[FRIAM] quotes and questions

[glen]

I share Dave's and SteveS' skepticism that actual "things" have a "largest model", i.e. can be completely represented with a description in a particular language. What Marcus has been doing, however, is trotting out many many different models of computation (MoCs) that have demonstrably solved each "easy problem" involved. So, the burden is on the skeptics to somehow squeeze the essence of their conviction out into the world. It's a common task in software debugging. You're laughed out of the room if you claim the bug isn't yours ... "It's the compiler!" Pfft. The burden's on you to write a minimal, repeatable use that demonstrates the problem.

We've wrestled with the same moving goalposts for hundreds of years. What we're actually seeing is that the people with the skeptical conviction simply *die* to be replaced by people without that conviction. And the progress continues steadily apace.

Of course, we *could* be working our way into a fictitious corner. (E.g. the just-so story of the wet monkey thing <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/08/wet-monkey-theory/>, where all the kids who believe in the ability of formalism(s) to capture the world are simply thinking inside the box.) But what's the likelihood of that? I claim vanishingly small.

With the plethora of MoCs and the steady success of computational techniques (and integration between them), it's WAAAY more likely that the old farts who doubt the algorithms' abilities are examples of DaveW's (or McGilchrist's) mis-application of an ill-fitting, old metaphor/model. And the standard way for us, as a fully embedded species in a co-evolving milieu, to get rid of that bad metaphor/model is for those who hold it to die off, clearing the way for those who will work toward new optima.

So, in spite of my skepticism, I continue to be faced with mounting evidence I'm wrong. I can either continue to ignore the evidence I don't like or embrace all the evidence and allow my mind to change.


On 5/16/22 05:26, Steve Smith wrote:
> My own shriveled work with UNM/DTRA of over a decade ago on a project called "pre-incident indicator analysis" was aiming at implementing an Indra's Net of sorts as a "hairball of interrelated event reports"  which would be organized into what we came to call a "faceted ontology" with the ontology speaking for itself and the "facets" being in some sense, pre-computed projections from the all-contextualizes-all hairball into a lower-dimensional space of one of many known-to-be-useful subject-matter-expertise areas.  I still believe this to be the problem of internet search with human-in-the-loop solutions in the form (primarily) of Wikis.

On 5/15/22 09:30, Prof David West wrote:
>  I still maintain that the "languages" of math, algorithms, logic, and similar formalisms are _inadequate_ for communication of most human knowledge and experience. Metaphorically speaking, they simply lack the bandwidth.



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