Directory talk:Jon Awbrey/Essays/Prospects For Inquiry Driven Systems
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Jon Awbrey 10:54, 14 January 2008 (PST)
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o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o PRO. Discussion Note 1 o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o MA = Murray Altheim Re: PRO 46. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05351.html In: PRO. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/thrd11.html#04671 MA: Before you travel further down this particular path, I wonder if you'd be so kind as to relate your concept/discussion of "state" with the concept of "context". Is a "knowledge subspace" a contextualized space, in the sense of contextualization per a specific individual, community, or domain, or is it something else? Sorry, Murray, you're already 'in medias res' -- but I imagine you knew that. This is the continuation of a thread that I started last Ides of March or so, and it's actually the "Interest Statement" that I attached to my application to Systems Engineering in the early 9O's -- they asked for a couple of pages, so naturally I gave them 50. Here I'm talking about a "system" the way they do in mathemtaical systems theory. You have to imagine a single point moving through a single space -- that's all there is to it. There is no self/other distinction yet, indeed, it may not even be possible to dis-entangle the state of an agent from the state of an environment in any of the more customary ways. At any rate, distinctions like that have to be discovered on a contingent basis if they do exist. All the information about the state of the system is represented by a point x in a space X, which may have a very large number of dimensions and a wildly exotic topology. That's all you have in general, but under various conditions that you have to make explicit you may be able to get some of the more usual kinds of apartments and furniture constructed in the space. For simplicity, let's say that we have a finite number of dimensions, and that we can order the components of the state vector x like this: x = <x_1, x_2, ..., x_p, x_(p+1), ..., x_(p+q)>. In other words, the components of state fall into two camps, with the first camp having a rank of p and the second camp having a rank of q. Here, "rank" is just a 4-letter word that economizes for the 6-syllable word "dimensionality". In this speculative scenario, let's say we have good reason to call the first camp of components the "physical component" of state and the second camp of components the "intellectual component" of state. What this actually means in practice will depend on the operational definitions of these terms, but the general idea is that the "agent" has more control over its own "intellectual properties" that it does over all the stuff in the "public domain" and the "state of nature", so to speak. The "knowledge subspace" would be generated by some subset of the variables in this so-called intellectual component. As far as the usual sort of "context" goes, it's a highly derivative notion. What's basic is the state of the agent, interpreter, observer, or system, as all of those names are just alternative figures of speech -- personifications or reifications of the underlying process. o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o