Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar
From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Emergence and Static Vs. Dynamic properties (was: Re: Another letter to the New York Review)
Summary: descriptive abstractions
Message-ID: <12467@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 19 Mar 90 15:53:48 GMT
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 46

In article <14648@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
Handelman) writes:
>In article <2cSD02rC93BD01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com
>(Ken Presting) writes:
>;I am primarily interested in philosophy of science and
>;metaphysics, so I prefer to highlight the problems of descriptive
>;abstractions.  This makes my analysis more cumbersome in application
>;to the experience of music - the selection of a descriptive abstraction
>;becomes a central theoretical issue, rather than a practical matter to
>;be decided according to the interests of a composer, reviewer, or
>;listener. 
>
>Well, maybe the point here is that you can think of music as a descriptive
>abstraction of more general experience. Not one that does anybody any good
>except for trained musicians.
>
I think this is one of the points Minsky was trying to develop in his "Music,
Mind, and Meaning" article in the Fall 1981 issue of COMPUTER MUSIC JOURNAL.
He has a paragraph which begins with the rather striking sentence, "Compare
a sonata to a teacher."  To a great extent this paragraph elaborates on how
the PROCESS of that sonata is similar to the process a teacher engages in
communicating with the pupils.  He does not call the sonata a "descriptive
abstraction" of that process, but that seems to be the direction in which
he is going.

Is this of any use outside the community of trained musicians.  For Minsky, it
provided some of the first steps in laying down his "society of mind" theory.
In other words, ANY descriptive abstraction is only as good as an agent's
ability to manipulate it.  IF a sonata abstracts the process of teaching,
what sorts of agents will be able to exploit that abstraction?  In trying
to answer that question, Minsky began to develop the agents which populate
his society of mind.  Thus, thinking about music as a descriptive abstraction
of more general experience may point us in the direction of machines which may
be able to reason about that more general experience.

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