talk about semantic models?

I was referred to you by Wayne Richter of the U of MN's math
department. I had addressed some questions to him that I felt were
related to logic, but he (rightly) pointed out that they have at least
as much to do with theoretical linguistics, and suggested that I
contact you. Do you have any time to meet with me in upcoming days?

Specifically, I'm considering sets of Things, some of which may be
Triples (A, B, C) where A, B, and C are Things.

I'm interested in applying these systems to build semantic models
e.g. with triples like (cat, is a, mammal), (cat, eats, mice).

What seems different about this model from typical semantic network
models is that Triples can appear inside other triples:

((cat, eats, mice), suggests, (cat, is a, carnivore))

So, I'd be interested in anything you might say that would illuminate
theoretical aspects of this system, or related systems (including
anything in current use). My background is in math, so don't assume I
know much about the linguistics aspects of this project -- but I am
very interested in linguistics... would love to get your views on
these broader interests too.

new york local expensive hot date night?

The annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture and banquet is now set
for the evening of Friday, October 26th, at the Princeton Club in New
York City. Leonard Shlain, MD, surgeon and author of recent books such
as The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, Art and Physics, and Sex, Time, and
Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, will present the
55th lecture in this series that began in 1952. Cost for the banquet
and lecture will be $90.00 for members and guests, $110 for
non-members. Cost to attend the lecture only will be $25.00. Make your
reservations now.
-- http://www.generalsemantics.org/news.htm

people

From an earlier topic of discussion:

"people tend to like talking with other people about topics of mutual
concern"

"the most fun part of working on a project is talking about it with
enthusiastic coconspirators"

We never figured out why -- maybe just aired the assumption that since
humans are social creatures, they need to do things in a social
context, which usually means talking to other people.

This reminds me of a quote from William Burroughs, which goes
something along the lines of -- "People ask if I get lonely. No; I
rarely suffer from the feeling people call loneliness, because of my
characters; they are very real to me, and generally are more
interesting than other people." (The actual quote would be found in
the book "The Job".)

Perhaps there is something about simulated interaction that stimulates
the same parts of the brain as real interaction. Hence: books, both
read and written, games -- and even "virtual" exchanges, like email.

Sometimes on a solipsistic bent I have imagined all my exchanges via
the computer to be with one entity, say, "the group mind". Of course,
if there was "one entity" out there (which on some level is certainly
true), then it is not homogeneous, and different people correspond to
nice blobular components of this thing. And brains are adapted to
think in terms of these sorts of blobs.

Indeed we may have precisely: a brain blob (or neural attractor)
corresponding to each person we know. If some person we like
"approves" of something we do, then the corresponding blob delivers
happy juice to the rest of the brain, whereas if this person
"disapproves" of something we do, unhappy juice is delivered instead.
(This paraphrases Marvin Minsky from "The Emotion Machine".)

It won't do to be swimming in happy juice all the time or one would
step in front a bus by accident and when gazing at a butterfly or a
flower garden. The brain's critical power runs mainly on unhappy
juice. Of course, a more common understanding is that swimming in
unhappy juice is also bad; under those circumstances you get people
stepping in front of busses not on accident.

How best to cope? E.g., how to ride the waves of motivation to reach
a suitable campsite?

Option A: Just accept things the way they are.

Option B: Try to manipulate the collection of brain blobs, by adding
new ones, feeding them garbled information, or renetworking them.

Option C: Try to study how Option B relates to relationships in the
"real world".

Example: I sent the email archived at

http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2007/08/absolutely-fake-burroughs.html

to an ex-girlfriend. She has not written back to anything I have sent
to her in a long time. I don't really have any reason to think that
she will write back to this particular email. I assume that she
generally disapproves of me and what I am doing. Still, I want to get
a modicum of happy juice flowing to the brain centers that were
associated with her, or maybe I mean, to ones that were one order
removed from those centers. So, I post the text on the internet and
send a link to you to see if perhaps you will enjoy it. If you don't
care for it, then I guess I write it off as a social loss and settle
for my own intrinsic enjoyment together with this post-hoc use/value.

Indeed, the text itself illustrates another point that I found
sympathy for in Burroughs, which is: to see what happens when you take
some textual structure, break it into little pieces, and look at
relationships that form between these pieces. I was first doing this
with my card game.

There are some problems with that approach, or at least, challenges.
First of all, often times no one large structure easily emerges from a
collection of snippets. This is probably OK if you are willing to
allow a subjective or aesthetic interpretation. However, if you want
to generate some particular "rhetorical" structure out of the
snippets, there will be organizing work to do.

Actually, "analysis" really means "taking things apart into little
pieces", so it may be that this approach is a very generally useful
one -- and any alleged "problems" are actually just "challenges".
(Although: one should assume that sometimes an "analytical" approach
may not be the right one to take.)

In any event: using cards or literary characters to "simulate" or
"stage" interactions only goes so far. (Note: the brain is itself
"simulational", at least in the Minsky-style formulation above, but
the human organism needs real inputs to be able to function.) I think
that we should study how and when simulation (and simulacra) fails.

Which can serve here as set up for the observation that Burroughs and
Baudrillard are both inspired by Korzybski. Korzybski also wrote a
large book that is sitting on my coffee table. (I've paged through it
at the library earlier.) I do not know exactly what his current
standing or status is in contemporary culture. But I can try to find
out.

absolutely fake burroughs

said by a man of great faith a man who represented the human race
your minds are a capacious invaginated imagining of the time
the space into outer space the place was turned into sleep
the wheel was asleep the captain was under the sea the deck
comes grinding to a halt the world is asleep everyone is asleep
in faith the human race is asleep at the wheel the textures
textures of thought make you asleep at the wheel the folds of
nothing you said reminded me of anything i heard from any man
his eyes closed he was asleep at the wheel the rig was fixed
the great faith of a man of great sleep a faith in the wheel the
outer space the outer planets was a disgrace to man an ejection
the opening of the dawn was rent into a new space from outer
eight track pieces of eight sleep a track at the wheel a feeling
of light is running into space the man from the wheel is turning
asleep at the wheel i am asleep at the wheel i am asleep
prayer of turning into a man from outer space i am asleep at
asleep at the wheel the wheel was set to turn in a certain way
asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel
at the wheel everyone was asleep the place was rigged everything
at the wheel the man is a picture of human race the wheel
the same for henry sugar asleep at the wheel he could win with
the wheel i am a man of great faith i am a man from outer space
the time of the wheel is turning the wheel is a space the man of
space was remembered the opening was dawn the snake was from
a sleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel i am asleep at the wheel
i am from the garden of eden and into human time the space was
the world a great wheel turning asleep at the wheel the
complete anonymity of a deck the deck is shuffled on the wheel
ship took off at dawn head for another planet from outer space
something you reminded me of i once heard from a man from space
asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel
was asleep at the wheel there's so much time to sleep they
wheeled past the shuffleboard placed at their feet they
walked the deck onto the next racket the game was rigged over
turning me to sleep on the wheel the picture of the human race
asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel
at the wheel the captain could not be found he was under the
planets the dawn was tread underfoot into a snake a snake from
something you said reminded me of something i once heard
under the roulette table rigged every probability came up
i am a man from outer space i am a man of great faith i am
the place in outer space the captain of this place is turning
on deck he was under the sea he had been keel-hauled for being
of thought removed from the picture the human race is asleep
black sheep of the family i am written in invisible ink
something you said reminded me of something i once heard
asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel asleep at the wheel
the textures of these thoughts remove me from every picture
quote from this rhyme and everything fell into space and time
something you said reminded me of something i once heard
asleep at the wheel the crash is sudden and final the earth
was asleep the deck was playing playback on the tape deck
from outer space the space of the race the space of the pace

there's so much time

late at night last night
i had the thought:
there's so much time!

so much time alone at night
so much time to do whatever you want
so much time to sit and wait

late at night last night
i had the thought:
there's so much time

so much time for nothing to happen
so much time for anything to happen

so much time -- if only it could be used well

Re: in a moment of greater awakeness

Ouch! I don't know if I knew about the "stomach thing" -- sounds bad.
Do feel better! Yes, I do have normal (and super-normal) free time on
Monday.

prototype

From the latest version of my paper (or, alternatively, your cell
phone camera):

There are three fundamental types of objects in the system: Things,
Triples, and Theories. A Thing is any Lisp object Elephant can
store. They are stored with the format [id|data]. A Triple
indicates three Things, by id. These are interpreted as
relationships or semantic links; so a Triple (C, A, B) says that A is
related to B by C. A Theory indexes an arbitrary collection of
Things, possibly giving each element a new ``local'' name.
Basically, however, a Theory is just a subset of the collection of
all Things (and so, a subnetwork, viewed under the relations defined
by Triples).

I'd like to modify this slightly and actually put together a
prototype. (Looks like it will be a bit of a wait for Elephant.)
Specifically, let's say the data components of Things were just
strings.

Suppose we can do this within a week in SQL? I'd like to give it a
try; if you can help with the database implementation that would be
super.