Creative Engineering

Intuition is an interesting concept, and I believe that it’s a bit hard to really make sense of for people who don’t consider themselves intuitive. At least it didn’t make a lot of sense for me a year or two ago.

I suppose many think that intuition is something you are born with… some people just “know” certain things without being able to reason them out, and other people have to conduct an elaborate analysis of the facts in their minds to end up with the same conclusion. If that’s the way you think about it, you might believe that intuition is something of an unfair advantage.

Another widespread position seems to be that intuition is very risky… after all, intuition doesn’t give you the certainty that logical reasoning can give you, right? So perhaps if you go by that idea, you might say that it’s better to not use intuition at all.

I think that the answer is somewhere in between, as it often happens to be… and I’m going to tell you how intuition became a natural thing for me, even though I wasn’t exactly born with it, nor did I think it made sense to trust in it. But now I do have it, and I do trust it, because I use it in a way that I’m confident in. And don’t worry, I’m not going to cite the usual hogwash about left brain versus right brain… I’ll just explain a useful way of looking at intuition, and I’ll also waste a few words on how important I think it is for knowledge engineering. Read the full post »

Pseudoscience is significantly worse than what science claims to be, and that’s the problem: science isn’t actually what it claims to be. Many people who boast about their extremely scientifically oriented thinking don’t actually know what science is, and they’re actually thinking religiously or even dogmatically.

Whew. That’s a rather provocative first paragraph, isn’t it? I’ll have to be extremely scientific to avoid getting shouted at by would-be scientists. Don’t worry, dear scientists, I’m not against science! I’m a huge fan of it. Until some “scientist” starts making overly general statements. That’s where it stops making sense. Why? Well, let’s have a brief look at how science works. Read the full post »

Here is a (not necessarily complete) list of philosophical “isms” that I believe in. I don’t believe in “isms” lightly at all, because I feel that adopting an “istic” view is a rather drastic thing to do.

The following list will give you deep insight into the way I understand life, reality and science… if you want to find out, that is. Read the full post »

Given the “right” philosophical attitude about how the world works, the ultimate goals of knowledge engineering, namely obtaining, processing, using and making accessible all kinds of knowledge, can definitely be achieved. This set of bold goals, however, presents researchers with very difficult problems. All attempts that exist today are restricted to small classes of knowledge. Read the full post »

What do life and knowledge engineering have in common? Everything. There, that’s all keywords from the topic. But I guess you’d like a little more detail. Read the full post »