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Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 (view source)
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=====5.2.11.7. The Experience of Satisfaction=====
=====5.2.11.7. The Experience of Satisfaction=====
<pre>
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.
The world's unwithered countenance
Is bright as on the earliest day.
Goethe, Faust, ...,
quoted in Weyl, The Open World, [Weyl, 29].
With these considerations freshly in mind, it is possible to return to the more immediate questions: Why is it useful to keep a store of memory? How does a record of past experiences serve an agent in meeting its present goals and thereby in achieving future satisfactions?
Assuming that an agent, however accidentally, elliptically, obliquely, occasionally, partially, or transiently it may happen, ever experiences a state of satisfaction, as reflects its achievement of one of its objects or as marks its identity with one of its goals, then it is likely to be useful for that agent to try to keep track of all the incidental experiences that accompany or surround this "experience of satisfaction" (EOS). Because the questions of causal order and even of purely temporal simultaneity are difficult in general to resolve in real time, in medias res, it is advisable for the agent not to focus too fixedly on trying to sort out the precedents from the consequents, at least, at first. But why is it likely to be useful? And what does it mean to be useful? Responding to these questions requires another apparent departure, as follows.
What does it mean to be useful? It means to further the purpose of an agent's present, continued, or future satisfaction. It means to help an agent achieve a specified goal, or else, failing the possibility of that, to help an agent know the reasons why a particular goal is impossible. Taking this as a satisfactory answer on this score, for now, it leads to the question of why a record of previous experience is likely to further the purpose of future satisfactions. Looking forward to the point when these issues of justification are out of the way, I will then be able to focus on the purely technical task of showing how sign relations can be used to construct many varieties of extremely flexible memory stores, not just accumulating the images of past experience, but indexing their elements in ways that make it possible to analyze their logical imports.
If there is any consistency to experience, in other words, any form of lawful relationship between one sample of experience and other samples of experience, then it follows that almost any kind of memory structure, any facility for attention and retention that an agent can contrive to organize the interaction between transient experience and the orders of its more persistent signs, any faculty that allows an agent to note the sundry aspects of a satisfying experience or the circumstantial details of a satisfying situation, any organization of processes that permits an agent to fashion periodic or persistent notes of the tangent experiences that surround an EOS, whether these stores are internal to its initially given body of resources or external to its innate endowment, is likely to be of service in achieving future satisfactions. Properly organized for quick access, the whole index of past experience can serve as a catalyst for future achievements, in other words, it can act on the whole as the sort of sign that is conducive to actualizing its object.
One may well ask: Is there any form of lawful relationship between one sample of experience and other samples of experience? To say "yes" too quickly is practically vacuous, that is, it is empty of anything beyond the vaguest hopes of an implication for action, until one is willing to risk the assumption of a specific form of lawful relationship. For the sake of proposing a non trivial stake, what one needs and desires is an "informative" form of lawful relationship. I am not making any form of fixed assumption here, but merely contemplating the forms of hypotheses that I am able to consider as possible. I admit to occasionally having experiences that cause me to question all the more frequently exploited answers to this question, that tempt me to say "no" even to this modest quantum of presumption, but then I note that it is particular varieties of experience that lead me to say this and specific brands of laws that I am led to question. Then I notice that all the forms of contrariety, disagreement, discord, discrepancy, disharmony, disparity, dispersion, dissension, distribution, diversification, incongruity, and opposition that I encounter at these junctures are themselves distinctions with a difference, and each in its way renders a generic form of distinction, "which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune", to wit, a wealth of unsuspected approaches to the problems that positive experience poses. Without being tempted to classify or to enumerate the full diversity of logical forms by which differing samples of experience come to grate on and to grind against each other, it is possible at this point to notice their essentially differential, negative, and oppositional characters.
In this way, I arrive at the conclusion that "forms of negation" (FON's), or fundamentally negative logical relations, are unavoidable necessities, needed to anchor any adequate basis for stating the forms of interaction among different samples of experience. One finds, instead of a positive foundation, that irreducibly negative operations are inescapable notions, needed to support any satisfactory system of notations for detailing the collisions and the collusions that particles of experience impart to one another. In spite of the aura of negativity that chances to shade their logical aspects, to color their evidential impacts, and to weigh against their positive receptions, the counter exemplary characters and conducts of these bearings of experience on experience do, at a minimum, contrive to convey "informative forms of lawful relationship between one sample of experience and other samples of experience".
The circumstance that absence, necessity, and privation are the mothers of invention, possibility, and plenitude is a difficult fact of logic to accustom oneself to, apparently because of the mind's innate blind spots in regard to its own nature and partly due to the mind's acquired bias in favor of positive relationships. Against these blocks and in accord with this bias, the aspects of nullity and vacuity that arise in respect of logical FON's are frequently responsible for leading the mind astray, for instance, into supposing that these FON's are: (1) purely derivative abstractions from wholly positive contents and structures of experience, (2) partially selective extractions from primary materials of experience and primitive elements of reasoning, (3) secondary, tertiary, and higher order constructions that are based on and built from basically positive forms of empirical and rational connection, and (4) wholly dependent for their practical utility and their rational justification on contents of positive experience to fill out their sparingly minimal forms.
By way of contrast, it is possible to identify a couple of dimensions along which the variety of clarification tasks can be classified into coherent associations among themselves and coordinated with each other.
1. One interpretation of the clarification task fixes the object and the class of signs that figure in as implied arguments of the operation, and thus it understands the task as a process of refining the quality of significance that stems from the individual signs, that is, developing a clearer interpretant for each sign given in the input class. I refer to this brand of clarification as a "modeling" process, for several reasons:
a. Speaking of "signs" in the generic sense, this mode of clarification process involves the finding or the making of "model" signs to serve as their clarified interpretants. In other words, it takes in signs of an arbitrary quality of clarity and replaces them with their "canonical", "normal", or "standard" equivalents, ones that have an improved or optimal level of clarity.
b. Speaking of signs in the sense of logical expressions, this mode of clarification process involves the detection, enumeration, and organization of their logical "models", that is, their logically satisfying interpretations.
Overall, this brand of clarification can be viewed a purely cognitive, intellectual, syntactic, or rational process, one that goes on in the absence of any interaction with the object domain beyond the initial sample of signs.
2. Another interpretation of the clarification task allows the object, or the information that the object avails of itself, to change over time. It is not that agents always have a lot of choice in the matter of whether changes occur or what changes take place, but only that they do have the option to envision the possibility of changes in the objects or the data, and accordingly to contrive systematic ways of tracking these changes and accounting for the developments of objects and signs through time. This rendition of the general requirement to "increase the clarity of the signs that the agent possesses about the object" comprehends the task of clarification as a matter of increasing the quantity of the agent's possessions in that regard, and it leads to a class of strategies in which agents proceed by gathering each new sign that they find of the object into the class of signs that forms their sample.
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=====5.2.11.8. An Organizational Difficulty=====
=====5.2.11.8. An Organizational Difficulty=====