[FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is transcendent
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Mon Apr 4 14:40:32 EDT 2022
Carl Tollander once told me that he saw an article about automated
programming with the title, "Do What I Meant Not What I Said. No Not That!"
Did I get that right, Carl?
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Mon, Apr 4, 2022, 11:57 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> *"I want to see a full round-trip"*
>
> The claim was made, and "proof of claim" was demonstrated, that
> Rationale's (Now IBM's) Rose provided exactly that. You could start with
> undocumented code and Rose would produce accurate and complete UML diagrams
> and templates. The Diagrams could be altered and Rose would then generate
> 'correct' and executable code that incorporated the changes. Or you could
> create a complete UML specification (models and templates) and Rose would
> generate 'correct' and executable code. You could make changes to the code,
> and Rose would generate the UML so you could verify the 'correctness' of
> the altered code.
>
> Problem was it only worked on a certain kind of program—one directed at a
> formally describable system, like a device driver or low level OS
> component. And even within this category of program, it did not scale
> beyond programs of tens to a few hundred lines of code.
>
> It was totally parallel to the massive efforts expended on formal proof of
> programs. This effort could not scale beyond programs of 100 LOC, or so.
>
> Roughly the same time frame, massive effort was invested in AI assisted
> natural language translation. It was deemed extremely difficult to
> translate from NL to NL, because a computer could not understand or deal
> with NL of any kind—too much ambiguity, context sensitivity, and
> metaphor.So an effort was made to find a "perfect language" that could be
> implemented in a computer and then translate from NL1 to PL to NL2.
>
> Two candidate PLs were proposed: Sanskrit and Aymaran. This effort broke
> down because it proved impossible to map any NL to either candidate PL
> beyond some very specific, somewhat formally defined, NL subsets— a
> business letter for example, or a technical paper.
>
> [I have no clue how Google Translate does such a good job at translation.
> Nor have I tried Google on things like poetry that is extremely difficult
> for humans to translate.]
>
> In the realm of software development the ropund-trip is not just from
> UML-->code-->UML, it is Domain Experts model to Business Analyst's model,
> to Architects model, to UML model, to code, to "limbo." Limbo, because no
> effort exists to close the loop back to the Domain Expert's model. Models,
> and language employed, at each step of this round-trip is idiosyncratic to
> that step and, although similar in some minor ways concerning definition
> and syntax, requires some fairly sophisticated translation. This
> translation is never made specific and the result is massive
> miscommunication (total absence of communication) across the silos.
>
> One more complication, the idiosyncratic variation among human individuals
> within a 'silo'—glen's example of senior and junior programmer, for example.
>
> There is a reason that the multi-billion dollar CASE effort failed. The
> problem is too complex and too reliant on human abilities to deal with
> ambiguity, incompleteness, and metaphor—abilities that a computer and AI
> will, IMO, never be able to duplicate. My elementary-level understanding of
> current AI efforts has yet to reveal an idea that seems novel or promising
> enough to merit a full blown investigation of the technology and my opinion
> about the possibility of significant automation of the software development
> effort remains pretty much intact.
>
> While I have focused on the narrow domain of software and the round-trip,
> there is a general argument to be made. Beginning with glen's restatement
> of my question,* "how far can our formal structures go *toward* that
> ambiguity?"* I would not deny that significant progress is possible, but
> I would assert that it will always parallel the efforts to apply perfect
> circles and spheres to planetary orbits—a never ending recursive
> application of more and more sophisticated epicycles.
>
> There will *always* be a loss of 'information' when reality is filtered
> by any formalism. Formalists of every stripe address this fact with nothing
> more than "whistling while passing the graveyard," i.e., self-comforting
> hand-waving while ignoring the issue.
>
> davew
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2022, at 9:41 AM, glen wrote:
> > I think what we're seeing there is simply that we're getting close
> > enough with big data to constraining the space of concretization an
> > automated system can arrive at. To see the context I'm trying to lay
> > out, consider one junior programmer telling another junior programmer
> > what to implement, declaratively. Then consider a junior programmer
> > telling a senior programmer what to implement. Then consider, say, a
> > literature or history buff explaining to a senior programmer what to
> > implement.
> >
> > With each case, the space of possible programs the implementer might
> > implement will change. Requirements flow and satisfaction is
> > concretization. And with examples like these, we're showing vast
> > improvement on such automation.
> >
> > But the preemptive nature is still there. The difference between a
> > junior and senior programmer (as implementors) should be obvious. It'll
> > carry things like "Well, I've been the Singleton Pattern for years. So
> > there will be a Singleton in there somewhere!" And "Well, the only
> > framework I know is NetLogo. So I guess I'll use NetLogo."
> >
> > A more interesting problem, I think, is abstraction. Automatic
> > *reading* of programs. We've seen a lot of progress there, too, of
> > course, perhaps the kerfuffle between xML and iML being fairly tightly
> > focused. But what I want to see is a full round-trip. I don't
> > particularly care which side it starts on, whether abstracting a
> > concrete thing, then reconcretizing the abstraction or vice versa. But
> > comparing and contrasting the initial thing with the iterated thing is
> > the interesting part ... and targets, say, EricS' conception of
> > identity as temporal inter-subjectivity (or "diachronicity" or
> > "narrativity").
> >
> >
> > On 4/4/22 08:54, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> Is that natural language that is more contextualized? When I look at,
> say, Open AI Codex, I start see the beginnings of systematic mappings
> between vague languages and precise ones.
> >>
> >> https://youtu.be/Zm9B-DvwOgw
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> >> Sent: Monday, April 4, 2022 7:53 AM
> >> To: friam at redfish.com
> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is
> transcendent
> >>
> >> But this is the point, right? That cultural language retains its power
> at least in part *because* of its ambiguity, it's facilitating role in
> [re]abstracting and [re]concretizing. Jon's pointing out that we can design
> formal structures that *approach* such ambiguity (wandering vs periodic
> domains - or here with programming language design) targets that ambiguity.
> Nick's targeted it by questioning intelim rules in natural deduction. I
> guess we've all targeted it at some point.
> >>
> >> Under the paradigm that cultural language follows/reflects something
> about the human animal, which follows/reflects something about the world,
> then the question Dave asks, I think, is how far can our formal structures
> go *toward* that ambiguity? Can our ideal/formal/rigorous structures follow
> the world and "jump over" the cultural language and human animal connection
> ... i.e. follow the world *better*? Or do our formal structures need the
> animal for a high fidelity following?
> >>
> >> We've seen this same question in many other forms (e.g. Penrose's
> suggestion that human mathematicians do something computer mathematicians
> can't do, Rosen's suggestion that math/logic/algorithms can't realize a
> "largest model", Chalmer's "hard problem", etc.). So, perhaps its old hat.
> But in the spirit of parallax, rewording it helps those of us who (think
> they) have solved it in their pet domain communicate their solution to
> those of us struggling in other domains.
> >>
> >> On 4/2/22 13:50, David Eric Smith wrote:
> >>> It’s nice having Marcus's answer and Frank’s juxtaposed.
> >>>
> >>> Conflating essences and attributes is logically and structurally
> incoherent in software design.
> >>>
> >>> Whatever process of ratification leads to human language conventions,
> these assignments get made and may even seem rigid within languages (do not
> confuse j'ai finis and j’suis finis in French, though the ambiguity in
> English is important to Daniel Day Lewis’s line in the bowling alley in
> There Will be Blood), the semantic field is ambiguous enough to the process
> of language generation that the verb scopes get drawn differently in
> different lineages.
> >>>
> >>> Hmm.
> >>>
> >>> Eric
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> On Apr 3, 2022, at 12:31 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Mixing-up is-a and has-a is a fundamental software design error. It
> >>>> is so consequential that some languages don’t even allow subtyping of
> >>>> concrete types. Now it seems essential, but just wait…
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Apr 1, 2022, at 9:42 PM, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu
> <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> On Mar 31, 2022, at 3:24 AM, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org <mailto:
> rec at elf.org>> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> And I suppose the back side of the trap is that we have an innate
> essentialist heuristic which we use for organizing essentially everything
> we encounter in the world.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> You know, in reading this now, I am suddenly put back in mind of
> >>>>> Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, and a category distinction he makes
> >>>>> between “family resemblances” and “predicates”. (Not that there is
> >>>>> any privilege to this reference; only that I have seen so few things
> >>>>> that I often come back to it.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> If “family resemblance” and “predicate” are even categories, maybe
> one should add to them “essences” as a third category.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> What would any of those categories be? Postures toward perceiving?
> Or “experiencing”?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The language that philosophers seem to like that “it is like”
> something “to be alive” (or whatever; to be a bat) — I have sympathy for
> their need to have some verbal locution, though I have no impulse to follow
> them in using that one — seems to have an origin something like the origin
> of terms like “quailia”. Or to be off somehow in the same general
> quadrant. So okay, we can do a lot, and we want verbal conventions for
> signals to put each other into various states of mind or frames of
> reference. The language isn’t analytic in any sense, but if people think
> they mostly agree on it, maybe it does whatever we put weight on language
> to do, to some degree. Cues to coordinate states of mind.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> When Vygotsky uses the term “predicate”, he doesn’t mean it only (or
> maybe at all) in the logician’s sense of existence of a partition of a
> collection into non-overlapping classes. He is referring to something
> somehow perceptual, so that from an early “family resemblance”, where maybe
> most of the blocks in a set are the red ones, or maybe most of them are the
> triangles, etc., we settle on taking “red” as a “property” on the basis of
> which to assign set membership. Somehow it is that investing of things
> with properties or aspects, as a cognitive-developmental horizon, that he
> means as the shift to assigning them predicates.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Is it a mode of perception? A cast of mind, among many in which
> >>>>> perceptions might take place or be enacted? Is “experiencing
> something” as “being of some essence” then, in any similar sense, a mode of
> perception or an orientation, disposition, or posture toward things that
> partly forms what we take from the interaction with them? That is my
> attempt to re-say REC’s “innate essentialist heuristic”. Is
> perceiving-in-essences a distinct disposition from
> perceiving-as-having-properties? Or are they two names for the same
> thing? Linguistically, we seem to use them differently. At least in
> English, one is strongly attached to the verb “is” and the other to the
> verb “has”, and there seem to be few instances in which we would regard the
> two as substitutes. (Though I can think of constructions involving
> deictics and existential where apparently the same usage can shift which
> verb carries it across languages.) Would the linguistic form strongly
> prejudice the semantic domain, or does it entrain on a semantic domain that
> is mostly language- and culture-invariant?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I guess the psychologists and the philosophers have all this worked
> out. Or maybe the contemplatives have systems for it. But those are
> literatures I don’t cover.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Eric
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> So in certain contexts -- mechanics, chemistry, thermodynamics,
> electronics, computation -- we have refined our naive essentialism into
> categories and operations which essentially solve or are in the process of
> solving the context. And in other contexts, we have lots of enthusiastic
> application of naive essentialist theories, lots of ritualistic imitations
> of the procedures employed in the contexts which are succeeding, and lots
> of proposals of ways that the unresolved contexts might be reduced to
> instances of the solved.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> EricS's dimensional analysis in a nutshell, which is an essential
> description of a successful essential analysis of a context, leaves a lot
> of problems for the reader to work out if taken as a recipe for action.
> How do you identify the units of aggregation? What are the rules for
> forming larger aggregates from smaller and vice versa? What is entropy,
> anyway, and what is the correct entropy (*dynamic potential) in this
> context?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Thermodynamic state functions as derivatives with respect to
> entropy are all over JW Gibb's On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous
> Substances. It is the point. PW Bridgman's Dimensional Analysis
> essentially summarizes all of physics up to 1922 as a problem of combining
> and factoring units of measurement, one of my favorite library discoveries
> as an undergraduate. Both available in the internet archive.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> -- rec --
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 12:12 PM Marcus Daniels <
> marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Here is a situation I frequently experience with software
> development where I try to adopt some code, even my own. I stare at the
> code and..
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> 1) It becomes clear how to assemble it into to what I want
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> 2) I become confused or frustrated. As a ritual, I remove it
> from my sight and open a blank editor window to start over. Sometimes I
> must walk away from the screen to think, until I want to type.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I think the reason I dwell in #2 space is because I believe in
> #1. That is, when I have just the right combinator library things just
> snap into place. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to convince myself
> of why it can't work, and whether it is a bad fit or something that needs
> to be fixed in the platform. What is important, in this value system, is
> that platforms are good, not that this or that problem gets solved. I
> think it is basically the Computer Science value system in contrast to the
> Computational Science value system.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> To [re]abstract and [re]concretize can be expensive and those
> who don't do it have a productivity advantage, as well as the benefit of
> having particulars to work from. I don’t think it is a case of confusing
> the sign for the object. It is a question of what kind of problem one
> wants to solve.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> In contrast, I have met several very good computational people
> that hate abstraction and indirection. They want code to be greppable even
> if it that means it is baroque and good for nothing else.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:
> friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of glen
> >>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 8:40 AM
> >>>>>> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> >>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is
> >>>>>> transcendent
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Of all the words being bandied about (quality, property,
> composition, domain, continuity, intensity, general, special, iteration,
> etc.) EricC's "contextless" stands out and reflects EricS' initial target
> of dimension analysis. The conversation seems to be about essentialism.
> Maybe that's a nice reflection that we're sticking to the OG topic
> "analytic idealism". But maybe it's Yet-Another example of our pareidolia
> to see patterns in noise and then to *reify* those patterns.
> [Re]Abstracting and [re]concretizing heuristics across contexts may well be
> what separates us from other life forms. But attributions of the
> "unreasonable effectiveness" of any body of heuristics is the most
> dangerous form of reification. The superhero ability to [re]abstract and
> [re]concretize your pet heuristics convinces you they are "properties" or
> "qualities" of the world, rather than of your anatomy and physiology.
> Arguing with myself, perhaps Dave's accusation is right. Maybe this is an
> >>>>>> example of swapping the sign for the object, or reworded
> prioritizing for the description over the referent, confusing the structure
> of the observer with the structure of the observed.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Those of us with less ability tend to attribute (whatever
> haphazard heuristics they've landed on) to the world *early*. Those of us
> with more ability continue the hunt for Truth, delaying attribution to the
> world until we get too old to play that infinite game any more.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I think Possible Worlds helps, here, too:
> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ <
> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/> Patterns are simply
> (non-degenerate) quantifiers over possible worlds.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Regardless, I'd like to ask whether the formulation of
> intensive properties as derivatives of entropy w.r.t. extensive properties
> is formalized somewhere? If so, I'd be grateful for pointers. I'm used to
> the idea that the intensives divide out the extensives. But I haven't seen
> them formulated as higher order derivations from entropy.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Thanks.
> >>>>>> -glen
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> On 3/29/22 14:37, David Eric Smith wrote:
> >>>>>> > [snip]
> >>>>>> > 1. One first has to have a notion of a macrostate; all these
> terms
> >>>>>> > only come into existence with respect to it. (They are
> predicates of
> >>>>>> > what are called “state variables” — the intensive ones and
> the
> >>>>>> > extensive ones — and that is what the “state” refers to.)
> >>>>>> >
> >>>>>> > 2. One needs some criterion for what is likely, or stable,
> which in general terms is an entropy (extending considerably beyond the
> Gibbs equilibrium entropy, but still to be constructed from specific
> principles), and on the macrostates _only_, the entropy function (which may
> be defined on many other states besides macroststates as well) becomes a
> _state function_.
> >>>>>> >
> >>>>>> > 3. Then (actually, all along since the beginning of the
> construction)
> >>>>>> > one needs to talk about what kind of aggregation operator we
> can apply
> >>>>>> > to systems, and quantities that do accumulate under
> aggregation become
> >>>>>> > the arguments of the state-function entropy, and the
> extensive state
> >>>>>> > variables. (I say “accumulate” in favor of the more
> restrictive word
> >>>>>> > “add”, because what we really require is that they are what
> are termed
> >>>>>> > “scale factors” in large-deviation language, and we can
> admit a
> >>>>>> > somewhat wider class of kinds of accumulation than just
> addition,
> >>>>>> > though addition is the extremely common one.)
> >>>>>> >
> >>>>>> > 4. Once one has that, the derivatives of the entropy with
> respect to the extensive variables are the intensive state variables. It
> is precisely the duality — that one is the derivative of a function with
> respect to the other, which is the argument of that function — that makes
> it not bizarre that both exist and that they are different. But as EricC
> rightly says, if one just uses phenomenological descriptions, why any of
> this should exist, and why it should arrange itself into such dual systems,
> much less dual systems with always the same pair-wise relations, seems
> incomprehensible. For some of the analogistic applications, there may not
> be any notions of state, or of a function doing what the entropy does, or
> of aggregation, or an associated accumulation operation, or gradients, or
> any of it. Some of the phenomenology may seems to kinda-sorta go through,
> but whether one wants to pin oneself down to narrow terms, is less clear.
> >>>>>> >
> >>>>>> > [snip]
> >>>>>> >
> >>>>>> >> On Mar 30, 2022, at 5:04 AM, Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>>> wrote:
> >>>>>> >>
> >>>>>> >> That is a bizarre distinction, that can only be maintained
> within some sort of odd, contextless discussion. If you tell me the number
> of atoms of a particular substance that you have smushed within a given
> space, we can, with reasonable accuracy, tell you the density, and hence
> the "state of matter". When we change the quantity of matter within that
> space, we can also calculate the expected change in temperature.
> >>>>>> >>
> >
> > --
> > Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
> >
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