[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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Howard,

I am stepping back a bit abye, and picking up on one of the several
severed points where this tongue of thrum doth dangle from the loom.

In my brief but lively human experience, my all too brief, all too
early experience, no sooner does one get a little momentum going
than one has to start turning gradually increasing measures of
attention to the obstacles in one's toddling path.  When it
comes to learning, curiously enough, some of the biggest
obstructions will turn out to be our past instructions
and our present constructions of the ways we wit
that the world just oughta be, but no longer
appears to continue its being.

Thus, I am going to split off a subsutra devoted
to the species of obstacles and resistances that
we typically observe blocking the way of inquiry.

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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

JA: I am having to jump around, as your question
    is way too big to encompass in a single scan.

JA: I lament the chance that this discussion might take
    a non-constructive and even anti-intellectual turn,
    as it is mostly the task of constructing software
    tools for the support and extension of our humane
    intellects that is my main aim. 

HP: There is nothing to lament but lament itself.
    Creating machine tools to support the intellect
    is an aim worthy of discussion.  Where in the
    course of inquiry, using any epistemic diagram
    you choose, do you feel the inquiring mind needs
    the most help?  Or is it more modest to ask where
    we could expect technically plausible software
    (and hardware) to help the most?

JA: Ah, where to begin!?  Being there is so much to do,
    and we cannot do otherwise than to start as we are,
    it may be the case that we can't do better than to
    let all pick their own eigenvectors as the optimal
    direction for them severally to go -- and yet that
    incurs the risk of chaos if there be no other form
    of community among them.  Something I worry about.

JA: Here are some of the big problems that I see here:

JA: There is a field of activity, transected by several shifty lines:

    1.a.  <What people can do>      Versus  1.b.  <What people cannot do>
    2.a.  <What people do best>     Versus  2.b.  <What people do not do best>
    3.a.  <What people like to do>  Versus  3.b.  <What people do not like to do>

JA: The uses of technology worth having are those take some of the stuff that humans can do --
    goodly, badly, or indifferently -- but out of which people no longer get much of a kick,
    and shift these fardels so that machines will bear them.

JA: I am pretty much content to leave the creative stuff to people for a while,
    since I have no clue how to automate it, and even if I did I would have to
    ask whether it's creative stuff we like or creative stuff we dislike doing.

JA: The thing is that many activities of interest to us are cyclic or recurring processes,
    and this means that we can often facilitate the whole cycle simply by identifying the
    places where things are pinched a bit more than others, the points of high resistance --
    no, there is no venturi flow here, it's a high viscosity current so far as I can tell --
    and by loosening up these bottlenecks to whatever extent that we can.  Still, not all
    of the bottlenecks are ones that we can do much about, so we have to pick our bottles.

JA: In view of these things, I am mostly focused on the barriers, blocks, boondoggles,
    bottlenecks, briar patches, broken fields, bulwarks, caltrops, hurdles, obstacles,
    obstructions, ramparts, rough spots, sandtraps, and walls that we keep on running
    into as we try to move forward in our evolving inquiry.  Whenever I run into one
    of these blocks I have to backtrack to a point in our common intellectual orbit
    where I can see the nature of the obstruction well enough to see a way around,
    beyond, or through it.

JA: Notice that this sort of work is often very different from trying to build imitation humans
    or anything like that.  In fact, though it is probably useless to tilt against the windmill
    of a mere name like "artificial intelligence" (AI), my roots go back to the classical angle
    of Ashby and others that initially disposed them to build an "intellectual amplifier" (IA).

    | If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified,
    | it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be
    | amplified.  Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns
    | do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better
    | than the gene-pattern could have specified in detail.  What is new is
    | that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.
    |
    | W. Ross Ashby,
    |'An Introduction to Cybernetics',
    | Chapman & Hall, London, UK, 1956,
    | Methuen & Company, London, UK, 1964,
    | Section 14/7, Page 272.

JA: On To The Epigenetic Algorithm!

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