[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 14

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1.1.3.  Reality and Representation (concl.)

There is a reason for the seeming excess of labels and packaging
invested around the distinction between reality and representation.
The razor that would function as advertised and earn its patent to
separate sharp realities from fuzzy impressions is not a toy to be
wielded lightly.  Until it is certain just where to cut, other means
may be required to manage, organize, store, and control the fringes
of a systematic imagination.  It is my hope to turn this measure of
redundancy to an informative purpose later on when the distinction
begins to seem both more elusive and more vital.  An uncertainty in
this dimension can become positively noisy in its interference with
the observation and communication of static situations and potentially
noxious in its undermining of a system's capacity for dynamic control.

The difficulty to be faced here is this:  There can be genuine questions
about what actually forms the best factorization of the total manifold
into a base space and a remainder.  The most fitting factorization is
not necessarily given in advance, though any number of possibilities
may be tried out initially.  The most suitable distinction between
phenomenal reality and epiphenomenal representation can be a matter
determined by empirical or pragmatic factors.  Of course, with any
empirical investigation there are logical and mathematical factors
that place strong constraints on what is conceivably possible, but
the risk remains that the proper articulation of the whole space
will have to be discovered through empirical inquiries that are
carried on by a systematic agent delving into its own world of
states in the absence of absolutely dependable lines as guides.
The appropriate factorization, in the ideal the first item of
description, may indeed be one of the chief facts to find out
about a system and one of the principal facts to know about
the total space of phenomena that it manifests, and yet
persist in being the last fact to be fully settled.

Jon Awbrey

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