[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 19

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1.1.4.1.  Imagination

The intellectual factor or the knowledge component of a system is usually
expected to have a certain "quality of mercy", in other words, to involve
actions that are Reversible, Assuredly, Immediately, Nearly.  Even though
every action obeys physical and thermodynamic constraints, processes that
suit themselves to being used for knowledge representation must exhibit a
certain "forgiveness".  It must be possible to move pointers around on the
map without irretrievably committing forces on the plain of battle.  Indeed,
actions carried out in the image space should not incur too great a pain or
too dear a price in terms of the time and the energy that they dissipate.
In sum, a virtue of symbolic operations is that they be as nearly and as
assuredly reversible as possible.  This "virtual" construction, as it
virtually always does, declares a positively oriented proportion:
Operations are useful as symbolic transformations in proportion
to their certain erasability and their exact reversibility.

Imagination's development of elaborate and seemingly superabundant
resources of imagery is actually governed by a strict obedience to
the cybernetic "law of requisite variety".  This is the principle
that that determines that it is only the variety in the responses
of a regulator that can counter the flow of variety from external
and internal disturbances to the "essential variables", that is,
the qualities that the system must act to keep nearly constant
in order to survive in its current and preferred form of being
(Ashby, chapts. 10 & 11).

Aristotle, thinking that the human brain was too flimsy and spongy
a material to embody the human intellect, thought it might be useful
as a kind of radiator to cool the blood.  This is actually a pretty
good theory, I think, if it is recognized that the specialty of the
brain is to regulate essential variables of human existence on a
global scale through the discovery of natural laws.  To view the
brain as a "theorem-o-stat" is then fairly close to the mark.

Jon Awbrey

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