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Re: Jack's Rosennean Cookbook idea...

As Richard Hamming famously said: "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

Cast in that light, just about anything a computer can do to illuminate, if only in some small way, candidate pathways to enlightnement in the eyes of modelers, problem solvers, then, let it be said that a benefit is accrued. If such modelers, problem solvers are looking for insight into the nature and solution to the vast array of complex and urgent problems facing humanity, then, even better.

We can sit here and wax poetic or even religious that computers can or cannot do this or that. In the end, who really gives a shit? Some of us are bucking for a dissertation defense, some of us are trying to collect or fulfill a payroll, and some of us really care about those complex and urgent problems. You (Judith) and others can take the time to wax thoughtful on the notion of a cookbook, or, you can get on with tossing ideas into the ring. I am happy to see a relational analysis of the problem space posed just by the notion of a cookbook, itself an intended relational model of a perceived discipline. The analysis sketched below, itself, is a useful start.

People, such as Jerry will argue, and correctly so, that we cannot share knowledge. Information is the currency of human discourse. Gordon Pask, who's entailment meshes are as close to a relational space as any I've seen, argued that we each hold, in our minds, models of those with whom we engage in social intercourse. Without such models, the information we encode in our conversations would likely be just so much noise. My model of my son, when he was 3, suggested that an indepth dialog on technical analysis of IBM's ticker just wouldn't make much sense to him. These days, he might surprise me. So, we can share information, and given that our internal models of our listeners allow us to perform a kind of "pre interpretation" such that we emit only those ideas that we either think to be meaningful--as in, capable of being interpreted in a way that meaning was made in the mind of our listener, or that we think will provoke a debate (or titilate, when the game is humor). Indeed, Marvin Minsky thinks that humor is all about expectation failure.

And, expectation failure is what anticipatory systems are all about, and that is what my qualitative reasoner uses as a modeling trick to provoke thoughts in the human in the loop. Thus, I would argue that even the simplest, purely syntactic, symbolic model holds forth the opportunity to illuminate things, ideas, concepts, events which the user may not have seen. In my experience with my program, crystalographers who were asked to encode their domain knowledge into the process rules of my system all commented that just the process of "teaching" my program opened their eyes to things they hadn't thought about before. You don't have to solve a problem to discover something; you just need a means by which you can hold-forth a dialog within your own mind as you formulate some story for some other entity to hear (whatever hearing entails). Following a cookbook is just one way to learn something. Writing the cookbook is another.

We, as humans, are extremely fond of telling each other what is or is not possible. I submit that that behavior is part of the problem. Go model that.

Jack

Judith Rosen wrote:

*I continue to mull over these ideas...*
** *What limits me the most is a clear understanding of what computer programming can realistically encode. I use computers a lot, and I have amassed a large cache of mostly intuition-based understanding, using what experts like Jack and others have said as a form of "parameter checking".... but I have grave doubts that this is enough to really help generate a "Rosennean information sorting protocol" or something along those lines... *
** *So I keep throwing various insights out there, hoping something will prove useful and can be plugged into your much larger cache of knowledge and help you along in your efforts.*
** *The problems Jack is facing, as I perceive them, are:*
*1.) Humans are complex systems.*
*2.) Human conscious minds are a complex system/component of the average human being.*
*3.) Language is a complex system in its own right, and is also a component of the human conscious mind.*
*4.) There is a relation between the human mind and language which is also complex.*
*5.) /Semantics/ are indispensable _within_ the complex system that is "language"-- as is /Context /(there is a crucial relation there, between those two aspects).*
*6.) Semantics and context are also indispensable in the complex relation between human minds and language.*
*7.) Computers are finite and are, therefore, incapable of fully modeling any complex system.*
** *The good news, on the other hand, is:*
*1.) This is intended to be an interactive tool and therefore its finite incompleteness is not a fatal limitation: The human mind and human relational ability will come along "for free" in any actual use of this interactive tool. (In other words; it's meant to be part of a larger chimerical system of human-and-computer-and-interactive-tool.)*
*2.) Reductional models of complex systems can be incredibly useful and, in fact, organisms naturally incorporate the formation and functional use of such reductions within themselves in the natural world (i.e.; Anticipatory Systems) to great effect, all the time.*
*3.) It should be possible to figure out which aspects of the complex systems being modeled can "safely" (safety being a relative term!) be dispensed with and which cannot, such that the use of the models doesn't generate intolerable "side effects".*
*4.) It should also be possible to list which potential side effects would be intolerable (a term which I would tentatively define as meaning: limited/limiting to a negative degree /and/ unable to be compensated for via the interactive human mind using the program) and which potential side effects are clearly tolerable (easily compensated for).*
** *What I can't answer, however, is whether the resulting information will provide answers which can be translated into an information-sorting protocol via computer programming language rules.*
** *Judith*
**