User:Rhmccullough/Sandbox/Theory of Knowledg

mKR and epistemology (theory of knowledge)
I hope I'll be successful in creating a new section here, because scrolling through the hugh volume of edits is getting out of hand. Rhmccullough (talk) 17:54, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I am extremely pleased with my language, mKR, from the point of view of its user interface. I think that when (and it will be when, not if) more people start using mKR, they will find it to be a very pleasant experience.

However, what is really important about mKR is its epistemology, the fundamental tools that it provides to express knowledge. Unfortunately, these issues have never even come up before this group, because all the words and references have been deleted before anyone could see them. I've been following the field of Artifial Intelligence for 30 years, not as closely as a college professor would, because most of the time, I had other job responsibilities not connected to AI.

I going to try to briefly tell you a few of the things that have been deleted from my article before they ever saw the light of day. Generally speaking, the theory of knowledge which should be the cornerstone of success in AI, is almost non-existent. The first of my deleted examples is Terry Winograd, who was doing early, successful work in Natural Language processing at MIT. Even though he achieved moderate success in his work, the signs of disaster were present in his discussion of the work (this was all written up in a book which described his research). In a nutshell, Winograd maintained that it just wasn't possible to define words -- I won't try to elaborate, because I don't have the quote in front of me, and I don't want to screw it up. I might still have the quote in someplace like User:Rhmccullough/Sandbox/History. You can look if you want.

Any way, that's a hell of a start for Natural Language processing -- to say it's impossible to define the words that you're using. And that is a significant indicator of the trouble that has persisted in the AI field for MANY years. The theory of knowledge that AI researchers needed just wasn't there. That's where Ayn Rand comes in, because she was a genius at thinking through complex issues, and identifying the essential concepts underlying those issues.

And, simply put, mKR implements Ayn Rand's theory of knowledge. My discussions with the W3C crowd showed how much trouble they were in, because of a lousy epistemology. But I was the only one who was able to see the problems. The W3C crowd did not appreciate that taking two different definitions for the same word, and stirring them up in a big melting pot would cause some trouble. They did not appreciate that saying that X is simultaneously an individual thing, and a group of things would lead to disaster. It was hard for them to appreciate what trouble they were in, because their logical experts told them they should ignore the question of meaning, that their language, e.g. RDF or OWL, was divorced from the real world, that you had to consider the mapping of language to all possible worlds that might exist.

The philosophy behind mKR is not aimed at "Artificial Intelligence". It is aimed at augmenting "Real Intelligence". The user of mKR is expected to connect his words to the reality around him. mKR provides tools to help him do that.

Now, I hope you have a little insight into why mKR is notable. Why it is important for the advancement of the "Semantic Web". If you sit around debating about possible worlds, you're not going to make much progress in this one, real world that we live in.

And I hope you also recognize how difficult it has been for me to support the importance of mKR, when I was never allowed to present you with any of the information which I outlined above. Rhmccullough (talk) 22:47, 27 June 2008 (UTC)