Re: R.J. Lipton and K.W. Regan • Legal Complexity

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice — there’s hope it will.
For the logic of laws to converge on justice may take some doing on our part.

Resources

• Survey of Cybernetics
• Survey of Differential Logic
• Survey of Inquiry Driven Systems

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: Theory and Therapy of Representations • 3
Re: Ontolog Forum • Paola Di Maio

JA:

What are the forces distorting our representations of what’s observed, what’s expected, and what’s intended?

PDM:

The short answer is — the force behind all distortions is our own unenlightened mind, and all the shortfalls this comes with.

I think that’s true, we have to keep reflecting on the state of our personal enlightenments.  If we can do that without losing our heads and our systems thinking caps, there will be much we can do to promote the general Enlightenment of the State.

On both personal and general grounds we have a stake in the projects of self‑governing systems — whether it is possible for them to exist and what it takes for them to thrive in given environments.  Systems on that order have of course been studied from many points of view and at many levels of organization.  Whether we address them under the names of adaptive, cybernetic, error-correcting, intelligent, or optimal control systems they all must be capable to some degree of learning, reasoning, and self‑guidance.

Resources

• Survey of Cybernetics
• Survey of Differential Logic
• Survey of Inquiry Driven Systems

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Representation is a concept we find at the intersection of cybernetics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, psychology, and sociology.  In my studies it led me from math to psych and back again, with sidelong glances at the history of democratic governance.  Its time come round again, I find myself returning to the scenes of two recurring questions.

Scene 1.  Pragmatic Truth • Discussion 18

We do not live in axiom systems.  We do not live encased in languages, formal or natural.  There is no reason to think we will ever have exact and exhaustive theories of what’s out there, and the truth, as we know, is “out there”.  Peirce understood there are more truths in mathematics than are dreamt of in logic — and Gödel’s realism should have put the last nail in the coffin of logicism — but some ways of thinking just never get a clue.

That brings us to Question 1 —

• What are formalisms and all their embodiments in brains and computers good for?

Scene 2.  Theory and Therapy of Representations • 1

Statistics were originally the data a ship of state needed for stationkeeping and staying on course.  The Founders of the United States, like the Cybernauts of the Enlightenment they were, engineered a ship of state with checks and balances and error‑controlled feedbacks for the sake of representing both reality and the will of the people.  In that connection Max Weber saw how a state’s accounting systems are intended as representations of realities its crew and passengers must observe or perish.

That brings us to Question 2 —

• What are the forces distorting our representations of what’s observed, what’s expected, and what’s intended?

Resources

• Survey of Cybernetics
• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

December 19, 2011

In a complex society, people making decisions and taking actions at places remote from you have the power to affect your life in significant ways.  Those people govern your life, they are your government, no matter what spheres of influence they inhabit, private or public.  The only way you get a choice in that governance is if there are paths of feedback permitting you to affect the life of those decision makers and action takers in significant ways.  That is what accountability, response-ability, and representative government are all about.

Naturally, some people are against that.

In the United States there has been a concerted campaign for as long as I can remember — but even more concerted since the Reagan Regime — to get the People to abdicate their hold on The Powers That Be and just let some anonymous corporate entity send us the bill after the fact.  They keep trying to con the People into thinking they can starve the beast, to limit government, when what they are really doing is feeding the beast of corporate control, weakening their own power over the forces that govern their lives.

That is the road to perdition as far as responsible government goes.  There is not much of anything one leader or one administration can do unsupported if the People do not constantly demand a government of, by, and for the People.

Resource

• Survey of Cybernetics

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Statistics were originally the data a ship of state needed for stationkeeping and staying on course.  The Founders of the United States, like the Cybernauts of the Enlightenment they were, engineered a ship of state with checks and balances and error‑controlled feedbacks for the sake of representing both reality and the will of the people.  In that connection Max Weber saw how a state’s accounting systems are intended as representations of realities its crew and passengers must observe or perish.

The question for our time is —

• What are the forces distorting our representations of what’s observed, what’s expected, and what’s intended?

Repercussions

• The Place Where Three Wars Meet

Resource

• Survey of Cybernetics

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science