding actual violence done to others, not laws forbidding gambling,
prostitution, drugs or other nonviolent acts, or acts without a victim other
than the actors. Everything else should be civilly enforced, by the
participants and through just process in impartial courts, at least in my ideal
formulation.
But let’s hope wiser heads than mine
tackle the problem. It can’t possibly be that simple.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of AzamatAbdoullaev
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 1:41
PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
intangibles (was RE: Why mostclassificationsarefuzzy)
RC: "But
it seems to me that self interest, widely distributed among the population, and
often at odds with the commons, that should drive the system instead of
regulatory bodies....I think what
is missing is a full and adequate accounting of self
interest."
Egoism/self-interest/self-concern/self-centerness as the concern
for your own welfare and desires, be it ethical, psychological, rational or
enlightened, appears the cause of the issue you mentioned. It's widely believed that social orders are emerging
form local multiple interactions of self-interested individuals
without resorting to any planning. A self-organization, or
spontaneous order appears without a central
authority/coordinator imposing it's central planning. The real
self-organizing emerges from bottom-up interactions, as happens with the
self-organizing networks, small-world networks, or scale-free networks,
limitless in size. What we see in the big politics is not about
self-organizing, but about the top-down hierarchical interactions or
interferences, reminding severely limited top-down hierarchical networks, which
are not self-organizing.
So why
the free market economy is failing with its "invisible hand" of
spontaneous order. A rather simple answer, the elite also has its
self-interest, which is fully domineering over common individuals. As a result,
the "invisible hand" disregards the general interests of
the nation and society at large while at the same time enriching the rich. As
we know from the statistics, the crisis makes the rich much more richer and
the poor much more poor.
I have to
agree with N. Chomsky that this "hand" is not as benevolent as
advertised; for: " It destroys community, the environment, and human
values generally—and even the masters themselves, which is why the
business classes have regularly called for state intervention to protect them
from market forces": http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199303--.htm.
Azamat
Abdoullaev
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, August 07,
2011 9:58 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why mostclassificationsare fuzzy)
Dear Richard,
Having read your paper, I like the way you
formulated the problem to be solved in terms of various groups. In
particular your quote:
We use the term ‘ontological’
quite deliberately in that expanded information and
meaning frameworks are generated by
people. Thus, people use their innate intelligence
and sense of being to create
relationships, to create meaning, and to solve problems. Such
meaning frameworks are not generated by
machines but through the use of human
interpretative intelligence (Vines and
Firestone, forthcoming).
This is an interesting formulation, though
I am not familiar with the examples from Australian politics you use to
illustrate the principles. But it seems to me that self interest, widely
distributed among the population, and often at odds with the commons, that
should drive the system instead of regulatory bodies.
Here in the US, if you have been watching our
silly struggle over the fiscal state of the country, you can see demonstrated
the two or three major viewpoints to which all parties subscribe.
Republican, Democrat and Tea Party actors hew to only three major value
systems. That is like mapping a fourteen dimensional physics onto a two
dimensional paper substrate.
I think what is missing is a full and
adequate accounting of self interest. Specifically, every American
(Australian, Syrian, Brit, Frenchman, …) has a unique evaluation of the
process. Jefferson anticipated
compromise and balance, and did not anticipate the conglomeration of
self-interests into a few major threads.
In an And/Or graph (e.g., IDEF0: http://www.englishlogickernel.com/Patent-7-209-923-B1.pdf
figures 5 and 11A) if I use different heuristic valuation methods, I get
distinctly different preferred solution subtrees. Each person in any
group has unique values, and therefore the emergent set of heuristics is plural
in value systems. With present systems, the projection of millions of
value systems onto a two dimensional regulatory body loses the knowledge needed
to solve everybody’s problem. I think a valuation of each
individual’s needs – the three hundred million US citizens, for
example – is the missing ingredient of subjectivity, and without
accounting for that massive divergence, we are doomed to average out the noise
of individuals in seeking a single, choiceless, and history shows incompetent,
solution to the single individual’s problems.
We need to look at multiple value
structures, not just logic, in how knowledge is represented, formulated,
selected, interpreted and conveyed into social structures. Economists
like Milton Friedman, Somebody Hyek, Adam Smith and others taught that self interest
and individual choice is what makes the free market work. Governments are
the least free of markets, presently structured, like ontologies, to represent
only a single value structured solution to problems formulated by a few special
interests, not by widespread representations of all citizens’
interests.
It may be stretching an analogy to say
that political graphs are like the current state of ontologies, but I do so
anyway. If anyone still reading this has a solution to that multiply
valued, multiply choiced fantasy of mine, I would love to hear more. But
logic alone is simply misleading, and IMHO inappropriate, as a solution to
problems of groups of people.
Negotiation of individual transactions by
individual choices and values is what makes the free market work, as well as it
does or doesn’t, and I have not seen another system level method that
even approaches the flexibility and evolving progress that so consistently
follows free market expressions of self interest.
Thanks for an interesting paper,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Vines
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011
4:25 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
intangibles (was RE: Why most classificationsare fuzzy)
Hi
Because I have followed a small number of the threads of this group over a
period and learned a number of things from doing this, I thought I might make a
small contribution back even though I am sure I am way out of my depth
……
RC: …….., I doubt if I can
contribute much more, since I have a very strong conviction that subjective
construction is the missing ingredient in ontology.
JS: There are three important issues that
are worth discussing, but they should be kept distinct when we're trying to
analyze them: (1.) The technical question about how modal logic is
related to possible worlds and/or possible models of the world. (2). The
philosophy of science about the nature of physical laws, and the criteria for
accepting a hypothesis as a law. (3) The psychological and sociological issues
about how scientists and engineers do their work and reach their conclusions.
In this discussion crossing over ontology and epistemic logic (and
modalities), I am not sure why there is no reference to the nature of
“evolutionary possibility”.
For me, there is a need to explicitly take into account a temporal
component to this analysis …. that different types of knowledge emerge
through time.
I have puzzled over these matters for some time and made a first
attempt to link them in section 1.3 of first part of this paper
(the overarching topic being about regulatory systems not epistemology or
ontology). In thinking about this notion of “evolutionary
possibility”, I was interested in exploring whether there might be merit in exploring a
synthesis between Pierce, Popper (and his idea of “evolutionary
epistemology”) Wittgenstein and Peter Munz. Munz was the only student
ever to study under both Popper and Wittgenstein. It is clear from his book
“Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker”, Munz carried this as an unresolved
burden for a good part of his life and his book has been an attempt to make
sense of this early experience in the 1940’s. I was very interested in
some of his discussion about meaning making within this context.
Subjective construction as “a missing ingredient in
ontology” (in the broad sense of the word ontology) is very much alive
and well in the discourse of knowledge management and to some extent, the KM
world has recently been keen to draw upon Pierce’s notion of abductive
reasoning to support the trend towards the uptake of a theory of social
constructivism. Whilst I am sure this is a good thing, I think there is a long
way to go before prevailing views about KM stabilise – it is still very
much an emergent domain.
To this extent, I have been very much
influenced by John’s advocacy for an “epistemic cycle”. I
think this has a lot to offer for those with interests in KM theory and
practice – and thus I referenced this in the piece referred to above.
This earlier piece on knowledge
support systems in research intensive enterprises also made an attempt to
integrate the impact of hierarchically
complex systems and public knowledge spaces into this mix. These two aspects
have some relevance to this discussion. – particularly, this:
i.e. RC multiple viewers of the same sign, each
seeing it in distinct ways, and reaching distinct conclusions,
Cheers,
Richard
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