Category: Uncategorized

The Pepys Connection. Atlantic Online review (via Jorn) by Philip Hensher of “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self” by Claire Tomalin. Interesting angle on the plethora of seemingly irrelevant first person details being key to why Pepys’ record represents a more important body of knowledge than any other 17th and 18th century objective accounts. Good advert for James Joyce in [Quote] Pepys’s commitment to recording the totality of experience would not really be matched until Ulysses and the diaries of Virginia Woolf. [Unquote]

Kurzweil’s Paradigm. Report on talk by Kurzweil by Weinberger of JOHO [Quote] Killer soundbyte from Kurzweil: The genomic information about the brain is 12 million bytes of compressed data, “smaller than Microsoft Word.” [Unquote]

I’m an American tired of American lies. Woody Harrelson (!) in The Guardian (via Gimbo). What was it I was saying about lying ?

The Classification of Links. Interesting link (via Seth) from “Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why” by Claire Harrison at First Monday. The ontology is a bit contrived and a bit focussed on e-biz dot.com web site domains, but (like Jorn’s simple text buttons) a step towards modelling the right bits of the semantic web IMHO. There is something fundamental here worth looking for.

Managing to find some time to read Eco’s Kant and the Platypus at last. He is a big fan of Nietzshe’s Truth and Lies and quotes ” … truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms … that subsequently gel into knowledge.” That’s just about where I’m coming from. Eco goes on to say “… we become accustomed to lying according to convention …. placing our actions under the control of abstractions …. having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks ….. constructed entirely by language …. the graveyard of intuition.” Exactly, “reification kills knowledge” is my mantra, “lying by (western) convention” is Argyris’ thesis. This could almost be the last word on the matter of justifying why rational objective ontologies are the last thing a model of knowledge needs.

[Metonymy and other forms of rhetoric seem to be a flavour of the month on the web.]

Chrucky’s paper (yesterday’s blog) covers interesting ground, even if the purpose is a catholic religious / abortion argument about what constitutes a human person. The concept of whether “morals” are something fundamental and whether consciousness and communication shared between “persons” are really part of some social contract, existing at tacit levels to build on more explicit conscious actions. (Duties, agreements, negotiations, Hobbes, body-politic, Searle, weak-AI, capabilities, facilities, and more.)

[Quote] […. distinguish between “Hypothetical” and “Categorical” duties or rules …..] H-duties are those things I must do to survive or to live well. The obvious h-duties that I have are to obey the laws of nature and such overwhelming forces as muggers, tyrants, and the law — on the threat of such things as penalties, injuries, incarceration, or death. C-duties are those actions which I have promised or agreed to do freely — overtly or tacitly. Talk of c-duties is grounded in some kind of an agreement. This is the insight of the social contract theoreticians, such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and John Rawls. Such an agreement is viewed as a historical fiction, but which is invoked to reveal the logic of c-duties. Talk of c-duties is based on some explicit or implicit set of agreed-to rules. According to the social contract theories, these rules may in fact be imposed through social laws or through indoctrination. Call this their genesis. However, their justification is through a fictitious, historical original free rational agreement. This is to say that h-rules in order to be freely accepted must be grounded in c-rules. And by being so grounded they become extensions of c-rules. Another way of expressing this is to say that there are many rules which appear to be h-rules but are really c-rules. Unless h-rules are agreed to at least implicitly, they have the character of imposed commands and remain merely h-rules. Let me clarify this through some thoughts about pursuing survival and the good life ….. [Unquote]

Very much Maslow / Hertzberg distinctions in motivations, here cast as social “duties”. Need to diagnose his “historical fiction” comment about the social contract idea – seems to me he’s making the same point that the distinction between survival pursuits and the good life is set at some (tacit) level defined by (or rationalised using) previous explicit negotiated agreements. Same thread as Pirsig and Foucault about the relationships between “moral” levels being pretty fundamental. As soon as you have a human social intent view of meaning and knowledge, the moral base level “human survival” seems a similarly fundamental basis for the knowledge model.

Transforming Information into Knowledge. Information Glut and Knowledge Creation in Biotechnology by Richard Gayle (via Seb’s Blog). Good paper – bases view of business on Porter’s stuff (see references in my own dissertation) therefore not limited to Biotech. [Quote] As companies grow and as the amount of information generated increases, fewer people have time to read the literature or are able to personally interact with those outside their particular program. This results in isolated projects, the inability to stay current, and the repetition of effort. [Unquote] Not surprisingly, the proposals are about knowledge management based on human interaction. (See also Heylighen’s papers on Information Overload effects.)

Concepts of Persons and Morality. Picked up this draft article by Chrucky (pr Kroosky) of Meta-Encyclopedia of Philosophy fame (see my glossaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias resource page.). Chrucky is a an “Emergent Materialist” or “Animal Realist” which sounds close to where I’m headed, and the idea that humans may have fundamental motives relevant to communication and knowledge, has intrigued me ever since reading Pirsig (Qualities and Morals) and recognising the parallels with Maslow. Chrucky looks worth further exploration.