Re: [ontolog-forum] Watch out Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine Learning

[Ravi Sharma <drravisharma@xxxxxxxxx>]

John

YES -

1. All our recent or useful discoveries and products are based on engineering which are ultimately dependent on physics approximations. Physics attempts to include life sciences phenomena but not yet convincingly till we can synthesize Life reliably! But otherwise physics is attempt at description of at least non-life matter.
2. Scientists / Engineers know their models are based on Range of Validity and approximations related to desired accuracy, deviations from mean, etc.
3. Reality and truth get us into the fuzzy areas where knowledge of how the brain works could help us better define the context or meaning. All Cosmic skylight (e.g. at night) falling on retina - does it describe reality? What kind?
• when individual photons from different sources impinged on retina but actually originated from different objects at different times some of which in our local-time may not even exist now.
• how long after photon entered retina - i.e. to individual subject's brain processing time?
• as believed in some philosophies that what appears in senses is not-real the reality is Only One.Thomas Johnson's description in email thread: that Being is One (and so an explanation of Being should be one) it goes earlier to Parmenidian - centuries earlier than 600BC.
• your earlier comments relating to models of objects perceived by individual brain and connectionism and including referenced URL- your work with Majumdar.
4. Now my Question - How does math or logic help us all with different philosophic and linguistic backgrounds to help converge towards universal understanding? At least Physicists understand Relativity and Symmetry models through mathematical "language"?

Regards,

Ravi

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 12:46 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4/22/2015 2:45 PM, Thomas Johnston wrote:
> But two theories are not better than one, as regimented attempts
> to understand things. I think the underlying intuition which pushes
> physicists towards a unified theory...

Tom, physics is the *worst* example.  Almost nobody ever uses the
most general theories.  For any particular example, they *always*
use a special-case approximation that is tailored for that example.
And most of them, even for the same project, are *inconsistent*
with one another.

Physicists have known for over a century that Newtonian physics
is only an approximation, but it is still the most widely used
theory.  But even then, there are huge numbers of special cases
of Newtonian mechanics:  supersonic fluids; subsonic fluids;
turbulent flow; viscous flow; incompressible fluids (which really
aren't).  The biggest examples are the incredible number of
approximations for computing the global weather -- different
versions for multiple levels of the atmosphere, different regions
of the earth, different terrains, geographies, ocean currents,
times of day, seasons of the year, etc., etc., etc...

The total number of widely used approximations is in the thousands.
The number of detailed approximations is in the billions -- every
engineer for every project takes a large number of general-purpose
approximations and specializes them for different parts of the project.

Every large system -- ranging from your cell phone to your car to the
trains, planes, and road systems you use every day -- is based on a
large collection of mutually inconsistent approximations to the basic
laws of physics -- all of which are *known* to be false when pushed
to the limits.

Fundamental principle:  The human brain is the most complex natural
system known.  It is far more complex than the global weather, the
Large Hadron Collider, or the global collection of all the human
constructions on earth.

Analogy:  The Greek theories of the cosmos by the pre-Socratics
are closer to modern physics than any current theory of the brain
is to the way it actually works.

John

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Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma)
313 204 1740 Mobile

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