[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 11

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1.1.2.3.  The Trees and The Forest (concl.)
 
The mathematical and computational tools that would be needed to implement
such a perspective go beyond the understanding of systems and their spaces
that I currently have in my command.  It is bad form for a workman to blame
his tools, but in practical terms there really does continue to be room for
better design.  The languages and the media that are available do, indeed,
make some things easier to see, to say, and to do than others, whether it
is English, Pascal (Wirth, 1976), or Hopi (Whorf, 1956) that is at issue.
A persistent attention to this pragmatic factor in epistemology will be
necessary in order to implement the brands of knowledge-directed systems
whose intelligence can function in real time.  Consequently, to provide
a computational language that can help to clarify these problems is one
of the chief theoretical tasks that I see for myself in the work ahead.

A system moving through a knowledge field would ideally be equipped
with a strategy for discovering the structure of that field to the
greatest extent possible.  This ideal strategy is itself a piece
of knowledge, a segment of code existing in the knowledge space
of every point that possesses this option within its potential.

Recognizing this circumstance leads in turn to a host of questions:

1.  Does discovery mark only a different awareness of something that already
    exists, a changed attitude toward a piece of knowledge already possessed?

2.  Or does discovery constitute something more substantial than unforgetting?

3.  Are genuine invention and proper extensions of the shared code possible?

4.  Can inquiry driven systems acquire pieces of knowledge that are not already
    in their possession, perhaps not even in their presumptive potential to know?

If a piece of code is near at hand, within a small neighborhood of a system's place
in a knowledge field, then it is easy to see a relationship between adherence and
discovery.  It is possible to visualize how crumbs of code could be traced back,
accumulated, and gradually reassembled into whole slices of the desired program.
But what if the required code is more distant?  If a system is observed in fact
to drift toward increasing states of knowledge, does its disposition and its
inclination toward knowledge as a goal need to be explained by some inherent
attraction of knowledge?  Do potential fields and propagating influences
have to be imagined in order to explain the apparent action at a distance?
Do massive bodies of knowledge then naturally form, and eventually come
to dominate whole knowledge fields?  Are some bodies of knowledge
intrinsically more attractive than others?  Can inquiries get
so serious that they start to radiate intelligible gravity?

Questions like these are only slightly speculative ways of probing the range
of possible systems that are suggested by the definition of a knowledge field.
What abstract possibility best describes a given concrete system is a separate,
empirical question.  With luck, the human situation will be found to rest among
the reasonably learnable universes, but before that hope can be evaluated a lot
remains to be discovered about what, in fact, may be learnable and reasonable.

Jon Awbrey

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