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Subject: [topicmaps-comment] new discussion on situated context
I look forward to a more detailed discussion regarding David's post on "how *situated contexts* can be specified by the computer and used to provide a context (or "scope"-like) for subjectindicators and other representations of the characterizations of topics."; as David put the issue. I prefer to have this discussion at the KMCI, in order to reflect the Knowledge Management perspective. However, I realize that the discussion might be of interest to many of the workers in the topic map community itself. So perhaps we can cross post for a day and then decide on where to have the discuss. I cc also the private forum Einstein Institute because several of the scholars in that institute are assisting in the preparation of a session on "Ecological Knowledge Management" at the March Knowledge Technologies 2001 conference http://www.knowledgetechnologies.net to be held in Seattle. The one hour and a half session will have a virtual component that allows 20 - 30 individuals from around the world the opportunity to try out a virtual classroom technology, developed by HP, as part of a face to face professional conference. Here is my specific challenge to David. From a theoretical and experimental foundation one can make the distinction between the computer -addressable-world and the non-computer-addressable world. Specifically the computer is a simple, but perhaps highly complicated, machine that does not have a stratification property that all natural systems have. In this sense the computer, as a machine, is an artificial system (Herbert Simon talks about this in his new book). Natural systems such as living systems have a dependency on being **situated**, where by **situated** I define to mean specifically existing in reality in a moment of time. Conscious experience is thus **situated**, as is the full reality of a biological process as it exist in reality within a period of time. The stratification of physical reality may be by organization scales. One example is the quantum mechanical scale - and metabological processes. Other examples include the scale of process one might conjecture to hold the phase coherence of lower levels of physical processes in support of awareness (I owe Karl Pribram for my understanding of this.) Now the new theory called stratified complexity is attempting to displace the work from the Santa Fe Institute called Complex Adaptive Systems, so the theory is not "reified" in any sense yet. But if one considers the notion of a computer by itself providing situated context, then we have a problem between this notion and the notion of situatedness as defined in a stratified theory. Now, I should say that stratified theory often has to put up with specific cases of contradiction. Up becomes down and down becomes up often, for example. But we see this also with quantum logics. One can talk about Godel's theorem and even Cantor's notions. I also should say that the tri-level architecture was developed in order to create computational paths to computational emergence, within what is called the Process Compartment Hypothesis (Prueitt, 1995). This computational emergence might be coupled with a type of control theory to allow an stratified entity (a human being who is aware) to make small adjustment so that a situated context occurs in the "artificial world" , and this artificial situated context reflects well the direct perception of the human. see for details: http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter1.htm So I continue to be interested in David Dodd's work and look forward to the face to face meetings in March.
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