On 10/30/2013 04:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
What a great cascade here... I'm not sure anyone but you and I are
properly enjoying it however <grin>.
The delete key suffices. And, in the spirit of "hiding in plain sight",
we have to populate caches like Arlo's with _something_ to lower the
SNR. Personally, I feel successful enough if I can stump ht://Dig
<http://www.htdig.org/>. I'm sure Arlo's got a better indexer for his
cache, though.
This deserves it's own entire thread... "what means creativity?". And
perhaps, "is creativity just another name for emergent?".
Ouch. No way. The concept of emergence is largely vapid, I think. It
can be unavoidable at times. But I try hard to avoid it. Creativity is
the Twitch, which I think reduces to randomness, a generative wiggle
that initiates causal flows. We then perceive novel acts and artifacts
through hindsight.
My direct involvement in this work, tangential (direct for me,
tangential for the domain itself) suggests that it is very young and
immature, that it often takes itself too seriously, etc. I'm naturally
interested in "ontologies" as low-fidelity, distorted snapshots in time
from a specific perspective of something much grander. Unfortunately
that line of consideration risks being yet-less mature and yet-more
self-aggrandizing-worthy not unlike classical Platonic Idealism.
I don't know. If you could recast what you're saying in terms of the
much more ancient sensory-motor complex presented by (mammalian?)
anatomy and physiology, then you could tie into something much more
mature and much more reality-based than the fluid brain farts that
constitute our language.
I have always had a very complicated relationship with postmodernism
myself. I'm knee-jerk suspicious of any movement whose fundamental
nature is deconstructionistic... that is the central power/theme of
"criticism". It's easy to tear something down, not so easy to build
something (and then defend it from entropy itself and those who would
tear it down for tearing-down sake). That said, I'm naturally
sympathetic with those who question the existing order which is (by
definition?) held in place by authority/intimidation/momentum...
I don't think of it as deconstructionist at all. I think of it as a
more -urgic construction. Modernism is too cerebral. Postmodernism is
more arbitrary, attempting to construct new stuff from whatever garbage
happens to be laying around at the time. But, that's probably me just
stamping it with my own "do what thou wilt" ethic (come to think of it,
Crowley could be thought of as a postmodern occultist... hmmm).
I think you are describing the problem of rut-following and creation?
One often doesn't recognize the ruts they are running in until they
manage to jump them, or more likely get high-centered when they get too
deep. Me, I'm dragging a LOT of shit with my undercarriage despite
having jumped and/or cut across ruts many times.
I typically think of "ruts" as behavior oriented. Personally, I
seriously enjoy doing the same thing day in, day out. I find a kind of
Taoist mindfulness to that. What I don't like are canalized patterns of
_thought_. I think the real secret to happiness lies in being able to
do the exact same thing an infinite number of times, yet thinking
something entirely different each time you do it, different yet
woven/coherent with the rest of the possible paths in the swath.
I can guess this is one reason Deutsch's concept of the multiverse is
interesting to me.
My yard alone tells me there should be some useful fungus around here
somewhere. ;-) It seems like those drugs are an established mechanism
for "cracking the cosmic egg", as it were.
I think their efficacy is intrinsically faith-based... there probably is
no objective way to determine whether the subjective experience induced
by them (immediate and latent) is "real" or not.
Hm. You seem to have taken an odd turn, there. Since I put little
stock in reality, it should be clear that I put even less stock in the
subjective experiences of any one animal. The point of psych drugs, in
my opinion, wouldn't be to find a new reality outside the cracked egg.
It would simply be to destroy whatever reality you _think_ you've found
as a result of your mind-rut. Anyone who has faith in anything should
be prescribed high doses of psychedelics as a cure for that debilitating
illness. 8^)
In my own case, my own maturing has lead me *away* from a strong or deep
belief in any of the specific, accepted classification systems. If
anything I've become more interested in a wider variety of them and
intuitive as well as formal comparative analysis of them. My
professional work in the area is informed by that as well... I'm
interested in how this plenitude of related classification systems are
related to eachother and whether one can combine or superpose them,
interpolate between them, etc.
I'm trying to fight this battle against SBML <http://sbml.org> as we
speak. Actually, that's not right. I'm a fan of SBML (especially
-multi). But it's a bit like Christianity ... I'm a fan of Jesus, just
not his followers. I suspect the ontologies you're talking about are
probably less about the automatic description and specification of
models. But I tend to think of them as the same, or more similar than
do the spooks I've interacted with. Describing a biological system at a
fine scale like that treated by SBML shouldn't be that much different
from describing at a coarse scale like that treated in social systems.
But SBML is very use case fragile, I think, which is where my criticism
lies. Luckily, I have some allies who are much more credible than I'll
ever be.
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