What Is a Symbolic Measurement Process ?

Our instruments of detection and measurement, which we have been trained to regard as reened extensions of our senses, are they not like loaded dice, charged as they are with preconceived notions concerning the very things which we are seeking to determine? Is not our scientiic knowledge a colossal, even though unconscious, attempt to counterfeit by number the. .. world disclosed to our senses? ABSTRACT Numbers have emerged historically as the most popular/convenient form of representation, and our basic scientiic paradigm is built on the foundation of numeric, or quantitative, concepts. Measurement, as conventionally understood, is the corresponding process for (numeric) representation of objects or events. Any (including a future) measurement device is constructed based on the underlying mathematical structure that is thought appropriate for the purpose. It has gradually become clear to us that the classical numeric mathematical structures, and hence the corresponding (including all present) measurement devices, impose on \real" events/objects a very rigid form of representation , which cannot be modiied dynamically in order to capture their combinative, or compositional, structure. To remove this fundamental limitation, a new mathematical structure|evolving transformation system (ETS)|was proposed earlier. This mathematical structure allows one to capture inductively the compositional structure of events. In other words, the model deenes a new form of object representation|struct|that captures the combinative, or symbolic, structure of events. Moreover, this combina-tive structure, which represents what appears to be the only possible natural symbiosis of the discrete/symbolic and the continuous representations, in principle, cannot be captured by the classical mathematical structures. Thus, since the the new structure also captures the concept of numbers, it ooers one the possibility of capturing simultaneously both the qualitative (compositional) and the quantitative structure of events. In this paper we brieey discuss the concept of a fundamentally new, biologically inspired, measurement process, inductive measurement process, based on the ETS. In simple terms, all existing measurement processes \pro-duce" numbers as their outputs, while we are discussing a measurement process whose outputs are structs (which are non-numeric entities) and which captures the structure of events/objects in an inductive manner, through a more direct interaction with the environment.