Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Sun, 04 Apr 1999 12:33:22 -0400
> It seems to me that you Hitoshi, are at the root of our tree.
> Stephen is attacking it brute force and climbing every branch
> while maintaining a good center of gravity near the trunk.
> Ben is also clinging to the trunk but straying onto the branches,
I would like to change the metaphor.
I think that the tree is not yet built -- we are building the tree, using
tree fragments
produced by us and others in the past. Many others have tried to build the
tree
but have either gotten stuck building roots (John Wheeler, 'it from bit';
my own work on Ons)
or have built a lot of intricate branching structures with no roots and
only half a trunk (string theory)
I am trying to build the roots and the trunk first, before building the
branches!!
Matti has already built a lot of interesting branches, and it's not yet
clear to me
if the trunk we build is going to link up to all of his branches, or just
some of them.
Hitoshi has built part of the trunk and some branches too, but the part of
the trunk
he has built is in my view still 2 feet up in the air ;)
Stephen is thinking about principles for building trees -- roots, trunks
and branches --
and has a lot of branches in mind, it not being clear which ones will
become part of
this tree as we build it and which will not.
And your plan is not 100% clear to me, but seems to me to be to focused on
issues that will
be more relevant once we have built more of the tree than we have done
right now.
Maybe we should pay more attention to these issues right now, but on the
other hand, maybe
that would distract us from actually building the tree.
To shift from a tree metaphor to a programming metaphor... I have learned
that, in software design,
there is a time for planning and plan-based execution, and a time for
hacking. Now we are still at the stage where we
need to "hack together" our first prototype of a unified physics theory.
Once the prototype is
hacked together, then we can step back, look at its flaws, and rebuild the
theory more systematically,
making sure there are no gaps, removing bugs, refining our language etc.
At least, this is the view from my corner of the intersubjective universe ;)
Ben
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sun Oct 17 1999 - 22:31:51 JST