Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology based conversational interfaces

[Ravi Sharma <drravisharma@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rich

Great narration and example.

Even if there is only one person involved, experience and understanding varies with time and of course successive recalls from learning or patterns in past.

But the process of perceiving or understanding depends, beside the presence of physical objects and phenomena, on the extent to which your mind (also brain) connects to senses that get you information about the physical objects or phenomena.

At one moment you say I understand, while sometimes you say I missed it or did not get it. Part of it may be also related to past training, experience and background of the person, as exemplified by you.

Summary - one important parameter is coupling between mind and senses and coupling strength is time variant.

Regards,

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Ravi,

 

Even within those many references (thanks!), I was unable to turn up an English definition of the word "prescissed" on ANY of the major search engines, each search focused on those sites.  At least google realized that the word wasn't "precise", which bing and  yahoo seemed completely unable to do; they insisted that the word was "precise" no matter what switches I flipped at them. 

 

But here seems to be an example sentence usage that has some intuitive value:

 

To use a weak analogy, I can conceive of the redness of a red cube even if I cannot in principle perceive redness apart from such an instantiation. Redness, as with prime matter, can be analytically prescissed from its instantiation in particulars.

 

So I deduce that "prescission" means "extracting the core interest portion of an object (thing?) for analysis".  Which indicates that it is kosher to pick a feature (e.g., redness) even when there is no particular (instance) that stands alone.  E.g., a "red table" has both redness and tableness.   Seeing a red bicycle leaning on a brown table makes that viewpoint easier to generalize separately, into redness and tableness.

 

OK, so "prescission" apparently means "taking a feature of an object (thing?) and analyzing that feature independently of the object (thing) itself". 

 

I hope I have prescissed the meaning properly from the poverty of the example stimulus. 

 

You continued:

 

What I am meaning is a slightly different mechanism that sensation-perception discussed above and it is not precise to strictly call it "seeing" but more like to recognize or realize as related to reality.

 

What falls on the eye of retina is same pattern, but embodied understanding of that pattern does not only depend on previous patterns experienced, but really being different from person to person (and observing from history), Einstein was a person who realized the space-time aspects of gravity ahead of many others even from people around him. Also someone discovers planets and galaxies of significance from same data images while others do not. Thus physical universe is perceived differently by different people even if data about it used are same.

 

Yes, the word "seeing" was an inarticulate choice.  I should have said "sensing", since it is as true of any one sense as any other sense.  The word used in that reference was "sensing" as opposed to "perceiving", and that seems like a reasonable characterization. 

 

Here is a schedule of the life history of one fictitious scientist:

Activity                 Year

------------            ------

Birth                     0

Education            23

Observation        46          

 

The point is that the infant Alice (later to become the scientist) develops those sensations and stores them over the years 0 to 23.  At age 23, she starts a career as an earth planetologist.  So when she observes at age 46, she generates possible objects (things?) from her past experience which she expects are possible in this newest observation.  That means Alice did not look at the same objects as her twin sister scientist Beta, who followed a different path from age 0 to 23 and became a musician. 

 

At age 46, Alpha and Beta went on a vacation together and observed the scenes together.  Alpha sensed geological features, fossils, the structures in which ancient peoples had lived, grown corn, and in time disappeared, as she could plainly see.  Beta was interested in the musical instruments shown in the museum with the claim that the ancient peoples had made instruments and played them.   

 

Each twin sensed a different reality from the other.  Instead, each sensed the same kinds of objects (things) and relationships each had sensed from ages 0 to 23.  The main difference was that each sensed them in a possibly new, different combination than the other. 

 

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 Ravi Sharma
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 2:40 PM
To: Thomas Johnston; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology based conversational interfaces

 

Rich

 

Although I have to study what Tom has posted on Hans Kamp & Uwe Reyle (1996) and Principia which is favorite of many learned people, I found references to  " prescissed " 

 

www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/greenbook.pdf

http://www.helsinki.fi/~pietarin/publications/Chapter%2012-Pragmatics%20from%20Peirce%20to%20Grice%20and%20Beyond-Pietarinen.pdf

http://philosophy.livejournal.com/1965850.html

Also book: Peirce and Biosemiotics: A Guess at the Riddle of Life https://books.google.com/books?id=qI7FBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=meaning:+prescissed&source=bl&ots=c4-xjuqoiE&sig=2okhDL15KUcWezOtewmJ-8c-2l0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwA2oVChMIx6fw_8PbxgIVizGICh28eg7R#v=onepage&q=meaning%3A%20prescissed&f=false

etc.

 

What I am meaning is a slightly different mechanism that sensation-perception discussed above and it is not precise to strictly call it "seeing" but more like to recognize or realize as related to reality.

 

What falls on the eye of retina is same pattern, but embodied understanding of that pattern does not only depend on previous patterns experienced, but really being different from person to person (and observing from history), Einstein was a person who realized the space-time aspects of gravity ahead of many others even from people around him. Also someone discovers planets and galaxies of significance from same data images while others do not. Thus physical universe is perceived differently by different people even if data about it used are same.

 

Regards,

 

 

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Rich,

 

Thanks for the link to the discourse analysis book. Based on looking at its TOC, I think it's definitely worth a read, although, being published in 1983, most of its value probably lies in documenting the history of discourse analysis. I also don't see any of the formal ontology in the book that you alluded to.

 

Another strange thing is that except for the Big Names in the bibliography -- Chafe, Fillmore, Johnson-Laird, Partee, Quine, Searle, etc -- I don't recognize many of the other authors listed there. But perhaps that just indicates that I haven't read enough. Or perhaps it represents a break with the past, that a genuine new path was taken by more current authors. I don't know.

 

Here's a 1996 article by Hans Kamp, who is, in the current literature, one of the Big Names in discourse representation theory. I cite it to indicate that those developing current DRT are interested in formalization, and not just in philosophical generalizations. (It costs $40 if you don't have access to a university library, so I haven't read it myself yet, and it actually sounds like a book one could skip.)

 

1.      Hans Kamp & Uwe Reyle (1996). A Calculus for First Order Discourse Representation Structures. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 5 (3-4):297-348.

2.      This paper presents a sound and complete proof system for the first order fragment of Discourse Representation Theory. Since the inferences that human language users draw from the verbal input they receive for the most transcend the capacities of such a system, it can be no more than a basis on which more powerful systems, which are capable of producing those inferences, may then be built. Nevertheless, even within the general setting of first order logic the structure of the formulas of DRS-languages, i.e. of the Discourse Representation Structures suggest for the components of such a system inference rules that differ somewhat from those usually found in proof systems for the first order predicate calculus and which are, we believe, more in keeping with inference patterns that are actually employed in common sense reasoning.This is why we have decided to publish the present exercise, in spite of the fact that it is not one for which a great deal of originality could be claimed. In fact, it could be argued that the problem addressed in this paper was solved when Gödel first established the completeness of the system of Principia Mathematica for first order logic. For the DRS-languages we consider here are straightforwardly intertranslatable with standard formulations of the predicate calculus; in fact the translations are so straightforward that any sound and complete proof system for first order logic can be used as a sound and complete proof system for DRSs: simply translate the DRSs into formulas of predicate logic and then proceed as usual. As a matter of fact, this is how one has chosen to proceed in some implementations of DRT, which involve inferencing as well as semantic representation; an example is the Lex system developed jointly by IBM and the University of Tübingen (see in particular (Guenthner et al. 1986))

Tom

 

 

 

On Monday, July 13, 2015 5:00 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

John,

 

Thanks for the reference.  It's a three page definition of Umwelt, but here is a salient quote of what you may have meant:

 

What UexkuÈ ll uniquely realized was that the physical environment, in whatever sense it may be said to be the `same' for all organisms (we are speaking, of course, of the environment on earth, though much of what we say could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to biospheres on other planets should such eventually be found), is not the world in which any given species as such actually lives out its life. No. Each biological life-form, by reason of its distinctive bodily constitution (its `biological heritage', as we may say), is suited only to certain parts and aspects of the vast physical universe. And when this `suitedness to' takes the bodily form of cognitive organs, such as are our own senses, or the often quite di€erent sensory modalities discovered in other lifeforms, then those aspects and only those aspects of the physical environment which are proportioned to those modalities become `objecti®ed', that is to say, made present not merely physically but cognitively as well.

 

For those interested in conversational interfaces, Here is a free pdf about discourse and conversational analysis: 

 

https://abudira.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/discourse-analysis-by-gillian-brown-george-yule.pdf

 

There are a lot of discourse analysis papers in pdf on the web, but very few are really about the ontology within which a conversational system must operate.  Most are more Social Science, or English or Philosophy in context and don't go to the symbolic level. This is the best book I have come across so far, unless someone has a better one, also available on the web in a PDF or a Kindle version, or otherwise available to the casual researchers.  I will invest some time in this one, but only in studying 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

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2015 5:21 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology based conversational interfaces

 

On 7/11/2015 10:48 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

> Since you are so persistent about insisting that every observer sees

> the same objective reality as the next one, I will concede the point to you.

 

That's not what I said.

 

Everybody knows that different people (and animals) have different views, opinions, and ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting.

 

For example, your pet dog, cat, or whatever may live in your home.

But you and your pet have very different experiences and ways of perceiving and acting.  But it would be misleading to say that you and your pet live in different houses.

 

If you want a technical term that has an associated theory that has been explored in some depth, I suggest 'Umwelt'.  The 'Welt'

component means 'world', but the theory of the Umwelt focuses on the way it's experienced.  See the article by John Deely:

https://manoftheword.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/umwelt-deely.pdf

 

An excerpt:

> an Umwelt is not merely the aspects of the environment accessed in

> sensation. Far more is it the manner in which those aspects are

> networked together as and to constitute 'objects of experience'...

> Jakob von Uexküll ... saw that the difference between objects of

> experience and elements of sensation is determined primarily not by

> anything in the physical environment as such but by the relation or,

> rather, network and set of relations that obtains between whatever may

> be 'in fact' present physically in the surroundings and the cognitive

> constitution of the biological organism interacting with those

> surroundings here and now.

 

John

 

 

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

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