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Communications on a National Project

On the nature of the inhibition we face

3/7/2004 8:20 AM

It is my sense that John's note has established a terminating point for the discussion, except for two points.

1) Dick believes that his understanding is beyond that of his mentor’s.

2) Dick has some very valuable work that is, has been, difficult to express and difficult to validate.

But for now, we make an attempt to move the discussion off of natural language and artificial language.

This new topic addresses the broad question of inhibitory social interaction that Pribram and Bradley call a social field (because the set of causes are no all localizable).

Gravity is an example of a holonomic constraint, as are many of the phenomenon talked about in the ecological psychology community (J. J. Gibson, Robert Shaw, Michael Turvey, Peter Kugler).

Wolfram’s group defines “holonomic constraint” as

Holonomic constraints which can be expressed in the form

F( r₁ , r₁ , . . . , t ) = 0

Holonomic constraints are further divided into rhenomorous constraints, in which time appears as an explicit variable, and scleronomous constraints, in which the constraints are not explicitly dependent on time.

The first comment here is that this definition of holonomic constraint may not be the definition that is perfectly acceptable to Pribram himself. The issue goes to whether conservation laws govern all cross-organizational scale “entailment”. Classical physics says that all entailment must be realized at point-to-point interactions that preserve a set of conservation laws.

Indexical entailment is also a technical term in the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) world, and this technical definition may not be what Michael Lissack is getting at when he talks about catalytic indexicals.