On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 01:06:35PM -0700, Charles D Hixson wrote: > For me the sticking point was that we were informed that we didn't know > anything about anything outside of the framework presented. We didn't > know what a Fred was, or what a human was, or what an animal was.
?? Well, no. In NARS, you actually know a lot more; you know the relative position of each statement in the lattice of posets, and that is actually a very powerful bit of knowledge. From this, you can compute a truth value, and "evidence", for the statements. NARS tells you how to combine the truth values. So, while you might not explicitly know what Fred is, you do have to compute a truth value for "fred is an animal" and "fred is a human". NARS then tells you what the corresponding "evidence" is for "an animal is a human" and "a human is an animal" (presumably the evidence is weak, and strong, depending on the relation of these posets within the universe.) In "measure-theoreic" terms, the truth value is the measure of the size of the poset relative the size of the universe. NARS denotes this by the "absolute value" symbol. The syllogism rules suggest how the measures of the various intersections and unions of the posets need to be combined. I presume that maybe there is some theorem that shows that the NARS system assigns "evidence" values that are consistent with the axioms of measure theory. Seems reasonable to me; I haven't thought it through, and I haven't read more in that direction. --linas ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=52168417-2fb31b
