Tags / 56 quotes from 25 sources
#meaning
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Il lavoro è uno strumento, non un fine
Voglio ricordare un semplice concetto: il lavoro non è un fine, ma uno strumento. Lo strumento per acquisire i denari necessari per vivere, oppure per coltivare i propri interessi, o per compiersi come uomini attivi. Un astrofisico si realizzerà, e non solo economicamente…
Una società che non trova il senso
Eccolo il segno del fallimento e della follia: non trovare il senso, non trovare l’energia, vivere nel tedio e nella disperazione da doversi imbottire di farmaci e droghe. Da chi ha prodotto questa società e da chi la vive ogni giorno senza alcuna ribellione, non accetto…
Puntare sulle cose difficili
Italo Calvino, interpellato da un giornalista sul millennio entrante, diede la sua ricetta su quel che bisognava fare per dare senso alla vita e renderla significativa: «Bisogna puntare sulle cose difficili, eseguite alla perfezione, le cose che richiedono sforzo; diffidare…
Stiamo poco con noi stessi
Il male di quest’epoca non è lo star poco insieme, non è comunicare poco, bensì il fatto che si sta poco con se stessi, e che dunque si comunica male. Sulla via dell’autenticità e della ricerca di senso c’è assai più il bisogno di riconnettersi con se stessi, ognuno con sé…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Ones and zeros mean nothing to the computer
From an electrical engineering perspective, the messy stuff in between one and zero does travel down wires, through chips, and in packets. Computer switches are actually not either on or off. Both physically and electrically, computer switches, transistors, or logic circuits…
Eyes only count photons
all the eye is doing is catching and counting photons. The millions of photoreceptors in our eyes only react to the number of photons they catch. Our brains then construct the colors, shapes, objects, depths, motion, or textures we see based partly on how many photons the…
Physicalism and how neurons create meaning
Physicalism in its most general form is the belief that the only things in the universe that are observer-independent are physical. This is also what ontological objectivity means: once again, what things in the Universe exist without human observers? Physicalism further…
Cidoc-crm Version 4.2.4 - Reference Document
Kr primitive
The term primitive as used in knowledge representation characterizes a concept that is declared and its meaning is agreed upon, but that is not defined by a logical deduction from other concepts
Digital Hermeneutics: Agora And The Online Understanding Of Cultural Heritage
Events give collection objects their meaning
The main building blocks in the interpretation process of history and collection objects are historical events and the relations between these events and the objects. A collection object on its own, has no meaning; by adding events to the object’s description we provide its…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Le autostrade cancellano il senso dei luoghi
“Ma le autostrade sono il nulla” ha detto lui. “Cancellano qualunque significato dei posti che attraversano.”
La luce non può venire dagli altri
“Il fatto che ne sai infinitamente più di me su tutto” ho detto. “Per esempio?” ha detto lui. “Sul senso ultimo delle cose” ho detto. “Le ragioni profonde dietro a quello che succede.” Lui si è messo a ridere, piano. Un cane ha sospirato profondamente. “Perché ridi?” ho detto…
Generalization Of Word Meanings During Infant Sleep : Nature Communications : Nature Publishing Group
Sleep helps babies learn new generic words and consolidate their meanings
Sleep consolidates memory and promotes generalization in adults, but it is still unknown to what extent the rapidly growing infant memory benefits from sleep. Here we show that during sleep the infant brain reorganizes recent memories and creates semantic knowledge from…
Hamlet On The Holodeck
Negative views of digital storytelling
The feely [with reference to what described by Huxley in Brave New World] offers an opposing image of a sensation-based storytelling medium that is intrinsically degrading, fragmenting, and destructive of meaning, a medium whose success implies the death of the great traditions…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Symbols by themselves are meaningless shapes
Searle’s argument concerns the inability of the symbols being manipulated to mean anything. By themselves, symbols are meaningless shapes realized by, in the case of a conventional computer, a pattern of electrical activity. Any meaning we confer to the symbols is parasitic on…
Learning Chinese from a Chinese-Chinese dictionary
First, imagine a native English-speaker learning Chinese, armed only with a Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Harnard likens this to a cryptologist cracking a code.
The symbol-symbol merry-go-round
Could you ever learn Chinese as a first language, with only the aid of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary? Harnard likens this to a symbol-symbol merry-go-round.
Wittgenstein and Heidegger against formal meaning
Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) strongly reject the formalist assumption of meaning.
Our interpretation of the world can't be made explicit
This alternative philosophical standpoint suggests that our interpretation of the world cannot be made explicit, and any attempt to do so will render our insights grossly inaccurate.
Evolving meaning and communication bottom-up
Although the principles of new AI translate most directly into the field of robotics, they are by no means limited to issues in robotics. A closer treatment of the interaction between agents and their environments can be applied to every branch of AI. Luc Steels, director of…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Il ritratto che dipingiamo noi
Lui guarda via; dice “Spesso quando trovi qualcosa pensi che sia perché l’avevi cercata”. “E non è così?” dice lei. Vorrebbe saperlo; le servirebbe. Lui sorride amaro. “È quasi sempre un collegamento illusorio” dice. “O una verità transitoria.” Lei dice “Nel senso che…
Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan)
The primary intention of bacon's semiotic analyses is, as it was already with augustine, to provide the foundations for the semantics of spoken language.
The primary intention of Bacon's semiotic analyses is, as it was already with Augustine, to provide the foundations for the semantics of spoken language.[27] According to Bacon, an adequate and complete account of the “difficult issue” (difficilis dubitatio) of what the…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Externalism and the stagnation of philosophy of language
Finally, more controversially, I think the philosophy of language has reached a period of relative stagnation because of certain common mistakes that surround the doctrine of so-called externalism, the idea that the meanings of words, and by extension the contents of our minds…
Syntax is not semantics
The distinction between syntax and semantics is so important for the rest of the argument of this book that I want to say a little more about it here. In order that there can be human linguistic communication at all, there has to be a language. A language consists of symbols…
The Chinese room threatened the citadel of functionalism
Forget about consciousness, which is scientifically irrelevant anyway. What matters about the mind is its capacity for information processing, and the modern computer at long last gives us the right model for understanding the information processing capacities of the mind. This…
Meanings just ain't in the head
You might think that “water” could be defined as a clear, colorless, tasteless liquid found in lakes and streams and coming out of the sky in the form of rain. But, says Hilary Putnam, that does not give the meaning of “water.” To see this, imagine a galaxy just like ours, with…
Indexical definitions are still in the mind
What are we to make of these arguments? I admire the philosophical acumen of their authors, but I think both arguments are fallacious. The basic idea of internalism is that the mind—and by “mind” here we mean what is inside the head—sets conditions that an object must meet in…
Knowing what words mean
There are then two sets of questions about the components of the thought. First, how does each element relate to the condition that it determines and second, how does the agent relate to the determination of those conditions? Granted that “Socrates” refers to Socrates and…
Is the condition in the speaker's head
The question is, Is the condition associated with the word something that is represented in the speaker’s mind / brain, or is it something that is in part independent of the speaker’s mind / brain? According to the internalist, the condition must be represented in the speaker’s…
Conscious thought makes content easy to explain
If you ask, How can a state of my brain have the content that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? it seems an impossibly difficult question. But if you ask, How can my conscious thought “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” have the content that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Then it is no longer…
Ontologies And Knowledge Bases: Towards A Terminological Clarification
Conceptualization vs state of affairs
..Referring to the example given, consider a different arrangement of blocks, where c is on the top of d, while a and b together form a separate stack standing on the table (Fig. 4). The corresponding structure would be different from the previous one, generating therefore a…
Ontology And The Art Of Not Designing | In Context
Ontology is an exercise in detection not creation
Requirements have no effect on meaning. Concepts are unaffected by whether or not you choose to include them in an application. If a given concept is that of a relative thing then that is the only thing it can mean; if you need to stand it up in an ontology at all, you need to…
Philosophy Of Information - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information
According to Luciano Floridi, four kinds of mutually compatible phenomena are commonly referred to as "information": - Information about something (e.g. a train timetable) - Information as something (e.g. DNA, or fingerprints) - Information for something (e.g. algorithms or…
Rdf Primer
The model-theoretic semantics of RDF
RDF statements also have a formal meaning which determines, with mathematical precision, the conclusions (or entailments) that machines can draw from a given RDF graph. The RDF Semantics [RDF- SEMANTICS] document defines this formal meaning, using a technique called model…
RDF Schema is itself an RDF vocabulary
The RDF Schema facilities are themselves provided in the form of an RDF vocabulary; that is, as a specialized set of predefined RDF resources with their own special meanings. The resources in the RDF Schema vocabulary have URIrefs with the prefix…
Markup tags carry no built-in meaning
This particular markup language uses the words "sentence," "person," and "animal" as tag names in an attempt to convey some of the meaning of the elements; and they would convey meaning to an English-speaking person reading it, or to a program specifically written to interpret…
Container semantics are only intended meanings
It is important to understand that while these types of containers are described using predefined RDF types and properties, any special meanings associated with these containers, e.g., that the members of an Alt container are alternative values, are only intended meanings…
Re: Blink
Who blinks first
..meaning derives from a kids game in a staring contest - whoever blinks first loses. in an adult context, it sometimes refers to a hi-tension stand-off between fierce rivals - can be applied to business or war.
Richard Feynman On Religion, Science, The Search For Truth & Our Willingness To Live With Doubt - Open Culture
Science and religion
Both Feynman and Tyson seem to agree that the scientific and Creationist methods for discovering “truth,” whatever that may be, are basically incompatible. Says Feynman: “There are very remarkable mysteries… but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the…
Semantic Web For The Humanities
Concept drift in the humanities
Different versions of the same dataset show that concepts change their meaning over time, especially if the time gap is wide. Although not meaning exactly the same, two time gapped instances of the same concept may preserve some degree of sameness. For example, the concept…
Synonym - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
No two synonyms mean exactly the same
Synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings. [...] An example of synonyms are the words begin and commence. Likewise, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. In the figurative sense, two words are often said to be synonymous…
Taking Philosophical Dialogue Online
Interpretation (philosophy)
Here we expect students to grasp the meaning of philosophical concepts, propositions and texts. What constitutes successful interpretation is a contentious issue, but for the purposes of this study, I shall assume that there is agreement as to what would constitute an inept…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Frankl's logotherapy
In the Nazi death camps where Viktor Frankl learned the principle of proactivity, he also learned the importance of purpose, of meaning in life. The essence of “logotherapy,” the philosophy he later developed and taught, is that many so-called mental and emotional illnesses are…
We detect rather than invent our mission
Frankl says we detect rather than invent our missions in life. I like that choice of words. I think each of us has an internal monitor or sense, a conscience, that gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions that we can make. In Frankl’s words…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Meaning as use, with a qualification
Wittgenstein argued that meanings of words often cannot be specified in logically comprehensive terms. ‘For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’23…
Tim Lott – Zen Buddhism And Alan Watts
Life was, in zen parlance, yugen — a kind of elevated purposelessness.
All the same, I read a couple of Watts’s books. They made a significant impact on me. The Meaning of Happiness (1940) and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Rowe was already teaching me: that life had no intrinsic meaning…
What Are The Differences Between A Vocabulary, A Taxonomy, A Thesaurus, An Ontology, And A Meta-model?
The many meanings of ontology
People use the word ontology to mean different things, e.g. glossaries & data dictionaries, thesauri & taxonomies, schemas & data models, and formal ontologies & inference. A formal ontology is a controlled vocabulary expressed in an ontology representation…
What a taxonomy is
A taxonomy is a collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure. Each term in a taxonomy is in one or more parent-child relationships to other terms in the taxonomy. There may be different types of parent-child relationships in a taxonomy…
Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web?
Hardwired semantics versus public semantics
The general case of automatically determining the meaning of Web content is somewhere between intractable and impossible. Thus, a human will always be hardwiring some of the semantics into Web applications. The question is what is hardwired and what is not? The shopping agent…
Informal semantics
At a further point along the continuum, the semantics are explicit and are expressed in an informal manner, e.g., a glossary or a text specification document. Given the complexities of natural language, machines have an extremely limited ability to make direct use of informally…
Discovering what another agent means
The moment we accept the problem and grant that agents may not use the same terms to mean the same things, we need a way for an agent to discover what another agent means when it communicates. In order for this to happen, every agent will need to publicly declare exactly what…
Model-theoretic semantics
“A model-theoretic semantics for a language assumes that the language refers to a 'world', and describes the minimal conditions that a world must satisfy in order to assign an appropriate meaning for every expression in the language”. [W3C 2002a] It is used as a technical tool…
Machines must know what content means
The most frequently quoted defining feature of the Semantic Web is machine usable Web content. Fundamentally, this requires that machines must “know” how to recognize the content they are looking for, and they must “know” what to do when they encounter it. This “knowledge”…
Implicit semantics are rife with ambiguity
In the simplest case, the semantics are implicit only. Meaning is conveyed based on a shared understanding derived from human consensus. A common example of this case is the typical use of XML tags, such as price, address, or delivery date. Nowhere in an XML document, or DTD or…
Publicly declared concepts in the semantic web
The assumption that there will be terms whose meaning is publicly declared and thus sharable is critical to making the Semantic Web work. Although we brought up this issue in the context of machine processible semantics, it is equally important when the semantics are hardwired…
Search engines don't use formal semantics
The ability of the agent to infer something about the meaning of fuel-pump depends on the existence of a formal semantics for ontology language such as DAML+OIL. The language semantics also allow the agent to infer the meaning of complex expressions built up using language…
Agents must publicly declare their ontologies
The moment we accept the problem and grant that agents may not use the same terms to mean the same things, we need a way for an agent to discover what another agent means when it communicates. In order for this to happen, every agent will need to publicly declare exactly what…