Category Archives: world

abstract concepts, abstract morality, changing matter, changing world, co-creative, decision, energy, evaluation, everyday life, finite world, game instruction, homo sapiens, immanent mutability, inference concept, irrationality, justification-free norm concept, mass, matter, memory, meta-moral-knowledge, meta-morality, model, morality, motivation, prognosis, rational unknowable, rules of change, science, self-changing finiteness, situation description, symbol, symbolic description, thinking, world

ABSTRACT MORAL IN A FINITE and CHANGING WORLD

(June 20, 2023 – June 22, 2023)

(This text is a translation from the German blog of the author. The translation is supported by the deepL Software)

CONTEXT

The meaning of and adherence to moral values in the context of everyday actions has always been a source of tension, debate, and tangible conflict.

This text will briefly illuminate why this is so, and why it will probably never be different as long as we humans are the way we are.

FINITE-INFINITE WORLD

In this text it is assumed that the reality in which we ‘find’ ourselves from childhood is a ‘finite’ world. By this is meant that no phenomenon we encounter in this world – ourselves included – is ‘infinite’. In other words, all resources we encounter are ‘finite’. Even ‘solar energy’, which is considered ‘renewable’ in today’s parlance, is ‘finite’, although this finiteness outlasts the lifetimes of many generations of humans.

But this ‘finiteness’ is no contradiction to the fact that our finite world is continuously in a ‘process of change’ fed from many sides. An ‘itself-self-changing finiteness’ is with it, a something which in and in itself somehow ‘points beyond itself’! The ‘roots’ of this ‘immanent changeability’ are to a large extent perhaps still unclear, but the ‘effects’ of the ‘immanent changeability’ indicate that the respective ‘concrete finite’ is not the decisive thing; the ‘respective concrete finite’ is rather a kind of ‘indicator’ for an ‘immanent change cause’ which ‘manifests itself’ by means of concrete finites in change. The ‘forms of concrete manifestations of change’ can therefore perhaps be a kind of ‘expression’ of something that ‘works immanently behind’.

In physics there is the pair of terms ‘energy’ and ‘mass’, the latter as synonym for ‘matter’. Atomic physics and quantum mechanics have taught us that the different ‘manifestations of mass/matter’ can only be a ‘state form of energy’. The everywhere and always assumed ‘energy’ is that ‘enabling factor’, which can ‘manifest’ itself in all the known forms of matter. ‘Changing-matter’ can then be understood as a form of ‘information’ about the ‘enabling energy’.

If one sets what physics has found out so far about ‘energy’ as that form of ‘infinity’ which is accessible to us via the experiential world, then the various ‘manifestations of energy’ in diverse ‘forms of matter’ are forms of concrete finites, which, however, are ultimately not really finite in the context of infinite energy. All known material finites are only ‘transitions’ in a nearly infinite space of possible finites, which is ultimately grounded in ‘infinite energy’. Whether there is another ‘infinity’ ‘beside’ or ‘behind’ or ‘qualitatively again quite different to’ the ‘experienceable infinity’ is thus completely open.”[1]

EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES

Our normal life context is what we now call ‘everyday life’: a bundle of regular processes, often associated with characteristic behavioral roles. This includes the experience of having a ‘finite body’; that ‘processes take time in real terms’; that each process is characterized by its own ‘typical resource consumption’; that ‘all resources are finite’ (although there can be different time scales here (see the example with solar energy)).

But also here: the ’embeddedness’ of all resources and their consumption in a comprehensive variability makes ‘snapshots’ out of all data, which have their ‘truth’ not only ‘in the moment’, but in the ‘totality of the sequence’! In itself ‘small changes’ in the everyday life can, if they last, assume sizes and achieve effects which change a ‘known everyday life’ so far that long known ‘views’ and ‘long practiced behaviors’ are ‘no longer correct’ sometime: in that case the format of one’s own thinking and behavior can come into increasing contradiction with the experiential world. Then the point has come where the immanent infinity ‘manifests itself’ in the everyday finiteness and ‘demonstrates’ to us that the ‘imagined cosmos in our head’ is just not the ‘true cosmos’. In the end this immanent infinity is ‘truer’ than the ‘apparent finiteness’.

HOMO SAPIENS (WE)

Beside the life-free material processes in this finite world there are since approx. 3.5 billion years the manifestations, which we call ‘life’, and very late – quasi ‘just now’ – showed up in the billions of life forms one, which we call ‘Homo sapiens’. That is us.

The today’s knowledge of the ‘way’, which life has ‘taken’ in these 3.5 billion years, was and is only possible, because science has learned to understand the ‘seemingly finite’ as ‘snapshot’ of an ongoing process of change, which shows its ‘truth’ only in the ‘totality of the individual moments’. That we as human beings, as the ‘latecomers’ in this life-creation-process’, have the ability to ‘recognize’ successive ‘moments’ ‘individually’ as well as ‘in sequence’, is due to the special nature of the ‘brain’ in the ‘body’ and the way in which our body ‘interacts’ with the surrounding world. So, we don’t know about the ‘existence of an immanent infinity’ ‘directly’, but only ‘indirectly’ through the ‘processes in the brain’ that can identify, store, process and ‘arrange’ moments in possible sequences in a ‘neuronally programmed way’. So: our brain enables us on the basis of a given neuronal and physical structure to ‘construct’ an ‘image/model’ of a possible immanent infinity, which we assume to ‘represent’ the ‘events around us’ reasonably well.

THINKING

One characteristic attributed to Homo Sapiens is called ‘thinking’; a term which until today is described only vaguely and very variously by different sciences. From another Homo Sapiens we learn about his thinking only by his way of ‘behaving’, and a special case of it is ‘linguistic communication’.

Linguistic communication is characterized by the fact that it basically works with ‘abstract concepts’, to which as such no single object in the real world directly corresponds (‘cup’, ‘house’, ‘dog’, ‘tree’, ‘water’ etc.). Instead, the human brain assigns ‘completely automatically’ (‘unconsciously’!) most different concrete perceptions to one or the other abstract concept in such a way that a human A can agree with a human B whether one assigns this concrete phenomenon there in front to the abstract concept ‘cup’, ‘house’, ‘dog’, ‘tree’, or ‘water’. At some point in everyday life, person A knows which concrete phenomena can be meant when person B asks him whether he has a ‘cup of tea’, or whether the ‘tree’ carries apples etc.

This empirically proven ‘automatic formation’ of abstract concepts by our brain is not only based on a single moment, but these automatic construction processes work with the ‘perceptual sequences’ of finite moments ’embedded in changes’, which the brain itself also automatically ‘creates’. ‘Change as such’ is insofar not a ‘typical object’ of perception, but is the ‘result of a process’ taking place in the brain, which constructs ‘sequences of single perceptions’, and these ‘calculated sequences’ enter as ‘elements’ into the formation of ‘abstract concepts’: a ‘house’ is from this point of view not a ‘static concept’, but a concept, which can comprise many single properties, but which is ‘dynamically generated’ as a ‘concept’, so that ‘new elements’ can be added or ‘existing elements’ may be ‘taken away’ again.

MODEL: WORLD AS A PROCESS

(The words are from the German text)

Although there is no universally accepted comprehensive theory of human thought to date, there are many different models (everyday term for the more correct term ‘theories’) that attempt to approximate important aspects of human thought.

The preceding image shows the outlines of a minimally simple model to our thinking.

This model assumes that the surrounding world – with ourselves as components of that world – is to be understood as a ‘process’ in which, at a chosen ‘point in time’, one can describe in an idealized way all the ‘observable phenomena’ that are important to the observer at that point in time. This description of a ‘section of the world’ is here called ‘situation description’ at time t or simply ‘situation’ at t.

Then one needs a ‘knowledge about possible changes’ of elements of the situation description in the way (simplified): ‘If X is element of situation description at t, then for a subsequent situation at t either X is deleted or replaced by a new X*’. There may be several alternatives for deletion or replacement with different probabilities. Such ‘descriptions of changes’ are here simplified called ‘change rules’.

Additionally, as part of the model, there is a ‘game instruction’ (classically: ‘inference term’), which explains when and how to apply a change rule to a given situation Sit at t in such a way that at the subsequent time t+1, there is a situation Sit* in which the changes have been made that the change rule describes.

Normally, there is more than one change rule that can be applied simultaneously with the others. This is also part of the game instructions.

This minimal model can and must be seen against the background of continuous change.

For this structure of knowledge it is assumed that one can describe ‘situations’, possible changes of such a situation, and that one can have a concept how to apply descriptions of recognized possible changes to a given situation.

With the recognition of an immanent infinity manifested in many concrete finite situations, it is immediately clear that the set of assumed descriptions of change should correspond with the observable changes, otherwise the theory has little practical use. Likewise, of course, it is important that the assumed situation descriptions correspond with the observable world. Fulfilling the correspondence requirements or checking that they are true is anything but trivial.

ABSTRACT – REAL – INDETERMINATE

To these ‘correspondence requirements’ here some additional considerations, in which the view of the everyday perspective comes up.

It is to be noted that a ‘model’ is not the environment itself, but only a ‘symbolic description’ of a section of the environment from the point of view and with the understanding of a human ‘author’! To which properties of the environment a description refers, only the author himself knows, who ‘links’ the chosen ‘symbols’ (text or language) ‘in his head’ with certain properties of the environment, whereby these properties of the environment must also be represented ‘in the head’, quasi ‘knowledge images’ of ‘perception events’, which have been triggered by the environmental properties. These ‘knowledge images in the head’ are ‘real’ for the respective head; compared to the environment, however, they are basically only ‘fictitious’; unless there is currently a connection between current fictitious ‘images in the head’ and the ‘current perceptions’ of ‘environmental events’, which makes the ‘concrete elements of perception’ appear as ‘elements of the fictitious images’. Then the ‘fictitious’ pictures would be ‘fictitious and real’.

Due to the ‘memory’, whose ‘contents’ are more or less ‘unconscious’ in the ‘normal state’, we can however ‘remember’ that certain ‘fictitious pictures’ were once ‘fictitious and real’ in the past. This can lead to a tendency in everyday life to ascribe a ‘presumed reality’ to fictional images that were once ‘real’ in the past, even in the current present. This tendency is probably of high practical importance in everyday life. In many cases these ‘assumptions’ also work. However, this ‘spontaneous-for-real-holding’ can often be off the mark; a common source of error.

The ‘spontaneous-for-real-holding’ can be disadvantageous for many reasons. For example, the fictional images (as inescapably abstract images) may in themselves be only ‘partially appropriate’. The context of the application may have changed. In general, the environment is ‘in flux’: facts that were given yesterday may be different today.

The reasons for the persistent changes are different. Besides such changes, which we could recognize by our experience as an ‘identifiable pattern’, there are also changes, which we could not assign to a pattern yet; these can have a ‘random character’ for us. Finally there are also the different ‘forms of life’, which are basically ‘not determined’ by their system structure in spite of all ‘partial determinateness’ (one can also call this ‘immanent freedom’). The behavior of these life forms can be contrary to all other recognized patterns. Furthermore, life forms behave only partially ‘uniformly’, although everyday structures with their ‘rules of behavior’ – and many other factors – can ‘push’ life forms with their behavior into a certain direction.

If one remembers at this point again the preceding thoughts about the ‘immanent infinity’ and the view that the single, finite moments are only understandable as ‘part of a process’, whose ‘logic’ is not decoded to a large extent until today, then it is clear, that any kind of ‘modeling’ within the comprehensive change processes can only have a preliminary approximation character, especially since it is aggravated by the fact that the human actors are not only ‘passively receiving’, but at the same time always also ‘actively acting’, and thereby they influence the change process by their actions! These human influences result from the same immanent infinity as those which cause all other changes. The people (like the whole life) are thus inevitably real ‘co-creative’ …. with all the responsibilities which result from it.

MORALITY ABOVE ALL

What exactly one has to understand by ‘morality’, one has to read out of many hundreds – or even more – different texts. Every time – and even every region in this world – has developed different versions.

In this text it is assumed that with ‘moral’ such ‘views’ are meant, which should contribute to the fact that an individual person (or a group or …) in questions of the ‘decision’ of the kind “Should I rather do A or B?” should get ‘hints’, how this question can be answered ‘best’.

If one remembers at this point what was said before about that form of thinking which allows ‘prognoses’ (thinking in explicit ‘models’ or ‘theories’), then there should be an ‘evaluation’ of the ‘possible continuations’ independent of a current ‘situation description’ and independent of the possible ‘knowledge of change’. So there must be ‘besides’ the description of a situation as it ‘is’ at least a ‘second level’ (a ‘meta-level’), which can ‘talk about’ the elements of the ‘object-level’ in such a way that e.g. it can be said that an ‘element A’ from the object-level is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘neutral’ or with a certain gradual ‘tuning’ ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘neutral’ at the meta-level. This can also concern several elements or whole subsets of the object level. This can be done. But for it to be ‘rationally acceptable’, these valuations would have to be linked to ‘some form of motivation’ as to ‘why’ this valuation should be accepted. Without such a ‘motivation of evaluations’ such an evaluation would appear as ‘pure arbitrariness’.

At this point the ‘air’ becomes quite ‘thin’: in the history so far no convincing model for a moral justification became known, which is in the end not dependent from the decision of humans to set certain rules as ‘valid for all’ (family, village, tribe, …). Often the justifications can still be located in the concrete ‘circumstances of life’, just as often the concrete circumstances of life ‘recede into the background’ in the course of time and instead abstract concepts are introduced, which one endows with a ‘normative power’, which elude a more concrete analysis. Rational access is then hardly possible, if at all.

In a time like in the year 2023, in which the available knowledge is sufficient to be able to recognize the interdependencies of literally everybody from everybody, in addition the change dynamics, which can threaten with the components ‘global warming’ the ‘sustainable existence of life on earth’ substantially, ‘abstractly set normative terms’ appear not only ‘out of time’, no, they are highly dangerous, since they can substantially hinder the preservation of life in the further future.

META-MORAL (Philosophy)

The question then arises whether this ‘rational black hole’ of ‘justification-free normative concepts’ marks the end of human thinking or whether thinking should instead just begin here?

Traditionally, ‘philosophy’ understands itself as that attitude of thinking, in which every ‘given’ – including any kind of normative concepts – can be made an ‘object of thinking’. And just the philosophical thinking has produced exactly this result in millennia of struggle: there is no point in thinking, from which all ought/all evaluating can be derived ‘just like that’.

In the space of philosophical thinking, on the meta-moral level, it is possible to ‘thematize’ more and more aspects of our situation as ‘mankind’ in a dynamic environment (with man himself as part of this environment), to ‘name’ them, to place them in a ‘potential relations’, to make ‘thinking experiments’ about ‘possible developments’, but this philosophical meta-moral knowledge is completely transparent and always identifiable. The inferences about why something seems ‘better’ than something else are always ’embedded’, ‘related’. The demands for an ‘autonomous morality’, for an ‘absolute morality’ besides philosophical thinking appear ‘groundless’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘alien’ to the ‘matter’ against this background. A rational justification is not possible.

A ‘rationally unknowable’ may exist, exists even inescapably, but this rationally unknowable is our sheer existence, the actual real occurrence, for which so far there is no rational ‘explanation’, more precisely: not yet. But this is not a ‘free pass’ for irrationality. In ‘irrationality’ everything disappears, even the ‘rationally unrecognizable’, and this belongs to the most important ‘facts’ in the world of life.

COMMENTS

[1] The different forms of ‘infinity’, which have been introduced into mathematics with the works of Georg Cantor and have been intensively further investigated, have nothing to do with the experienceable finiteness/ infinity described in the text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor . However, if one wants to ‘describe’ the ‘experience’ of real finiteness/ infinity, then one will possibly want to fall back on descriptive means of mathematics. But it is not a foregone conclusion whether the mathematical concepts ‘harmonize’ with the empirical experience standing to the matter.

Actor, actor theory [AT], Bourbaki, cognitive-semiotic turn, mathematics, meaning, meaning function, metamathematics, oksimo, oksimo.org, semiotic architecture, world, world - internally processed

OKSIMO and BOURBAKI. A Metamathematical Perspective on Oksimo. Part 1

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 22.Sept – 24.Sept  2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

(Some minor corrections: 23.Sept 2021)

(A substantial extension: 24.Sept.2021)

CONTEXT

This text is part of a philosophy of science  analysis of the case of the oksimo software (oksimo.com). A specification of the oksimo software from an engineering point of view can be found in four consecutive  posts dedicated to the HMI-Analysis for  this software.[*]

THE BOOK: THEORY OF SETS

Covered under the pseudonym of N.Bourbaki [1] appeared 1970 the French edition of a book which 1968 already had been translated into English  (reprinted 1970) called  Theory of Sets.[2] This book is the first book of a series about ELEMENTS OF MATHEMATICS.

To classify this book about set theory as a book of Metamathematics and as such as a book in the perspective of Philosophy of Science will become clear if one starts reading the book.[3]

MATHEMATICS WITH ONE LANGUAGE

It is the basic conviction of the Bourbaki book, that “… it is known to be possible … to derive practically the whole of known mathematics from a single source the Theory of Sets.” (p.9) And from this Bourbaki concludes, that it will be sufficient “… to describe the principles of a single formalized language, to indicate how the Thory of Sets could be written in this language, and then to show how the various branches of mathematics  … fit into this framework.”(p.9)

Thus, the content of mathematics — whatever it is — can according to Bourbaki be described in one single language [Lm] and the content will be called Theory of Sets [T] .

METAMATHEMATICS

Because the one single language Lm used to describe the Theory of Sets shall be a language with certain properties one has to define these properties with some other language, which is talking about Lm. As language for this job Bourbaki is using the ordinary language [Lo].(p.9) But the reasoning within which one is using this ordinary language is called metamathematics (cf. P.10f). Within the metamathematical point of view the language Lm under investigation is seen as a set of previously given objetcs without any kind of meaning, where only the assigned order is of importance.(cf. p.10): “… metamathematical ‘arguments’ usually assert that when a succession of operations has been performed on a text of a given type, then the final text will be of another given type.”(p.10)

What looks here at first glance  as the complete formalization of mathematics it is not. Bourbaki states clearly that “formalized mathematics cannot in practice be written down in full“(p.11) There has to be assumed as ‘last resort’ the assumption of a common sense of the mathematician and the intuition of the reader. (cf. p.11)

COGNITIVE-SEMIOTIC TURN

This conflict between at one hand of  the idea of a formalization of  Mathematics by a formalized language Lm  and on the other hand by the well known proof of Gödel [4] of the incompleteness of the axioms for classical arithmetic  (cf. p.12) is not a real conflict as long as one takes into account — as Bourbaki points out — that the ‘content of mathematics’ is only given in different layers of languages (Lm, Lo, …) which again are embedded in a presupposed ‘common sense’ which is nothing else as the cognitive machinery of human persons including an embedded meaning function relating different kinds of knowledge into different kinds of — internal as well as external — expressions of some language L. Thus any kind of a  ‘reduction of meaning’ seems never to be a ‘complete reduction’ but only a ‘technical reduction’ to introduce some ‘artificial (abstract) objetcs’ which can only work because of their embedding in some richer context.

This new perspective can be called the cognitive-semiotic turn which became possible by new insights of modern brain sciences in connection with pysychology and semiotics.

From this new point of view one can derive the idea of embedding metamathemics in a more advanced actor theory providing all the ingredients to make metamathematics more ‘rational’.

OUTLINE OF ACTOR THEORY

Actor theory first outline
Figure 1: Actor theory first outline

The details of the Actor Theory [AT] can become quite complex. Here a first outline of the basic ideas and what this can mean for a metamathematical point of view of mathematics.

World is not World

The main idea is founded in the new insights of Biology and Neuro-Psychology of the handling of body-world interactions as exercised by humans. One of the main insights is rooted back to von Uexküll [5] more than 100 years ago, when he described how every biological organism perceives and handles some world outside of the body  with the inner neuronal structures given! Thus different life forms in the same outside world  W will peceive and act neuronally in different worlds! Brain X acts in world X which is somehow related to the outside world W as well as Brain Y acts in world Y which also is  somehow related to the outside world W.

These basic insights relate as well to more developed life forms as such as  humans are. We as humans do not perceive and think the world W outside of our bodies ‘as it is’ but only as our brain inside our body can process all the body states related to the outside world in the mode of the inside brain. Thus if the different human individuals would have different brains they would live in different worlds and their would be no chance of a simple communication. But as we know from physiological and behavioral  studies humans can to some extend communicate successfully. Thus there exists inside of every human individual a human-processed world h(W) which is different from other life-forms like a rat, a worm, an octopus, etc.

From this basic insight it follows that if we speak about the world W we do indeed  not speak about the world  W directly but about the world W as it is processed in a human-specific manner, the  world h(W). This has many implications.

  1. Because we know already that the world h(W) is not a static but a dynamic world depending from our learning history it can happen — and it happens all the time — that different individuals have different learning histories.  This can result in quite strong differences of experience and knowledge attached to different individuals, which can prevent a simple understanding between such individuals: the learned world h1(W) can to some degree be different from the learned world  h2(W) such that a simple and direct understanding will not be possible.
  2. This difference between the outside world W and the processed inside world h(W) relates to the communication too! The spoken or written expressions E of some language L are belonging to the outside world. They have a counterpart in the inner world as inner expressions E*, which can be associated with all kinds of processed inner states of the inner world h(W) = W*. These possible — and learned — associations between inner expressions and inner states belonging to h(W) is assumed here to be that what commonly is called meaning. Thus one has to assume an internal meaning function μ which maps the internal expressions E* of some internal language L*  into parts of the internally processed world h(W)=W* and vice versa. Thus we have μ: E* <—> W*. Thus μ(e*) would point to some part w* of the internally processed world W* as the ‘meaning’ of the internal expression e*.
  3. This semiotic architecture of human beings enables a nearly infinite space of expressions as well as associated meanings definable during learning processes. This is powerful, but it is also very demanding for the speaker-hearer: to enable a succesful communication between different speaker-hearer these have to train their language usage under sufficient similar conditions thereby constructing individual meaning functions which work — hopefully — sufficiently similar. If not then communication can slow down, can produce lots of misunderstandings or can even break down completely. [6]
  4. In the case of mathematics it is a long debated question whether mathematics can be reduced to the expressions Em of some mathematical language Lm or if mathematics has some mathematical objects on its own which are different from the expressions. If one would assume that mathematics has no objects on its own but only some expressions Em, then it would become difficult to argue whether exactly these expressions Em should be used and not some other expressions Ex. Moreover to classify expressions as ‘axioms’ or ‘theorems’ would be completely arbitrary.   The only ‘anchor’ of non-arbitrariness would consist in some formal criteria of a formal consistency which would disable the formal generation of pairs of expressions {a,a*} where one is excluding the other. But even such a formal consistency presupposes some criteria which are beyond the expressions as such! Thus mathematics would need some criteria outside mathematics. This can be understood as an argument for metamathematics.  But according to Bourbaki  metamathematics is defined as a set of operations on given expressions without a specific meaning.  This is not enough to establish formal consistency! Thus even metamathematics is pointing to something outside of given mathematical expressions.  What can this be?
PART 2

To be continued …

COMMENTS

[*] More recent versions of the specification of the oksimo oftware can be found in the bolg oksimo.org. Unfortunately are the texts in that blog  — at the time if this writing — still only in German. Hopefully this will change in the future.

[1] Bourbaki group in Wikipedia [EN]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

[2] N.Bourbaki (1970), Theory of Sets, Series: ELEMENTS OF MATHEMATICS, Springer, Berlin — Heidelberg — New York (Engl. Translation from the French edition 1970)

[3] The first time when the author of this text has encountered the book was some time between 1984 – 1987 while being a PhD-student at the Ludwig-Maximilians Univesty [LMU] in Munich. It was in a seminar with Prof. Peter Hinst about structural approaches to Philosophy of Science. The point of view at that time was completely different to the point of view applied in this text.

[4] Kurt Goedel. Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia
Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, i. Monatshefte fuer
Mathematik und Physik, 38:173–98, 1931.

[5] Jakob von Uexküll, 1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J.Springer.

[6] Probably everybody has made the experience in his life of being part of a situation where nobody speaks a language, which one is used to speak …

 

 

abstraction process, abstraction pürocess, decidable - expression, false, makedecidable(), meaning, meaning function, reality supporters, true, world

THE OKSIMO CASE as SUBJECT FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. Part 2. makedecidable()

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 23.March – 23.March 2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This text is part of a philosophy of science  analysis of the case of the oksimo software (oksimo.com). A specification of the oksimo software from an engineering point of view can be found in four consecutive  posts dedicated to the HMI-Analysis for  this software.

STARTING WITH SOMETHING ‘REAL’

A basic idea of the oksimo behavior space is to bring together different human actors, let them share their knowledge and experience of some real part of their world and then they are invited to  think about, how one can   improve this part.

What sounds so common — some real part of their world — isn’t necessarily  easy to define.

As has been discussed in the  preceding post to make language expressions decidable this is only possible if certain practical requirements are fulfilled. The ‘practical recipe’

makedecidable :  S x Ahum x E —> E x {true, false}

given in the preceding post claims that you —  if you want to know whether an expression E is concrete and can be classified as   ‘true’ or ‘false’ —   have to ask  a human actor Ahum , which is part of the same  concrete situation S as you, and he/ she  should confirm or disclaim   whether the expression E can be interpreted as  being  ‘true’ or ‘false’ in this situation S.

Usually, if  there is a real concrete situation S with you and some other human actor A, then you both will have a perception of the situation, you will both have internal abstraction processes with abstract states, you will have mappings from such abstracted states into some expressions of your internal language Lint and you and the other human actor A can exchange external expressions corresponding to the inner expressions and thereby corresponding to the internal abstracted states of the situation S. Even if the used language expressions E — like for instance ‘There is a white wooden table‘ — will contain abstract expressions/ universal expressions like ‘white’, ‘wooden’, ‘table’, even then you and the other human actor  will be able to decide whether there are properties of the concrete situation which are fitting as accepted instances the universal parts  of the language expression ‘There is a white wooden table‘.

Thus being in a real situation S with the other human actors enables usually all participants of the situation to decide language expressions which are related to the situation.

But what consequences does it have  if you are somehow abroad, if you are not actually part of the situation S? Usually — if you are hearing or reading an expression like  ‘There is a white wooden table‘ — you will be able to get an idea of the intended meaning only by your learned meaning function φ which maps the external expression into an internal expression and further maps the internal expression into the learned abstracted states.  While the expressions ‘white’ and  ‘wooden’ are perhaps rather ‘clear’ the expression  ‘table’ is today associated with many, many different possible concrete matters and only by hearing or reading it is not possible to decide which of all these are the intended concrete matter. Thus although if you would be able to decided in the real situation S which of these many possible instances are given in the real situation, with the expression only disconnected from the situation, you are not able to decide whether  the expression is true or not. Thus the expression has the cognitive status that it perhaps can be true but actually you cannot decide.

REALITY SUPPORTERS

Between the two cases (i) being part of he real situation S or (ii) being disconnected from the real situation S there are many variants of situations which can be understood as giving some additional support to decide whether an expression E is rather true or not.

The main weakness for not being  able to decide is  the lack of hints to narrow down the set of possible interpretations of learned  meanings by counter examples. Thus while a human actor could  have learned that the expression ‘table’ can be associated with for instance  25 different concrete matters, then he/ she needs some hints/ clues which of these possibilities can be ruled out and thereby the actor could narrow down the set of possible learned meanings to then only for instance left possibly 5 of 25.

While the real situation S can not be send along with the expression it is possible to send for example a drawing of the situation  S or a photo. If properties are involved which deserve different senses like smelling or hearing or touching or … then a photo would not suffice.

Thus to narrow down the possible interpretations of an expression for someone who is not part of the situation it can be of help to give additional  ‘clues’ if possible, but this is not always possible and moreover it is always more or less incomplete.