Heylighen: Ontology

 The world tends to be much more contextual and fuzzy than the crisp categories used in logic or ontology.

Ontologies only work well in relatively restricted formal domains, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers. It already becomes much more difficult to create an ontology of professions, since new types of occupations are constantly emerging while old ones shift, merge or disappear. But if you stick to the formal domains, the semantic web approach does do not much more than a traditional database does, and therefore the added intelligence is limited.

I see the solution in some kind of a hybrid formal/contextual labelling of phenomena, where categories are to some degree fuzzy and able to adapt to changing contexts. An example of such a hybrid approach are user-added “tags”, where the same item may get many different tags that are partly similar, partly overlapping, partly independent, and where tags get a weight simply by counting the number of people who have used a particular tag. But reasoning on tag clouds will demand a more flexible form of inference than the one used in semantic networks, and more discipline from the users to come up with truly informative tags…*

Francis Heylighen on the Emerging Global Brain

By: Ben Goertzel

Published: March 16, 2011

Re Animism, which Heylighen mentions in the article, the assumption of a collective consciousness  in all (perhaps an appearance of that to the situated individual due to collective affect of what may appear individually  'random' movements (and motivations?)) appears to be dismissed but it could have been "built out"ideologically and physically via our constructions, such an  understanding of animals, nature etc as one global consciousness maybe was related to a synchronistic form of symbolic / semiotics we are dismissing, perhaps it is from the synthesis of these two views that the progress will come...

Helighen balances his width of knowledge with a concern with efficiency:
Also GTD :Affordance, effieciency etc


* Could be implemented explored via
http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch05.html

"Getting the wrong end of the 'stick'": on the limitations of language

The 'stick' does not have  an absolute beginning or end unlike the word 'stick'

they are a product of the type of measurement…we know this from 

zeno

quantum theory

there is only a 'stick-in-environment; as there is not a ' hand' but a 'hand of body'
this is a limitation of language... (the excluded middle)

the " beginnings" and "ends" of the stick are fictions

created by the measurement system.

Because the 'stick' is situated in an environment
Unlike the abstract version it cannot exist without it's environment


It is not separate from it in an absolute sense.

What are the limits on the application of  binary measurement systems?

e.g. logics based on an excluded middle

If we are insistent on applying a binary classification system to  a continuum

especially if we feel we are identified with one pole in an either or situation

we appear to have no choice but to assign an absolute negative value to the other pole.

This is likely to lead to conflict…

It is the product of a lack of wisdom of how measuring systems (relatively simple designed abstract systems logics) 

relate to  the systems to which they are being applied  i.e. often to  complex living systems

The fact that the things being measured are of the same type, a type both susceptible to measurement makes them an order of magnitude more similar than the 'difference' implied because of the linguistic category applied…?


To move together as a society-in-nature towards sanity we need to understand this...

 the effectiveness of binary measurement in relation to simple physical constructed systems is clear

however in the context of  complexity such as social disputes  it is not enough...

Dualism and Complementarity

'Binarism' has been defined as 'the passion of those who tend to see everything as divided into two categories' (Hervey 1982, 24). 
'The world is divided into those who divide people into two types, and those who don't'. The interpretive usefulness of simple dichotomies is often challenged on the basis that life and (perhaps by a misleading 'realist' analogy) texts are 'seamless webs' and thus better described in terms of continua. But it is useful to remind ourselves that any interpretive framework cuts up its material into manageable chunks. The test of its appropriateness can surely only be assessed in terms of whether it advances our understanding of the phenomenon in question.

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987, xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that 'the entire mechanism... is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition' (in Greimas 1987, xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that they are nevertheless subject to 'semiotic constraints' - 'deep structures' providing basic axes of signification.
c.f Shaw & Gaines (Comparing Constructions)
 Jameson suggests that Not S2, the negation of the negation, 'is always the most critical position and the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction' (ibid., xvi).
Critics of structuralist analysis note that binary oppositions need not only to be related to one another and interpreted, but also to be contextualised in terms of the social systems which give rise to texts (Buxton 1990, 12). Those who use this structuralist approach sometimes claim to be analysing the 'latent meaning' in a text: what it is 'really' about. Unfortunately, such approaches typically understate the subjectivity of the interpreter's framework. Illuminating as they may sometimes be, any inexplicit oppositions which are identified are in the mind of the interpreter rather than contained within the text itself (Culler 1975; Adams 1989, 139). Yet another objection is that 'the question of whether categories like sacred/profane and happiness/misery are psychologically real in any meaningful sense is not posed and the internal logic of structuralism would suggest it need not be posed' (Young 1990, 184).

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem05.html

Categorization: Epistemology

Knowledge is based on categorization (taxonomy)(eg Foucault),  process usually  involves reducing the complexity of perceived system to enable this, ( in extreme case  into simple icon?)  eg Swan > b  and then classification as swan/not swan
utilising dualism.

re Taleb

Dualism a boundary re directional currents in flow?

reduction of complexity more exaggerated with distance >prejudice (Kelly)

therefore knowledge (categorisation)  denies multiple readings(textuality)?
(sounds like dualism)