From: osborn@socs.uts.edu.au (Tom Osborn)
Subject: Opium and Power Outlets...
Organization: Computing Sciences, Uni of Technology, Sydney.
Date:  6 Nov 92 01:08:21 GMT

mddeitch@socs.uts.edu.au (Mark Deitch)  writes:

>.... WHERE ARE ALL THE GEORGE BOOLE'S IN THE WORLD? How can a system that 
> was invented so long ago, still be the most efficient basis, for such 
> powerful machinery? Perhaps some more nerds should connect themselves 
> up to power outlets and smoke opium?

Valuable theorems probably, in the main, do not come from using Opium and
Electric Fields, but from a lot of painstaking fascination and subjective
beliefs about "what explains what", or "what underlies what", ...

I'm sure that a few insights came about by spontaneous revelation - with
very little incubation of rough clues - through the consumption of various
substances (Espresso, through LSD) or various physical practices (fasting,
through retreats, through tantra...), but the ability to judge the worth
(after its revelation) requires a well equipped mind - no necessarily that
of the recipient of the revelation, and not necessarily in the same decade.

Watanabe is no lightweight! His theorem implies that radical nominalism is
a flawed discipline. Or, translated into plain language, that _AT_BASE_ the
capability to discriminate between things is not a consequence of logic or
objective theory building, but is _subjective_ in that _your_ discrimination
between things depends on _your_ selective application of various (important)
predicates, and your selective or accidental ignorance of other predicates.

Well, that wasn't really plain language. Put more plainly: 

To say what "kind/type of a thing" something is, you need to say what you 
mean by "kind/type" first!

Of course, your determination of "kind/type" may be quite unconscious
and even 'intuitive', or it may be very conscious, and driven by 'free'
choice or indoctrination (or the selective nature of experience and the
individual's ability to learn), but nevertheless, it is subjective.

Therefore, be mindful...

...of the Ugly Duckling.

Tomasso.
_________________________________________________________________________

We can thus state the Theorem of the Ugly Duckling: "Insofar as we use
a finite set of predicates that are capable of distinguishing any two
objects considered, the number of predicated shared by any two such
objects is constant, independent of the choice of the two objects".
This theorem is true also if we limit the number of predicates of any 
given rank....

"Any arbitrary two objects are equally similar". Thus, a swan and a duck, 
and two swans (insofar as distinguishable) are equally similar. This theorem 
is mathematically a very simple theorem, but it has a very profound meaning
for the study of pattern recognition. If we use the concept of distance D
instead of similarity, the situatiobn is the same; the distance between
a pair of objects is the same for any choice of the pair.

			Satosi Watanabi, 1985, in "Pattern Recognition".

_________________________________________________________________________
Tom Osborn,                            " This again is a manifestation of the
School of Computing Sciences,            inductive ambiguity we encounter when
University of Technology, Sydney,        we want to make a class out of an
PO Box 123 Broadway 2007,  AUSTRALIA.    object "            Satosi Watanabi.
Newsgroups: aus.flame,uts.flame