Nelson,
Wow, what a soliloquy; that was great ! Your discussion of syntactical
awareness was particularly fascinating to me as I spent more years than
I care to think about coughing up a thesis attempting to use ideas
embedded in Chomsky's hierarchy of grammars to try and produce automated
procedures for deducing the syntax from data streams (e.g. the
"authenticity" behind a gamma ray burst time series).
Now for my specialty (the picking of trivial nits); re. your muon mass
example I'd say the Higgs mechanism is ever so slightly more inspired
than blind guessing.
So to paraphrase an old Zen master, lets get our eyes of that damn
finger,
>
> Stav,
>
> > One note - the word "authentic" in this context is a very sloppy term.
> > Perhaps John Walker and myself mean genuine, heartfelt, original, precious,
> > but yet relevant across different periods of time. What word captures all of
> > this? Surely "authentic" is not up to this task.
>
> 'Authentic' is probably as good a word as any because I don't think what
> you're talking about can be nailed down anyway.
>
> The first evening Zen master Momataki arrived at Rain Mountain Monastery the
> monks requested their new master show them the way. When Momataki assented
> with a nod and pointed to the rising moon all but one of the assembled
> looked at his finger.
>
> Lao Tzu, an older contemporary of Confucius, was keeper of the imperial
> archives at Luoyang in the province of Honan in the sixth century B.C. All
> his life he taught that "The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao"; but,
> according to legend, as he was riding off into the desert to die he was
> persuaded by a gatekeeper at Hangu Pass of the Great Wall in northwestern
> China to write down his teaching for posterity.
>
> The essence of Taoism is contained in the eighty-one chapters of the
> book--roughly 5,000 words--which have for 2,500 years provided one of the
> major underlying influences in Chinese thought and culture, emerging also in
> proverbs and folklore. Whereas Confucianism is concerned with day-to-day
> rules of conduct, Taoism is concerned with a more spiritual level of being.
> Appropriately, first line of the book is "The Tao that can be told is not
> the eternal Tao."
>
> So was Lao Tzu just being mysterious, being difficult--or was he on to
> something? Is there something which you has called "authenticity" or isn't
> there? And if so, can it be adequately named?
>
> Suppose a slightly edited film (consisting of doctoring the film by removal
> of the ball) of a soccer match were shown to a person unaware of the game of
> soccer. Could the viewer perceive the rules of the game? It would depend on
> the viewer's syntactic awareness. To make it simple lets call syntax--the
> rules. It would depend on the viewer's native ability in guessing what was
> going on in the film. Did the soccer play have structure, reasons--did it
> have rules? Watch a film of cars at an intersection for a while and almost
> everyone can pick up on the syntax--the rules. Red light, stop--Green light,
> go. As syntax (rules) becomes more subtle our syntactical awareness is
> tested and then eclipsed. What rule(s) governs the mass of the sub-atomic
> particle called a Muon? Nobody knows. The best minds in the world have
> studied the equivalents of Muon/soccer films for decades and haven't a clue.
> So what's the syntax of a Muon's mass? At this point blind guessing is about
> as good as anything.
>
> If our mental maps, our models of the world are sensorially based, then
> those among us with the sharpest sight, the keenest hearing would be the
> most knowledgeable. I think that minimal sensory acuity is all that's
> required here, because our models of the world aren't the result of sensory
> acuity. Let me attempt to define syntactic awareness, explain its domain.
>
> For purposes of framing, let's begin with what syntactic awareness ISN'T.
> Syntactic awareness is less an exact procedure and more an art. What can be
> described ISN'T intuition, which is the ability to perceive or know without
> conscious reasoning. Conscious reasoning often is directly involved in
> syntactic awareness--doesn't have to be but quite often is. Syntactic
> awareness ISN'T pattern detection. Although it uses pattern detection it is
> more concerned with the processes subsequent to the detection of pattern.
> Syntactic awareness ISN'T concerned with the search for perfect knowledge
> but the process of ever increasing the reliability of one's knowledge.
>
> Syntactic awareness results in the creation or discovery of a personal
> operating syntax for the world. The rules, laws, causes--how the world
> works. To be syntactically aware is to comprehend the ways of the world. To
> be syntactically aware in a particular situation is to possess penetrating
> insight into the 'whys' and 'wherefores' of that situation--knowledge of
> that situation. Syntactic awareness is the ability to see what can't be
> seen, hear what can't be heard, and feel what can't be
> touched--comprehension of the ineffable. It's to be aware of the PROCESSES
> of the world--the syntax we use to understand it--rather than the world
> itself.
>
> For example, there is an important logical and conceptual difference between
> the objects of chess (the board and pieces) and the rules of the game
> (processes). Such rules can be described and demonstrated but, in fact, have
> no sensory basis. The rule that's written down is not the rule, it's an
> attempt to describe the rule. Further, individual styles of play have
> definite, but non-sensory, attributes which can also be described and
> demonstrated. Without syntactic awareness all the chess examples (and
> written rules) in the world are pointless, because, in the end, each of
> these descriptions or demonstrations is just a finger pointing at the (a)
> moon. A chess rule becomes a RULE once you understand what it means, how it
> functions--once you see the moon.
>
> Syntactic awareness is sometimes described as "second sight" or a "sixth
> sense" and understanding it necessitates a clear separation of sensation
> from insight--the separation of visualizability from visualization,
> verbalization from comprehension. Although, and this is a central point,
> syntactic awareness uses sensory modalities for the representation of
> insight, such a representation does not portray or consist of sensory input.
> We may draw a picture to represent a concept while the concept itself
> remains unseeable. The picture remains an example of the concept, not the
> concept itself. So our mental models of the world are symbolic rather than
> literal.
>
> Paraphrasing Lao Tzu, "The symbol that can be fully reduced to a sensory
> representation is not the eternal symbol." See the problem? Doesn't mean
> that 'authenticity' doesn't exist, just that we begin to loose hold of it
> when attempting to define it.
>
> You and John Walker can detect a certain quality of purity, consistency and
> congruency in the syntax of the things, events, concepts you encounter which
> resonate. Call it authenticity, call it beauty, call it ....
>
> The concept which can be fully reduced to a sensory representation is not
> the true concept.
>
> Nelson
-- KY
Karl Young kyoung@slac.stanford.edu
SLAC M/S 71 PO Box 20450
Stanford, CA 94309
650-926-3380 (voice)
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