Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!FINFUN.BITNET!YLIKOSKI From: YLIKOSKI@FINFUN.BITNET Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: metaepistemology Message-ID: <19880625192541.0.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 25 Jun 88 19:25:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 58 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu Date: Fri, 24 Jun 88 12:46 EDT From: YLIKOSKI%FINFUN.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: metaepistemology To: AILIST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU X-Original-To: @AILIST,@JMC, YLIKOSKI Distribution-File: AILIST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU JMC@SAIL.Stanford.EDU In AIList Digest V7 #41, John McCarthywrites: >I want to defend the extreme point of view that it is both >meaningful and possible that the basic structure of the >world is unknowable. It is also possible that it is >knowable. Suppose an agent which wants to know what there is there. Let the agent have methods and data like a Zetalisp flavor. Let it have sensors with which it can observe its environment and methods to influence its environment like servo motors running robot hands. Now what can it know? It is obvious the agent only can have a representation of the Ding an Sich. In this sense the reality is unknowable. We only have descriptions of the actual world. There can be successively better approximations of truth. It is important to be able to improve the descriptions, compare them and to be able to discard ones which do not appear to rescribe the reality. It also helps if the agent itself knows it has descriptions and that they are mere descriptions. It also is important to be able to do inferences based on the descriptions, for example to design an experiment to test a new theory and compare the predicted outcome with the one which actually takes place. It seems that for the most part evolution has been responsible for developing life-forms which have good descriptions of the Ding an Sich and which have a good capability to do inference with their models. Humans are the top of this evolutionary development: we are capable of forming, processing and communicating complicated symbolic models of the reality. Andy Ylikoski