Saturday, November 06, 2004
American and Canadian Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies activities
Working Notes
On the nature of science and
cultural Polemics à
Tom,
Perhaps you will remove those concepts that you feel are not as you wish them to be, and then we will move on without my making any substantial refinements that would reflect the physical processes that might be involved in
1) the formation of the mental event that "carries" the
thought process
and
2) the formation of channels of expressive communication that occur within a social system
As we have both agreed, the development of a proper and complete exposition of your work on letter semantics is a wonderful exercise and we should all be deeply grateful to be inside of a cultural interaction at such a depth.
This is also an important research note, because the set of issues that are exposed are substantial and of some importance. It is important that the core team consider how we may advance the knowledge of the group.
The nature of Islam, as you have been blessed to deeply and fully experienced, and the nature of the Bahai faith, and a study of many religions, and Native American Old Way that I have fully experienced, need to have a reconciliation of terminology differences. If we appeal to our trust of each other, then we may be able to navigate properly to achieve some results that are pure. I enumerate these as
1.0: a pure representation of the Islamic cultural ontology as
expressed in this wonderful natural language called Arabic.
1.1: We need participation in this discussion, soon, by more than one
leading American Islamic Studies professor, so that you and Pat might have
someone to talk with who already knows and is within the thought process that
is the Uma [1], which I
translate to mean the spirit of the community.
1.2: The non-funding of the challenge problem means that our work has
to continue to be unsupported economically, while all of the parties; Ken,
Nathan, myself, you and your lovely wife; are without income of any kind.
1.3: The application of the generative methodology to Navaho is
critical for a number of technical and social reasons.
2.0: The limitations of Hilbert mathematics and first order
predicate-logic were discussed by a line of scholars whom understood logics,
one of whom was Kurt Godel. You do not
understand his work nor his life or social views, and should not represent to
your self that you do. The situation is
similar to VP Cheney’s belief that he understands Islamic fundamentalism, he
simply does not and the problems that develop because he is unwilling to
understand the “other side” are profound.
I would hope that you would read Chapter 2 of Knowledge
Foundations again, and recognize that this distinction between
formal constructions and the natural world is a core “belief which I hold as a
consequence of my four decades of study and my life experiences.
2.1: A more complete application of this core belief, regarding the
limitations of formal construction, is entirely reasonable. The application here is the core of
Buddhism, in my view. Natural language
is what it is, and in that sense a creation of God. However, the formation of natural language at the two time scales
mentioned above
2.1.1: the individual experience of mental processes in the present
moment, i.e., in the pragmatic axis only “existing in the present moment
2.1.2: the instantiation of lines of communication within community.
2.2: Paul and Pat Churchland have
created a polemic in regards to the role that connectionism plays in
the revealing of a complete neuroscience.
This polemic extends the incorrect foundations for
machine “intelligence” to a two-layered paradigm with no system
environment to serve the role that the ultrastructure serves in the Tri-level architecture. This polemic is harmful to the attempt to create
the science of knowledge systems.
There exist a wonderful software system that SchemaLogic Inc founder, Breanna Anderson brought to the market. This software does many “knowledge management functions” that are “understood” by the procurement process, but SchemaServer also does, and was designed primarily to do, a reconciliation of terminology differences that occur across communities of practice.
The market is not ready for the actual solution to conflict, so it is economically important to the as yet to emerge knowledge technology sector that a very large micro-processing corporation (pharmaceutical) put some real money into Breanna’ group so that they could continue to understand how knowledge management with controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies, might work within a real working environment where IT is not governing almost all activities and expenditures.
I will leave your note to me outside the bead game, until we can find a way to synthesize an higher level of abstraction to represent the communication within it, and the set of interests that various points in your communication expresses.
I look forward to the next step.
[1] I believe that I have misspelled this word. Jenni will have to write something about this, so that the founding committee might link her comments to this spot.