# 1999/7/28 #=============# # Tabula Rasa # #=============# Ayn Rand, "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution", page 190 At birth, a child's mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness -- the mechanism of a human consciousness -- but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. Knowledge Explorer provides an initital knowledge unit, at view = tabula_rasa ready to receive new knowledge. It is "blank", but contains the concepts which characterize the mechanism of a human consciousness existent, entity, characteristic, proposition, action, causality, consciousness, volition, knowledge, integrate, differentiate, space, time, view and the grammatical relationships of the knowledge representation language, KR. For example: at, with, from, to, either, or, all, and, not, is, has, do, isin, haspart, changes, causes, means, if, then, else, fi, every, do, done As a concession to practical efficiency, the tabula_rasa view includes some commonly used concepts, e.g., animal, plant, object, man (person), purpose, live, move, birth, death, number and some less common concepts used by Knowledge Explorer, e.g., identify, perceive, classify, measure, enumeration, requisite, sequence, set, hierarchy, lattice, group, file Here's the final tabula rasa hierarchy. The tabula_rasa view is augmented with a knowledge of the attributes and actions of Knowledge Explorer. Here's the description of Knowledge Explorer and its attributes and actions.