Re: I am.

On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 6:26 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

> Yes, I is an indexical, and we have in our language one indexical at our
> disposal,
>
> <>
>
> which is “this document”, so we can formalize “I" as  the author of the
> document  as
> in N3 as
>
> [ is dc:author of <> ]
>
> read “the author of this message”
>
> So
>
> [ is dc:author of <> ]  .
>
> Could be read as “I exist”.
>
> Or in plain turtle
>
> <> dc:author [] .
>

Excellent, why didn't I think of that? I stand corrected.

I'll go you one better.  English has the copula ("am"), which is lacking in
many natural languages.  So we can read <> as analogous to the "sum" of
"Cogito ergo sum".  And since <> is general, we can take it as referring
not just to identity but to space-time location, yielding <> =
sum-here-now.  Then if we discard the notion that RDF triples must be
translatable directly or naturally to Subject-Verb-Object constructions in
some natural language, we can write

<> <> <> .

At least I think we can.  I'm not sure how best to gloss it; something like
"every doc is related to itself by itself (in space-time)"?  Which is kinda
sorta like "I am", if you squint hard enough.

It won't get published in Philosphical Quarterly any time soon, but it
makes for a pretty good RDF riddle.

-Gregg


>
>
>
> On 2017-05 -18, at 22:54, Gregg Reynolds <dev@mobileink.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On May 17, 2017 4:46 PM, "Sarven Capadisli" <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
>
> Philosophers and Semantic Web junkies gather around.
>
> Use the the RDF language to represent the following statement:
>
> "I am."
>
>
> obviously not possible, since "I" is an indexical.  You might as well try
> "now”.
>
>
>
> [ is date of <> ]    # now?
>
>
> -Sarven
> http://csarven.ca/#i
>
>
>
>