Re: PLI: gismu for <lojrfuzi>

["Steven M. Belknap" <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

>selkantu is quantized. kamkantu is quantumness.

Yes, I saw this in the dictionary also:

&quantized,x2 of kantu
&quantum,x1 of kantu
*quantum, x1 is a |/ray/elementary particle/smallest measurable increment
of property/activity x2 /:/ [| ray (= bonka'u)] /=/ kantu (ka'u)

Perhaps your interpretation is right; I find it a real struggle to decipher
some of the rather terse definitions in the dictionary. But I think x2 of
kantu means "the property/activity quantized" rather than the  "quantized".
Thus <selkantu> is not the abstraction of <kantu> that we want, as it is
referring to a particular instance, when I want to talk about the abstract
concept. I agree that <kamkantu> could be translated to English as
"quantumness", but would also argue it could be translated as "quantized"
In my view, the following two statements are equivalent:

"Electron orbitals have quantumness."

"Electron orbitals are quantized."

The first sounds strange in English because it is not the idiom commonly
used in English. But it is logically fine, by analogy to other uses of the
subscript "ness." I've often been wrong before in my dictionary deciphering
before; perhaps others can weigh in on this.

>
>Also, I don't know if this is any good, maybe you could use selkle,
>divided into classes. Because, if you say "It hurts like 3 on 10-valued
>scale", you are not dealing with quants of pain, but much larger units

As lojbab has pointed out, <kantu> refers to things indivisible and single
valued, but not necessarily small.

>(I don't think anybody has defined a quant of pain yet...

The patient is the one with the pain, so I let the patient define the scale.

>But then I am
>no physician. Maybe minimal impulse capable of getting from the receptor
>to the brain?).

Of course many definitions are possible. The one I use clinically is to ask
the patient to indicate on a visual analog scale how severe the pain is,
where the left-most edge of the scale is "free of pain" and the right-most
edge of the scale is "most severe pain possible" Thus, the patient
autolinearizes and interprets my instruction, and comes up with a value. I
use this method sequentially over time and adjust pain medication
accordingly. Big pain or big side-effects (over sedation) lead to big
changes in drug-dosing, little pain or slight side effects lead to small
changes. Is the patient using a logarithmic transformation and changing
from polar to Cartesian coordinates to come up with the output visual
analog value she/he indicates? Could be.


>What you are doing is translating a continuous scale
>into a discreet one, i.e. classifying the data.

No, this is not what I am doing. The position the patient marks on the
scale is the position he/she marks. It is a position somewhere along a
continuous scale. There is no categorization.

>There are very few
>things we can measure on a quantum scale (does this count as a pun?).

What about cookies? I have three cookies in my lunchbox. What about
anything else you would describe using integers? Integers are quantizers
for things measured on a <kamkantu> scale.

>
>So, I think you basically have three concepts:

No, I have two concepts:

Discrete logics, which include (1) and (2) above and fuzzy logics which is
what you describe in (3)
>
>1. two-valued logic corresponds to Aristotle's (if this is what you call
>   Zoroastrian, OK, I don't know what it is)

Zoroastrianism is a very old religion. It may be the first recorded
instance of dividing things into two categories: good and evil.
Zoroastrianism did this to an obsessive degree about nearly everything. It
is possible (although I don't know that this is true) that Aristotle was
influenced by Zoroastrian ideas when he described the law of the excluded
middle (The object in my hand is either a cookie or not a cookie.)

>2. discrete multi-valued logic (a simplification of fuzzy logic for
>   human use), and

No, the simplification of fuzzy for human use is not a transformation from
fuzzy to discrete. When someone says they are "90% sure they will be at the
party" they are not saying they are *exactly* 90% sure. They are giving a
fuzzy estimate of their certainty about party attendance. If they said that
they thought there was a "90% chance they will be at the party" that is
still another thing, a probabilistic statement.

>3. continuous logic which nobody can really use,

Actually, I believe that fuzzy logic is what we *do* use most of the time.
Yesterday I was describing an extraction we did using the HPLC instrument I
have in my laboratory. I said that the extracted chemical was "fairly pure"
Someone corrected me and said that purity was an absolute, and that "fairly
pure" was an improper use of the word "pure". I disagreed that this was the
only way that pure could be used. He agreed that he understood what I
meant, in the context of our conversation. So we calculated the degree of
purity (it was 98.2 percent pure by dry weight). For the purposes of our
conversation, fairly pure was good enough to convey what I meant with the
accuracy and precision I desired. So I used a fuzzification. The exact
value of purity was irrelevant to our discussion, and was a distraction.

Note that my critic did *not* claim to misunderstand what I meant, he
actually understood me quite well and agreed that, in the context of our
conversation "fairly pure" was accurate and precise enough for our
purposes; he was saying that my usage was "bad English", whatever that
means. Of course, when we have to publish, we would need to define what
"fairly pure" means so everybody else will be able to figure out what we
mean. Saying that people shouldn't say something a certain way is
prescriptive. There are *good reasons* for being fuzzy; in this case it
allowed us to discuss a lab procedure without getting bogged down in
irrelevant exactness. I am more interested in understanding what people
actually mean when they make these sort of utterances, and I believe fuzzy
logic & sets is useful for this purpose. Others disagree, and insist on
called these utterances "errors"

>because we can't
>   calculate, or even measure things to infinite precision (which is
>   what a continuity of scale inspires in my mind)

You are misunderstanding what fuzzy logic is. There is no need for infinite
precision. Perhaps you are confusing the number of fuzzy sets being used
with some requirement for infinite precision. I call the number of fuzzy
sets the "granularity" of fuzziness. If the granularity is 5 and we are
using an interval scale, then there are 6 sets, which I designate as:

{0/5, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 5/5}

Each set can be defined by a membership function. Commonly, each set is
defined by a membership function which is linear, equals 1 at its apex, and
drops to 0 at the apex of each of its neighbors. So any point between
apices has partial membership in two sets. Thus I might say "The new
Smashing Pumpkins CD is a 4 out of 5." The exact point I mean might be
anywhere between 3/5 and 5/5; I have chosen the granularity I wish to use
to express my opinion of the new album, and then picked which fuzzy set I
want to use. This can be as accurate and precise a process as I wish, there
is no compulsion to express to infinite precision.

-Steven


Steven M. Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

email: sbelknap@uic.edu
Voice: 309/671-3403
Fax:   309/671-8413