Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
possibility of complexity arising in grid computing
[368] ß [comment on four issues
(Richard Ballard)
[367] ß [Four Issues facing
Ontological Modeling (Paul Werbos)
[371] ß [Discussion about founding the
Second School (Paul Prueitt)
[151] ß [Comment by Paul Werbos on
invariance of natural laws
[152] ß [Continuing discussion
between Peter Krieg and Judith Rosen
Communication
to part of the SOA Blueprint Technical Committee (at OASIS) à [144],
Discussion between Peter Krieg and Judith Rosen
Peter Krieg
We even find growing investor interest now, including from some major players. This was that biggest problem over the last years, when nobody dared to touch such an outsider project... But I guess all radical innovators have to go through this phase, even in our time and age where everybody talks about the need for innovation but hardly anyone has the vision to see it or the courage to support it...
Judith Rosen
I hear you on that one! I lived it, though my father. However, in response to your comment that:
Peter Krieg
Our current handicap is that the inventor is one of these rare outsiders, self trained and without any academic background or history in IT. Sometimes, it takes such a fresh outsider look to advance science, but it is often hard to understand and even harder to accept.
You might be interested to know that the lack of academic background, history, and formal qualifications in your inventor is likely NOT the cause of your current handicap: My father had all those official things, in spades. He was still an outsider with a fresh look at old problems, and he also still had to deal with all the same problems you describe your inventor as having/causing. Furthermore, I hope you'll pardon my plain speaking, but there are plenty of people with credentials up the yingyang who can't think their way out of an open box. So, there is something to be said for native gifts and independent learning/thinking, regardless of formal credentials. Indeed, if I could persuade someone to pay me for what I know about my father's work.... I would be a whole lot better off, financially, myself! A lot of folks only see formal credentials. I earned my collection of PhD's in the Robert Rosen life-school of relational complexity.
Peter Krieg
The
Pile space holds only uniform objects in the form of complex addresses (these
addresses are like code, we call them 'combinatory pointers', which is the
actual IP (patent pending) of Pile. They are self-connecting to other such
objects and self-organize into the Pile structure (which by itself can
vary depending on what Pile agent you use or design).
What is new here is that
a) all Pile objects are relations between other Pile objects
b) all these relations are referable objects as well
(So you overcome the distinction between object and relation or node and link etc.)
c) all interpretations are OUTSIDE Pile space, so you have no 'semantic contamination' (if you don't mind me calling it such) of the 'pure' relation space. Unlike in a data space, where you always have syntax and semantics mingled up, here you have a strict separation which allows you to truly formalize data (by computing pure relations and generating data as result). Just think computer game, and if you don't have access to those, ask your kids or the neighbor's kids...:-).
I'm wondering if there is a typo in "a)", above. Are you saying that all Pile objects are relations? Or; that there are both relations and data (for lack of a better word...), which are considered of equal importance? à (answer when posted)
I think it's a step in the right direction to view data and relations as capable of equal importance (although they may not necessarily always be equal, in reality). I also like the distinction you made that all interpretations are expected to reside outside the "Pile space".
However, does that mean that interpretation is outside the computer, altogether? As in-- residing entirely in the computer user? Or, does the Pile space have to communicate/interface with other software and hardware systems? à (answer when posted)
The reason I ask is primarily because I find computation discussions often tend to forget the human factor, which is (from where I'm looking at it) the main source of complexity and the source of final causation in the whole equation. There is no need to try and build certain aspects of complexity into computation unless one is actively trying to create life or intelligence via computers/computation. This is the thing Robert Rosen said will prove to be impossible.
However, it doesn't mean that computers and computer modeling cannot be essential tools in relational approaches within science-- far from it. For those not pursuing AI or A-Life goals, the main requirement is to make computers the most useful tool possible, for a wide variety of applications (both problems and tasks, in myriad diverse fields) isn't it?
My main handicap in these things is an unanswered question I have regarding what the real limitations of computer language (which programming must be based on) are. Binary digitization was chosen as the mode by which all computation is to be done, for reasons that don't really make sense to me to tell you the truth-- I know it's not the only way for computation to be done and it's not the only option that existed at the time, either.
Be that as it may, it is now the system by which various software must be written. It is a system which is entirely syntax based, which puts relational complexity forever outside its capability, unless the human factor is brought into the equation.
If computation is viewed as a component to the human mind, then the larger system of humans is already alive, already intelligent... which by definition means it is extremely complex. I tend to think that all attempts to create better operating systems and better programming for computers should be entirely based on what humans need them to do. Therefore, the kind of relational requirements to consider are the ones required by human minds for sifting through information-- in order to answer questions or complete tasks or communicate with one another.
The trouble is that humans want to use computers to do many things that we already do fairly effortlessly, but we want to be able to do them better. The mind manipulates and integrates spatial information, temporal information, language-based information, sensory information, etc. and we therefore have tasks and questions requiring assistance in all these modes. The good news is that entailment patterns do cross all boundaries, which is the only reason why we can create models of natural systems that can accurately predict natural system behavior. The bad news is that certain patterns of entailment are far more relation-based than others, where relations between relations and relations between relational effects are more important than the material components themselves in overall system organization.
Where complex systems are concerned, material structures are merely a means by which a system can generate multiple dimensions of interactive relational structures, and through which we ultimately see the expression/manifestation of systemic behaviors. But those behaviors are not based on the nature of the material structures in any direct way, nor is there a single type of relation and, likewise, not all relations or relational types are equal in impact within overall system organization.
So, if we have a binary digital system with which to work, then zeroes and ones are our "material structures", our building blocks. Are we only able to create direct relations between these material structures in our programming capability? Or can we create relational dimensions with that. This is the essence of my unanswered question.
For example, let's look at natural language as a system. It's a complex system, created by the human mind to serve human requirements, and is nominally based on an alphabet as the building blocks, or its "material structures".
Each letter of the alphabet has certain qualities and properties and those qualities generate most of the relations between letters to form words. However, once the words exist, as separate entities, they have their own properties and qualities, around which new relations can form between words to build sentences.
It's worth pointing out that the qualities manifested by a word often have very little (or even nothing) to do with the letters any word is made up of. Likewise, the way words are organized into sentences is generally not connected to the qualities of those letters. At this level of organization, with sentences, we can see that some of the relations governing the sentence are going to be grammatical in nature and others are aesthetic, but all are based on a set of relations we can't see but must never try to fractionate away from language: the relations of the word to its referent.
Semantic meaning. This is something about the word, and also, at the same time, it is something which the word is about. It's an entailment loop and although it's an integral part of language organization, it emanates from outside of language itself. To try and make such an entailment loop linear is to destroy it because it is a simultaneous relation which is both self-entailed and self-entailing, and yet it couldn't exist without the interactive relations of system and environment-- namely; language (the system) and human mind/human being (its evolutionary environment).
So the trick in designing programming to process natural human language within computer networks is to build models of these entailment relations so the program can accurately identify relational effects and process them accordingly, right?
In order to do that, one has to encode the entailment from the actual system into the model, and everything after that will hinge on how accurate that whole encoding process is. A prediction is only as good as the model that generates it. All of the "semantic web" discussions I have seen are about some aspect of this and all of the designers of information-sorting protocols for computer programming are faced with this dilemma.
So, have you found a solution? It sounds like you may be on the right track, to me. You wrote:
especially if one has found (as we think we have) an operational method to describe the relationist paradigm
How does Pile handle relational entailment loops?
Judith
Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm