Comparing Interoperability when there is a transliteration of material forms.

Today, 9/11/2021, there was a good discussion on project Catalyst (for Cardano) on building blockchain reputation systems.

Later, in an ancillary discussion I was offered feedback on my project, (very grateful for this).

I wanted to include some of my response here. As it speaks to the core of how problems such as those arising in developing or proposing a project such as mine often encounter. Hopefully some will find this useful.

begin response:

I wanted to provide a couple links related to our conversation related to your observations/articulation of my project, which I appreciated very much.

You mentioned Lambda Calculus, and I mentioned:

Laws of Form:

Laws of Form Wikipedia Page

I did study Laws of Form, as an undergraduate. And still have the text which is out of print. It has some similarities with Lambda Calculus—-it seems. Laws of Form focuses more on mathematics/philosophy crossovers. It allows for grey areas. And I wonder if this kind of structure might be useful in creating the grey-areas which were brought up in the earlier discussion on Haskell-based reputation systems? I would need to revisit it to explain more clearly.

Also, I wanted to add that I have worked with material scientists on developing novel transducers, which came from a “questioning” ideation, similar to my current project. I have a long history in integrating materials with machines and machine language.

Also, I wanted to respond to your comment on my process as being a kind of “imagineering”. On further consideration, I think I would disagree with this. As I thought about Mathematician Andrew Wiles process when solving Fermat’s last theorem, which was well presented in a documentary:

Andrew Wiles Documentary on Solving Fermat’s last theorem.

I am not equating my project with his of course!! But I do think the process of problem solving included a similar ideation process that we would not refer to as “imagineering”. If one engages in structuring a scaffolding of complex knowledge mechanisms so that the problem at hand crosses disciplinary boundaries, it can be solved using similar processes, as Wiles used, (if you analyze his process, as presented in the documentary). It uses structured, informed intuition, as he used. If we called that “imagineering”, it might be misunderstood by he and his peers. It is a common misunderstanding when looking at ideation processes in the humanities from outside the discipline. But I think much common ground can be found and can benefit all those engaged in interdisciplinary problem solving. we learn from each other.

Much Gratitude

—updated 9/11/21-10:56 PM

I listened to this conversation again, and realized the thoughtful comment on Lambda Calculus, was offered as a possible solution to provide a kind of logical transition, between the data in the Stone, and the language of the computing device. I missed this elegant part of the thought. But recognize its beauty now, and will think more on it.

Much Gratitude.

Sept 12 2021 5:35PM Reply from SW:

It was an interesting session. With reference to your wiki notes: yes "Laws of Form" looks like it has parallels with Lambda Calculus. The name I was searching for on Saturday was Alonzo Church who collaborated with Alan Turing on computability. And Church's Lambda Calculus came to mind, in relation to your proposal, because it is an analogue means of computation (written notation) and a way to test what is computable without a digital computer. Another aspect of Lambda Calculus is its sparseness - at its core it is a non-extensional theory of functions. So it does not rely on external references to ordered pairs of data. Lambda functions are unary and immutable. A passive interface with an immutable history if it is computable would be a Turing machine and a possible reader/writer could be Lambda functions.