Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

[adam.kulidjian]

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone in here could help direct me a little. Any feedback or help would be super appreciated!

@Pascal Hitzler, @Leo Obrst, @Alex Shkotin ... I do appreciate your help from the last post. 🙏

The Motivation

I'm working on a "theory" you could say (more like a logical sequence of building up a picture of reality) based upon my personal meditations / observations of experience and the senses, Mind's Eye ... etc.

This work excites me a lot, but I feel like I'm in a vacuum sometimes. It would be amazing to start interfacing with the world around me, and make Truth-discovery more of a multiplayer game, a collaboration.

My Question

I am wondering ... if there is something similar out there to the work that I am doing, or if someone could guide me towards work that is has been done / is being done that is contending with similar ideas / frameworks / concepts / approaches / modalities , etc.

• (Pssst I don't think this neatly fits under one academic category)

I've attached an 11-page PDF of the latest package of my work ... but in case that is inaccessible, here are a few bullet points of the material to convey the essence of what I am doing:

A Summary of the Work

the starting point:

• What is happening right now? It's the "moment".
• Now there is another moment, another one, another one, etc.
  • I picked the word "moment" to be as neutral as possible. It's not really not about the word. I'm just trying to point to the experience of what is happening right now, the present moment, etc.

an experiment:

• Look at a cup (moment)
• Look at a bird (another moment)
• Look at the cup again (moment)

Now ... notice that there is a visual correspondence between that 1st moment, and that 3rd moment.

• Again, we can use any word (similarity, correlation, repetition, pattern) but the idea is that there is a feeling of "oh, I'm experiencing this again)

next steps / building a picture:

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

recursion:

Think about the fact that in the last image you just saw, you were not just looking at pure reality itself. You were looking at a representation of reality, a picture I sketched to convey something.

But here's the thing ... this representation is still within a moment. And therefore it's now a thing to which correspondences can be built upon / between.

(I feel like people don't talk about this often ... usually there is a textbook explaining philosophical concepts, a theory of everything, topics about consciousness, but the fact of that experience of reading text scribbled on a page articulating things ... this itself is part of Reality as well, not an isolated thing that just sits by itself. It needs to be accounted for by that 'theory of everything')

Appreciation for making it this far!

Any advice, ideas, or insights would be immensely appreciated. 🙏

I am not working within academia, but am curious about connecting with like-minded people and branching within people whom this content resonates with.

Sincerely,

Adam

[Alex Shkotin]

Hi Adam,

I haven't looked at the PDF, and I want to point out that your thoughts are similar to a topic I call the phenomenology of matter to humans, but it doesn't feature cups and birds. It's just geometric surfaces glowing in different colors in different places. By shifting our gaze from one place to another and from one object to another, we construct a 3D image in our minds of a piece of present existence. Every philosopher touches on this topic in their theory of existence. Some might recommend Peirce's Phaneroscopy, while I'll recommend Hegel's Science of Logic (doctrine of being).

We can discuss the structure of 3D images and the details of their construction, and then their movement and change of shape. There's a lot of interesting geometry there.

Alex

пн, 24 нояб. 2025 г. в 01:24, adam.kulidjian <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>:

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[Alex Shkotin]

IN ADDITION: have a look at https://philevents.org/

пн, 24 нояб. 2025 г. в 12:28, Alex Shkotin <alex.s...@gmail.com>:

[adam.kulidjian]

Alex, thanks for your suggestions.

RE https://philevents.org/, is there any particular reason for sharing this? Any events in here that you think dovetails with my work.

Best,

Adam

[James Zaiss]

Hello Adam,

Your approach reminds me of a certain strain of Phenomenalism in philosophy.  You might want to look at:

• Ernst Mach: The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (1886,1900)
• Rudolph Carnap: The Logical Structure of the World (1928)
• Nelson Goodman: The Structure of Appearance (1951)

Best,

Jim Zaiss

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/1358783a-1900-4ee5-99d6-5b4468542b92n%40googlegroups.com

.

[Alex Shkotin]

This resource can be configured to send notifications about interesting philosophical events. Well, that's what I do 🏋️

Alex

вт, 25 нояб. 2025 г. в 22:52, adam.kulidjian <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/1358783a-1900-4ee5-99d6-5b4468542b92n%40googlegroups.com.

[Alex Shkotin]

Jim,

Exactly!

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 10:27, 'James Zaiss' via ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/457093305.732023.1764141931119%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Alex Shkotin]

Hi Jim,

And the question arises: have we formalized this knowledge?

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 10:27, 'James Zaiss' via ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>:

Hello Adam,

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/457093305.732023.1764141931119%40mail.yahoo.com.

[adam.kulidjian]

Jim, thank you for your insights and suggestions.

My reading list just got a little longer. :)

- Adam

[bob...@ontoage.com]

One of my independent study topics in Cognitive Psych in college was ‘similarity’.  It led to the thought that we think in metaphors, little contextual patterns (graphic connections, little ‘ontologies’) that we have stored somewhere, and when we perceive something (in a context), we walk the metaphor graph to the situation most similar in context.

 

Similarity was hard, and led to contextual patterns of thought.  Example:  if you have an orange, a banana, and a tennis ball, which two are most similar?  The answer is contextual – if the context is fruit, then the orange and banana; if the context is shape, then the orange and tennis ball.   

 

I had come to think that thought is metaphoric, involving metaphor in a context.  I don’t recall any work around this, but that was a long time ago.  There might be some…

 

Bobbin Teegarden

CTO/Chief Architect, OntoAge

bob...@ontoage.com

206.979.0196 cell

425.378.0131 home/fax

Bellevue, WA

 

next steps / building a picture:

 

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

 

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

 

 

 

recursion:

Think about the fact that in the last image you just saw, you were not just looking at pure reality itself. You were looking at a representation of reality, a picture I sketched to convey something.

 

But here's the thing ... this representation is still within a moment. And therefore it's now a thing to which correspondences can be built upon / between.

(I feel like people don't talk about this often ... usually there is a textbook explaining philosophical concepts, a theory of everything, topics about consciousness, but the fact of that experience of reading text scribbled on a page articulating things ... this itself is part of Reality as well, not an isolated thing that just sits by itself. It needs to be accounted for by that 'theory of everything')

 

Appreciation for making it this far!

Any advice, ideas, or insights would be immensely appreciated. 🙏

I am not working within academia, but am curious about connecting with like-minded people and branching within people whom this content resonates with.

 

Sincerely,

Adam

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[adam.kulidjian]

Bobbin,

So much of your message resonates with me. I'm very curious about these metaphor thoughts. Did you write any of them down? Any artifacts of these thoughts (eg. documents) lying around somewhere?

Similarity was hard, and led to contextual patterns of thought.  Example:  if you have an orange, a banana, and a tennis ball, which two are most similar?  The answer is contextual – if the context is fruit, then the orange and banana; if the context is shape, then the orange and tennis ball. 

This example resonates a lot with me. It reminds me of part of a brain-dump that I had a while back, thinking about files on a desktop computer and how you organize them.

TLDR The place where the Design School/ sits in the folder structure depends on the context: mood / previous patterns / metaphors you are steeped in, etc

I've imagined that the true nature of relation is some kind of superpositions of relationships, and I have wanted to diagram such a thing, but have not found a way to do it (reminds me a lot of equivalence classes in Math).

[John F Sowa]

Adam.

The subject you're talking about seems to be  phenomenology or the version by C. S. Peirce called phaneroscopy.

You might start with Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

But the version I prefer is by C. S. Peirce, which he called phaneroscopy.   You can start  with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron ,

There is much, much more to say.   But look at those references and check whether they are going in the direction you are working on.

John

 

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From: "adam.kulidjian" <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>
Sent: 11/23/25 5:25 PM
To: ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

[Alex Shkotin]

You are not alone. We had some topics. Have a look at https://ontologforum.com/index.php?search=metaphor

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 22:33, <bob...@ontoage.com>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/086a01dc5f0b%2495ce5a80%24c16b0f80%24%40ontoage.com.

[adam.kulidjian]

Thank you John. I will look into phaneroscopy.

Cheers,

Adam

[adam.kulidjian]

Attaching another image that folks (hopefully) get delight from.

The diagram is similar to what I had in the original images I attached, only done in Figma (computer tools)

[Michael DeBellis]

One book I would recommend is: Memory and the Computational Brain by Gallistel and King. I think this is one of the most important books that shows how the idea that cognition can be reduced to neural networks can't be all there is. I.e., neural nets are clearly important for some kinds of learning but there must be more than just neural nets. Another book that I really think is critical is Chomsky's Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind. Gallistel and Chomsky both hypothesize that recursion and set formation are essential for language comprehension and human cognition. There is another book by Gallistel that is really interesting that he wrote with Gelman called: The Child's Understanding of Number. This is really fascinating. Gelman has done a lot of research with preverbal infants to try and find concepts (what ev-psych people call Cognitive Modules) that are innate and not dependent on culture. She pioneered the approach of videotaping the eye movements of preverbal infants to tell what kind of input surprises them vs. what are things they expect to happen. Their research suggests that Peano arithmetic (the formal foundation for mathematics) may be innate in the human genome.

I know none of those are directly relevant to what you're describing but I think they may still be relevant. 

Michael

https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog

[Ravi Sharma]

Michael

Great email, will read more

What caught my attention was

"She pioneered the approach of videotaping the eye movements of preverbal infants to tell what kind of input surprises them vs. what are things they expect to happen. Their research suggests that Peano arithmetic (the formal foundation for mathematics) may be innate in the human genome."

The first time a child understands or is surprised by unexpected results is a great notable knowledge event. If that happens again and if there is still surprise then it could be retention or other factors such as inability to grasp concepts.

Finally Logic and Genes may be connected but directly going to Math and genome is a step away ! even though we know that mathematics is important for genomics.

Thanks.

Ravi

(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)

NASA Apollo Achievement Award

Former Scientific Secretary iSRO HQ

Ontolog Board of Trustees

Particle and Space Physics

Senior Enterprise Architect

SAE Fuel Cell Standards Member

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[Michael DeBellis]

Finally Logic and Genes may be connected but directly going to Math and genome is a step away ! even though we know that mathematics is important for genomics.

Ravi, I realize it's kind of a leap but it is hardly unprecedented. E.g., in Biology,  everyone agrees that the "Waggle dance" of bees must be in their genome. And compared to Peano arithmetic which remember is very basic: successor function, 0, equality, and basic logic; the waggle dance is quite complex and includes:

1. Direction. The angle of the waggle run relative to vertical gravity inside the hive. This angle corresponds to the angle between the food source and the sun
Example:
* Waggle straight up = “fly toward the sun”
* 30° left of vertical = “fly 30° left of the sun”

This is angular encoding (symbolic reasoning), not a simple cue.

2. Distance. Encoded by:
* Duration of the waggle phase
* Number of abdominal oscillations
* Longer waggle = farther distance

3. Quality. Intensity, repetition rate, and vigor correlate with:

• Nectar richness
• Profitability of the food source

Reference Frames and Transformations. This is where the biological sophistication becomes undeniable.

• The dance occurs in darkness, on vertical honeycomb
• Bees use gravity as a proxy for the sun’s position
• This requires a stable internal coordinate transformation: gravity axis → solar azimuth → external landscape

Time-Dependent Sun Compensation

• The sun moves ~15° per hour
• Bees automatically correct for this drift
• A recruit who leaves minutes later still flies in the correct direction

This implies an internal circadian + ephemeris-like correction, not memorized locations. A key aspect of correctly interpreting the dance requires some basic geometry. Biologists sometimes argue over whether it is correct to say that bees are "doing geometry" but if we look at it in purely functional terms, there is no question that for a human scientist to reconstruct how the dance maps to the food source the human needs to do basic geometry. 

BTW, there have been experiments that rule out a pheromone trail or some other physical marking of the trail to the food source and have shown that it is indeed the dance communicating all the information. 

Some of the reasons the Waggle dance must be in the bee genome:

1. No learning period. Bees perform correct dances on their first foraging trips No training, feedback, or correction phase is observed

2. Robust to isolation. Bees raised without experienced dancers still perform the dance

Of course that in no way proves anything about Peano arithmetic and humans. For that read the book. But my point is the  idea that something as complex as Peano arithmetic is part of the human genome isn't inherently absurd given examples like the bee dance that show more complex computations can be in the genome of an animal with a tiny fraction of the brain that humans have. 

On a somewhat more philosophical note: I also find the hypothesis appealing because it is so consistent with the idea that Socrates expresses in one of Plato's early dialogues where he takes an uneducated slave and works with him to show that the slave actually "knows" basic geometry and only needs the proper cues to "remember". 

Michael

https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog

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[Ravi Sharma]

Michael 

Wow!

Your details are very very educational and we need to see how ontology can encode, explain or create KGs of Bees Waggle Dance if worthwhile!

I was Excellent in Biology grades in my college days but left fully paid medical studies for physics. Will the same encoding be found which is described as dreams of Monarch flies which knows where to reach south to give birth to the next generation?

Back to analysis: It is therefore ascertained by you that genetic memory encoding and mathematics are related and further physiology or processes use that encoding = which could be roughly called behavior or practice. Probably such behavior is now in humans even when they grow up such as that used while doing mechanical work or exercises? Perhaps John Sowa would say inbuilt genomic Logic leads to Math?

Thanks.

Ravi

(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)

NASA Apollo Achievement Award

Former Scientific Secretary iSRO HQ

Ontolog Board of Trustees

Particle and Space Physics

Senior Enterprise Architect

SAE Fuel Cell Standards Member

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[Nadin, Mihai]

Dear and respected colleagues,

Genetic reductionism is as dangerous as any other form of reductionism. The examples (bees, butterflies so far) are part of a larger body of empirical evidence of anticipatory action. I discussed many examples, in detail, in my book (no reason to advertise). Would be happy to provide details to those interested. Of bees and butterflies…superb title for a book on the subject. The data and information landscape of the living is MULTIVARIATE!.

 

Best wishes.

 

Mihai Nadin

 

next steps / building a picture:

 

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

 

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

 

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/CAAN3-5cnnN7mBk-LQe4h65md37fuanj8xKNewsKbZ4H6rV3-AA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Michael DeBellis]

Genetic reductionism is as dangerous as any other form of reductionism.

I disagree with your premise. You seem to be implying that "reductionism" is inherently wrong and I don't think that is true at all. In many ways what scientists try to do all the time is reduction. We try to find general models that can explain a broad range of phenomena. That is reduction.  We find laws of genetics  like Hamilton's rule that describe kin selection and the probability that a gene will spread through the genome based on it's impact on reproductive success and we reduce the description for how a broad range of physical and behavioral traits evolved in organisms from flat worms to humans to a simple inequality:  (rB>C).

Reductionism is not a fallacy. It’s a methodological strategy that has produced some of the greatest successes in science. Reductionist explanations are wrong only when they are empirically inadequate, not because they are reductionist. Rejecting reductionism per se would require rejecting modern physics, chemistry, and molecular biology.

An example of "bad reductionism" is radical behaviorism that hypothesized all human cognition and behavior could be explained in terms of stimulus response models. That is clearly reductionism. But most people don't reject Skinner because he was a reductionist but because he was wrong. You just can't explain all human behavior in terms of SR models. Or animal behavior for that matter. The waggle dance is a classic example of something that can't be explained by SR conditioning. 

One of the most brilliant achievements of twentieth-century science was the demonstration by Linus Pauling that quantum mechanics could be used to explain chemical bonding and other chemical phenomena. This work showed that chemistry could be "reduced" to physics in principle, resolving what had previously seemed to many to be a deep and possibly insurmountable gap between the two sciences. 

As for "genetic reductionism" if I had said "all humans should find mathematics trivial because Peano arithmetic is in our genes" then I agree, that would be a ridiculous thing to say. I mean to be clear I'm not saying Peano arithmetic is in our genome and I don't think Gallistel would either. I'm saying that based on the data that Gallistel and Gelman collected, it is an intriguing hypothesis that Peano arithmetic may be in our genome. 

But even if that turns out to be true that doesn't mean that humans inevitably will learn math. This goes back to a fallacy about genetics and environment. When I first went to college in the Late Pleistocene era we were taught about "nature vs. nurture" as if the goal was to find which traits are "determined" by the genome vs. those which are a factor of culture. No one talks like that anymore. Now it's environment and genome and we know that both are dependent on the other. A classic example is an experiment where they put blinders on kittens so that their eyes still received some stimulation but it was ill defined. They took the blinders off but the cats that had them on during the formative period for vision to develop in kittens never achieved normal vision. That's an example of something almost everyone would agree is in the genome (the structure of the eye and the visual system) but that can still be derailed if the organism doesn't have the proper environmental stimulus during the critical time in their development when the trait matures. 

Another example is the language faculty. Chomsky tells a story of going to Italy to teach with his wife, his older daughter and his young son. Everyone except their son was excited to be able to live in Italy. The son hated it because he didn't want to be away from his friends. His son went to an all English school and his son hated Italy and did not in any way try to learn the language while Chomsky, his wife and older daughter all did. But his son was in the formative period for language development so as Chomsky says: "after a while if the phone rang our son had to answer it" because as much as he tried not to and the adults tried to learn, the son learned Italian because he was in the critical time where the language faculty develops and he learned it without any effort while the adults tried but never achieved his level of proficiency. 

And I seem to have drifted way off topic so this is a good place to end. 

Michael

https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog

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[Michael DeBellis]

One last thing: when I first read this post I knew there was something I had read a while ago that I thought was relevant but I couldn't remember what it was and I just stumbled over it while looking for something else. It's a paper by an  evolutionary psych  anthropologist named Pascal Boyer.  If you are ever interested in the scientific study of religion read his book Religion Explained. It's an amazing discussion of the role religion played in our hunter gatherer ancestors and how different that was from modern religion and what the evolutionary drivers of religion may have been. It's a fascinating topic because religion is one of those things that from a purely evolutionary perspective doesn't seem to make sense. Tribe members spend all sorts of resources in the form of sacrifices (animals and people), lopping off body parts, rituals, etc. for no obvious evolutionary benefit. Actually, it always amazed me that Dawkins of all people could just dismiss religion as a "mind virus" because if that is all it is (i.e., if there was no benefit to ancient hunter gatherers from religion) then there would be strong selection pressure for atheism. Boyer's hypothesis (this is of course gross over simplification) is that religion served to 1) Increase tribal cohesion, to differentiate our tribe (which is the good people) from the other tribes (the bad people) and 2) to serve as a check against "cheaters" in the game theoretic sense. Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust came to similar conclusions.  Anyway, this paper by Boyer is I think relevant to the questions the OP was posing about memory and our sense of self.  What Are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture by Pascal Boyer. 

Michael

https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog

On Sunday, November 23, 2025 at 2:24:46 PM UTC-8 adam.kulidjian wrote:

[Nadin, Mihai]

One answer (but not before expressing my respect for your arguments): the dynamics of life is holistic. 

Best wishes.

Mihai Nadin

Sent from planet earth

On Dec 23, 2025, at 6:49 PM, Michael DeBellis <mdebe...@gmail.com> wrote:

One last thing: when I first read this post I knew there was something I had read a while ago that I thought was relevant but I couldn't remember what it was and I just stumbled over it while looking for something else. It's a paper by an  evolutionary psych  anthropologist named Pascal Boyer.  If you are ever interested in the scientific study of religion read his book Religion Explained. It's an amazing discussion of the role religion played in our hunter gatherer ancestors and how different that was from modern religion and what the evolutionary drivers of religion may have been. It's a fascinating topic because religion is one of those things that from a purely evolutionary perspective doesn't seem to make sense. Tribe members spend all sorts of resources in the form of sacrifices (animals and people), lopping off body parts, rituals, etc. for no obvious evolutionary benefit. Actually, it always amazed me that Dawkins of all people could just dismiss religion as a "mind virus" because if that is all it is (i.e., if there was no benefit to ancient hunter gatherers from religion) then there would be strong selection pressure for atheism. Boyer's hypothesis (this is of course gross over simplification) is that religion served to 1) Increase tribal cohesion, to differentiate our tribe (which is the good people) from the other tribes (the bad people) and 2) to serve as a check against "cheaters" in the game theoretic sense. Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust came to similar conclusions.  Anyway, this paper by Boyer is I think relevant to the questions the OP was posing about memory and our sense of self.  What Are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture by Pascal Boyer. 

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[Alex Shkotin]

Michael,

I did not read this book but support the direction https://philpapers.org/rec/KNELIR

Any verbal knowledge is more or less logical and strictly formalizable.

MXmas,

Alex

ср, 24 дек. 2025 г. в 05:49, Michael DeBellis <mdebe...@gmail.com>:

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[John F Sowa]

Alex, Michael, and Adam,

Human perception, thinking, reasoning, and formalization in mathematics and logic are always approximations to reality.  The humanly observable world and the universe it's embedded in are vastly more complex than any theory of science or mathematics or logic can represent.  The final stages of representation in any formal, computable form are always APPROXIMATIONS.

I recommend the following  advice by two logicians and a poet:

 Alfred North Whitehead: “Human knowledge is a process of approximation. In the focus of experience, there is comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background. There are always questions left over. The problem is to discriminate exactly what we know vaguely.” 

Charles Sanders Peirce: “It is easy to speak with precision upon a general theme. Only, one must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain. It is equally easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague. It is not so difficult to be pretty precise and fairly certain at once about a very narrow subject.” 

Alfred North Whitehead: “We must be systematic, but we should keep our systems open.” 

Robert Frost: “I’ve often said that every poem solves something for me in life. I go so far as to say that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world... We rise out of disorder into order. And the poems I make are little bits of order.”  [To make the comparison, replace every occurrence of poem with theory.] 

These comments by Whitehead, Peirce, and Frost  are from Slide 55 of a presentation at the European Semantic Web Conference in 2020:  https://jfsowa.com/talks/eswc.pdf .   I recommend those slides as a summary of the many complex issues in every branch of science:

The two logicians emphasize the same kinds of approximations as the poet:   The world is a continuum that is immensely more complicated than anything we can represent in human languages.  And our languages are vastly more expressive than anything we can represent in mathematics of formal logic.

As Whitehead, Peirce, and Frost emphasize,  our perceptions are approximations to the world.  Our languages are approximations to the perceptions.  And out formalized theories represented in mathematics and logic are approximations to the perceptions,  An immense amount of detail is lost in every stage of those approximations.

Summary:  Our perceptions are approximations to reality, but we have to make approximations to those approximations in order to describe them in a natural language.  But our vague natural languages are not computable.   A further approximation is necessary to map vague language to the precise formalizations in science, mathematics, and logic. ,  The progress of science is based on improving approximations to approximations to approximations.

Conclusion:  Our formal theories are necessary for computation, but we must always remember that they were derived by many levels of approximation.  Engineers summarize that point:  All models are wrong, but some are useful.

John

_________________

 

From: "Alex Shkotin" <alex.s...@gmail.com>

Michael,

I did not read this book but support the direction https://philpapers.org/rec/KNELIR

Any verbal knowledge is more or less logical and strictly formalizable.

next steps / building a picture:

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

[Alex Shkotin]

John,

I advised Michael to pay attention to a collection of articles on the logic of religious texts. I emphasized that they, too, can be formalized, although the rules of inference differ greatly from both mathematical logic and from religion to religion.

The topic of perception is not even orthogonal, but rather opposed to the topic of religious feeling and thought.

If we touch on this, then speaking of "our perceptions" is completely naive – we can only speak of our own perceptions; we only guess about others' perceptions by analogy with ours, or by receiving messages.

Merry Xmas

Alex

пт, 26 дек. 2025 г. в 04:14, John F Sowa <so...@bestweb.net>:

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[jsi...@measures.org]

Alex,

As John has been conveying from Peirce’s work on existential graphs, Peirce recognized that diagrammatic logic was *iconic* and therefore superior for conveying thirdness relations compared to serialized statements using *symbolic* conventions. These latter could never capture the simultaneity, continuity, reciprocity and mutual dependence of true thirdness, no matter how many statements were accumulated.

This is directly parallel to Rosen’s work on the complex and impredicative character of living systems being different in kind from aggregates of mechanisms or simple systems. Rosen held that the structure of such complex systems could be represented diagrammatically in relational entailment networks, but those dynamics could not be serialized and encoded into a complete computable simulation.

If only Rosen had known about Peirce’s work on diagrammatic logic he could have worked to build on it, and the conclusions they each reached would be accepted as settled science by now.

Janet

On Dec 26, 2025, at 1:09 AM, Alex Shkotin <alex.s...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[jsi...@measures.org]

Alex,

You said “the logic of religious texts can be formalized”. Some traditions actually have prohibited writing down teachings because of how much meaning is lost. All writings do lead to debates about interpretation.

Otoh, consider a taijitu diagram or other mandalas. They convey form and meaning as icons, but would you say their meaning ‘can be formalized’?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taijitu#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Janet

On Dec 26, 2025, at 1:56 PM, jsi...@measures.org wrote:



[Michael DeBellis]

Peirce recognized that diagrammatic logic was *iconic* and therefore superior for conveying thirdness relations compared to serialized statements using *symbolic* conventions. These latter could never capture the simultaneity, continuity, reciprocity and mutual dependence of true thirdness, no matter how many statements were accumulated.

I haven't heard that before, that's interesting. What is an example of something that the "diagrammatic logic" can convey that can't be conveyed using FOL? 

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[John F Sowa]

Michael, 

Lotfi Zadeh had proposed "fuzzy logic'. which had many proponents while Zadeh was living and active in promoting it.  But after he died, the theories and applications decreased and largely died away.

But the discussions addressed issues that are still very relevant in any attempt to translate natural languages to a computable form.  For example, see my article "What is the source of fuzziness?"  https://jfsowa.com/pubs/fuzzy.pdf 

 

John 

 

---

From: "Michael DeBellis" <mdebe...@gmail.com>

[Alex Shkotin]

John,

Let's discuss the most important perception for our civilization – vision. It's impossible to verify that one person sees the same color as another. But it seems possible that we see the same shape of objects. And here, definitions play a significant role. But practical definitions. For example,

A surface is what we see around us – what our gaze rests on. Our gaze can move along it lengthwise and widthwise, but not depthwise.

A line is the boundary of a surface that curves back on itself.

A point is how we see a receding object before it disappears.

These are the practical principles of Euclidean geometry.

A line is considered straight if looking along it turns it into a point.

An infinite straight line is rarely seen, but easily imagined. Hilbert took it and an infinite flat surface, in addition to a point, as fundamental entities to formulate the axiomatics of Euclidean geometry. Some have taken other entities as primary entities, for example, Weyl, vectors. The structure of a definition as a unit of knowledge is nontrivial, and understanding and agreeing with it, or presenting one's own, requires mental effort.

For example, what do you think of this definition [1]? There's room for formal languages: rcl is Rocq, and I might add col for Common Logic. All it takes is enthusiasm.

The system of definitions is a gem of theory.

Alex

[1] lHaob1 rus:расположено шарнирно eng:located on a hinge

rus	Пусть существует несколько попарно не наложенных тел и b1 одно из них. b1 расположено шарнирно [относительно других тел] еите существует дугор or0 такой что b1 сдвигаемо or0 и всякий ор or1 такой что b1 сдвигаемо or1 есть дугор.
eng	Let there be several pairwise non-superimposed bodies and b1 is one of them. b1 is located on a hinge [relative to other bodies] iff there exists an arcor or0 such that b1 is shiftable by or0 and every ror or1 such that b1 is shiftable by or1 is an arcor.
yfl
yf0
rcq

пт, 26 дек. 2025 г. в 04:14, John F Sowa <so...@bestweb.net>:

Alex, Michael, and Adam,

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[Alex Shkotin]

Janet,

I'm on the road today, so I'll answer without diving.

-EG is a mathematical construction using the geometry of labeled objects, i.e., some kind of mathematics.

-What distinguishes Eastern icons is that they don't have letter or word marks. Christian icons usually do. Is it possible to formalize the shapes of icons? Of course, there's usually an established canon for their drawing. The experience of contemplating religious paintings is a separate topic. As Landau said, "Personal experience cannot be transferred."

-Gelfand said in his Kyoto lecture, and this still seems true: we don't have mathematics for biology.

The use of visual thinking is not only natural, but almost inevitable:

-the text we read is two-dimensional,

-any more or less complex formula is two-dimensional.

Visual thinking about forms is Euclidean.

Alex

сб, 27 дек. 2025 г. в 01:30, <jsi...@measures.org>:

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[Nadin, Mihai]

Dear and respected colleagues:

1. Uexkull—for those dealing with what do animals see...
2. We do NOT see a line, or a 2 dimensiuoinal space, or what that matter  an n-dimensional space...We see REPRESENTATIONS. Period. These are constructs. We do not see RED, but we see red cars...etc.

Just to make sure we are addressing the same questions.

Best wishes.

Mihai Nadin

---

From: ontolo...@googlegroups.com <ontolo...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Alex Shkotin <alex.s...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2025 12:20 AM
To: ontolo...@googlegroups.com <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Re: Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

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[jsi...@measures.org]

Alex,

Following the direction of Mihai’s clarification, the below attempts to get on the same page re your assertion ‘the logic of religious texts can be formalized’. 

The opening declarative statement from the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1)

can be translated to:

∃t (Beginning(t) ∧ At(W, t)) ∧ With(W, G) ∧ (W = G)

• Let W be a constant denoting "the Word" (Greek: Logos).
• Let G be a constant denoting "God".
• Let B be a constant denoting "the Beginning" (as a specific point or context in time/existence).
• Predicate At(x, y): "x exists/was at y" (or "x is present in y").
• Predicate With(x, y): "x is with y" (denoting accompaniment or relation).
• Predicate Is(x, y): "x is identical to y" (for the equality in "was God").

(this is one AI suggestion)
In your view, what has been gained by that formal encoding?
Has ‘the logic’ of the text been preserved? 
Janet

On Dec 26, 2025, at 10:20 PM, Alex Shkotin <alex.s...@gmail.com> wrote:



[John F Sowa]

Janet,

Your translation illustrates a point I have been repeating in different ways:  A translation of a vague statement to formal logic does nothing to clarify the issues.  It just converts a vague statement that may convey some meaning to a precise statement that that is either false or meaningless.

John

 

---

From: jsi...@measures.org

[Nadin, Mihai]

Janet Singer makes a very powerful argument: if ontology engineering is ONLY a dictionary for the machines called computers, what is translated makes sense only to the extent that it is meaningful. But the notion of ontology is way broader that translating to machines. 

Mihai Nadin

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Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2025 3:52 PM

To: ontolo...@googlegroups.com <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Re: Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

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