Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Reading material [1]
Reading material [2]
Reading material [3]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
On Edelman’s notion of degeneracy, and n-articulate ontology
Related discussion on ontologyMapping thread à [17]
Judith,
Your note expresses a sentiment that is very close to how I felt that you would regard Edelman's term. I want to not dominate the discussion. Others should make comments... but I also want to state an agreement to your preliminary judgments.
Edelman's "Neural Darwinism" was one of a few dozen books in my life that I was so fond of as to develop a reverence for. In the book there are extensive discussions about the entailment mechanism involved in neural growth, what he called "cellular adhesive molecules". This is richly expressive of anticipatory behavior and moves the reader towards the central questions of "what is life" and how do living systems exist.
The word "degeneracy" is related, in my mind, to a specific point within a reoccuring process development phase where a biological substrate gives up some reactants into a whole that has a specific function there is determined in a complex way. This complex way can not be predicted precisely - for some reason. Here we have true open questions of science.
So this specific point is (or produces) a "symmetry induction" where the process moves from what is likely deterministic entailment to a condition in which the entailment opens up to the "specific" affordance (both "internal to each of the substrate reactants" and "external from the environmental conditions") . Rossler called this endophysics and exophysics. It is this specific affordance that is where I have felt that the Rosen relational entailments could be measured.
Maybe it is simple to say that there is a transition from parts to the whole that is not determinate except when push comes to shove and real time "collapse of the wave" forces an underconstrained dynamic to "become real". I am using a metaphor to the Heisenburg equation.
I want to remind everyone, with respects, that my efforts at moderating this discussion is focused on practical issues related to how uncertainty and incompleteness of entailment can be modeled within the newly forming web service environments.... Of course, it is nice to have some income to support my effort, but perhaps more important to everyone else, this work is attempting to advance information models so that that part of current models (cell, gene or social expression) that is not being perfectly modeled can be understood (perhaps separately).
By separately, I am referring to my conjectural opinion that current OWL ontology is not sufficient to the task of modeling key aspects of web service collaboration and discovery. But the far simpler object oriented data objects in the SOA-IM and SOA-CS standards have qualities that allow a registry of OWL "machines" to be used usefully.
John Sowa's common logic is not as yet understood by me - I am working very hard on this.
The trick is to know when to step away from the formalism.
I hope that this babble makes some sense.
Paul Prueitt