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Monday, November 28, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à 

Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

 

 

 

 

Discussion about ONTAC forum

ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group

It is a working group of

Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

 

 

 

Thank you Paul Werbos for the note à [248] ,

 

Zenkin helped me become aware of his work on the conjectured incorrectness of the Cantor diagonalization proof.  In 1998, I posted Zenkin’s proof on the web.

 

Penrose and others makes similar arguments about issues with the notion that "mathematics" is perfect.  Robert Rosen starts with the biological/ontological phenomenon of intention and develops the bases for what I now call anticipatory technology.  ( see ** )  Whitehead made similar arguments about the perfection of mathematics.

 

It is unfortunate for me that I have focused on these types of issues, since I have no career anymore.  I hope that everything, personally, is not lost.  The loss of my career occurred in a way that has some political visibility and some increasing support for political activity around the notions of what some regard as how do we as a free society maintain the democracy. 

 

Are individuals in our society really free to explore truth, if that exploration goes against well-entrenched control structures?  Of course, one has to be moral in some objective sense, but my loss of funding and the bias against my work was based on pure political power expressed in peer review and systemically as in the ONTAC forum’s displeasure with my discussion points. 

 

My work can be peer reviewed as fundable, but not within the community that is peer reviewing government supported Information Technology projects.  See ( **, and ***  and * ).  

 

Perhaps, I say to myself, there is a way to recover and have a career that takes what has been a damaging issue for me personally and uses technology breakthroughs to build a system which is as close to the really as can be for what Paul Werbos is referring to.

 

as Paul Werbos said:

 

"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."

 

I first saw the automated theory proving literature when I was 24 working on my BA degree.  It seemed odd, but I could not put my finger on why, or how to talk about what seemed to be incorrect.  Richard Ballard feels that he is really close to building such a system, called the Mark III knowledge processor.  Doug Lenat founded Cyc Corp over a decade ago with this vision in mind.  Lenat’s system is only marginally successful and there are many lessons learned.  I know Ballard’s architecture, well, and feel that it may be an improvement over Lenat’s system if the Mark III finds a market.  But the limitations of formalism are still not fully accounted for.  Ballard’s system is much more human centric; however, and more sensitive to the inductions the humans make. 

 

I now know how to approach the discussion regarding the difference between how a human experiences awareness and how a computer program executes lines of code.  Paul Werbos's note is in line with how I would start.

 

Paul Werbos also said:

 

"Systems which 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."

 

Here we have a different, but related issue.  Paul Werbos is pointing to a political problem.  This political problem stems from an intellectual monopoly that is supported by funding patterns and by deep-seated cultural attitudes. 

 

****

 

These two issues; the fallibility of computer science and the funding patterns supporting that fallibility are entangled with each other.  Both are entangled with other social/political issues, including religious fundamentalism and pure capitalism. 

 

This complex of entangled social/political issues is sensed by more than 50% of the American public.  Most American citizens feel lied to by the institutions.  There is confusion and opposing viewpoints so that no political movement has yet formed that taps into this feeling.  

 

The revolution that may come might start with mathematics and computer science curriculum reform at the freshman level…  à  [bead thread on curriculum reform]