Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: mark@dolphsys.demon.co.uk (Mark Lewis)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!dolphsys.demon.co.uk!mark
Subject: Re: Knowledge and reasoning
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Organization: Dolphin Systems Ltd
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Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 16:36:09 +0000
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From previous posts, it appears that there are two forms of knowledge; 
structured and unstructured, that high order systems are not the sum of 
their components and there exists something called consciousness which can 
be assessed.

Is it not fair to suggest that this unstructured data that we talk about is 
nothing more than data which could be structured if we tried hard enough.  
Like the surgeon who cannot operate because he does not have an 
instrument which is sharply enough refined we are unable to analyse this 
knotty problem because we are clouded by the judgement of self and 
introspection.

So its a bit fiddly.  What we are looking for is a surgical knife to parse 
the bits about life that we do not understand.  We need to decide what is 
this unstructured data and what is consciousness.  I believe that the 
items are interlinked.

Let us suppose that the equilibrium is dynamic - that consciousness is to be 
measured by some function of the treatment of information / knowledge and
 that knowledge to be knowledge requires some conscious agent.  Let us talk 
about real world systems such that the notion of the closed systems 
does not exist, since outside any system boundary is the innards of 
another wider system.

However, consider the human race as a network of nodes.  Each node is a 
centre of consciousness.  When considered across the globe, energy is fairly 
well spread out among the five or six billion nodes.  Entropy is thus 
not in contradiction to life since there will always be a minimum size 
building block - consider the atom.

Thus life forms - not just human ones - can be considered as concentrations 
of energy.  This energy takes a particular configuration in terms of both 
formal matter, structure and the ethereal consciousness.   Bound up in 
this system is knowledge some of which is structured some of which is not.  
We seem to require this structure to form a framework for analysis and use 
consciousness to fill in the gaps.  If this is the case then the road 
to understanding lies in structuring all the things we need to 
understand.

How is it that the world can exist when Newtonian Physics and Quantum 
Physics both exist.  Science says Newton was right - as long as the bits are 
fairly large - but when they are small we need Quantum stuff.  
Maybe we are there in our present studies.  Our real world stuff is 
subject to a bunch of laws and all the internal bits to another set.  It is 
my suggestion that this type of analysis is simplistic, that if we need 
two sets of laws then our understanding is flawed.

The feeling is that the world revolves around a set of true laws which we 
have not yet been able to define either because they are beyond definition 
or because our understanding is just imperfect.  It is not that Newton 
/ Quantum are wrong but that they provide only the framework and 
structure.  But science is a perfect art!  How can we integrate conscious 
thought into this debate without saying that we can define and 
structure only up to a point?

We can prove many things in physical science through demonstration but can 
we not structure that which is unstructured?  Perhaps however far we go we 
will find unstructured bits becoming more structured as we are able 
to understand them and the unstructured bits that remain, becoming 
acceptably small.  However, while there remains doubt, we have proved 
nothing.  When doubt is eradicated we can test our theory.  If our theory 
seems to 
match reality than we have a framework for understanding  but let us try to 
stick to one set of laws, a set which represents reality and not one 
which stops short and says we need a whole new set of laws.


-- 
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| Mark Lewis    EMail mark@dolphsys.demon.co.uk                             
                  |
| Peace on the Planet
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