Marcus -
The _/From Other Tongues/_ sketch is good. Both what is heard and
what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective
representation.
...
The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the
agents.
I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues" collection
is that one culture (and in this case associated language) has atomic
concepts built into it (as a single common word) which do not have an
atomic word in the other language and in fact may not lend themselves to
a succinct description. In fact, I believe entire books, multivolume
sets, maybe even libraries have been written on and dedicated to a
concept native to one culture but not to another?
My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is succinctly
described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's possessions by
borrowing them one at a time and not returning them". The fact of a
single word for this suggests that in that culture it is a much more
common occurrence than in our own, or that the number of possessions
involved is a tiny fraction of what we are familiar with, or the
attachment to them by the original owner is so minimal that it is
*possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's possessions before he might
notice "what she did there".
Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own
input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have food-induced
conversations with the people you have had a meal with.
WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the overtones
that Stephen once observed at the Complex: "When you get together with
a group of autistics, they might all appear to be listening intently to
your every word, when in fact they are just waiting intently for you to
pause so THEY can talk about what THEY are interested in!"
I’m not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and
extrapolations of ontologies. It sounds too much like “agree to
disagree”.
I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal
experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps 10
years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to be the
most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount of work put
forth to bring it to it's current state. I think the number of concepts
was roughly 5,000 at the time.
Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types
and constant by negotiation and empirical validation.
I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the level
of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood that this was
more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate and apt Ontologies
from the many subfields... it was more useful for translation than for
understanding, and that real understanding required learning the
language/ontology of the subfields. I don't think these are
"disagreements" but rather an awareness that there is a fuller richness
behind the formalisms agreed upon for convenience of discussion.
Many “interpretations” just put off getting to the bottom of things.
Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a
better interpretation, then press Delete.
I do agree with this in a mild form. Many of us here are very
interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper understanding
residing in a word's original use, just as the calling up of deprecated
terms can turn out to be useful for many reasons.
John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how
idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when
it found new utility in quantum loop gravity? I am winging this if
John wants to correct me.
I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists
before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the
Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences and
in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table. Similarly
Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention Quantum Theory?
Each has a domain of utility which may last past a formal resolution of
the differences and an agreement on a shared view (e.g. GUT)?
Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and
Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how
facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts?
- Steve
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