> Thinking seems to be a dangerous thing.
> The more I think, the more I feel confused about everything. [snip]
That's a very good start, seriously!
> My favorite confusion now is on what "carries" what in the world.
> We all know that walls carry paint, people carry ideas,
> hardware supports software that runs on it, brain supports
> consciousness, etc.
>
> Last year, Minsky on one of his lectures mentioned a red cube -
> i.e. an object (cube) that has a quality (redness) to it.
> With my usual habit of arguing I suggested to look at it as
> a _red_ object with a quality of "cubeness" to it. Why not? [snip]
>
> Did the debate of what carries what ever make sense? [snip]
> Confused,
Don't be confused. That confusion is just a product of the poor use
of subset theory in the west, exactly the same thing that was pointed
out so well in Russell's Paradox. If the notion of set containment is
widened to partial containment then paint carries walls just as walls
carry paint, but to different degrees within the continuous interval
between the two endpoints 0 and 1. A subset contains its superset,
but only partially, and paradoxes and dilemmas melt away in a puff of
previously inadequate western mathematics.
For the full gen, read Bart Kosko's "Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of
Fuzzy Logic" (ISBN 0-00-654713-3); also, his "Neural Networks and Fuzzy
Systems" (ISBN 0-13-611435-0) is an excellent textbook. Together, these
two are to fuzzy logic exactly as Drexler's "EoC" and "Nanosystems" are
to nanotechnology, ie. one popular and the other technical. I recommend
them both, strongly.
Rich.
-- ########### Dr. Rich Artym ================ PGP public key available # galacta # Email : rich@galacta.demon.co.uk 158.152.156.137 # ->demon # Web : http://www.galacta.demon.co.uk 194.222.245.150 # ->ampr # AMPR : rich@g7exm[.uk].ampr.org 44.131.164.1 BBS:GB7MSW # ->NTS # Fun : Unix, X, TCP/IP, kernel, O-O, C++, SoftEng, Nano ########### More fun: Regional IP Coordinator Hertfordshire + N.London