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Avoiding Buridan's Ass

Avoiding Buridan's Ass
As Easy As
1-2-1
----
To avoid Buridan's Ass
    Do Not Make A Decision
To avoid An irrevocable Decision
    Do Not Call It Forth
If you want to be an Emperor
    Imperate
If you want to be a deferrer
    Deferate

 

To avoid Buridan's Ass

    'Tis beyond all dispute

        And avoids all recisions

It's really quite crass

   But beyond all refute

        You'll make no revisions

It is truly a gas

    Yet you CAN still compute:

        Just make no decisions!

 

(That's not the joke:

 the joke is:

   it ain't no friggin' joke!)
====
A decision is classically modeled as a unitary discrete soliton event.

In the actual real world, it is usually implemented or carried out by a series of actions, taken largely sequential in nature, with many degrees of freedom that have inherent possibilities of parallelism, lack of irrevocability, untaken alternatives' pre-requisite steps, and common root causal actions of all subsequent final causal results.

Buridan's Ass specifies that, in any scenario involving the reduction of a continuous domain to a discrete range, there will be at least one point of uncertainty where the decision to do so cannot be made instantaneously:  the Ass will fail to choose immediately, or will have to choose randomly.  There are more general statements of it than this.

If you modally model the overall paradigm as completely as possible (including as many degrees of freedom as possible against the actual implementational reality), you will include as many sub-precursors as possible for alternative positioning within the actual manifold space of that trope set.

Additionally, asserted:

F Varela notes the distinction between states internal to the living system (decisions, distinctions) from the states present in the external world (the living system under study).  Categories do NOT exist in the real world OUTSIDE the mind:  "two" is in concept space, not the real world.

Similarly, in the world of prions, protids, prolids, and subvirals, there MAY be (almost certainly are) larger cooperating sets across semiotic boundaries AS WE RECOGNIZE THEM that "implement" "more complex" "imperatives"

Drawing an ana analogy: same thing here for a "different" "theory" of "decisions":  it is highly likely things can be done better/faster/more flexibly than current ultimate bounds of decision theory allow for, BY HAVING A THEORY TO REPLACE DECISION THEORY AT IT'S BASIS or even entirely outside of any form of modeling at all.

 

   Example, in re NNP traduction of living semiotic cognitive systems: if you do not distinguish between

 

          cause and effect

          goal and result

          input and output

 

   you CAN achieve a result without denoting it as such ...

 

because effectuallyand operationally, no distinction between cause & effect  (OR affect) has been made.

 

If you can avoid making a decision,

you will not have the delays associated with such

in asynchronous computer hardware:

 

     or other forms of 'puters.


But beware:  


      do not disturb sleeping dragons where they lie at rest. 

      You may not be able to get them back to sleep again.

The "23 mathematical Challenges" of DARPA (at URL http://www.darpa.mil/dso/personnel/23_math_chall_b_mann.pdf )
are unlike Hilbert's list (at "Wikipedia" URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems );
there is an agenda in the later not present in the earlier.  Especially Hilbert's 24th problem.



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