Philosophical Writings in LaTeX.
A “monograph” provisionally entitled “An Epistemological Synthesis”.
It is not intended that this repository will contain any code, since it is primarily concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of knowledge representation. Some parts will address fundamental philosophical issues, which include addressing philosophical scepticism about semantics and proof. Other parts will move closer to architectural design, addressing the logical structure of knowledge repositories built on the foundations addressed in the more purely philosophical materials.
The strategy fpr the production of the “monograph” has evolved substantially since its inception. At first I had intended to embedd the substance in an evolutionary story spanning the past history of life on earth and extending into the future. The historical part would place in context the evolution of the logical systems upon which the exposition was to be based. The future projections of that evolutionary story would underpin the idea that the proposed methpods of knowledge representation would prevail.
Eventually I realised that this architecture would take far too long to expose the key ideas which I seek to present, while talking about matters in which my compeence is more limited, and which ultimately relate more to motivation than to substance.
I therefore sought a structure which would expose as early as possible the bare bones of the technical substance of the ideas, aiming to present that skeleton in the introductory chapter. In this I have continued to be confounded by the desire to place those bare bones in a context which would make them as widely intelligible as possible.
A second major change in strategy has now begun, without much progress as yet. It began with me attempting to coopt AI into my enterprise. There are instructions for Grok in the file forgrok??.tex Note that this project has so far involved frequent restarts on every aspect of the work, and so that I could more easily refer back to previous writings from which material might be re-used, every time I restart a topic from scratch I chose a new filename with an incrememt to a digital suffix (or postfix?). For this reason, progress, which continued to be marked by frequent restarts (and hence doesn’t really amount to progress), and now exclusively on the introductory chapter.
Then this stopped being just the coopting of AI into my second strategy and morphed into the third stategy, which is to write for the AI, as if it were my target audience. Because of the breadth of knowledge of my new target audience that would permit an even more direct assault on the key technical issues. The idea would then be that the text is supplied on the understanding that the best way to understand the ideas would be to supply that text to your favourite AI, and get it to explain the ideas to you. I also expect Grok (or some other AI) to prepare new versions of the story for different channels or target audiences, and hoped to make an X bot which would engage with X users with a full grasp of the ideas.
On this strategy I have now made zero progress. But the intention is to continue with the introductory chapter until such time as I have an account which is pretty well understood by Grok. I probably will soon need a new version of the forgrok document.