Yes indeed Brent! Tts a very tough problem, and exactly what I've been critizing Bayesianism for. That's what I've been going on about when I talked about how Bayesianism can only fully deal with *Shannon Information* , it can't fully handle the *meaning* (semantics) of the information.
So how do we ascribe meaning to mere formalism? Remember the story of John Boole. He developed a means of reasoning about thinking, by matching up the abstract concepts of *algebra* with concrete concepts of *mental logic*. In large part, his ideas were the foundation for Bayesianism. Enter the story of Marc Geddes ;) Like Boole, I’m trying to extend logic further meaning by matching up abstract concepts with concrete logical concepts. In particular, it is highly suspicious that there appears to be a remarkably close match-up between the concepts of *category theory* and the concepts of *analogy formation*. What is even more remarkable, no one but me seems to have noticed ;) So, the meaning is obtained by matching the abstract concepts to the concrete ones. Let’s look once again at the close match between an *analogy*, and a *functor* from category theory: First, observe the definition of an analogy: " Analogy is both the cognitive process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process." Go to the definition of a functor from category theory: "Given two categories C and D a functor F from C to D can be thought of as an *analogy* between C and D, because F has to map objects of C to objects of D and arrows of C to arrows of D in such a way that the compositional structure of the two categories is preserved" So we can match the meaningful concept (ie 'analogy') to the abstract concept (ie 'functor', from category theory) Intriguing huh? It useful to look at the story of George Boole once again, because he developed computer logic precisely by performing these sorts of match- ups between abstract algebra (meaningless) and basic mental logic (meaningful) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_boole --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---