I often joke that we should assign unique identifiers (UID) to everything. The important points in my articles are labeled with UIDs, not numbered 1.2.3 like theorems in a paper. This is not a fetish; it has an epistemic reason that is extremely related to the fact that naming things is hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is a very simple example. Someone can be known as A<\/i> and B<\/i> on different occasions; for many tasks, this name is not a correct identifier. For some tasks, even a Social Security Number cannot be a correct identifier. But we can still find a coherent description of the situation, for example, \u201cA<\/i>, B<\/i>, and the person holding the Social Security Number 987-65-4321<\/i> are the same biological person (whatever \u2018biological\u2019 means)\u201d. At this point we have shifted some senses to track the same object in a more desirable way. But as long as the identifier goes, the best we can do is to assign a UID to that object in each small interaction session as soon as we can conceptualize and identify it, attach a label in natural language, then attach a proof or belief that these objects are identical in some sense across the sessions. Fortunately in many cases we can afford to weaken this standard and automate a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interestingly, when I attempted to assign UIDs to my friends they appeared to not understand the motivation and actively disagreed with the practice. There seems to be an emotional response to this practice: I can feel once significant objects being apparently demoted to UIDs, stripped away of any metaphysical significance. But such an emotional response is premature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the way of UID, the status of the information captured is different from that of natural language text. With natural language we tend to believe that a text tells something concrete and ready to be understood. Contrarily, the information corresponding to the UID is a sense<\/em> evoked by its natural language labeling; it can only be truly recovered by those sufficiently engaged with the subject. This is a fundamental setting: no sense is by default widely recognized, but whenever it is used it must have been understood very well. Alternatively speaking, this permits a labeling that is detached from literal natural language when needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Extending the idea, I am going to write as if these senses in human thinking are reflected in computer data in a rather direct way. One sense is represented by one unique object. Any senses we consider identical, i.e.<\/i> cannot further distinguish as different senses, are considered the same object. I might call this system \u201cpseudo-formal\u201d. The objective here is not to perform computation on this pseudo-formal data, but manage, distribute, and facilitate intelligent senses in an effective way. Only after these senses become formal enough may a computer process them symbolically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thesis 51879e1b<\/abbr>.<\/strong> The initial motivation of UID as an accurate tracker of sense maintained by human users. This thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of Project 262c86ec<\/abbr><\/strong>. This idea is the start of an approach to information where humans maintain structured senses \u201cpseudo-formally\u201d, in a format that is more structural than natural language yet represent informal senses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often joke that we should assign unique identifiers (UID) to everything. The important points in my articles are labeled with UIDs, not numbered 1.2.3 like theorems in a paper. This is not a fetish; it has an epistemic reason that is extremely related to the fact that naming things is hard. Here is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tebibyte.io\/~yihanwu1024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}