Sorry, that last message was unfinished. *** Dear Ed – Thanks for this comment. Just let me say – that your previous messages here have been very helpful and clarifying for me. Your clear direct way of describing “what a professional semantic ontologist actually does” has been very illuminating, and helped me understand what this business is about. For me, this “ontolog” discussion is set in the context of very broad interdisciplinary concerns, generally pointed towards constructive and enlightened social change. I’m involved with many conversations and groups concerned with this kind of change – and among them, I am one of the very few who see “semantic ontology” as critically pertinent. This is an advanced technical subject, and not everyone sees its direct pertinence to politics and governance and democracy. But just yesterday, I was chatting with Joe Brewer, a political activist/organizer and visionary who is a protégé of George Lakoff. He is one of the few that does see this connection. So, for me, that’s exciting, and on his recommendation, I’m going to get into Lakoff’s book “Where Mathematics Comes From”, looking for further insights on the simplest possible foundations for developing a collaborative system of shared definitions (what are “identity, similarity and difference”, and how do these definitions control how we collectively see the world – and in those terms, how is “metaphor” created?). So yes, for me, there is a very broad philosophic ambition driving my interest. Maybe it’s naïve, maybe it’s impossible – but something tells me it’s workable, so I keep showing up. ** ED: When I said “common world”, I followed it with the well-defined term “universe of discourse” – the set of all things that the parties will communicate about. But I would add that in order to talk about that set they have to agree on what SBVR calls a “body of shared meaning” associated with a “shared vocabulary” – a set of terms that can be used to “connote” (be interpreted as) the “shared meanings” and “denote” (refer to) things in the universe of discourse. BRUCE: SBVR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_of_Business_Vocabulary_and_Business_Rules Clearly, there’s a lot of negotiation and an extended history behind the emergence of this shared vocabulary and shared meaning. This is an interesting article, and one thing it says is that SBVR is “aligned with common logic” -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Logic Common Logic (CL) is a framework for a family of logic languages, based on first-order logic, intended to facilitate the exchange and transmission of knowledge in computer-based systems. The CL definition permits and encourages the development of a variety of different syntactic forms, called "dialects." A dialect may use any desired syntax, but it must be possible to demonstrate precisely how the concrete syntax of a dialect conforms to the abstract CL semantics, which are based on a model theoretic interpretation. Each dialect may be then treated as a formal language. Once syntactic conformance is established, a dialect gets the CL semantics for free, as they are specified relative to the abstract syntax only, and hence are inherited by any conformant dialect. In addition, all CL dialects are equivalent (i.e., can be mechanically translated to each other), although some may be more expressive than others. So, thank you, Ed, for guiding me into these references. I had never heard of SBVR before your message, so you have shown me some clear ways to link these things together. Map all these grand ambitions back to first order logic in one common/shared framework? Yes, it’s blue sky and a little wild – but seen from a global perspective – rapidly becoming the compelling perspective of all business (and politics/governance) today – it starts to make sense. So, I’m out there floating this idea around to see what I can learn and who might care… Maybe what I am talking about has a direct correlation with the logic of “local dialects” mapping into – and being supported by – the “abstract CL semantics”. I’d like to see that mapping project extended in many directions, with everything going on in any arena or domain seen as branches of a common tree…. ED: Note that the “shared meaning” needs only to be shared to the extent needed for the communications. If you are an ivory poacher and I am an ecologist, we must agree on what an “elephant” is, in order to converse, but we need not and will not agree on many other aspects of the “elephant” domain. (And some of the political positions are not much closer than that.) 
BRUCE: Yes, clearly you are quite right, obviously right – that there are critical and perhaps very dangerous disagreements in the world. But there is something called “law” – maybe a system of boundary values on the critical dimensions of common space – and that system has emerged under many evolutionary influences, most of which today have involved negotiations. So, the concept of “poaching” emerges from that framework. As regards “widely divergent positions” – yes, you are so right. Just this morning, I had on Fox News and I happened to hear Jason Chaffetz speaking very broadly about the data breach of the privacy records of 21 million federal employees, citing that as proof that “you can never trust the federal government on anything”. That’s a pretty extreme statement… So, yes, no doubt getting people to agree on the fundamentals of the “politics” domain might be impossible. But from my point of view – just launching a clearly-defined common-logic-grounded framework capable of addressing very broad issues would be a big step in the right direction. Get those highly conflicting “dialects” (“Tea Party”) mapped into the common frame – and negotiate from there... ED: And we can agree on the meaning of a term, and disagree on whether a given individual thing in the UoD is a referent of the term. This can happen because the *shared* meaning leaves out characteristics that we don’t agree on, or because we don’t have sufficient knowledge of the individual to be certain that it possesses a given characteristic, or because one of us thinks that having observed characteristic A implies having characteristic B, while the other does not accept that as an axiom. BRUCE: Yes. People see different characteristics – because, as we have been noting here lately – people see things differently, in ways highly influenced by ideology and local perspective and values. That tendency seems to be innate in human psychology – and because it is innate, is probably a circumstance that simply must be accepted as a natural part of the human condition – maybe with some hope for some modification or adjustment as we learn from one another. The famous metaphor of the blind men and the elephant is very pertinent. None of us can see the whole. Maybe we got to get used to that, maybe we need community or teamwork, maybe we need mutual respect – maybe we need semantic ontology -- ED: Now, as to whether “agreeing to disagree” and find no solution to a joint problem is “an unaffordable luxury”, that clearly depends on a viewpoint. And we emphatically do *not* “gotta live together on this planet”. There is an alternative. As Clausewitz observed, “War is politics conducted by other means.” And there are many versions of social problems being addressed by means other than agreement or compromise. In effect, they all come down to eliminating “live together” by removing one of those words. BRUCE: Yes, a lot depends on viewpoint. Is there, can there be, should there some kind of common shared ethic? There are strong arguments out there that the answer has to be yes – yes, if, in an interdependent world, we want to stay alive and healthy. Who is responsible for that ethic? In one of your earlier recent postings, Ed, when you explained how you saw the role and responsibility of the professional semantic ontologist, you suggested that this issue was not part of the job. In a working professional context, that’s fully understandable of course – but in a broader human context, “somebody” has to step up to the plate. In his recent encyclical, the Pope calls for “dialogue” regarding “our common home”. We can disagree strongly on the particulars – but the notion that the earth is not our “common home” is not really debatable. Global climate change, global ecology and environment, global economics – this is the world we are living in. So, yes, you can argue that war and terrible human suffering and waste are an alternative. And I’d say they are not. Thanks. Bruce, When I said “common world”, I followed it with the well-defined term “universe of discourse” – the set of all things that the parties will communicate about. But I would add that in order to talk about that set they have to agree on what SBVR calls a “body of shared meaning” associated with a “shared vocabulary” – a set of terms that can be used to “connote” (be interpreted as) the “shared meanings” and “denote” (refer to) things in the universe of discourse. Note that the “shared meaning” needs only to be shared to the extent needed for the communications. If you are an ivory poacher and I am an ecologist, we must agree on what an “elephant” is, in order to converse, but we need not and will not agree on many other aspects of the “elephant” domain. (And some of the political positions are not much closer than that.) And we can agree on the meaning of a term, and disagree on whether a given individual thing in the UoD is a referent of the term. This can happen because the *shared* meaning leaves out characteristics that we don’t agree on, or because we don’t have sufficient knowledge of the individual to be certain that it possesses a given characteristic, or because one of us thinks that having observed characteristic A implies having characteristic B, while the other does not accept that as an axiom. Now, as to whether “agreeing to disagree” and find no solution to a joint problem is “an unaffordable luxury”, that clearly depends on a viewpoint. And we emphatically do *not* “gotta live together on this planet”. There is an alternative. As Clausewitz observed, “War is politics conducted by other means.” And there are many versions of social problems being addressed by means other than agreement or compromise. In effect, they all come down to eliminating “live together” by removing one of those words. -Ed So, ok, maybe the United Airlines system crash, the NYSE stock trading going down, the Wall Street Journal website crashing, and my own ColdFusion hosting company (hostek.com) going on the blink all at the same time is just coincidence. Weave into that combination stories about the unbreakable end-to-end encryption that ISIS is now using once they build a connection over open social media – and you got a hot news day… Ed: I would point out that U.S. Republicans and Democrats, like the political parties of other major “democracies”, must agree on a “common world” (universe of discourse) in order to communicate and legislate. That “common world” is a small part of the “world” each sees himself as inhabiting. Bruce: Yes, ok – kinda-sorta. What is common, what is world? That, too, is a matter of stipulation and agreement. Given the local apoplexy on this definition, maybe this concept too should be precisely scoped… Ed: It only exists as the universe of discourse for particular legislative and/or executive activities. It is possible in that common world to talk about each other’s theories of the “world at large”, and to determine where they can reach compromises. Bruce: And of course, there’s a lot of discussion about the scope and role/responsibility of governance. I heard an economist talking yesterday about Rand Paul’s argument that “paying taxes is slavery”, that it takes away individual human freedom. The economist laughed – and said that Paul was only free *because* of taxes. Ed: This is where the “logic” model of “world” differs from the philosophical model. The universe of discourse for a particular “domain ontology” is specific to a problem space, and it explicitly excludes aspects on which there are true contradictions among the “world models” of the stakeholders. Bruce: But – in a broader (and maybe more realistic) context – this is an unaffordable luxury. We do gotta live together on this planet. So – seen this way, we can’t really “localize the problem space”. Issues like “immigration” (“what is a border?”) aren’t going away. Ed: If those “view models” cannot be reconciled over a carefully constrained universe for the resolution of a particular problem, effective communication is not possible and the target problem cannot be solved. Bruce: Ok – IF “not solving the problem” is an option. Ed: A political solution is to modify and narrow the problem space to an area in which there can be agreement, and thus produce a “partial solution” to the real target problem. An alternative “political solution” is just “majority rules” – the chosen model contradicts the view models of the stakeholder minority, and their participation in the “conversation” effectively ends. And some combination of the two is typical. Bruce: Yes, this probably describes what is actually happening. But is this good enough? Maybe “partial solutions” are the best we can hope for. Or maybe they’re not good enough… Ed: This approach to problem solution is by no means limited to political parties. It happens in corporate decisions, and in family squabbles. We don’t usually make ontologies for government politics or for family squabbles; we do make them for corporate decisions. Bruce: Yes, and why? Because in the corporation somebody pays for it, somebody defines the values and objectives, somebody defines the questions, somebody takes responsibility… * I’m still flirting a little bit with creating some very simplistic collaborative database for a universal shared ontology, maybe starting with John’s assertion that the process should begin with first-order logic – maybe in very simple/minimalist form. A few very basic definitions with the strongest/clearest directly-machine-compatible definition anybody can come up with – and a comprehensive list of disciplines that use those terms – like the list of disciplines included in “cognitive science” – with logical bridges to specifics of usage within that discipline – and expand from there in every direction – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science http://bcs.mit.edu/research/cognitivescience.html I like John’s three starting concepts: identity, similarity, difference. The whole world runs on those three concepts, and the entire world of Linnaean taxonomy and Socratic genus/species definition runs on it as well. > We don’t usually make ontologies for government politics or for family squabbles; we do make them for corporate decisions. I’m involved with a number of groups that are interested in revitalizing or redefining the process of democracy itself. For example – the Great Transition Initiative – GTI – http://greattransition.org -- run by a former NASA physicist – or “the next system project” that is linked to the GTI project -- http://thenextsystem.org/ In many quarters today, it is widely accepted that “politics is broken”, or that governance is very messed up – for who knows how many reasons. I’ve been collecting books on this theme for ten years – and started with EJ Dionne’s “Why Americans Hate Politics”, first published 1991 and still highly pertinent today. I started building some heat on this theme in 2005, with Joe Klein’s “Politics Lost: How American Democracy was Trivialized by People who Think you’re Stupid”. Here’s the lead quote: “People on the right are furious. People on the left are livid. And the center isn't holding. There is only one thing on which almost everyone agrees: there is something very wrong in Washington. The country is being run by pollsters. Few politicians are able to win the voters' trust. Blame abounds and personal responsibility is nowhere to be found. There is a cynicism in Washington that appalls those in every state, red or blue. The question is: Why? The more urgent question is: What can be done about it?” My humble thought: don’t be part of this mess. Don’t be an unconscious ignorant dumbbell or cash-cow for the oligarchy. Be part of the solution… While the politicos battle over these things – I’d say that problems of semantic ontology – which tend to be illustrated rather sharply right here on this mailing list – play a significant contributing role in political chaos and significantly wasteful disagreement. Yes, these possibilities are generally unprecedented. But in an electronic world, there might be a huge role for a well-ordered project in semantic ontology when it comes to “organizing the people” – perhaps as suggested by Bernie Sanders – or in the email I got today from “Too Much” -- http://toomuchonline.org/tmmonthly.html -- an online journal from inequality.org, that includes a little article on the Russian billionaire building a 492 foot yacht, not satisfied with his current 394 foot yacht… What I want to see happen – along with 100 other less revolutionary reforms – is the emergence of highly idealized forms of network-mediated democracy – that run on something like the power of Google with something like the user-base and participation of Facebook. Why not? Because we’re too dumb or too irritated to put it together? Governances IS “cybernetics” – the terms have the same root. “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics And years ago I had a book called “Cure for Chaos” by control systems engineer Dr. Simon Ramo – founder of TRW – that went directly to this issue. So it’s interesting to see you guys – many of whom have a very technically-competent background and lifetime of experience – but may tend to presume that the scale of semantic ontology is somehow necessarily constrained to relatively local or insular levels – start to at least consider that maybe (??) there is no real reason not to expand the scale and breadth of application. Yes, right, it’s blue sky, it’s idealistic, utopian, we’re all busy, and who is going to pay for it. But maybe the bigger question is – as we might see in health care reform or prison reform (or 100 other issues) – who’s going to pay if we DON’T do this….? The boiling frog metaphor is just too obvious. And I’d say the reference to The Magical Number Seven, by George Miller, for years the director of WordNet, is so pertinent. The world is too complicated, it’s moving too fast, things are too interdependent – and it’s a lot easier to just to sit in the pot and stay irritated or numb. Why rise to the occasion and develop broad-scale and highly enlightened and masterful collaboration when it taxes our little private brains… Just a thought. Thanks for this conversation. Azamat, I agree with almost all of what you say. But I would point out that U.S. Republicans and Democrats, like the political parties of other major “democracies”, must agree on a “common world” (universe of discourse) in order to communicate and legislate. That “common world” is a small part of the “world” each sees himself as inhabiting. It only exists as the universe of discourse for particular legislative and/or executive activities. It is possible in that common world to talk about each other’s theories of the “world at large”, and to determine where they can reach compromises. This is where the “logic” model of “world” differs from the philosophical model. The universe of discourse for a particular “domain ontology” is specific to a problem space, and it explicitly excludes aspects on which there are true contradictions among the “world models” of the stakeholders. If those “view models” cannot be reconciled over a carefully constrained universe for the resolution of a particular problem, effective communication is not possible and the target problem cannot be solved. A political solution is to modify and narrow the problem space to an area in which there can be agreement, and thus produce a “partial solution” to the real target problem. An alternative “political solution” is just “majority rules” – the chosen model contradicts the view models of the stakeholder minority, and their participation in the “conversation” effectively ends. And some combination of the two is typical. This approach to problem solution is by no means limited to political parties. It happens in corporate decisions, and in family squabbles. We don’t usually make ontologies for government politics or for family squabbles; we do make them for corporate decisions. -Ed From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Azamat Abdoullaev
Sent: Monday, July 6, 2015 3:11 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology based conversational interfaces They are good questions I missed somehow: 1. Do we share the same world? We have one world, but a multitude of individual interpretations, depending on knowledge and education, morals and principles, etc. 2. In USA politics, do the Republicans “sense the same world” as the Democrats? See above, both parties view the political things, as republics, democracy, polity, government, etc., as prejudiced. For example, Democracy originally means rule by the people, demos, ‘people’; kratos, ‘rule’, or the form of government where the sovereignty resides in the people. In real Democracy, "the state should be controlled by the people, each sharing equally in privileges, duties, and responsibilities, and each participating personally in the government, as in the city-states of ancient Greece". In practice, the powers, legislative and administrative, and control are vested in a small portion of the people, "elective officers" or "public administration", "the elite", thus violating a true democracy, political, legal and social equality. In fact, there are two polar types of democracy as the forms of government, or polity: real direct democracy, or true polity, and false democracies, presented by representative democracy (republic) and liberal, constitutional democracy. Applied to most forms of government, republics considered as giving more liberty and equality than kingdoms, empires, or dictatorships. Historically, Greek democracy has a small direct influence on the practice of modern states since the fall of the city-states. Although, current Greece try to correct things in its own ways. Try and interview a republican or democrat, neither of them has real ideas of polity and its forms and processes, restricted by its party program or mass media propaganda. https://www.slideshare.net/ashabook/i-europe-digital-direct-democracy-government One sees the world as wide and deep as his mental world developed. On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: I'm not sure, but the Watson demo was more to advertise their technologies than to actualize it, I have been told. Watson made good media, and people paid attention. From what I hear, they are now applying their technologies to marketing and advertising analysis, customer retention, and applications like that. If you google "predictive analytics", that phrase is all over the place now. 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 There is a good first page if you google: ontology based speech recognition By the way, what about our leader - Watson@IBM - does it use speech recognition? 2015-07-06 20:33 GMT+03:00 Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: Here is another paper with a bit more depth: http://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2278529&fileOId=2674859 Here is a snippet on the method they use: In Pythia, natural language expressions are parsed and interpreted with respect to a grammar which we assume to be composed of two parts: an ontology-specific part and an ontology-independent part. The ontology-specific part contains lexical entries that refer to individuals, concepts, and properties of the underlying ontology. It is generated automatically from an ontology-lexicon model, as will be described below. The ontology-independent part comprises functional expressions like auxiliary verbs, determiners, wh-words and so on. The overall picture can be sketched as follows 
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 Alex, From the introduction, I got these snippets: Conversational interfaces as defined by Kölzer [Kölzer 1999], let users state what they want in their own terms, just as they would do, speaking to another person. One of the most difficult tasks in implementing a conversational interface is to interpret utterances and understand their meaning. To do that, we are using ontologies. The ontologies play a key role at the semantic interpretation time since the meaning of utterances can be inferred by looking for concepts and their attributes. The use of ontologies for representing domain knowledge and for supporting reasoning is becoming widespread. The ontologies however, may also be used for facilitating the interaction between user and PA. Later in the paper, they say: we limited the space of dialogue utterances to directive speech act classes [Searle 1975]—inform, request, or answer—since such classes define the type of expected utterances in a master-slave relationship. ... In the context of an open conversation, the problem of understanding is complex, demanding a well structured knowledge base. Domain knowledge is used here to further process the user’s statements and for reasoning. To this effect, we are using a set of task and domain ontologies, separating domain and task models for reasoning. ... The key components that make up an ontology are a vocabulary of basic terms and a precise specification of what those terms mean [Guarino 1998]. Ontologies play two main roles in our PA: a) they help interpreting the context of messages sent by others agents or by the user (utterances); and b) they keep a computational representation of knowledge useful at inference time. The ontologies may also facilitate the process of semantic interpretation, supplying the parser with linguistics elements, like noun synonyms, or hyponyms/hyperonyms. Figure 1 in the paper models the concept Project, but it is shown in isolation, so how it fits into the picture is undescribed. So, in general, the paper is slight (4 pages) and so doesn't go into enough depth to really know how they do it. 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 is there any overview of methods used for voice recognition, as this service is really good done today (for Russian too;-) and may be used as input for ontology based part of conversation. Do they use ontology (of any kind) on their part? I don't think so. But we may get just good quality of recognition. My friend is developing read/write assistant using OWL 2 and reasoner. And I am sure to add voice recognition and generation interface is not a problem nowadays. 2015-07-04 21:57 GMT+03:00 Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: Here is an abstract from a paper: In this paper we present an ontology-based utterance interpretation in the context of intelligent assistance. Ontologies are used for syntactic and semantic interpretation and for task representation. This mechanism is embedded in a conversational interface applied to personal assistant agents. The main goal of this approach is to offer a system capable of performing tasks through an intuitive interface, allowing experienced and less experienced users to interact with it in an easy and comfortable way. The paper's URL is: http://www.nilc.icmc.usp.br/til/til2007_English/arq0185.pdf And the title is: "An Ontology-Based Utterance Interpretation in the Context of Intelligent Assistance " The paper is not real deep, but it gives an overview of the authors' approach to the conversational interfaces. So it's inspirational. Products like Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) have shown that speech to text and text to speech are functional enough to treat as mostly reliable text I/O for a conversational interface. Add a text based assistant to DNS text I/O, and you get a hearing and speaking conversationalist. The paper above is focused on the ontology of the agent as used to interpret the user's side of the conversation. Does anyone have any references on conversational interfaces they would like to share, or any comments on the subject? Another issue is the impersonality of the agent - that's bad. If you watched the movie "Her", you know the depth of conversational mutual understanding it demonstrated between the (supposedly inhuman) agent and the user. There are lots of ways that people respond to simple stimuli - ways that are used by salesman to get your attention swung toward the product or service they sell. They work a certain small fraction of the time, so with large volumes of conversation, they can be studied as case histories of conversational actions. With a database of conversations to interpret, some knowledge can be gleaned. But the Hollywood-like addition of art, and elegance, and plot, and interest, and music and video, among other attention demanding tactics, give publishers more ability to steer the conversation in ways that the user appreciates, and to avoid topics or facts that the user finds cause him dissonance. Is anyone else on the list concerned with conversational interfaces and personal agents? If so, please speak up and share references! 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 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 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.” 
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/ This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England and Wales No. 6632177. 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 Personal Weblog 1: http://kidehen.blogspot.com Personal Weblog 2: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/kidehen Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/+KingsleyIdehen/about LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen Personal WebID: http://kingsley.idehen.net/dataspace/person/kidehen#this
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