Zombiac and The Semantic Web
Nocturne in D Major, Part Three

An activation record monitor (not shown in the SVG code presented at the nocturne) is able to perform "plan detection" (and, hence, goal inference as well).

The clock picture shows the actual time and passage of time second by second and the SVG clock picture also has knowledge of time domain things (by virtue of the embedded ontology) BUT the clock (picture) does not KNOW that it has this knowledge. It is not situated and does not have the "organic" holistic inter-knowledge that a biological system has. This is the crux behind why even though the clock can answer questions about time (things) it does not "appreciate" or "apprehend" what it is doing or what it knows and this is the basis for "nobody at home". [In this regard it would be useful to read Peirce: "Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness".]

Zombiac and The Semantic Web
Nocturne in D Major, Part Two

The slides and the two SVG files are available for viewing at open-meta.com.

A podcast of the nocturne will also appear on the site. My poster paper and a podcast to accompany it are already available on the site.

Before we get back to continuing the discussion from part one let us spend a moment and consider what Zombiac is. Philosophical Zombie (see Wikipedia) is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience or qualia or sentience. Zombiac, then, is a metaphor of a "mechanical contrivance" like Edsac, Ordvac, Univac, Illiac (computers) and zombie-homunculus-in-a-box. It is a play on words and a metaphor.

Wed 7PM August 9 2006 I gave a nocturne titled "Metaprogramming, Ontologies and Still Nobody's Home".

The last of the audience / listeners / discussion participants left at 9:28 PM, so I figure it was a successful nocturne.

I showed some slides to start off with and then showed two demos. They were both SVG files. I actually showed the text of the files on the screen using a program editor and explained salient parts of the text. Then I ran the demo by opening the same SVG text file in a Firefox browser. A "picture" immediately appeared on the screen in both demos.

The point of showing the SVG file text was to show that there was no binary content in the file only text, and also to show that even though the bulk of the text in both SVG files was embedded metadata, SVG rendered its visual output immediately and well.