On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Abram Demski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Pei, > > I sympathize with your care in wording, because I'm very aware of the > strange meaning that the word "model" takes on in formal accounts of > semantics. While a cognitive scientist might talk about a person's > "model of the world", a logician would say that the world is "a model > of a first-order theory". I do want to avoid the second meaning. But, > I don't think I could fare well by saying "system" instead, because > the models are only a part of the larger system... so I'm not sure > there is a word that is both neutral and sufficiently meaningful.
Yes, the first usage of "model" is less evil than the second, though it still carry the sense of "representing the world as it is" and "building a one-to-one mapping between the symbols and the objects". As I write in the draft, it is better to take knowledge as "a representation of the experience of the system, after summarization and organization." > Do you think it is impossible to apply probability to open > models/theories/systems, or merely undesirable? Well, "to apply probability" can be done in many ways. What I have argued (e.g., in http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/wang.bayesianism.pdf) is that if a system is open to new information and works in real time, it is practically impossible to maintain a (consistent) probability distribution among its beliefs --- incremental revision is not supported by the theory, and re-building the distribution from raw data is not affordable. It only works on toy problems and cannot scale up. Pei ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
