Re: nature -> "human brain" -> "language terms" ==>> knowledge ?
On Friday 18 March 2005 03:03, Alexander Povolotsky wrote:
> By the way Rob (speaking of interpreting ;-) ),
>
> >I think the solution is to do just the kind of search you propose, but
> >to do it "on the fly." So you can find the "meaning", out of all the
> >(inconsistent!) "meanings" with which it is possible to interpret the
> > >world, which is relevant to a given problem at any given moment.
>
> Did you really meant "world" in above paragraph ? (then I strongly disagree
> with you on that - the world, aka NATURE, does not have multiple "true"
> interpretations - but just one, all others are "false" mis-interpretations,
> so charactheristical of humans)
No typo. You read right.
I believe strongly no single, consistent, interpretation of the _world_ is
complete, and therefore there is nothing we could regard as a single "truth."
I think that has been the fundamental problem with our knowledge
representations over the years, and our models of language as well
John Sowa seems to believe all this (knowledge soup). But he he is not quite
sure whether the subjectivity is fundamental (JS: "Perhaps it's possible to
have a single unified theory of everything".)
I think Goedel's theorem (that for any sufficiently powerful formal system
there exist p such that p => p & ~p) is relevant, and that since this says
for _any_ formal description of the world there will be another, inconsistent
one, this means "truth" itself must be considered to be subjective.
Whether you believe Goedel is relevant or not, language structure certainly
seems to be inconsistent, and our representations of knowledge up to now have
been too, which "knowledge soup" attests to.
That this idea, the one that knowledge and language structure must be thought
of as subjective, should be getting a good airing, is probably the most
useful part of this whole debate.
Once you accept that, it is a cinch that we should be looking at inconsistent
orderings as a model.
-Rob