Psybertron Asks

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.

I have a Catch-22 thread running since the original manifesto about how to provide convincing arguments about knowledge modelling, if I’m sceptical about there being any place here for “scientific method”. The range of ANKOS reviews – positive, negative and indifferent to Wolfram – suggests he really has the same problem. [Amazon reader reviews.]

The recently much publicised Laughlab survey of the funniest jokes in the world, reported the following as the top joke in Germany. [Quote] A general noticed one of his soldiers behaving oddly. The soldier would pick up any piece of paper he found, frown and say: “That’s not it” and put it down again. This went on for some time, until the general arranged to have the soldier psychologically tested. The psychologist concluded that the soldier was deranged, and wrote out his discharge from the army. The soldier picked it up, smiled and said: “That’s it.” [Unquote] Catch 23 I call that. Many a true word.

‘One picture is worth ten thousand words’, (via phrasefinder) Frederick R. Barnard in Printer’s Ink, 8 Dec 1921 retelling a Chinese proverb. Looked this up ‘cos I keep thinking Wolfram has missed the point of this one.

More seriously, this aphorism is easily mis-interpreted when extolling the power of GUI’s, or contemplating graphical means of communicating knowledge. Truth is, whilst the original quote was probably more concerned with marketing value in publishing, it is probably best thought of as referring to power of memory in recalling graphic images as spatial representations of complex situiations. In practice the picture may be a very ambiguous means, even a completely metaphorical means, of communicating in the first place, without a good deal of supporting explanation – thereafter, it’s easier to remember the picture to recall the story, rather than the words.

Blogging Tools Comparison. Survey by Al MacIntyre (via randgaenge) confirms Blogger / Blogger Pro as the biggest with Moveable Type and Radio Userland as the most sophisticated. Whatever happened to Manila ? Includes comparative review of MT and RL, loads of blogging info sources, including a link to a Taxonomy of Blogging by Steve Outing which, starting from a journalistic context, describes many kinds of Blog including K-logs / K-Blogs.

I asked for help with Wolfram and Steven Weinberg (via Jorn) provided a timely review in the NY Review.

[Quote] Wolfram makes it seem that physicists choose simple rather than complex phenomena to study because of long habit or mathematical flabbiness, but in seeking the laws of nature it is the essence of the art of science to avoid complexity. [Unquote] Good old Occam again. Therefore how can “science” hope to explain anything complex.

[Quote] It was the simplicity of planetary motions that allowed Newton to discover the laws of motion and gravitation ……. Newton would never have discovered his laws by studying turbulence or snowflakes. [Unquote] Excellent – well that’s the two-body problem sorted, what would “science” like to offer as an encore ? It’s interesting that Weinberg should use this example, because he also rather disparagingly denies any practical value in simple computers with [Quote] The simpler the design of a universal computer, the more steps it takes to emulate each single step of a practical computer. This is why Dell and Compaq do not sell Turing machines or rule 110 cellular automata.[Unquote] Meeeooowww !

[Quote] I am an unreconstructed believer in the importance of the word, or its mathematical analogue, the equation. [Unquote] Glad to hear it, but unless I’m misunderstanding current thinking around mathematical equations, Weinberg seems to have a strangely simplistic / logical / mechanistic view of words in a linguistic sense.

[Quote] After looking at hundreds of Wolfram’s pictures, I felt like the coal miner in one of the comic sketches in Beyond the Fringe, who finds the conversation down in the mines unsatisfying: “It’s always just ‘Hallo, ‘ere’s a lump of coal.'”[Unquote] I know what he means. (See my earlier plea.)

At least Weinberg found some claims worth challenging in Wolfram’s book – all I’ve seen so far is countless pretty pictures, and constant repetition of what must be pretty obvious to anyone who’s taken any interest in chaos and complexity in recent decades, that complexity can arise from simple rules. Interesting too that Weinberg writes in an apparently open-minded way, referring to Wolfram’s magnum opus as “an interesting failure”, yet he constantly exhibits that western scientific arrogance in his choice of arguments. This one will run and run.

Having finished Foucault, I was off to Borders the night before.

Scan read Wolfram’s “New Kind of Sience” yet again. Just can’t bring myself to buy it. For anyone excited by patterns in numbers and nature, it has a million and one examples to play with, but I cannot fathom any structure in the book itself leading to his hyperbolic claims that the whole basis of science is changed. A thousand pages of little fractal images [“cellular automata”] is pretty, but ultimately tiresome. Help me somebody. I’d actually like to believe him, some of his claims would appear to support my own case, but I cannot find any rationale or argument, be it scientific, logical or rhetorical. Is his case simply that if he lists every scientific law / phenomenon he can think of, and can express it in terms of some little pattern generation rule, that these little numerical rules must therefore underly all science, because no-one has written a longer list than he ? I hope no-one takes up his challenge of writing a longer list to prove him wrong, ’cause it’s not likely to be a rivetting read. Proof by attrition ?

Drifted into the Philsophy section again, only to find they’ve re-organised it. Couldn’t find Foucault’s Pendulum in stock (nor any Wittgenstein at all ! Not that I was looking for any you understand. Does this mean the world has really moved on ?) Came away with Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus. Amusing start, looks promising.

[Must get my bibliographic notes / reading list organised so I can plan / order books needed, as well as record the significance of those read / referenced.]