Monday, November 28, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Communication from Paul Werbos
I can see how both viewpoints here – John Sowa's and Paul Prueitt’s -- are more or less correct when viewed within their separate contexts.
There are some fine points that are debatable. For example, Alex Zenkin, a well-known mathematician from Russia (and friend of my wife) has published some papers recently raising some very serious questions about some of Cantor's hypotheses, and the relation between discrete logics and continuous variables.
Ed Nelson of Princeton gave an excellent plenary talk at the 1999 world conference on consciousness, summarizing the schools of thought taken seriously by leading mathematicians -- and they really do not represent a consensus or a state of completion. It is questionable whether any human on earth can claim to understand the foundations of quantum theory very well; certainly we do not have a mathematically rigorous logical formulation of quantum field theory for any empirically plausible model of physics as yet.
I have ideas about how we could get there, but I see no really promising movement at all at present.
Since 1963 or 1964, when I took Alonzo Church's graduate course on this stuff at Princeton, I haven't given high priority to those fine points.
It seems to me that induction, not deduction, is where we get most of our workable information content in life.
I place priority on better understanding induction or learning.
Systems that try to do learning about substantive things by using only binary logic tend to be relatively weak when dealing with continuous variables. One can indeed do better, in a variety of ways. But should we do better? Is it realistic politically? Those are not trivial questions.
It would be nice, however, if we found a way to really construct a kind of database of true theorems, theorems for which machine-verifiable proofs are available.
Best of luck,
Paul W.