[xtm-wg] Inquiry Into Inquiry

["Paul Stephen Prueitt" <bcngroup@erols.com>]

I am not sure which of the forums this will be posted to.  I have left the
Topic Maps forum because there is no response to the issues that I have very
carefully brought up.

Arisbe and Stand! Unfold! and Ontology! are unknown to me.  I post this to
com-prac because the discussion is essential to defending community of
practice work from those who insist that the IT is the most important part
of collaborative tools.

There is the computer science and the human science, and these two
viewpoints must be balanced if **Value Propositions** are to pay out a
return on investment.

***

Jaworski said:

"Okay, maybe, but I wasted far too many years playing the viscous circuits
of
declarative/procedural volleyball to want to go through that again, which is
why I left cogsci for a better refereed net."

****

I also feel a waste of my time and of the time of our society on this
declarative/procedural distinction.


I read through John Sowa scholarly work that he posted at;

   http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnetw.htm


and the history is familiar.  But as I read this history, I keep asking the
question, "what is missing here?"

Tulving is referenced on page 1, but this is the 1972 work that Tulving
specifically deconstructs, and disavows, in the 1980s and the 1990s.  In the
volume edited by Schacter and Tulving (Memory 1993) the best minds in human
memory research essentially say that the earlier distinction between
semantic memory and episodic memory can not be supported by the modern
empirical work.

"quote from Schacter and Tulving page 2 -"

" The fact that concern with the neural mechanisms underlying psychological
manifestations of memory and knowledge was absent in the earliest thought
about different forms of memory is not surprising.  On the one hand, there
was little understanding of the brain at the time, and thus the neural
influence was necessarily absent. On the other hand, the doctrine of
associationism held almost universal sway over philosophical and
psychological thinking about memory, rendering any kind of physiologizing
superfluous.  Moreover, the associative doctrine was dominated by the idea
that all expressions of memory could be attributed to the functioning of a
single associative mechanism, an idea that is still around even today. "

***

What is missing is the modern view of cognitive neuroscience.  I do not mean
Pat Churchland's work or other work that is developed (strongly supported by
NSF) in a specific means to support the hard AI position, but rather the
core experimental work on understanding the biology of cognition and
behavior.

This is a difficult discussion with the strong AI camp.  The discussion
brings to bear the modern research on human memory and anticipation as a
means to try to deconstruct the strong AI position.  As Tulving and Schacter
state, there is deeper evidence about memory and this deeper evidence does
not support specific previous viewpoints - from which both strong AI and
much of connectionism is derived.

It is a consuming debate, requiring continual review of books and the
writing and rewriting of e-forum communications.

This process might go on for a few more days.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OntologyStream is an open forum.. where those
wishing to discussion this may gather.

I, and my colleagues, want to try to establish a new position (change a
mind) but realize that we may just increase our own understanding of the
entrenchment of strong AI.  In phone discussions on this, it is clear that
entrenched positions will not allow principled argument - and often fail
back into claims that some harm is being done to the good paradigm.  One is
not allowed to bring up the fact that there are no intelligent computer
programs out there.  There are no computer programs out there that are a
"they".  There are no computer programs out there that "know".

The language used is simply wrong and misleading.  By pointing this out, my
camp does not begin talking about "God" or a theory of everything, we are
just pointing out a clear fact that the AI community continues to be in
denial about.  The behavior of those entrenched minds is scandalous to
science as a discipline.

One of the reasons why I have spent most of my life looking to develop a
bead game that converts topics in a e-forum, or other discussion, into a
machine knowledge ontology is so that the slight of hand used by the
entrenched camps can be revealed for what they are.  The **Value
proposition** is that by shining light on why the current investment in IT
technology are not paying off, society might benefit form a new epoch.

Important problems, like Computer Intrusion Detection (CID) or Situational
Decision Support, just require an easier interface between human communities
and the data structures.  We need less strong AI religion and more agility
in the data structures.  And this interface requires an understanding of the
fundamental difference between a finite state machine and a human mind or a
human community.  In the CID world the situation is special, in that the
attackers mush act via the computer.. and so AI done right has a chance of
doing much more than it is doing now.  But ...  there are still the problem
that AI is not non-stationary in the same way as a natural system.

http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter2.htm

I ask John Sowa to make a comment about the fact that Tulving has declared
his former views, regarding the distinction between semantic and episodic
memory, as being a distinction that has been found to be lacking.  Are we
simply to ignore this history?

If science cannot walk away from an establish paradigm, when evidence sets
it aside, then why have a notion of falsification at all?




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