First off: Yay! Peter is willing to continue this aspect of the
conversation. I was just complaining to Eugene not half an hour
ago that I wish we talked about this particular aspect more
often. (01)
(more below) (02)
On Tue, 13 May 2003, Peter P. Jones wrote: (03)
> 3) For the purposes of solving the world's major problems spawning
> artificial concepts creates false positives more often than it is
> likely to generate a genuine insight (plus (1) & (2) - auto-
> translation busts). It is not without reason that those philosophers
> that most folks agree talked sense in the last couple of millenia
> were pedantic about the use of language. How do you have an insight
> if you've fogged the picture so that objects within it are not
> distinguishable? (04)
There's a lot to respond to here, but I think I'll have to just
start with: (05)
How can there possibly be such a thing as an artificial concept?
If a concept is born, it's no longer artificial: it exists, it
has at least a seed of meaning, it has potential, it has
context. (06)
I wouldn't call it fogging the picture, I'd call it, perhaps,
layering. (07)
WikiWords are concepts are names are patterns are containers are
objects are neurons are transmitters are identifiers are labels
are categories ... (08)
That makes them both special and not. You can take any of the
words in my previous list and make it first instead, it doesn't
really matter. (09)
Once you have identified a stack of things in a layering, you can
try to apply the associates of an element in the stack to one of
the other elements in the stack. This leads to questions and
answers that one may not have thought about before[1] (010)
Okay, so say a WikiWord is a neuron. What might be LSD for Wikis? (011)
A WikiWord is a label. Human readable labels lead to namespace
collisions. What can we do about that? Is it a good or bad
thing? [2] (012)
If you want to be more formal about what I'm saying, change 'are'
above to like-a rather than is-a and then place it all in the
context of my belief that productive thinking comes about through
analogy. (013)
[1] I'm not suggesting this is th eonly path to whatever thoughts
are made, just that this is a way and many ways seems like a good
idea. (014)
[2] http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/forums/devel/2003-05/msg00001.html (015)
--
Chris Dent
cdent@blueoxen.org (016)
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