Gabi Witthaus's List: Philosophy

Stephen Downes: Oh, I'm in heaven. I cannot count the hours I spent embroiled in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. And now they're available online, complete, for free - including some of my absolute faves, like Language, Mind, and Knowledge (1975, ed. Keith Gunderson) and Scientific Explanation (1989, eds. Philip Kitcher & Wesley C. Salmon). Oh! This is fabulous stuff. Eric Schliesser, It's Only a Theory, November 5, 2009. [Link] [Tags: none] [Previous][Next]

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have released something they’re calling the Whole Brain Catalog. At its core, the catalog is meant to serve as a repository for data gathered about the mouse brain. Scientists around the globe can opt to pop their brain studies into the catalog and help create a richer, shared set of information than what’s available at each individual research institution.

Turning the staircase into a piano keyboard in Sweden - 66% more people took the stairs.

But what I am saying is that knowing is a skill, just like driving, and that there are constituent skills to knowing - skills like literacy, learning, prioitizing, evaluation, planning and acting.

So I very much enjoyed this little contest in the Wall Street Journal (thank you Cheri) between Karen Amstrong, a religious scholar I have a lot of time for, and Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist. They were both asked: “Where does evolution leave God?”

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects!

In order to achieve a genuinely intelligent World Wide Web, it seems that building some kind of general machine-readable ontology is an inescapable task. Yet the past 20 years have shown that hand-coding formal ontologies is not practicable. A recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology-building (e.g. YAGO, DBpedia), but here quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. I suggest that the long-running Cyc project can finally come into its own here, describing methods developed at the University of Waikato over the past summer whereby 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia were added to appropriate Cyc collections, and automatically categorized as instances or subcollections. Most importantly, Cyc itself was leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ assertions to it one by one, allowing it to ‘regurgitate’ those that are ontologically unsound. Cyc is arguably the only ontology currently sophisticated enough to be able to perform such a ‘digestive’ function, using its principled taxonomic structure and purpose-built inference engine. It is suggested that a traditional fixation of AI researchers on realizing the intelligence of the brain has perhaps caused us to overlook more humble yet genuine steps towards the AI vision which might be gained by realizing the intelligence of the stomach.
[Sent to me by David Hawkridge]