In preceding papers about the concept of an Empirical Theory [ET], especially in the context of Karl Popper (e.g.Popper and Empirical Theory. A conceptual Experiment ) it has been investigated whether and how these concepts can be merged with the idea of a development process (e.g. An Empirical Theory as a Development Process ). Another aspect is the idea of ‘sustainable development’ as it has been characterized by the so-called Brundtland report [1] in 1987, which laid the ground for the United Nations Rio conference ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 [2] which ended after several more UN conferences up in 2015 with the ‘Agenda 2030’ propagating 17 ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs). [3]
‘Sustainability’ depends on the ability to make ‘qualified estimates about possible future states’. This again presupposes qualified knowledge about the ‘past’ and the ‘present’. Especially should this knowledge contain those kinds of ‘elaborated changes’ in the sequence of events which can be interpreted and used as ‘patterns of possible changes’ leading from one observed situation to another observable situation. Starting from here the following text communicates some more ideas.
SAET BASICS
This figure shows three different layers in the construction of an applied empirical theory: (i) On a ‘meta level’ some natural experts are communicating, are observing some parts the empirical environment, and try to describe these ideas with some symbolic expressions of a shared natural language. (ii) The content of these meta-level activities produces three kinds of texts as an ‘object level’: (a) One text describes the observed given situation with interesting properties; (b) another text describes the requirements for some wanted situation in a future state; (c) another text describes a collection of ‘change rules’ of possible actions which are assumed to be able a given situation to a new situation. (iii) On a third level called ‘philosophical level’ one can raise questions to the ‘conditions’ of all the elements used on the meta level.
SAET DYNAMIC SPACES
This figure is ‘zooming into’ a process described by an object level of a SAET. The ‘given state’ of a concrete SAET describes some part of the empirical environment which as such has some ‘dynamics’, but one can additionally describe individual actors as parts of the environment. Every actor has its own dynamics and viewed in isolation he is able to produces a set of states by its actions. ‘Potentially’ nearly non-countable many possible continuations are possible. Thus every actor is associated with a ‘space of possible continuations’ called ‘potential individual realization space’ [PIRS]. In reality every actor must all the time ‘decide’ which concrete continuation shall be selected from many possible continuations. Thus the large space will be transformed into a single process representing only one path in the PIRS. If one is asking what are the ‘factors’ influencing the selection process one can detect many kinds of factors. Besides the internal factors there is the ‘environment as such’: No water to drink; no food to eat; deadly criminals around you … this will hinder every child to select those options which would be helpful. The in the realm of the ‘internal states’ there is a certain amount of ‘experience’ enabling certain kinds of ‘knowledge’ which is the point of reference for possible decisions. If this experience is too small, if the knowledge is wrong, there exists no chance to produce good selections. And much more…
SAET MULTIPLE THEORIES
This figure is again looking from the meta level. Usually there is more than one theory written down. Mostly these theories are dealing with different aspects of the empirical reality. Because the reality as such is ‘one’ it would be helpful to ‘unify all different special views’. In a SEAT like theory as described here this is quite simple: one has only to unify each kind of text as the ‘given situation’, the ‘wanted situation’ as well as the ‘change rules’ to get a new ‘unified’ theory.
In an elderly post from 2017 I have developed the concept of ‘Intelligent Machines’ by using the paradigm of ‘Distributed Actor Actor Interactions‘ which includes the concept of an ‘Actor Story’. Meanwhile the DAAI paradigm has been ’embedded’ in the more general concept of an ‘Applied Empirical Theory’ [1], which can immediately being used as a ‘simulation’. The ‘content’ is the same, only the ‘format’ is different. But to use the concept of an ‘applied empirical theory’ in this dynamic way directly as a simulation needs a ‘tool’ which is a piece of software called ‘oksimo (reloaded)’ [2] which is located on a server (see: oksimo.com) which can be used via an interactive web-page.[3]
This new format of an applied empirical theory [AET] is producing during simulation a process which can be understood as an inference chain. Doing all possible inference chains this produces a graph of processes, whose nodes are situations. This corresponds directly to the ‘actor story’ [AS] as a central part of the DAAI paradigm.
Knowing this it makes some sense to re-think the concept of ‘intelligent machine’ [IM] within the concept of an applied empirical theory, especially in the format of a dynamic simulation.
Until now the language games of ‘intelligence’ or ‘intelligent algorithms’ or something like this are not yet an established part of the classical theory concepts.
EMPIRICAL THEORY – (COLLECTIVE) INTELLIGENCE – INTELLIGENT MACHINE. Introduction
[2] The name ‘oksimo’ is ‘reloaded’ from an earlier project of the author around 2009 which is described in the German wikipedia under ‘oksimo‘. ‘oksimo’ was an acronym for ‘Open Knowledge Simulation MOdeling’. The ‘new oksimo’ or ‘oksimo reloaded’ repeats this vision mostly but is rather more extended and implemented in a completely different way.
[3] At the time of this writing the software is still only open for those who are participating in the testing phase. We are working with level 2 of the software (normal language extended with math) while we are already preparing level 3 (a more comfortable GUI to edit ‘complete empirical theories’).
In the uffmm review section the different papers and books are discussed from the point of view of the oksimo paradigm. [1] In the following text the author discusses chapter 8 of the book “Collective Intelligence. mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace” by Pierre Lévy (translated by Robert Bonono),1997 (French: 1994)[2]
CONTEXT
In a proceeding post the chapter 7 of Lévy’s book has been discussed. Here follows chapter 8.
Chapter 8: Anthropological Space
POSITION LÉVY
In this chapter Lévy characterizes the ‘Anthropological Space’ following some heading ideas like ‘Signification’, ‘Structuring effects’, followed by ‘Planes’ and ‘Velocities’.
The Multiple Spaces of Signification
Lévy starts his considerations with the statement, that “A simple conversation could be seen as the shared construction of a virtual space of signification, which each speaker attempts to shape according to his mood and intentions.” (p.143) And in another step he is looking from the outside of messages onto the messages as objects being part of a complex situation where messages are examples of interactions between individual speakers/ hearers, which are part of an overall situation, and where the messages are “evoking representations” in the individuals. The situation is not an ‘untouched something’ but the individuals are part of it, reacting to the situation by actions and thereby they are changing the situation. Thus, Lévy can state “Our interactions produce, transform, and continuously develop heterogeneous and interlinked spaces.” (p.143)
The general schema seems therefore to be ‘interactions produce spaces’ in a somehow general meaning, and ‘messages’ are a special kind of ‘interactions’ and these special interactions as messages produce special spaces characterized as ‘spaces of signification’.
The general concept of ‘(anthropological) space’ assumes that these spaces are “living” and “relativistic” with regard to the “objects” they contain and which “organize them”. (cf.143)
Another aspect is the occurrence in time: Lévy distinguishes spaces which are more “evanescent” compared to others, which are more “durable”. (cf. p.143f)
“Being larger” is also an aspect of an anthropological space. This kind of ‘largeness’ depends an the number of participating interacting individuals and objects, tools and other artifacts.(cf. p.144)
“The importance” of an “event” in its “sphere” can be “recognized” by its ability to “reorganize the proximities and distances in a given space”, and to create “new space time(s)”…” (cf. p.144)
Different kinds of spaces are mentioned as “physical”, “geometric”, “emotional, aesthetic, social and historical”, spaces of “signification in general”. (cf. p.144) This view summarizes this in the statement “we live in thousands of different spaces, each with its own system of proximity (temporal, emotional, linguistic, etc.) such that a given entity can be near us in one space, yet quite distant in another. Each space has its own axiology, its own system of values or measurements.”(p.144)
A good part of our “cognitive activity” and of “time” is used to navigate through these spaces, to operate on these in different ways. (cf. p.145)
Structuring, Living, Autonomous, Irreversible
In the age of an increasing digitization of everything the basic reading of a normal text with the associated processing of interpretation seems to ‘fade out’ slowly and in silence. But — as Lévy circumscribes in a wonderful way — all ‘outer effects’ of humankind are rooted in the inner dynamics of individual people enabling a collective intelligence, a collective understanding, by using symbolic expressions as the main signals between different brains. ‘As such’ these signals have ‘no meaning’, but interwoven with all the other experiences they can become ‘loaded with meaning’ which can be encoded and decoded by these symbolic expressions and thereby can become a ‘trigger’ for other brains to organize some ‘triggered meaning’ as a mean for understanding. But this ‘encoding and decoding’ is not an isolated process but as such already interwoven in a network of interactions called ‘learning process’; it is culturally embedded. What you can see in the figure above are additional marks in the text produced by the reader of this text to underline those parts of the expressions which appear for the reader as strongly related to his understanding of the text and thereby pointing to ‘building blocks’ of the rising understanding inside of the reader what he presupposes to be the ‘intention’ of the writer of this text. As everybody can control in the light of the own interpretation experience such a ‘re-construction’ is always in danger to reconstruct something which is not the intention of the author. Without further clues the interpreting reader is ‘lost in an approaching understanding’.
In this section Lévy brings forward the question, what the “specific characteristics” of the four anthropological spaces are, which he had described so far.(p.145) And in front of a puzzle of disturbing aspects he points to the heart of everything: all these aspects “are engendered by the practical and imaginative activity of millions of beings, by anthropological machines that work within the recesses of their subjects …”.(p.145)
Although these distinguished four anthropological spaces are in a certain sense “structuring” by their objective and interactive materiality, they should not be misunderstood as purely “abstract” properties within some understanding. In the contrary, they are “living worlds continuously engendered by the processes and interactions that unfold within them.”(p.146) And this grounding insight in the nature of the anthropological spaces is reverberating in every of these spaces.
Thus, “the knowledge space” isn’t simply “the subject of cognitive science”. It isn’t some kind of an “abstract container for all possible knowledge”. (cf. p.146) It is an “ongoing anthropological creation, it is a living plane, qualitatively differentiated by … the collective intellects that pass through it.”(cf. p.146)
Similarly, the commodity space is not “the subject of a specific social science”, but it is “a world that has grown and developed autonomously , … self-organized, creative, destructive.” (cf. p.146)
Despite is manifest character it is not “unthinkable” that these different spaces would again disappear in the future. When this would happen then this would be a “terrifying catastrophe, a deadly chaos”. The close connection between earth and humanity point to a kind of “irreversibility” which motivates the qualification of these spaces as “anthropological spaces”. (cf. p.147)
Planes of Existence, Contingent and Eternal Velocities
As an introductory phrase one could here perhaps select the following: “Anthropological spaces in themselves are neither infrastructures nor superstructures but planes of existence, frequencies, velocities, determined within the social spectrum.”(p.147) And fundamentally “the appearance of anthropological spaces is in no way governed by necessity.”(p.148) This motivates the statement, that anthropological spaces are ‘contingent’.(cf. p.148) Otherwise, this statement contrasts in some sense with the statement, that anthropological spaces, “once they have shaped … they become timeless, as if they had always already have been there.”(p.148) And Lévy infers from this ‘irreversibility of anthropological spaces’ that “these effect the past as well.”(cf. p.148) A hint for this flexibility, for this astonishing dynamics of anthropological spaces is given in the statement, that anthropological spaces “are worlds of signification and not rarefied categories sharing physical objects…” (p.149) An anthropological cartography using categories which “serves only to separate, classify, or isolate, we should abandon it at once.”(p.150) The main challenge is “to clear the way … which traces the lines to the future.”(p.149)
Somehow hidden, as an accompanying framework, within which the anthropological spaces are emerging, Lévy uses continuously the concepts of ‘earth’, ‘territory’, ‘capital’, and ‘virtual space of knowledge’ (cf. p.150) like a ‘coordinate space’, which outlines an undefined space-like something.
COMMENTS ON LÉVY
Here some comments on the position of Lévy.
The Multiple Spaces of Signification
This chapter is a bit challenging on account of the different usages of the term ‘space’. In one sense ‘space’ is associated with ‘interaction in general’ where the production of ‘messages’ (mediated by statements/ utterances) is only one special kind of interaction.
A space in general is characterized by its ‘ingredients’ realized by individual actors, used objects, artifacts, kinds of interactions, usage in time (evanescent or more durable), etc.
A ‘message-born space’ is not a ‘real space’ like those interaction-based spaces with real objects, real effects, but a purely ‘cognitive space of meanings’ associated with the used language expressions and the associated ‘meaning function’ rooted in the ‘individual speaker’ which is ‘member’ of a cultural space with specific meanings induced by social learning.
Because all ‘real spaces’ have automatically a cognitive counterpart in the acting individual which to some extend is encoded as meaning of the used language, there exists a subtle relationship between ‘spaces in general’ and ‘spaces of meaning (significance)’: both spaces are — by meaning — close together, but they are — nevertheless — different! Spaces of meaning can ‘reflect’ the ‘dynamics of real spaces’ ‘sufficiently well’, and if this is the case then they are ‘helpful’ and can be classified as being ’empirically sound’ (true); if the ‘dynamics of real spaces’ is ‘not sufficiently well’ reflected, then they are ‘less helpful’ and can be classified as being ‘not empirically sound’ (false).
For the survival of biological populations on the planet earth it seems to be of vital importance that the ’empirical soundness’ of the space of meaning’ is ‘good enough’.
Things would be too simple if the criterion of ’empirical soundness’ would be sufficient. As one can learn from the ‘evolution of life’ the available ‘knowledge’ of the empirical environment at a certain point of time is only of limited help, as long as the upcoming ‘future’ is widely ‘unknown’. This ‘unknown character’ of the future results from the real dynamics and complexity of the overall process of empirical reality, which principally can not be predicted. Therefore that part of knowledge which influences the real behavior must contain a ‘minimum of unclassified knowledge’ which — at least in the past of life on this planet — was the reason, why life survived.
Comments on Structuring, Living, Autonomous, Irreversible
The text of Lévy continuous to be very dense, compact, partially nearly poetic, but nevertheless the text is revealing a strong analytic power keeping the ‘balls in the air’ and thereby ‘keeping all tensions alive’.
For me as a reader with a special background most amazing is his handling of the relationship between the richness of the ‘outer appearance’ of humankind in many dimensions (earth, territory, commodity, knowledge) and the grounding of all these in the inner dynamics of the acting individuals, not as isolated entities, but interwoven by interactions, which not only have their objective impact in the outer world of bodies, but simultaneously also in the inner world of subjectivity with a very special internal dynamic structure.
Neither the ‘inner dynamics as such’ nor the ‘outer effects as such’ taken apart can tell the story about humankind. The main ‘secret’ is given in this special way how the ‘outer world’ and the ‘inner world’ continuously, permanently, always are ‘vibrating together’: the outer world is brought to the inner world through a mediating body which ‘feeds’ a part of the body called ‘brain’, and the brain again ‘transforms’ these modified outer world events in new structures of a radical different reality, the ‘inner reality’, a ‘virtual reality’ compared to the ‘outer reality’ which is not known ‘as such’, but only known in the mode of ‘already transformed signals’ which are ‘further processed by the inner dynamics’ of the brain.
Humankind, a collection of interacting individual brains, appears in this view as a special environment with special laws ruling this environment, in which the outer world is ‘received’ as something ‘different’, but given as ‘clouds of single signals’ which are ‘caught’ by ‘filtering’ these clouds as ‘sequences of events’ partitioned by many different ‘patterns’ indicating ‘possible structures’ for further ‘processing’. And while this is happening all the time the outer world is a ‘hybrid’ world consisting of non-human parts and humankind together where this hybrid ‘outer-inner-being’ is continuously modified by the human as well as outer activities. Thus, human actors perceiving the outer world do not perceive the outer world ‘independent of humans’, but always ‘entangled with humans’, with ‘humankind’. This entanglement is not really new because since the rising of life on this planet earth we can observe this entanglement of life-free earth and life as the new live-earth where the earth is ‘cocooned with the biosphere’ which from the early beginnings started to modify the earth. But somehow new is this special ability of humankind — thereby surpassing all the other life forms — to ‘cognitively see itself as part of the outer world’ and ‘understand itself as a really moving something’ which can and does ‘change the earth-life being’. There is less and less no more only one ‘earth’ and only some biological ‘life’, no, there is since the advent of humankind now only an ‘earth-life being’ (ELB) which is ‘irreversible’ and whose ‘fate’ is somewhere in a future state of a ‘knowing earth-life being’ which ‘knows about itself’, which is an ’emotional something’ of new dimensions.
The today widespread vision of ‘intelligent machines’ will be remembered as the dream of ‘children’ which didn’t yet understand that not the machine in front of them (built by them) is the real wonder, but they as the ‘children’ are the original wonder, which can built such machines and which can built much more, an ‘earth-life being’ of nearly infinite order.
In the light of these ideas the manner of speaking of ‘anthropological spaces’ appears slowly ‘questionable’. A human being as the ‘prototype’ of an ‘outer-inner transformer’ is never something ‘completely different’ to the outer body world, and the body world is never isolated from the ‘inner world’ of bodies. And the synergies between outer-inner-transformers resulting in a new kind of ‘collective intelligence’ is again not separated from the outer body world, but manifests a new morphological earth-life-being where the so-called ‘anthropological spaces’ are only different manifestations of this unique earth-life-being. The idea of ‘human kind’ as something special is only important for a ‘taxonomy’ between the different species of biological manifestations, but the biosphere as a whole is finally not a ‘foreign something’ to the earth, not to the solar system, not to the milky way galaxy [3], even not to the whole universe. The biosphere is an ‘outcome’ of the earth system because the so-called ‘material world’ is — as we can know today — not something ‘dead substance’ but the most dynamic something we can know. And biological life as we know it is nothing else than one of the outcomes of the radical ‘freedom’ rooted in these maximal dynamics of the ‘matter-energy something’ partially revealed by quantum mechanics, partially by evolutionary biology.
The primary root of the ‘irreversibility’ of the earth-life-being has then to be located in the primary nature of the earth-life-being itself: the matter-energy-something (MES) contains all these different transformations as its ‘inner potentials’ within its dynamics. Therefore the ’emergence’ of biological systems is an ‘outcome’ of these primary structures and as ‘outcome’ it sheds some light back on the ‘matter-energy-something’. In the beginning of the appearance of the matter-energy-something there was not too much to observe from the outside, but during the existence in time the matter-energy-something produced more and more complex structures which showed up as complete systems of self-reproduction, of self-knowing, of self-knowing even as populations. The self-knowing of the earth, the solar system … will be next. There is no natural ‘boarder’ to stop this … only the system itself can destroy itself. There is no need for destruction, but a real possibility rooted in the fundamental freedom of everything.
Planes of Existence, Contingent and Eternal Velocities
Thus, we have two meta-frames: (i) as common ground Lévy assumes a 4-dimensional coordinate system grounded in what he calls ‘earth’, ‘territory’, ‘capital’, and ‘virtual space of knowledge’, and (ii) then the individual human with his body and knowledge space which is embedded in a stream of infinite interactions between some environment (earth, territory, capital, knowledge space of others) and his own knowledge space. Thus, whatever is ‘real’, it is ‘mediated’ by his knowledge space which can have nearly infinite many ‘sub-spaces’. The ‘same real thing’ can appear in different knowledge spaces as a ‘differently known thing’. Between the knowledge spaces of different humans interactions (partially by symbolic communication) are occurring which can can shape the individual knowledge space with all its sub-spaces. In some sense one can interpret a knowledge sub-space as a ‘plane of events’ representing the ‘plane of existence’, which is basically ‘contingent’ because the knowledge space as such is ‘contingent’. Driven by a dynamic environment as well as by a dynamic knowledge space a dimension of ‘time’ is framing all events, inducing implicitly some order, is making things ‘slow’ or ‘fast’.
One can ask whether his assumed 4-dimensional coordinate system grounded in what he calls ‘earth’, ‘territory’, ‘capital’, and ‘virtual space of knowledge’ is indeed as ‘hard’ as he presupposes?
Thus, ‘territory’ is not a real given object but a ‘minded object’ which can be or not. ‘Capital’ is also a creation of some knowledge-space which is a ‘symbolic instrument’ associated with something different; it has no life on its own. In radical thinking there seem to exist only two dimension: (i) the ‘real world outside’ of the human mind (with the body as part of the real world) and (ii) the human mind (knowledge space) somewhere ‘inside’ the real world. In one sense the ‘real world’ is the primary source for everything, in another sense is the knowledge space the only ‘real space’ embracing everything else as ‘secondary’. From an ‘abstract outside’, from the perspective of some abstract ‘meta space’ is the ‘reality of the knowledge space’ a ‘virtual world’ reconstructing the real world as a virtual structure, which is used by the human body as a ‘guide’ in the real world of bodies.
Re-building the real world inside a virtual world and using the virtual models as guides for a behavior in the real world of bodies this enables the energy-matter of the universe to ‘recognize itself’ in the format of an ‘universal self-consciousness’. As long as the individual virtual knowledge space are more ‘separated’ than ‘unified’ the universal self-consciousness is very ‘dim’, very ‘weak’. To that extend that the individual knowledge spaces are becoming unified the universal self-consciousness can grow. But, this unification can only work in the ‘right way’ if the individual knowledge spaces are ‘as true as possible’ and are ‘communicating as free as possible’. The human history shows numeral examples of ‘crashes’ by ‘imperfectly unified knowledge spaces’.
In a preceding post I have illustrated how one can apply the concept of an empirical theory — highly inspired by Karl Popper — to an everyday problem given as a county and its demographic problem(s). In this post I like to develop this idea a little more.
AN EMPIRICAL THEORY AS A DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
The figure shows a simplified outline of the idea of an empirical theory being realized during a development process based on the interactions and the communication of citizens as ‘natural experts’.
CITIZENs – natural experts
As starting point we assume citizens understood as our ‘natural experts’ being members of a democratic society with political parties, an freely elected parliament, which can create some helpful laws for the societal life and some authorities serving the need of the citizens.
SYMBOLIC DESCRIPTIONS
To coordinate their actions by a sufficient communication the citizens produce symbolic descriptions to make public how they see the ‘given situation’, which kinds of ‘future states’ (‘goals’) they want to achieve, and a list of ‘actions’ which can ‘change/ transform’ the given situation step wise into the envisioned future state.
LEVELS OF ABSTRACTIONS
Using an everyday language — possibly enriched with some math expressions – one can talk about our world of experience on different levels of abstraction. To get a rather wide scope one starts with most abstract concepts, and then one can break down these abstract concepts more and more with concrete properties/ features until these concrete expressions are ‘touching the real experience’. It can be helpful — in most cases — not to describe everything in one description but one does a partition of ‘the whole’ into several more concrete descriptions to get the main points. Afterwards it should be possible to ‘unify’ these more concrete descriptions into one large picture showing how all these concrete descriptions ‘work together’.
LOGICAL INFERENCE BY SIMULATION
A very useful property of empirical theories is the possibility to derive from given assumptions and assumed rules of inference possible consequences which are ‘true’ if the assumptions an the rules of inference are ‘true’.
The above outlined descriptions are seen in this post as texts which satisfy the requirements of an empirical theory such that the ‘simulator’ is able to derive from these assumptions all possible ‘true’ consequences if these assumptions are assumed to be ‘true’. Especially will the simulator deliver not only one single consequence only but a whole ‘sequence of consequences’ following each other in time.
PURE WWW KNOWLEDGE SPACE
This simple outline describes the application format of the oksimo software which is understood here as a kind of a ‘theory machine’ for everybody.
It is assumed that a symbolic description is given as a pure text file or as a given HTML page somewhere in the world wide web [WWW].
The simulator realized as an oksimo program can load such a file and can run a simulation. The output will be send back as an HTML page.
No special special data base is needed inside of the oksimo application. All oksimo related HTML pages located by a citizen somewhere in the WWW are constituting a ‘global public knowledge space’ accessible by everybody.
DISTRIBUTED OKSIMO INSTANCES
An oksimo server positioned behind the oksimo address ‘oksimo.com’ can produce for a simulation demand a ‘simulator instance’ running one simulation. There can be many simulations running in parallel. A simulation can also be connected in real time to Internet-of-Things [IoT] instances to receive empirical data being used in the simulation. In ‘interactive mode’ an oksimo simulation does furthermore allow the participation of ‘actors’ which function as a ‘dynamic rule instance’: they receive input from the simulated given situation and can respond ‘on their own’. This turns a simulation into an ‘open process’ like we do encounter during ‘everyday real processes’. An ‘actor’ must not necessarily be a ‘human’ actor; it can also be a ‘non-human’ actor. Furthermore it is possible to establish a ‘simulation-meta-level’: because a simulation as a whole represents a ‘full theory’ on can feed this whole theory to an ‘artificial intelligence algorithm’ which dos not run only one simulation but checks the space of ‘all possible simulations’ and thereby identifies those sub-spaces which are — according to the defined goals — ‘zones of special interest’.
In an earlier post the overall structure of the oksimo paradigm has been outlined. This was the perspective available during spring 2021. Since this time the theory, the software as well as the applications are evolving very quickly. A major event was the closer and closer conjunction of a general ’empirical everyday life theory’ [1] with the oksimo paradigm. The central idea is that an oksimo application is by its implicit structure a complete empirical theory in an everyday life setting. This growing clearness about the theoretical dimension of an oksimo application raises new questions how to organize an oksimo application.
Oksimo Workflow
The figure shows the basic oksimo workflow between a user/ group of users and the oksimo simulator (theory inference machine): A user can upload an oksimo simulation (= theory) document to the simulator either by sending an address for an HTML-document or by directly uploading a text document in agreement with a minimal HTML-schema. The upload includes some additional parameters as directives for the wanted format of the output. The simulator computes then the output according to the selected parameters an shows an HTML page either directly on the login page of the simulator or as an HTML document sent to the email address which the user has specified.
In the first software development phase the main interest was the clarification of the concept of a theory-like environment using only everyday language (every language is possible). In the second phase this has been extended by allowing math-extensions to the everyday language accompanied by first simple graphical presentations during the simulation. Oksimo can be used here in single mode as well as in multiple user mode allowing an exchange of data as well as a ‘unification’ of different simulations
This is quite powerful.
But at this point the oksimo paradigm looks a bit like an ‘Island’: living there is OK, but there is not yet some ‘normal exchange’ possible.
Looking back in history Tim Berners-Lee [2] has during his life-time developed the idea of an open space of knowledge and communication embedded in a space called World Wide Wed [WWW]. Despite all the many details there one can see one central idea: an open space of addresses each representing a web-page, which can be a html-page. Thus the WWW can be understood as an universal ‘interface’ between people exchanging knowledge in the format of HTML-pages. And because an HTML-page follows a clearly defined pattern everybody can read and write such html-pages with simple readers and writers.
While the oksimo software itself is for a user available through an interactive web-page and it’s outputs can already be shown on a web-page it is not a too big step to extend the oksimo software generally with an export-function of a simulation as a complete html-page and as well with an import-function read an html-page which contains a complete simulation as a text which then is ‘converted’ in states, goals and rules which are needed for the simulator.
Thus without changing the software as it is now one could make the oksimo software with these additional functions immediately speaking to the whole World Wide Web.
By this step every user in the world wide web could edit a simulation with a normal editor, post this on a server of personal choice for everybody and vice versa every user could read everywhere html-pages with simulations, download them and modify or extend these in the light of his experience. This would enable a new kind of wikipedia-like servers. In this sense the oksimo paradigm could perhaps become the new operating system for the whole knowledge space.[3]
