Doug ended his tri-partite session yesterday in hopes of a "summary" from me--he's not going to get it. I thought it might be fun to share with you guys, instead, the one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges which Sandy referenced today; written in the form of a literary forgery, it's called "Del rigor en la ciencia"/"Exactitude in Science," ("Rigor in Science"?) and elaborates on Lewis Carroll's idea of a map that has "the scale of a mile to the mile": "In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..."

I'm smiling, thinking that this image of a map as large as the world it represents might be what the Working Group on Emergence is turning into--especially some days (like y'day morning) when we seem to be tracing again and again (w/ what alteration?) territory that we've covered before. Anyhow, here's how the map is looking, right now, from my particular perspective on the universe:

• you can have a rule that is wrong; the ability to construct a rule says nothing about its "truthiness"
• solving problems by adding a sequence of provisos to existing rules can lead
  • (per Mark) to " the right thing"--i.e. a revised-and-improved tax code
  • (per Paul) to "epicycles," stories so complicated that they become brittle, unusable (and so function as invitations to revision, to a simpler account that may be more more move-able/applicable to other sites, other problems)
• Descartes' notion about what is quintessentially human is
  • (per Alan) the ability to generalize, to find apply what we know to "new situations in which we can still behave appropriately,"
  • (per Paul) usefully revised/turned upside down, to claim precisely the reverse: that what distinguishes humans is the ability to behave inappropriately
  • (per Sandy) Machiavelli is a great example of the latter phenomenon: the ability to recognize when you have to be immoral; i.e., the capacity to break the rule set.

  What seemed to me--after all this fun--the real question outstanding (which I hope Doug's chapter will weigh in on more clearly than today's session did?) is just how this notion of the revisabilty of rules--or is it something much more radical, i.e.: giving up the concepts of rules altogether?--plays out in A.I. particularly and in emergent processes more generally. Doug said (out of one side of his mouth) that "intentionality is a problem or a boon in AI: Paul was claiming that intentionality "is not directly inferable from external behavior" (don't misunderstand, folks: this doesn't mean it doesn't exist); Doug was saying (I think) just the opposite: that the only way it makes sense to infer intentionality is from from behavior (they call this behavioralism). Whichever side of the fence you jump on this one, there still seemed to be a problem w/ intentionality being part of the models Doug was describing for us. On the one hand, The earliest psychology assumed a tabula rasa, everyting the result of experience; the second generation saw that a change in behavior could result in a change in rules; today we are looping back (perhaps) to experiement w/ whehter a change in the rules can result ina change in behavior "it's a problem if intentionality ends up being part of the models." evolution: putting a represetation of the entity withint he entity: this is just recursion. trying to fix itself thinks its conducting a full assembly of interdependent minded players it has no control over Descartes: you can build a monkey machine, but you can't build a human-machine, one which is able to engage in the central work of intelligence, the ability to generealize. (what children are doing, for instnace, when they make a correlation between length and amount: a "beautiful mistake"--applying an old rule when they encounter something new). To find situations in which we behave appropaitely. Paul twist: what is distinctley huma is the ability to behavie inappropriately. The soula gneralizing machine. belive idn rightness Machiavella: innatley huma; recogzin when you ahve to be immorla; break rule set qhat is qunitesential humanis the abilityto exhibit inappropriate behavior really like to know whehter it is the case that relations betwen language nad use irregular verss all langue most common verbs are irresulat ones?? explanation: sorter than history o the inputs what's the idference betwen explantain and adescriptio: Bordes' riding hte desrt shards of maps come upa serious proble Baudrillard's 'Precession of the Simulacra" (from Simulacra and Simulation again (1994: 1-42)) -- that survives into the final screenplay. Baudrillard's "desert" itself reworks Borges' fable of an empire who created a 1:1 scale map covering the land completely before being left to rot in the desert (Borges, 1975: 131), but Baudrillard escalates Borges to argue that today it is the map -- the process of the materialisation of a programmed, preceding model of the real -- that precedes and produces the territory, making the distinction impossible. W