Grace and peace to you Ibraham, Andrius, Joseph and all,

After reading both of your latest entries Andrius and Joseph, I have
2 questions. Can "What is knowledge? What is life?" find its
refining to assemble all of your exchange by consolidating as an
initiative into the
work of "unology universe" by John Tolder? My next question
is: "Could such consolidation find global crystallization from
Canada with the socio-cultural healing initiative
called: ...cleansing our vision of the Crown..."?
All of the mind
complexities that you(thechnologists) are all engaged in, need a way
to converge into the restful breathing, in the pure state
of "being", where knowledge and life get revealed, absorbed and
manifested. The restful breathing can be compared to the tuning and
playing like a guitar, so as to ring from the justice that causes
peace to rule my soul and body in the joy of togetherness. Instead
of tediously reaching for knowledge, we delightfully go from knowing
on. I know from breathing in all that which satisfies and I exgoel
out all that which makes room for ongoing satisfaction to come in.
The progressive rock music group of the 70's named Yes had a
conceptual double album and one of the 4 songs was: "The revealed
science of God". "Unology universe" seems to be an appropriate
reference to point out toward the experience of all in all.From
personally being just by God's grace, I am then at peace with the
communal joy of togetherness. Technology offers ways to make tools
to be of use to manifest the pathways to and from the revelation,
but it must never deter as it does so much now, from the task of
serving the revelation, otherwise we generate interference and
diversion from "meaning" where life and knowledge can no longer
converge. Unology universe may offer a reference to boldly enter
and offer Canadians the "open lead" in the research and development
of universal good health and happiness, where the "open ground" can
be developed, where from the awakening dragon could sense good mood
and calm, by finding as he opens his eyes that the Eastern tiger's
needs were met by the awakening of non threatening unity. Unology
universe might be an inviting offer to all powers and interests to
the common ground that can rally all extremes and opposites like the
Buddhists and the Taoists and all the way to the skin heads and the
black panthers of the world. Terror-anti-terror has humanity
painted in a corner. ...cleansing our vision of the Crown... offers
a user friendly handle for all servants of God on Earth to get
together to gracefully demonstrate the manifestation of the
knowledge of life personally, communally, culturally,
sociologically, and to unveil from such an experience, the life of
knowledge educationally, Economically, politically and to verily,
verily be scientifically, historically, religiously and
theologically spiritual local Worshippers. If the thirst of
globalization gets quenched with such healthy and happy local
disposition, then there is a bright future ahead. ...cleansing our
vision of the Crown... is conceived to offer the Canadian reality
and globalization as an avenue to reach the maturity of a people of
all people, directly with democracy's passage from colonisation to
sovereignty. The initiative is design to cause a massive ground
swell in support of rapid changes in consumers purchase habits. The
aim is to gain the attention and support of the Canadian population
for the re-alignment of the citizenship life style. The benefits of
such endeavour can only come if the changes are executed without
absorbing the wind of panic that will come to the economic powers
that exist solely for profits amd who rely on military services for
their security. This is why, by inviting the Queen of England's to
host the project during her visit to Canada in the week of the 23rd
of May 2005, there will be a way to contain and to direct the ground
swell invitation to personally and communally...cleanse our vision
of the Crown...No more humanity playing as if, only real people
learning to live by knowing one another from living in the knowledge
of each other...then the sword of technology and all of its allies
can serve the good cause, without fear of some secret endeavour
somewhere on earth. No, only open leads in the transparency of
unology universal. Does that fit in? Benoit




Joseph, I add some very quick responses as I engage
your "motivations"
and the direction that you lay out...

- "Knowing" as the "truth of concepts" - fantastic! And that makes me
think that God (the nullsome - division of everything into no
perspectives, so that it is of itself) is the "concept of truth" and
thereby related to the foursome (division of everything into four
perspectives) which may be thought of as bifurcating the "concept of
truth" into "concept" and "truth" and reordering them, those holding
them separate, which would explain the role of the foursome as the
maximal unfolding of structure, which opens up space for the godlet
but
also starts the collapse of structure, the eightsome finalizing the
collapse into the nullsome, as it has a perspective "all are good and
all are bad" which is to say, an empty system (here I say:
"true"="obvious"="not hidden" which as a "concept" (stands on its own
and is thus "hidden") is by nature contradictory and is thus both
"obvious" and "hidden").

- Fauconnier et al's "blend" theory should be inverted, by which I
mean
to say that "understanding" is the ability to make use of the blend
to
hold two domains separate rather than to merge them. It's the
separation, the teasing apart of the domains, wherein lies the
intelligence.

- You mention "relativeness" as the point of scope - great! Indeed,
we
may think of everything, anything, something, nothing as serving
these
purposes. Relative to "everything" - all statements are true!
(Because
a statement is just a narrowing down of the truth, and note that the
state of everything is contradictory, thus not restricting the
truth).
So we may think of a statement as true (= obvious = not hidden)
relative to:

- all contexts ("everything"=open+unbounded) if we think broadly
enough,
then truth wins out, everything is obvious, and there is no
falsehood,
there is nothing hidden
- any context ("anything"=open+bounded) if we restrict to a
particular
context, there is a way to empathize with its truth, if necessary, by
way of the relevant framing of everything
- some contexts = not all contexts ("something" = "not
everything"=closed+bounded), which is to say, it is sometimes true,
and
sometimes false, the usual way of looking at logic
- no contexts = ("nothing"=closed+unbounded), then there is no
context
to distinguish truth and falsehood, and so they are equal in
standing.

Note: In this way, the four scopes serve a most important structural
function: they allow for the description of a "distinguished
opposite".
Perhaps the greatest structural challenge is defining
a "distinguished
opposite" - we want to be able to say that, on the one hand, good and
bad are opposites, but on the other hand, good wins out, which is to
say, there can be good without bad. One way to think about this is
that
God wants "all the good" - so some good does not require bad, but
he's
willing to take all the bad that might be needed so as to include
every
least bit of good. Structurally, this "distinguished opposite" is
slack
(note in English the interesting fact that "loosen" and "unloosen"
mean
the same thing, or that tightening and loosening are both
representations of slack - decreasing and increasing). Slack is the
"anti-structure" that dissolves structure so that it can collapse and
doesn't keep growing in metalevels. What's new for me here is the
idea
that the point of the scopes (and what gives rise to them) is that
they
are what's needed for being able to look at truth as self-standing
(as
with everything) but also an equal opposite to falsehood (as with
nothing). Apparently, all four scopes are needed - the two
intermediate
scopes "any" and "some" apparently restrict the question to
individual
matters - do we link back to the "true" and "false" of nothing or to
the
"all true" of everything - do we place the question in the conceiver
or
in the conceived?

Now, furthermore, these scopes make it possible to relate "God" and
"godlet" in a symmetric way, and yet ultimately realize the primacy
of God.

God is that which is separated from itself by "everything". The
godlet
(the heart which arises in the space that God opens up for it as he
goes
beyond himself) is separated from itself (it's self, it's structure)
by
"nothing" (it identifies with its structure that it has found itself
in,
awoken up within). Now, the "everything" (all contexts) and the
"nothing" (no contexts) may seem (and the heart presumes initially)
are
symmetric, equal. Yet ultimately it becomes apparent that the heart
distinguishes everywhere true and false (a "knowledge of good and
evil")
whereas for God all is true. Note here that "true / false" is a false
"separation", a false "or", as it does not keep the two concepts
separate, but rather combines them, blends them with an "either or".

As part of this growth in understanding, we may consider a "human" as
that which "is" what it identifies with:

A) first God's perspective, as separated from itself by everything,
and
then going beyond itself, a general "love" (and perhaps an empathy
for
the "world")
B) then the heart's perspective, that which awakens within structure,
and is separated from it's self (structure) by nothing, thus a "love
of
self" (so that the heart is like "personality" of a
person-in-particular). Here we are one with ourselves.
C) then the human (hopefully) identifies with an "other" by which God
and heart coincide, thus one lives as a person-in-general, as
"character" by which we are all the same (this is the key event in
life,
to live from this general perspective) This happens as the heart goes
beyond itself (from a narrower scope to a broader scope - one of six
ways - between nothing, something, anything, everything) as a loved
one
who is met by God receiving, loving, conceiving, supporting it. Here
the human is an intermediary by which God outside and the heart
within
meet. Here we are one with others. This is about "love other".
D) Finally the human identifies with the God who supports, loves the
"other", is able to place that other within an understanding context
by
going beyond itself into the limitations of the other. This is
to "love
God". As the evangelist John says, we can't love God except as we
love
others.

I will study your links to the theory of institutions. Thank you!

I will write more about my wish to "know everything" - that I mean
what
I say - but it is related to knowing 'everything'. Briefly, it is the
idea of positioning myself in that vantage point from which (if I had
God's farsightedness) I would indeed see everything. I imagine it
comes
from being a very nearsighted child (us not realizing that until much
later though) and so considering "knowing" to be not the same as
"seeing". I have memories of a game where I would take chess pieces
to
the far side of a room and then go away and try to remember what they
were, and then go back and check. Apparently, I may have played that
when I was crawling. This kind of 'knowing' also suggests how a
person's and God's views can coincide. So the end goal is to take up
that vantage point and in that sense "share" God's vision (and I
think
he likes to share) and then be able to know 'anything' by crawling up
and inspecting it, and then going back to the middle of the room, so
to
speak.

This very much relates to my friend John Harland's (a fellow grad
student from UCSD) theory of consciousness. It's actually simple but
very powerful: You simply consider the statements relevant to some
domain and the ability to check if they are true or not. Something is
conscious if it shares this "Turing test" type ability - but this is
crucial! it is with respect to that domain. (I suppose also the
ability
to reflect upon oneself or another being that it is able to apply
such
tests. I suppose this accords with the operation +3 that I think of
as
consciousness, by which I think we add three perspectives (to a
division
of everything) so as to allow for such a generic "other" (such as
ourselves but also others) who can make such tests). So there is a
huge
partial order of consciousnesses that accords with the many domains
out
there. As a practical example, he's interested in how a deaf person
might be able to "see" sound in an intuitive way, this should be
possible. Similarly, I'm interested to be able to not just 'know
anything' but to be able to know, in particular, that vantage point
from
which I can know anything, looking out on all dominion. Which is to
say, to sit in God's lap, and look out with him.

In particular, one of the ways to look out is through those "key
concepts" that we, as independent thinkers, back ourselves into, as
whatever we deem to be the deepest. So, for example, John's is "the
experience of life" and mine is "living by truth". These are like
stars
in the sky, each person a witness to a concept, and we know that that
person can bring us so promptly to the intuition relevant regarding
that
concept. And there are others ways to look out, including asking God,
and I think there is a structural machinery that generates absolutely
all of these routes. That is what I'm looking for, the structural
routes, but there will also be, in practice, non-structural short
cuts
that leap to the matter. We'll be able to inspect as much of the path
as we like, however. I suppose it's a structure for eternal life, a
bridge from that world out into this one. Imagine rotten corpses
going
back in time and receiving a spirit, now that's a thought. Or the
whole
direction of time being reversed and headed towards the Big Bang and
whatever's beyond that. Yes, it is far fetched, but as John says, we
can spare a person to work on it.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...
+370 (5) 264 5950
Vilnius, Lithuania


Joseph Goguen wrote:
> Dear Andrius, Ibraham and Others,
>
> For quite some time now, ive been passively reading
> and enjoying email from your lab, and quietly
> congratulating you on your gradually evolving
> success. Your post to Ibrahim (and a spell of
> relative quiet in my crazy schedule) has stimulated
> me into writing to you at last.
>
> I have often thought that your goal to, "know
> everything and apply it usefully" sounded a bit far
> fetched, until your post explained what you meant by
> "everything" - a concept, not a concrete collection
> in the world (so maybe it should be in quotes ('..')
> in your goal statement?). Your detailed explanation
> makes it clear that your understanding of 'everything'
> is actually close to the Buddhist understanding of
> *sunyata* (in Sanskrit, often misleadingly translated
> as just 'emptiness' or 'nothingness' but also often
> explicated as 'fullness' or the 'fullness of emptiness').
> Nagarjuna is the most cited philosopher for this area
> of Buddhist thought.
>
> Buddhists also find the absolute in sunyata, saying that
> the world is all relative and non-absolute, but the
> emptiness of the world is absolute. There are also a
> traditional theory of knowledge and a logic based on
> the viewpoint of sunyata, for which one might consult
> the book by Stcherbatsky "Buddhist Logic" (this email
> is not a good place for such details but Google can
> find some interesting links (of variable quality)).
>
> What i really want to write about is the question that
> Ibrahim also wants to address: What is knowledge?
>
> I should first confess that since i am a professor in
> a research university, i need to publish in professional
> books and journals, and there are limits to what i can
> do in such a context, especially from within a department
> of computer science and engineering, which operates
> within the Western traditions of science, mathematics,
> and engineering, which are very result oriented. This
> means that it can be difficult to read my papers, and
> very difficult to discern the underlying philosophical
> perspectives that motivated them. So one goal of this
> email is to explain some of that motivation (this is
> also helpful to me).
>
> My first step in answering the question "What is
> knowing?" would be to break it into two parts: "What is
> a concept?" and "What is truth?" since true concepts
> will be knowledge.
>
> I would also like to "de-reify" the question, since i
> think the processes of knowing are more fundamental
> than the results. So we should ask about processes of
> conceptualization, and of reasoning, while still noting
> that a great deal can be learned from looking at the
> reified notions of concept and truth.
>
> As you say in your analysis of "everything", knowledge
> is relative, and hence always uncertain, perhaps even
> contradictory; it is also uncertain to varying degrees.
>
> As noted long ago by Charles Sanders Peirce, the problems
> of relativity can be overcome to some extent by making
> the truth of what concepts refer to relative to context,
> in a very broad sense of context that includes the
> "knower" and his/her point of view, background knowledge,
> perceptions, etc., as well as what is in the world.
>
> So now we want to look at concepts and how they refer in
> variable contexts, and how we can reason with concepts
> in a way that allows the result to truthfully refer, not
> forgetting that concepts can of course refer to other
> concepts as well as to percepts.
>
> It does not seem to be as well known as it should be
> that there is a great deal of recent research on concepts,
> how they refer, and how we reason with them. This work
> has been done under labels that include cognitive
> linguistics, cognitive semantics, semiotics, and
> experimental psychology.
>
> It is also not very well known that a theory of logics
> has recently been developed, that includes a notion of
> satisfaction of a sentence by a model that can depend
> on context. It also includes as special cases all the
> classical logics (first order, modal, higher order, and
> so on), and even has generalizations of much of classical
> model theory (Craig interpolation, Beth definability, and
> so on). Moreover, it has had applications to mainstream
> programming languages (C++, Ada, ML) as well as to many
> specification languages, to database systems, ontologies
> (in the sense of the semantic web), and more, but for the
> purpose of this note, especially concepts. (Also the
> truth values of the satisfaction relation can be fuzzy.)
> This theory is known as the "theory of institutions."
>
> Id like to review just a little of work in these two
> areas, concepts and logics, give some references, and
> then some conclusions.
>
> Eleanor Rosch started the stream of modern research on
> concepts, with her pioneering experiments on what today
> is often called prototype theory. She showed that humans
> do not have concepts in the form that most philosophers,
> beginning with Aristitle, thought, as sets of conditions
> that are necessary and sufficient. Instead, our concepts
> have prototype effects, involving similarity to most
> prototypical exemplars, and often other instances related
> by metaphorical or analogical extension. (This work is
> nicely reviewed in books by Lakoff mentioned below.)
>
> George Lakoff took the next important steps with this
> theory of metaphor, showing that metaphors come in natural
> families, which he called image schemas, that relate to
> how humans are embodied in the world. A simple example is
> "higher is more," a family of metaphors that includes
> instances like "His salary is higher than mine" and "My
> expectations have risen." See "Women, Fire and Dangerous
> Things" and "Philosophy in the Flesh", among other books,
> which collectively have been very influential in several
> disciplines.
>
> Fauconnier and Turner enriched Lakoff's work with their
> theories of conceptual spaces and conceptual blending. A
> good review of this (like the work of Rosch and of Lakoff)
> would take a LOT of space, but suffice it to say that they
> found that in understanding natural langauge, we draw on
> "spaces" of related concepts, where the relations are also
> concepts, and we also combine such spaces to form more
> complex concepts and spaces, in a process called blending
> or conceptual integration. Moreover, they also showed
> that metaphor and analogy can be seen as side effects of
> blending, and they claimed that blending is a fundamental
> cognitive capacity, that distinguishes humans from other
> species (e.g., great apes) and gives us our greater mental
> abilities. See their popular book "The Way We Think".
>
> Lakoff (with coauthors) has recently been arguing that much
> of human reasoning, even in formal mathematics, is actually
> metaphorical. Case law in legal disputes is certainly a
> good example, but Lakoff goes much further.
>
> The conference series "Conceptual Structures" has published
> a lot of interesting material; the organizers are oriented
> towards work of C.S. Peirce, John Sowa, and Rudolf Wille,
> and applications to the semantic web are on the minds of
> many contributors. There are papers formalizing Peirce's
> triadic semiotic, with its contextualized relational
> satisfaction relation, on the information flow formalism
> of Barwise & Seligman, on Sowa's lattice of theories, on
> Wille's formal concept analysis, and more.
>
> As far as i can tell, all of this is subsumed by the theory
> of institutions, and two recent papers of mine draw out many
> of the connections. These are "What is a concept" (written
> for the 2005 Conceptual Structures meeting) and "Information
> Integration in Institutions" (written for a memorial volume
> for Jon Barwise). You can find these papers at
>
> http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/iccs05.pdf
>
> http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/ifi04.pdf
>
> More information on institutions can be found here, and much
> more in more technical papers listed on the institutions
> homepage, at
>
> http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/projs/inst.html
>
> especially the recent paper "What is a logic?" Applications
> to databases can be found in the paper "Data, Schema and
> Ontology Integration", also linked from the institutions
> homepage.
>
> The time seems to have come when the technology that "we"
> (meaning, Western society in general but also Minciu Sodas)
> are developing, and the applications that "we" have in
> mind for it, requires a more sophisticated understanding
> of knowledge, concepts, and logic than has previously been
> available. Such an understanding is developing rapidly on
> a number of fronts, overthrowing millenia of philosophical
> prejudices in favor of results that have an empirical basis
> either in laboratory experiments or in working prototype
> computer based systems. Database integration, robotics,
> the semantic web vision of Berners-Lee, the cognitive
> linguistics of Lakoff, Fauconnier, Turner, the multi-logic
> specification languages CafeOBJ and CASL (by Futatsugi, and
> by a European collective called CoFI), and so on, are all
> parts of this. One can also see it in the practice of
> contemporary artists (such as Bill Viola) and musicians
> (such as Beck), and many many others.
>
> I have taken on the crazy task of trying to formalize all
> this, and also developing some prototype systems that
> implement the aspects of the formalizations, such as an
> interactive poetry generation system, a blending algorithm,
> a database schema matching system, and an algebraic
> specification language. Obviously this is just a small
> part of a much bigger movement, but i think we can say that
> the goal of everyone involved in this large and diffuse area
> is to answer the questions raised by Ibrahim and Andrius,
> and i think we can say that we are getting answers, though
> slowly and often with considerable technical difficulty,
> in spite of which, the field as a whole seems to be moving
> very fast, at least to those who try to keep up with all
> (or a large part) of it. (Unfortunately there is not even
> an accepted name for the whole field!)
>
> I have also been trying to relate my ideas about concepts
> and logic to consciousness, and in particular, to qualia,
> which i define as segments of perception that are
> perceived as wholes (though they may still be seen to have
> parts), and i have worked on applications to free jazz
> improvisation. For these topics, see
>
> http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/projs/qualia.html
>
> http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/projs/arts.html
>
> for more detail, as well as the Journal of Consciousness
> Studies.
>
> Another strand of all this relates to consciousness and to
> the ultimate concerns of the Buddhists who created concepts
> like sunyata ("mu" in Japanese), which is to fully liberate
> the mind. Consciousness studies is another new field that
> is currently exploding with new results and new ideas, in
> part due to the movements mentioned above, but mainly (i
> think) due to new technology for observing the mind at work,
> e.g., fMRI and PET scans. It has been shown that advanced
> meditators really do have different minds from the rest of us,
> and many old myths about memory, perception, emotion, etc.
> have been deposed. I think we are coming to understand what
> it means to be human much better than ever before, and along
> with that, what it means to be alive. So Ibrahim's questions
> are really very timely, very deep, and very productive!
>
> It should not be thought that all this theory is divorced
> from practical social action. George Lakoff is currently
> spending most of his time applying his theory to political
> rhetoric, with the aim of revitalizing the American left.
> My classes on user interface design use some of this theory
> as website design guidelines, and build websites for local
> community service groups; other students are concerned with
> racial, ethnic, and gender equality issues, and are engaged
> in artistic and web design projects in those areas.
>
> Finally, id like to apologize for the length, technicality,
> and detail of this message; it just seems to me that the
> picture is so big that a lot of words are needed to even
> begin to sketch it out, and even so, i am afraid that this
> note has barely begun that task.