Thursday, May 19, 2005
The next generation knowledge tools
Comment from Paul Prueitt on new information of Ballard’s theory of information, and his internal architecture.
Richard Ballard said in [80]
A conceptual view of a
combined N=7&8 n-ary bundle is represented within a Mark 3 semantic web
. Some examples can be given.
These theory bundles
represent all possible theory-options and situational alternatives within a declarative
theory based semantic web. N=7 & 8 indicates that the different reasoning
paths available involve 7 or 8 degrees of freedom. In contrast to algorithms
and linguistic description, semantic web pathways are unconstrained and free of
context walls and barriers that force the reasoning path to start at one
particular step and flow in just one direction.
The n-aries n-degrees of
freedom contain sufficient conditionals so their application is possible in any
sequence of application and so are everywhere reversible (any m conditions can
be treated as independent and all known predictions for the remaining n-m can
be treated dependent.
This property makes every
bundle information conserving, when reasoning in any direction. This is
equivalent to the thermodynamic (2nd Law) condition that there is no entropy
change (information is conserved) if a process is reversible (maps
independent<->dependent). The erroneous assumptions have been that
communication is information conserving, but necessarily computation is not.
I would like to see examples of the 7&b n-ary “bundle”, since the concept of bundle has not completely fix a definition for me. Ballard then uses the expression “theory bundle” and this helps but there is still a great deal of uncertainly as to what precisely is being meant.
In my own theory, I use the notion of degrees of freedom to suggest that at tipping points the evolutionary path is “informationally” underconstrained, while the normal constraints associated with natural law is as it always is. I do not have a complete handle on this, but felt that the notion of independent and independent conditions is related to this “artificial notion of mine” about informational constraints.
While recognizing my own discomfort about the language I am using, we realize that Edelman’s concept of response degeneracy in metabolic pathways is relevant to the relationship between causal indeterminism and ambiguation that occurs in natural language.
Ballard’s goes off into his discussion about matrix inversions, but for me this is more about mathematics and not necessarily about physical processes that have or do not have response degeneracy. Ballard’s analysis is interesting and useful, but I am not sure that he gets the full point about pathways having under determined state transitions. Maybe he does?
Response degeneracy is not a merely philosophical issues of no relevance, we claim, it is the core to what scientific realism brings forward. One has to make sense out of a real world, not one that is ideally conforming to our theories and abstractions. The real world has these tipping points.