[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 5

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1.1.1.  Systematic Inquiry

In their underlying form and tone these questions sound a familiar tune.
Their basic tenor was brought to a pitch of perfection by Immanuel Kant,
in a canon of inquiry that exceeds my present range.  Luckily, my immediate
aim is much more limited and concrete.  For the present it is only required
to ask:  "How are systematic inquiry and knowledge possible?"  That is, how
are inquiry and knowledge to be understood and implemented as functions of
systems and how ought they be investigated by systems theory?  In short:
"How can systems have knowledge as a goal?"  This effort is constrained to
the subject of systems and the frame of systems theory.  It will attempt
to give system-theoretic analyses of concepts and capacities that can be
recognized as primitive archetypes, at least, of those that AI research
pursues with avid interest and aspires one day to more fully capture.
By limiting questions about the possibility of inquiry and knowledge
to the subject and scope of systems theory there may be reason to
hope for a measure of practical success.

Kant's challenge is this:  To say precisely 'how' it is possible,
in procedural terms, for contingent beings and empirical creatures,
physically embodied and even engineered systems, to move toward or
synthetically acquire forms of knowledge with an 'a priori' character,
that is, declarative statements with a global application to all of the
situations that these agents might pass through.  It does nor seem feasible
within the scope of systems theory and engineered systems to deal with the
larger question:  Whether these forms of knowledge are somehow 'necessary'
laws, applying to all conceivable systems and universes.  But it does seem
reasonable to ask how a particualr system's trajectory might intersect with
states whose associated knowledge components have a wider application to the
system's manifold as a whole.

Jon Awbrey

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