Dear Bruce,
You wrote:
In USA politics, do the
Republicans “sense the same world” as the Democrats?
Many republicans seem to view freedom and property rights very
highly, and consider that the way that the poor can grow with all of us is best
expressed in the free market, which has been getting less free with every
change of government. And republicans are well positioned to accept money
from wealthy political cause promoters. Nearly all are wealthy people,
with a few not so wealthy (yet).
Many democrats appear to see poor people in vivid memories of
their own, such as Bernie Sanders' stories of growing up with inadequate
resources. In every case I am familiar with, the dems don't give much of their
own money, but they want to take money from other people, and give said others'
money to the poor. That is why dems work through government instead of
private industry. Surprisingly, the dems get rich giving your money to
poor people. Al Gore has billions, the Clintons are hundred millionaires,
...
Other democrats seem to invent various *ways* to give
other people's money to the poor, and often the receiving poor seem to include
the politicians themselves, who get a whole lot more of the money than the poor
get.
Does Supreme Court Justice
Scalia see “the same world” as Justice Sotomayor?
Clearly not, as per the last supreme court decision and Scalia's
indignant statements about that decision.
Is [it] that people do not
“see the (entire) world” – but only selected parts of
it?
IMHO, we each see an amazingly tiny, small part of the world,
and the part we each see is as unique as our memories.
And those selected parts are
of course different? Is it values that causes them to see separate
parts?
Values, IMHO, result from our processing of those memories.
We can be taught some values, though we have to learn others experientially,
but in the vast majority of cases, it seems to me that our values are different
also, if only in small regions. We can agree on "similar"
experiences we share with each other. However, those small regions of
divergence still cause a whole lot of trouble.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bruce
Schuman
Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2015 9:19 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Is Philosophy Useful in Software
Engineering Ontologies?
Rich wrote:
“What I do believe
is that we sense different worlds because of our diversity of sensing and
interpretation. I can only interpret things that I have some past
experience with. Any my past experience is very different from even my
neighbor's experience, or your experience, or JFS's experience. The world
is so frigging big, and so frigging complex, that we will probably never focus
so tightly each to see the others' sense of the world.
“That is, whether I
sense the same world as you sense (I think I most probably do) doesn't really
matter. The WAYs in which we sense the world are not exact, not even
approximately equivalent, so that it is less important than my understanding
your views and beliefs about the world, or than your understanding my views and
beliefs, because we have so much trouble aligning along those
axes. “
Yes. And seen at the “macro-plane” –
the big simple variables that actually impact our collective social lives
(unlike, for example, quarks) – this view would seem obviously
true. In USA politics, do the Republicans “sense the same
world” as the Democrats? Does Supreme Court Justice Scalia see
“the same world” as Justice Sotomayor? Is that people do not
“see the (entire) world” – but only selected parts of
it? And those selected parts are of course different? Is it values
that causes them to see separate parts? Does your choice of a television
news channel or newspaper affect your perception? Does a trained
surgeon “see” something different in an X-ray than a layman?
Is a political issue (e.g. same-sex marriage) “part of
the world” -- ? Certainly, we cannot say that a political issue has
no empirical reality. An issue, too, is a kind of “thing”
– albeit an abstraction or concept or shared factor in collective
decision-making.
I am an avid psych lit
reader, but not a psychologist. From my readings, I think most of what we
experience is a reactivation of our memories, comprising a jambalaya of objects
that are in some way linked either to the present stimuli, or to other memories
of other linked stimuli.
I think of it as a DAG
(directed acyclic graph) of AND and OR nodes with a "~" prefix to
calculate the complementary NOT. In total, an AND/OR graph, with symbols and
functions with parameter lists, all represented in the DAG.
And something like this structure organized in an individual
human mind creates a “world view” – a kind of interpretive
lens through which we view the world
The linkage, according to
Chomsky, is a stored pattern with empty slots, or variables, that we fill in
with bits and pieces of the current situation. We see this newly
filled-in pattern, in many ways like the matching pattern along with links,
within links, ..
Yes – and the choice of that structure – what
“pattern” it is – is highly free-form and adaptive. Not
only “which bits and pieces” are selected to fit into it, but how
they are organized – and how they come together to form a “world
view” or interpretive lens.
So do we inhabit a
commonly shared world?
We can never know
that. We can share our knowledge and observations with other agreeable
agents, and they with us, and we can even run confirmatory experiments to
confirm or deny our own view of a theory, theirs or ours. But we can't
really know if it is the SAME experience we have, or an experience of the SAME
situation, because we are different observers, each with our own vast library
of biases.
Is this a problem that evolution must inevitably
confront? I’m involved with many deeply holistic conversations
around the world, and there seems to be a common movement arising in different
ways in many places towards an improved sense of community, a sense that we are
all in this together, that this issue of interpretive fragmentation (and the
inevitable confrontation) must be overcome – that forces of evolutionary
cultural psychology are pushing in this direction – generally under the
influence of globalization. In some sense, perhaps naively utopian, this perspective
supposes we must all somehow become “agreeable agents”.
Mystical and religious approaches often underlie this sense
of broad inclusion in the context of diversity. But these approaches are
highly holistic and perhaps somewhat “wordless”. What about
very concrete specific differences and collaboration/trust/cooperation around
specific concerns – or political issues?
“we have so much
trouble aligning along those axes.”
And we have no shared or consensual model of those
axes. My instinct is – the deep holism of religion and mystical
spirituality DOES begin to offer intuitive guidance on this possible shared
common structure or alignment. Many “mystical symbols” point
in this direction. If we wish, we can see the Christian Cross in terms of
X and Y axes – and in my world (check out “centering
prayer”), I often hear talk about the vertical and horizontal axes of
spiritual alignment – and how human beings can align shared understanding
through some emerging intuition that seems to be common to many or all
traditions. One term to explore is “Axis Mundi” – the
“axis of the world”.
IS there such a thing, in some empirical sense – or is
this supposed “axis” a synthetic human construct, an artifact of
belief, a intentional stipulation? Are the “tree” and
“circle” and “mandala” and “hierarchy”
images commonly encountered in mystical spirituality a kind of
“pre-mathematical holistic intuition” – an intuitive
conceptual stab at a primal ontological mathematics that can help authentically
guide or interconnect human beings? If we believe in an innate wholeness
of human thought, perhaps part of the broader task of semantic ontology
involves keeping the door open to holistic symbolism.
Approached in these broad terms, what is the intuitive
meaning of “directed” in these attached images of DAG graphs?
Is there any simple general mapping for any DAG to a one-dimensional
interpretation (i.e., every element of the graph can be interpreted as
organized in one linear order – ie “from” one point along a
single dimension “to” one point along a single dimension? If
so, could that “axis” be in some sense a common center or
coordinate origin – despite the high variance in the DAG patterns?
The definition of “reachability” in the Wikipedia
article seems to suggest the answer is yes.
Bruce Schuman, Santa Barbara CA USA
http://networknation.net/vision.cfm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
“In mathematics and
computer science, a directed acyclic graph is a directed graph with no directed
cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and directed edges,
each edge connecting one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start
at some vertex v and follow a sequence of edges that eventually loops back to v
again.
DAGs may be used to model
many different kinds of information. The reachability relation in a DAG forms a
partial order, and any finite partial order may be represented by a DAG using
reachability. A collection of tasks that must be ordered into a sequence,
subject to constraints that certain tasks must be performed earlier than
others, may be represented as a DAG with a vertex for each task and an edge for
each constraint; algorithms for topological ordering may be used to generate a
valid sequence. Additionally, DAGs may be used as a space-efficient
representation of a collection of sequences with overlapping subsequences. DAGs
are also used to represent systems of events or potential events and the causal
relationships between them. DAGs may also be used to model processes in which
data flows in a consistent direction through a network of processors, or states
of a repository in a version-control system.”
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2015 6:47 AM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Is Philosophy Useful in Software
Engineering Ontologies?
Dear Matthew,
You wrote: Dear Rich,
So to summarise,
you have no proof that we inhabit different worlds.
Yes, I have no proof we inhabit different worlds, and I don't
necessarily believe we do. But I also have no evidence that we inhabit
the same world.
What I do believe is that we sense different worlds because
of our diversity of sensing and interpretation. I can only interpret
things that I have some past experience with. Any my past experience is
very different from even my neighbor's experience, or your experience, or JFS's
experience. The world is so frigging big, and so frigging complex, that
we will probably never focus so tightly each to see the others' sense of the
world.
That is, whether I sense the same world as you sense (I think
I most probably do) doesn't really matter. The WAYs in which we sense the
world are not exact, not even approximately equivalent, so that it is less
important than my understanding your views and beliefs about the world, or than
your understanding my views and beliefs, because we have so much trouble
aligning along those axes.
Brian Greene has a very thought provoking video on the 11
dimensions he believes comprise the universe. Here is his video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M
Do you think we sense quarks? I don't. Our
ability to interact with the universe is so extremely limited, and the universe
is so vast, that we will likely never be looking at the same part of it.
So why assume we do see the same world? That assumption
seems suspect to me.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Dear Rich,
So to summarise, you have no proof that we inhabit different
worlds.
Regards
Matthew West
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk
+44 750 338 5279
Dear Matthew,
You wrote:
In
my view it is a really big thing to say that we do not together inhabit some
common world. We might experience it in different ways, but to say that what we
experience is different is quite another thing.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information
Junction
I am an avid psych lit reader, but not a psychologist.
>From my readings, I think most of what we experience is a reactivation of our
memories, comprising a jambalaya of objects that are in some way linked either
to the present stimuli, or to other memories of other linked stimuli.
I think of it as a DAG (directed acyclic graph) of AND and OR
nodes with a "~" prefix to calculate the complementary NOT. In total,
an AND/OR graph, with symbols and functions with parameter lists, all
represented in the DAG.
The linkage, according to Chomsky, is a stored pattern with
empty slots, or variables, that we fill in with bits and pieces of the current
situation. We see this newly filled-in pattern, in many ways like the
matching pattern along with links, within links, ..
So do we inhabit a commonly shared world?
We can never know that. We can share our knowledge and
observations with other agreeable agents, and they with us, and we can even run
confirmatory experiments to confirm or deny our own view of a theory, theirs or
ours. But we can't really know if it is the SAME experience we have, or
an experience of the SAME situation, because we are different observers, each
with our own vast library of biases.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Dear Kingsley,
On 6/30/15 9:21 PM, Chris Partridge wrote:
Not sure this is going to get us far, but I still cannot make
much sense of "But the point is that none of it is about objective reality
or objective truth. It is about the world as seen by the people and
software that have to communicate." Don't we see/sense the same world?
No we don't.
[MW>] That’s a big statement.
Would you care to back it up with some evidence, rather than just assume it is
a self evident truth?
That's Ed's fundamental point. The very same point made by
John Sowa, Patrick Hayes and others -- in a variety of posts over the
years.
[MW>] I’m not sure I’ve
heard them say that either. Care to give specific quotes?
In my view it is a really big thing to
say that we do not together inhabit some common world. We might experience it
in different ways, but to say that what we experience is different is quite
another thing.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information Junction
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype: dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
https://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
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Registered office: 8 Ennismore Close, Letchworth Garden City,
Hertfordshire, SG6 2SU.
We are individuals for a reason :)
Think of this as the cognition paradox .
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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