Thanks for your views, Leo, and for taking
the time to record them so clearly here. I appreciate your offer to
discuss and perhaps debate aspects of the positions I take.
My comments are interspersed below, and
meant respectfully,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Leo Obrst wrote:
Rich,
I
disagree. I would say that there is an underlying ontology that we all share
(though we may not know it) + additional ontologies which are cultural,
mini-cultural, and personal in nature.
Re the
assertion “there is an underlying ontology that we all share”, I
haven’t found any substantial evidence supporting that assertion, but I
have found evidence, such as the three articles I mentioned earlier, that I
interpret as examples of some observer’s realities, therefore as evidence
against that assertion. Statistical support would be useful, but those
articles are the closest to it I could come yet.
If you
have such evidence to support the assertion, I would appreciate references, in
URL format preferably. I am open to such evidence, though I am aware that
my belief against the assertion works against my openness; that’s the
best I seem able to do at this point to be flexible.
There
are also views or perspectives onto those ontologies which elaborate needs of a
community, set of individuals, or an individual.
Whoa!
There is an enormous amount of projection you do in that one sentence. You
have not yet provided evidence – though I welcome any you can provide –
to support the first assertion. Then you build another assertion, this
one dependent on the first assertion, and again offer no physical evidence from
that reality you credited the One True Ontology, all others of which are mere views
or perspectives of the same One True Ontology:
There
are also views or perspectives onto those ontologies which elaborate needs of a
community, set of individuals, or an individual.
The “... views … onto those ontologies”
recognizes the plurality of views, not simply one view, elaborating needs of a
community. In any community, there are conflicting needs, so the
elaboration cannot be initially consistent, therefore not coherent.
But the “…onto
those ontologies” suggests that bits and pieces can be instantiated off slices
of the One True Ontology as sort of a generic ontology fragment launching mechanism.
Mapping of concepts implies that all observers, past and future, will agree on
the meaning of the concepts. History shows that is not what
happens.
Suppose,
for example,
If
humans did not largely have a common ontology, we could never communicate,
cooperate, etc. Witness these distribution list messages: we have disagreement, but
we know we have disagreement because largely we have agreement.
Actually,
I must have missed the agreement part, but we have definitely and positively
and for the most part constructively debated these kinds of conceptual conundra
for thousands of days. It has been very useful to me, and I hope to many
others.
Back to
the fray;
By and
large, we still don’t communicate well, but we act out behaviors well
enough to use domesticated humans to act out scripts as tellers, receptionists,
salesmen, politicians, waiters, robbers, cops, victims, taxpayers, and other
vaguely defined classes, that is not really communicating – it is
synchronization of the domesticated mechanisms employed by the media because
they have been found to be effective.
So Buyer
does her end of the script and Sales Agent does her thing with the plastic, the
merchandise goes to the Buyer, and they bark a polite exit for each role.
It takes
some serious sit-down time between two people for them to communicate in any
full sense of that word. It seems to have been done, and you are
beginning to reward yourself, when you notice flaws in the behavior of the
others, and ask why.
In
the extreme, a person may develop their own language, but that language by
necessity has to ground itself somehow into the things of the world (including
fictitious worlds potentially) in order to have “meaningful”
interpretations.
If
someone develops a unique language and never uses it to communicate with others
then the only meaningful interpretations are those of the said someone. No
others ever experience that unique language, so there is no act of
communication.
A
coherent world (even if fictitious) is needed for world reference of those
interpretations.
If the
coherent world you are describing acts as a model for proposing and testing
strategies, then a coherent world is very much desired, but unavailable to
actual experiencers of the world as it is currently situated. There is
ambiguity in nearly every designation of an object, classification of a verb
phrase, or any other annotation made on language samples supposedly describing
their observations. Uncertainty dominates the certain interpretation in
essentially all cases.
The one
which we as observers prefer is based on our own personalities, as per the
title of this thread. Its “confirmation bias” that we use to
make our own internal world coherent, i.e. consistent, and complete, and quiescent.
A
person could indeed be schizophrenic or have other interpretive/cognitive
disfunctions, but one way we characterize these are as anomalous cognitive
systems, which means typically failing to cohere and in the case perhaps of
paranoid schizophrenia, as establishing a bizarre set of coherent axioms. How
can you establish “bizarre” except via reference to some
established notion of reality?
I
establish “bizarre” on my own recognizance, thank you, without
recourse to any one else’s view of the same situation. Then I
gather input from others who experienced similar situations and we can compare
our approaches to ameliorating the present situation based on past ones stored
in our history.
Of
course you could object and say that such a description is deprecatory, because
it minimizes the individual mind’s contribution or invention. But my
guess is that it’s really the individual epistemology that corrupts the
real ontology.
Again,
your “guess” based on prior and standing belief in the One True
Ontology (the “real” ontology) already shows a crack – here you
need to invoke yet another kind of ontology, and further assert that it has to
have some property value “bizarre” without identifying its
ancestry.
Repeating:
But
my guess is that it’s really the individual epistemology that corrupts
the real ontology.
How do
you distinguish the “individual epistemology” from the “real
ontology”? And by “corrupts” do you mean recombines, in a
Darwinian sense, to create new concepts by recombination of parts.
A
bad epistemology doesn’t invalidate the underlying real ontology; it just
distorts it and makes one (the adherent) unable to communicate or, in the
extreme, live in that reality.
So now
there is some kind of metaontology called a “bad epistemology”?
Its some kind of pathogen based on your interpretation.
Personally,
I think our cognitive (and physical) systems as animals have enabled us to
adapt (and proliferate) to the world because there is a real world we can adapt
to. And that real world has a real ontology.
I fully
respect your right to believe so, though I fully disagree on the basis of
empirical evidence available to me at this moment.
I do
agree that there is some model of the world for each one of us, but I do not
agree that it’s the same model in each person, and in fact I have just
presented anecdotal evidence that people distort their perceptions, and those
distortions can be switched off by an ontogenic event, such as the birth of the
second child.
So yes,
in some ways we agree more than we disagree, but more discussion is
welcomed.
-Rich
Thanks,
Leo
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014
1:25 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum]
'
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology is affected by Personality
Dear Robert,
Thanks for your thoughts. To say
that there is ONE objective reality to be experienced by all observers is to go
beyond the actual evidence. We already know that quantum mechanics
insists on dualities of various kinds. We still don’t know how to
distinguish wave from particle in many physics problems. The physics
explanation is simply that we are not familiar with the phenomenon at quantum
level; therefore we can’t expect it to be intuitive.
But what I am proposing is that,
regardless of whether reality is monopolar or multipolar, our perception is
focused by our individual behaviors, our learned personal experiences, and our
subjective belief systems. The three articles I cited show scientific
evidence that such active interpretation of reality forms our ideation of
reality.
Muslims see a very different world than
Westerners do. So do Buddhists, Apaches, and rain forest tribes in Brazil.
My point of interest is not so much in whether reality is monopolar or
multipolar as in how humans perceive, control and plan for reality.
Specifically, how we do it differently from each other.
An ontology is not an objective
phenomenon. It is a purely subjective phenomenon that some people think
is universally perceived in the same way by all observers. I
disagree. I have provided evidence (anecdotal only at this time) that
different people perceive differently the same situation in important
ways. It is very likely that the differences described in those three
articles are just a few of the experimentally verifiable differences among
people’s view of reality.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
I don't see what the
purported evidence is evidence of.
There is a difference between theories of reality and reality itself. That we
can come up with different theories, and that those theories may be influence
(or biased) by certain pyschological (or other) factors does not mean there is
no universal ontology. (I say this with the understanding that "universal
ontology" is in the philosophical sense, basically meaning that there is
an objective (mind-independent) reality...and that it is knowable). Now why one
would subscribe to a view questioning (or the stronger: denying) that there is
a reality independent on minds, I cannot say. But in doing so (at least the
stronger), they would negate science itself, and therefore their own mind.
As for natural kinds: by their very definition (or by the common
philosophical understanding of them), they are delineations of a
mind-independent reality, hence natural. The only change I would make to this
would be to remind persons that minds are themselves parts of reality and hence
natural.
To say beliefs steer (in a strong sense as in determine) perception is
likely too strong; I would not take the articles cited too much to heart. The
universe itself is dynamically changing, as in mind. One limitation of the
entire knowledge representation (and related fields) is that snapshots are
(perhaps presently necessarily) used to represent a dynamically changing world.
Respectfully,
Robert
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On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Here is yet another
anecdotal evidence atom that
the way we individually see the world biases our
interpretations of it:
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-beliefs-attitudes.htm
l
Those of us who have been parents know how
effectively the generations are culturally
separated:
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-beliefs-attitudes.htm
l
Mothers, according to the following article form a
deluded belief that their first child is shorter
than they are, and suddenly lose that delusion
when their second child is born:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-mothers-youn
gest-shorter.html#inlRlv
With this much evidence, can we still consider
there to be a universal ontology of any natural
kind, at the top or the bottom of the lattice?
If beliefs (constructed during ontogeny, as a
slice of reality is encountered by an organism
with a slice of the human genome) steer both
perception and logic, then how could a logical
rendering of a snapshot of one person's experience
be anything but dynamically changing?
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
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