Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > Do you mean undeclarable in the sense of 1) It's unreasonable to > expect a one-time formal, and complete declaration from anyone, or 2) > the knowledge can't be communicated or inferred or modeled, in > principle.
I largely mean (2); but I also mean (1) because in any given finite interval, (1) becomes (2). They are only distinct if we assume a long enough time and enough resources to make the knowledge explicit. > The ethic of `more is better' is what I'm pushing, and > yes, toward machine readability (e.g. semantic web) and automatons. [...] > Btw, no, I don't mean [science can be pursued by a specified > automaton]. I mean a growing, developing automaton. Evolving on its > own accord as well as with editing by human experts. Much more useful > than a textbook! I couldn't agree more. The only problem with this belief is the vague concept of "growing" or "progress". Such a concept is very hard (probably impossible) to nail down when considering a process like this. So, because I have no faith that we can define "growing" or "progress" successfully, I just stick with _drift_. There's no method for us to objectively measure the drift of our evolving automaton (currently consisting of an amalgam of databases, dusty journals, old men in lab coats, swarthy women building chairs, migrant strawberry pickers, pasty people pecking at keyboards, the fleas feeding and breeding on our pets, etc.). Since there's no way to grok that drift, we can't really claim that we have strong evidence that the codec can be explicitly declared. We can only hope. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
