Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Blair (Pittman),
I would like to have a scientific/cultural gathering along the border somewhere (Lajitas ?). In this communication, I would like to develop the focus of this possible conference. With permission from those in the cc, I ask that there be a principled discussion about the possibilities. I will post into the BCNGroup web log some of the discussion. à [61]
I raised some issues in some correspondence (below) with the editors of a new book on computational semiotics. Tom Adi and I are two contributors. Ben Goertzel is also a contributor and lives in New Mexico. The same is true of Krieg Peter. Five or six of the faculty at the Center for Big Bend Studies (Sul Ross) also may have interest in submitting papers in the area of cultural anthropology and linguistics.
<quote, Paul Prueitt to Gudwin and Queiroz>
I thought a great deal about the cultural judgments that are made on my
work,
and was concerned that these same judgments were being applied to
others.
A book such as this one should represent a community viewpoint, with
pros and
cons and comparisons so that the reader can get to the heart of what
is, or might
be, occuring in an emerging field called computational semiotics ...
But the AI belief starts out with an advantage - one expressed by the
saying that
AI as NOT YET achieved the level of human intelligence.
When I originally thought about the book, I had hoped that no author
would take
this type of position or in taking the AI position would make the
position clear
as a conjecture (with reservations).
The intelligence that we seek is in nature, and we use language
unclearly when we
attribute intelligence to abstractions. The word both loses meanings known by
children and gains meanings unrelated to the meaning of the term
"natural intelligence".
The elements of language are abstractions, cognitive symbols. Language however
might be referred to as a living system... if we see the full reality
of how
language forms - both as part of individual speach acts and as a larger
process.
Tom Adi's work
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/generativeMethodology/AdiStructuredOntology-PartI.htm
shows the possibility that language has a more complex dimension.
Language is seen to be more than a simple interaction between
individuals making
speech acts and physical environmental elements.
Well , these things are hard to say properly.
<end quote>
One more point about Tom's work (and then on to a second point about the role of category formation). Tom's work could be applied to original indigenous languages (with individual corruptions removed) as a means to create a computational model of the indigenous social system. The initial model can be encoded as an Orb
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/Notation/notation.htm
with my existing (simple) software; and then extended by hand to create an “active” knowledge base, of the type that Dr Richard Ballard discusses.
The "natural types" found in rock art styles (see F M Galvan - "Rock Art of the Chihuahuan Desert Borderlands" 1998 Center for Big Bend Studies) is a good example of where categorical collapse (around word and letter patterns) might be approached. A computational linguistic (with a system of signs arises from this) effort would be easy (the linguistic software exists), and would perhaps boot strap a community into a formal semi-formal knowledge base about various aspects of cultural anthropology under study now. The problems will be in interpretation, but this is to be expected. The result would be a “semiotic system” with computational encription.
The edited volume "Computational Semiotics" will not be out this winter (perhaps), or this volume might be designated one target (background reading) for members of the conference. Other background materials might be developed (to include Maturana and Varela's "Tree of Knowledge".) The editors of the Computational Semiotics book are Brazilian, and would be able to bring some of the South American scholars (perhaps Maturana ?).
Paul (Werbos) might NSF be asked to provide a conference grant ? The DHS aspect can be raised, as this would be a major cultural exchange across the Mexican – US border, leading to a better understanding of the cultural expressions that have been closed off due to border closings at Lajitas, Redford, etc…
Computational semiotics must use categorical collapse (using the computer and techniques like co-occurrence or latent semantic indexing), in order to have something to compute with. Lofti Zadeh (father of fuzzy logic ) AT FIRST THOUGHT (1980s) that computing with words was possible; and later spoke to conference after conference about the failure of fuzzy computing to (by itself) address the full reality of human use of language. Tom Adi's work suggests dimensions to a sub-structural reality that enforces the use of substructural invariance in how words MUST come to mind. This "ontological" reality to the invariance in language can be over written, as it often is in English. But in Arabic and some other language (perhaps the primitive languages) the invariance is enforced by a spiritual awareness of the use of words and parts of words.