Wednesday,
September 01, 2004
Manhattan Project to Integrate Human-centric Information Production
Ontology referential base (Orb) basic Notational Paper (2003)
Previous highly related beads [43]. [44] [45] à
BCNGroup Founding Committee
Conjecture: Periodic tables exist for each type of naturally occurring complex system. Each of these periodic tables has a small number of "atoms" and each of these atoms has a specific set of valences/affordances from which one can predict the function of compositions of these atoms in natural settings.
In trying to get language around this conjecture, the following language is added to bead [43]:
***
It is vital that the analyst understand the origin and justification for each of the Readware letter triples. Questions like, “why three letters”, need to be answered. The answer is likely to involve some demonstration of a bell curve where comparisons are made between different processes, each discovering a set of structural primitives. Then some numerical answer can be given that the Readware construction is optimal in some specific sense.
Perhaps the proper answer is “we found a process of producing three letter tokens that measured, perhaps imperfectly but still quite useful, the invariances in human communication needs.
At this point, it might be useful to use the language of J. J. Gibson and others in the ecological psychology community. They talk about linguistic affordances. As you and Tom have said, the nature of the need to communicate, the physical properties of the human mouth and brain, and other factors are all involved in created a very stable set of substructural elements from which human thought, in each case, must arise.
Of course, the expression of individuality occurs as a perturbation from what is otherwise a very predictable situation. The predictability and the perturbation from what would be, otherwise, a purely deterministic flow of events play against each other. Over the long term the stability of the substructural elements is established. One need only look at the atomic periodic table for chemistry to see this substructural stability and the great variability that occurs in the chemical compositions we enjoy.
In any case, the reason why we can talk about a national Manhattan-type project to produce (Human-centric Information Production) HIP, is due to the possibility that a simple computer-based methodology may map the substructure any type of complex phenomenon. The possibility of mapping is due to an “ontological claim” that a fixed set of affordances shape the behavior of any type of complex system. The formation and presence of specific types of terrorism cells is then brought under the light of new information tools. The War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs and several other types of social-political conflicts would be provided a science that measures complex phenomenon and would therefore provide a PUBLIC viewing of relevant information about many types of threats to the democracy.
The presence of HIP technology tools, as open source software, will allow the application of HIP techniques to complex manufacturing processes, such as the production of foods and medicines. The primary purpose of the National Project is thus to create the HIP technology as public domain technology and to provide a new K-12 curriculum in mathematics and computer science.
The answer to the question, “why three letter tokens” is then placed into the context of creating a measurement device. A different set of tokens might have been discovered, but the ontological claim is that there is something “external” to the measurement that is being measured.
As I will propose in a later bead, [45], we can provide to
the public a notational system and theory as to why our theory of stratified
semantics has a correspondence to how the real world works.