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Learn to Count in Twelve Easy Steps
e-Lectures given in WS 2012/13 in the FIS chatroom
The Foundations of Information Science (FIS) group - - is making progress towards building a rational approach to phenomena observed in Nature. The contributors have arrived at the following:
* the current set of rules used to explain Nature are not sufficient;
* a new approach is needed that is still rational but somehow radically different;
* the new approach uses computation and numbers (as tokens for words);
* the new approach concerns less about the numbers as such, but on how we conceptualise orders while using the tokens for words;
* in the new understanding, 'interdependences', ‘links,’ ‘contexts,’ ‘levels’ and ‘connections’ will play an important part;
* the new approach must be self-evident and easy to communicate;
* the new approach will change the way we look at facts, not the facts themselves;
* in a rational discourse, ‘facts’ can be substituted by numbers.
The good news is that it is possible to achieve the above goals; alas, one must re-learn deep-seated, falsely learned– oversimplifications.
The change in paradigms is comparable to the change in the way scholars had to re-learn looking at the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. It was not the facts or the impressions that needed to change, but the underlying explanatory model. It was much more seductive to build a model of the world based on sensory organ suggestions; the Earth is stationary and the Sun moves
The unfortunate fact is that we have learnt a cultural convention based on ancient teachings, common cultural consensus, sensory evidence and decrees of Authority since early days in school and up to today, where gross oversimplifications are made.
The FIS group could be the pioneers of learning to count in a more precise and productive manner, if only this group would have the intellectual courage to want to learn.
There is a course titled ‘Learn to Count More Exactly in 12 Easy Steps’. If the FIS group has the wish to find that which it is looking for, a 12-session running seminar can be organized as 12 consecutive lectures of one page contributions, like this one with links to graphs and tables that support the logical statements that are presented. Of course, the lectures result on the whole in a tautology, modi Wittgenstein, being that they are logical assertions that relate to numbers.
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