This is a special thought experiment as part of the uffmm.org blog.
INTRODUCTION
Since its recent ‘coming out’ (November 2022) the chatbot chatGPT from openai.com has gained a growing public attention: Posts in blogs, Journals, newspapers, TV … Even I noticed this new presence.
The one way to understand it is ‘looking behind the scene’, looking ‘into the system’, which is in principle possible. But because the direct inspection of the human brain would you tell nearly nothing about its fantastic properties (even not in the light of the interpretation of the brain sciences) and as well, looking into the ‘chips of computer hardware’ would you tell too nearly nothing about what a computer-system is able to do, so it will in a first step be of no great help, to fill many pages with the algorithms of chatGPT. As such an isolated algorithms doesn’t tell too much, and a whole network of such algorithms doesn’t either.
What perhaps can be interesting is a ‘comparison’ between our human behavior (and understanding) with the behavior of chatGPT and some ‘implicit meaning’ embedded in this behavior.
Thus curious about what this chatGBT is I logged into the system and started interacting with the chatGBT software in the offered ‘playground’. The first two chats have been a little bit like ‘swaying back and forth’, my next two chats have become quite interesting.
After this experience I decided to document these chats in this blog in a 1-to-1 fashion thus enabling further reflections about them later. [3] Rather quickly one can learn that this adventure has many different dimensions from ‘simply being impressed’ until ‘deep philosophical thinking’.
The 8000-signs embracing chat No.4 ends up with the following paragraph:
Human: OK, this all sums up to the conclusion that human rationality is composed of emotions, spiritual experience as well as conscious as well as unconscious cognitive processes. Do I miss something important?
Machine (citing human documents): No, you have accurately summed up the components of human rationality. Additionally, human rationality is also composed of social and cultural influences, which can shape and inform our understanding of the world and our decisions. Additionally, human rationality is often impacted by our values and beliefs, which can provide a moral foundation for our behavior and decision making. Finally, human rationality is also impacted by our environment, which can provide a source of information and insight.
[1] wkp en: chatGPT, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT, is a chatbot with the technology of a ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’. See more there.
[2] wkp en: chatbot, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot, is a software which is able to interact in the format of a dialogue (which tells nothing and all …)
[3] During the first two chats I didn’t save the dialogues. This I started beginning with chat No.3
At first sight, the previously described galactic cell association of a human body does not provide a natural clue for a ‘center’ of some kind. Which cell should be more important than others? Each one is active, each one does its ‘job’. Many ‘talk’ to many. Chemical substances are exchanged or by means of chemical substance exchange ‘electrical potentials’ are generated which can travel ‘faster’ and which can generate ‘impulse-like events’ which in turn activate chemical substances again. If one would make this ‘talking with chemical substances and electric potentials’ artificially audible, we would have a symphony of 127 trillion (127 x 10^12) single voices …
And yet, when we experience our human bodies in everyday life, we don’t see a huge cloud of galactic proportions of individual cells, we see a ‘delineated object’ with a surface that is ‘visible’; an object that can make ‘sounds’, that ‘smells’, that is ‘touchable’, that can ‘change’ and ‘move’. Moreover, it can ‘stuff things into itself’, and ‘gases’, ‘liquids’, and ‘more solid components’ also come out of it. Further it is obvious with longer observation that there are areas at the body which react to ‘light’ (eyes), to ‘sounds’ (ears), to ‘smells’ (nose), to ‘touch’ (skin), to ‘body positions’ (among other things sense of balance), to ‘temperature’ (skin), to ‘chemical compositions of substances in the mouth’ (taste organs in the mouth) and some more.
This everyday ‘experience’ suggests the assumption that the cells of our human body have spatially arranged themselves into ‘special networks’ [1], which show a high ‘degree of organization’, so pronounced that these networks appear like ‘one unit’, like a ‘single system’ with ‘input’ and ‘output’, and where complex processes take place between input and output. This opens up the possibility of viewing the galactic space of autonomous cells in a human body as a ‘collective of organized systems’ that appear to be in active exchange with each other.”[2], [4],[5]
In modern technical systems such as a car, an airplane, a computer, there is a ‘meta-level’ from which the whole system can be ‘controlled’. In the car the steering wheel, the brake, the gear shift etc., similarly in the airplane the cockpit with a multiplicity of instruments, or with the computer the input and output devices. However, for years an increasing ‘autonomy’ of these technical devices has been emerging, insofar as many control decisions of humans are shifted to ‘subsystems’, which thereby ‘self-perform’ more and more classical control performance of humans.[6].
In a human body there exists ‘parallel’ to the different body systems among other things the ‘nervous system’ with the ‘brain’ as central area, in which many ‘signals from the body systems’ run together and from which again ‘signals to the body systems’ are sent out. The brain with the nervous system seems to be a system of its own, which processes the incoming signals in different ‘neuronal processes’ and also sends out signals, which can cause ‘effects in the body systems’.[7] From the point of view of ‘functioning’ the brain with the nervous system can be understood as a kind of ‘meta-system’, in which properties of all other ‘body systems’ are ‘mapped’, find a ‘process-like interpretation’, and can be influenced (= ‘controlled’) to a certain degree with the help of these mappings and interpretations.
As the modern empirical sciences make visible more and more by their investigations and subsequent ‘interpretations’ (e.g. [4],[5]), the distinguishable body systems themselves have a very high complexity with their own ‘autonomy’ (stomach, liver, kidney, heart, …), which can be influenced only conditionally by the brain, but which conversely can also influence the brain. In addition, there is a hardly manageable amount of mutual influences via the immense ‘material flows’ in the blood circulation and in the body fluids.
For the context of this book, of particular interest here are those structures that are important for the ‘coordination of the different brains’ by means of ‘language’ and closely related to this are the ‘cognitive’ and ’emotional’ processes in the brain that are responsible for what ‘cognitive images are created in the mind’ with which a brain ‘interprets’ ‘itself’ and ‘everything else’.
How to describe the Human Being?
The description of the human cell galaxy as ‘subsystems’ with their own ‘input’ and ‘output’ and and including ‘inner processes’ – here simply called the ‘system function’ – can appear ‘simple’ at first sight, ‘normal’, or something else. We enter with this question the fundamental question, how we can describe the human cell galaxy – i.e. ‘ourselves’! – at all and furthermore maybe how we ‘should’ describe it: are there any criteria on the basis of which we should prefer a ‘certain way of description’?
In the case of the description of ‘nature’, of the ‘real world’, we may still be able to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘nature’ (which, however, will later come out as a fallacy)), it becomes somewhat more difficult with the ‘description of ourselves’. If one wants to describe something, one needs certain conditions to be able to make a description. But what are these conditions if we want to describe ourselves? Doesn’t here the famous ‘cat bite into its own tail’?
In ‘normal everyday life’ [8] typical forms with which we describe are e.g. ‘pictures’, ‘photographs’, ‘videos’, ‘music’, ‘body movements’ and others, but above all linguistic expressions (spoken, written; everyday language, technical language; …).
Let’s stay for a moment with ‘everyday language (German, English, Italian, …).
As children we are born into a certain, already existing world with a respective ‘everyday life’ distinctive for each human person. At least one language is spoken in such an environment. If the parents are bilingual even two languages in parallel. If the environment is different from the language of the parents, then perhaps even three languages. And today, where also the environment becomes more and more ‘multi-cultural’, maybe even more than three languages are practiced.
No matter how many languages occur simultaneously for a person, each language has its own ‘rules’, its own ‘pronunciation’, its own ‘contextual reference’, its own ‘meanings’. These contexts can change; the language itself can change. And if someone grows up with not just one language, but more than one, then ‘in the person’, in the ‘speaker-listener’, there can naturally be multiple interactions between the different languages. Since this happens today in many places at the same time with more and more people, there are still hardly sufficient research results available that adequately describe this diversity in its specifics.
So, if we want to describe ‘ourselves’ as ‘part of the real world’, we should first of all accept and ‘consciously assume’ that we do not start at ‘point zero’ at the moment of describing, not as a ‘blank sheet’, but as a biological system which has a more or less long ‘learning process’ behind it. Thereby, the word ‘learning process’ as part of the language the author uses, is not a ‘neutral set of letters’, but likewise a ‘word’ of his language, which he shares with many other speakers of ‘German’. One must assume that each ‘speaker of German’ associates his own ‘individual conceptions’ with the word ‘learning process’. And also this word ‘conception’ is such a word, which as part of the spoken (and written) language normally does not come along ‘meaning-free’. In short, as soon as we speak, as soon as we link words in larger units to statements, we activate a set of ‘knowledge and skills’ that are somehow ‘present in us’, that we use ‘automatically’, and whose use is normally largely ‘unconscious’.”[9],[10]
When I, as the author of this text, now write down statements in the German language, I let myself be carried by a ‘wave of language usage’, so to speak, whose exact nature and effectiveness I cannot fully grasp at the moment of use (and this is the case for every language user). I can, however, when I have expressed myself, look more consciously at what has been expressed, and then — perhaps — see clearer whether and how I can place it in contexts known to me. Since also the ‘known to me’ is largely ‘unconscious’ and passes from ‘unconscious knowledge’ into ‘conscious’ knowledge, the task of a ‘clarification of speaking’ and the ‘meaning’ connected with it is always only fragmentarily, partially possible. The ‘conscious eye of knowledge’ is therefore perhaps comparable to a ‘shining knowledge bubble’ in the black sea of ‘unconscious knowledge’, which seems to be close to ‘not-knowing’ but it isn’t ‘not-knowing’: ‘unconscious knowledge’ is ‘inside the brain ‘real knowledge’, which ‘works’.
… to be continued …
COMMENTS
wkp := Wikipedia
[1] In microbiology as a part of evolutionary biology, one has recognized rudimentarily how the individual cells during the ‘growth process’ ‘communicate’ possible cooperations with other cells via chemical substances, which are ‘controlled’ by their respective individual ‘genetic program’. These processes can very well be described as ‘exchange of signals’, where these ‘signals’ do not occur in isolation, but are ‘related’ by the genetic program to other chemical substances and process steps. Through this ‘relating’, the chemical signal carriers, isolated in themselves, are embedded in a ‘space of meanings’ from which they find an ‘assignment’. This overall process fulfills all requirements of a ‘communication’. In this respect, it seems justified to speak of an ‘agreement’ between the individual cells, an ‘understanding’ about whether and how they want to ‘cooperate’ with each other.
[2] When thinking of complex connections between cells, one may first think of the cells in the brain (‘neurons’), certain types of which may have as many as 1000 dendrites (:= these are projections on an ‘axon’ and an axon is the ‘output’ on a neuron), each dendrite housing multiple synapses.[3] Since each synapse can be the endpoint of a connection to another synapse, it suggests that a complex network of the order of trillions (10^12) connections may exist here in a brain. In addition, there is also the system of blood vessels that run through the entire body and supply the approximately 36 trillion (10^12) body cells with various chemical substances.
[3] wkp [EN], Neuron, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron, section ‚Connectivity‘, citation: „The human brain has some 8.6 x 1010 (eighty six billion neurons. Each neuron has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 1015 synapses (quadrillion). This number declines with age, stabilizing by adulthood. Estimates vary for an adult, ranging from 1014 to 5 x 1014 synapses (100 to 500 trillion).”
[4] Robert F.Schmidt, Gerhard Thews (Eds.), 1995, Physiologie des Menschen, 25th edition, Springer
[6] Famously, the example of the ‘auto-pilot’ on an airplane, software that can ‘steer’ the entire plane without human intervention.
[7] Thus, the position of the joints is continuously sent to the brain and, in the case of a ‘directed movement’, the set of current joint positions is used to trigger an ‘appropriate movement’ by sending appropriate signals ‘from the brain to the muscles’.
[8] Of course, also a certain fiction, because everyone ultimately experiences ‘his everyday life’ to a certain degree, which only partially overlaps with the ‘everyday life of another’.
[9] When children in school are confronted for the first time with the concept of a ‘grammar’, with ‘grammatical rules’, they will not understand what that is. Using concrete examples of language, they will be able to ‘link’ one or another ‘grammatical expression’ with linguistic phenomena, but they will not really understand the concept of grammar. This is due to the fact that the entire processes that take place in the ‘inside of a human being’ have been researched only in a very rudimentary way until today. It is in no way sufficient for the formulation of a grammar close to everyday life.
[10] Karl Erich Heidoplh, Walter Flämig, Wolfgang Motsch (ed.), (1980), Grundzüge einer Deutschen Grammatik, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. Note: Probably the most systematized grammar of German to date, compiled by a German authors’ collective (at that time still the eastern part of Germany called ‘German Democratic Republic’ (GDR)). Precisely because the approach was very systematic, the authors could clearly see that grammar as a description of ‘regular forms’ reaches its limits where the ‘meaning’ of expressions comes into play. Since ‘meaning’ describes a state of affairs that takes place in the ‘inside of the human being’ (of course in intensive interaction with interactions of the body with the environment), a comprehensive objective description of the factor ‘meaning’ in interaction with the forms is always only partially possible.
The ‘inside’ of the ‘outside’. Basic Building Blocks
Starting point are the preceding thoughts about a minimal scenario for a common action of people.
In that scenario we meet each other as humans with our bodies, which we experience as part of a ‘body world’.
The rich manifestations of these human bodies linked to the subjective experience of each individual point to a corresponding ‘diversity behind the surface’ of the bodies. In everyday life we also like to talk about our ‘inside’, about ‘the inside’ of a human being. But, what is this ‘inside’?
The history of medicine is also a history of the exploration of the ‘inside’ of the body starting from the ‘surface’. This history is complemented by the history of biology, which has expanded the view from the present into more and more of the past, into the ‘origin of species’, into the structure of living things, and at some point it was clear that the smallest units of a ‘biological living being’ are to be found in the ‘biological cells’.[5] This opens up the view of an incomprehensible large space of interacting cells, which makes talking about an ‘inside’ difficult.
FIGURE 1. The fertilized egg cell of a human being multiplies in a self-organized growth process in the form of somatic cells, forming a ‘body’, which are colonized by microbes (bacteria) on the surface as well as inside.[1] An important part of the somatic cells is formed by the brain, which consists of approximately equal parts of neuronal cells and non-neuronal cells.[2]
If one takes the ‘cell’ as the smallest biological unit [3], then one can make a direct connection between a single fertilized human egg cell up to those inconceivable quantities of cells that emerge and organize themselves in the course of a growth process (ultimately over the entire lifetime).(See Fig. 1) To date, this complex process has only been partially researched, and even all the quantitative data are so far still only estimates based on the known factors.
If we compare the number of body cells together with the bacteria in the body (about 137 x 10^12) with the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way [4] then, when we assume 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, we come to the conclusion that the number of cells in a human body together with the internal bacteria is approximately equal to the number of 457 galaxies in the format of the Milky Way. This indicates the huge dimension of only one human body.
Through our cells, which make up our bodies, we as humans are connected to all other living beings. While we each live in a particular present, our cells point back to an incredible history of some 3.5 billion years, during which biological cells have traveled a path that has led from single-cell organisms to increasingly complex cellular structures that have resulted in billions of different life forms throughout history. This history is studied by ‘paleontology’ in conjunction with many other sciences.[6]
So when we talk about the ‘inside’ of a body, we are talking about a ‘galaxy of cells’ which are in a living exchange with each other ‘around the clock’. We ourselves with our ‘consciousness’ do notice almost ‘nothing’ from all this. All this happens ‘without our conscious action’. The ‘sound’ of 457 galaxies of cells with altogether about 127 trillion (10^12) single cells as actors nobody would be able to ‘process’ it consciously.
Knowing this, is it not possible that we can say a little bit more about this ‘biological-galactic inside’ of our body?
For a direct continuation see HERE (https://www.uffmm.org/2023/01/13/oksimo-r-start-the-inside-of-the-outside-part-2/)
Comments
wkp := wikipedia
[1] Gerd Doeben-Henisch,(2015), DIE HERRSCHER DER WELT: MIKROBEN – BESPRECHUNG DES BUCHES VON B.KEGEL – Teil 1 (THE MAKERS OF THE WORLD: MICROBES – DISCUSSION OF THE BOOK BY B.KEGEL – Part 1), URL: https://www.cognitiveagent.org/2015/12/06/die-herrscher-der-welt-mikroben-besprechung-des-buches-von-b-kegel-teil-1/
[2] wkp [EN], Human Brain, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain
[4] Maggie Masetti,(2015), How many stars in the milky way? NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, blueshift, 2015. https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2015/07/22/how- many-stars-in-the-milky-way.
[5] Volker Storch, Ulrich Welsch, and Michael Wink, editors. Evolutionsbiologie (Evolutionary Biology). Springer-Verlag, Berlin – Heidelberg, 3 edition, 2013.
FIGURE 1: Elements for a minimal scenario. Different ‘actors’ are in a common real environment. They have a ‘sensory perception’ of this environment. They can change parts of their body surface in such a way that ‘movements’ arise. Each actor has ’emotions’ and has ‘images in his head’. They have a ‘common language’.
If you want to play a ‘game’ together, then you usually need a ‘starting position’ with which you begin. In addition different ‘materials’, which are in the starting position or which one can ‘bring in’ or ‘take out’. You need ‘players’ who share this situation. One needs a ‘language’ to be able to communicate. One needs ‘rules of the game’ (= pictures in the head), which are to be ‘considered’ while playing. One needs to be able to perform different ‘game actions’ (= movements), and one experiences in the game that every fellow player shows very different emotions that influence him when acting.
In real everyday life this is not different. One can perhaps say that ‘games’ represent idealized everyday situations’; in principle, everything is there, only simpler, rather complete.
In real everyday life, in principle, almost everything can change at any time. Sometimes in the short term, sometimes in the long term. Actors can come and go, get sick or old. The weather goes crazy; there are seasons. Houses, roads and bridges are built or torn down. Plants grow and disappear. People rejoice, laugh, get sad, cry, scream, go crazy.
Without the ‘sensual perception’ we human actors would know nothing of the ‘world out there’, of the ‘body world’ in which we find our own body. People who are blind, or deaf, who have no tactile sensations, who cannot smell … for them the world is dim, distant, always little tangible.
Whatever we perceive, all kinds of ’emotions’ constantly exist within us; a vast spectrum of different ‘states of excitement’ that ‘fill’ us, that we perceive as rather ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’; they come and go without our being able to control them completely. And yet they seem to follow fixed laws …
The human body with its different body parts, but also its surface, allows changes in the form of movements. These partly have an effect on the own body, on the own sensory perception, but partly these movements also cause changes in the environment, leave traces on the body of another human actor. Over the years, children complete a huge movement program, which does not stop in adulthood, which does not have to stop.
Children learn to ‘speak’ very early, just like that, alone, but then increasingly also in community. This speaking differentiates itself more and more in the course of the years in vocabulary, expression, emphasis, situation reference …
One and the same situation different people often describe it very differently! One sees the fruit, the other the flowers, still another the car, the wall, other people, insects …. This indicates that we do not keep the surrounding world 1-to-1 in us, but only parts of it, depending on current ‘interests’. The ‘world inside us’ is therefore usually only a ‘fragment’ of the real world around us, a world that has been ‘simplified’, which we can partially ‘remember’ again mostly, not always. And we also know that ‘memories’ can change ‘in us’. The ‘remembered world’ can thus have an ‘existence of its own’ at some point: The ‘pictures in our head’ are real for us, they represent ‘the world’ for us, and we don’t necessarily realize that these ‘pictures in our head’ don’t ‘represent’ the real world….
So it is possible – and perhaps even the ‘normal case’ – that people carry around ‘images in their heads’ that are more or less ‘false’; that are additionally linked to different ’emotions’ that may be ‘misleading’; that we use ‘ways of talking’ that make the whole thing to appear to be ‘true’, which can lead to ‘actions’ that are guided by these unrealistic presuppositions.”[1]
These considerations draw the picture of a – strongly simplified – minimal scenario, however only the ‘surface’. As one can already see in a hint, behind the ‘surface phenomena’ there is an ‘inner world’ in the human actors; of course also in the – so far not mentioned – other ‘biological actors’, which populate this planet with us. Yes, even in the ‘a-biological’ material of our everyday life: stones, metals, plastics, dead wood, … there is an ‘inner life’.
[1] I run out into the waterless mudflats and am suddenly surprised by the receding water. I don’t make it to the beach. Or: I urgently have to go to a meeting and rush to my bicycle, but it’s not there because a friend has just ‘borrowed’ it. Or: We eat in a restaurant in a good mood, and the night brings nausea and vomiting to many; the food was spoiled. Or: I dream of a lot of money, get involved with a financial advisor, give him money, and the whole project turns out to be a ‘junk project’. Or: I cultivate my field, use a certain seed. The plants start growing, and then there are numerous storms that leave little of the plants usable. Or: Someone else tells me a story about evil people who want to rule the world (he says he read it), and because of that he now has to fight his own government. …. Everyone knows long lists of such experiences.
This post is part of the uffmm.org blog and has no direct predecessor, but the subject is thematically related to the larger topic of ’empirical theory’.
CONTENT
This text is devoted to Günter Wagner, who paved the way for many achievements in Research, Technology and Industry, and thereby for Society too. Born in 1934 his life is interwoven with many important events in history and his personal knowledge about these events is striking. The center of his experience and knowledge is mass spectrometry and the more specialized perspective of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry [1,2]. Günter Wagner is dealing with this topic from many sides: theoretical foundations, technological realizations, and different applications in industry, accompanied with many new improvements in the applied technologies.
The author of this text is a ‘layman’ in the field of mass spectrometry. His experience is centered around the topic of Philosophy of science, Cognitive Sciences as well as Computer Science. Besides the many interesting points in the knowledge and work of Günter Wagner the author of this text is focusing on the ‘role’ of mass spectrometry in the ‘measurement’ of real world objects and properties as starting point for possible theories.
With this setting the encounter with Günter Wagner can be understood as an ‘experiment in trans-disciplinary understanding’ of one field — mass spectrometry — from the point of another field — Philosophy of Science. Such an approach is not a simple undertaking. It needed about 30 years of personal knowledge of each other for this idea to take shape. What will be the outcome is at the time of this writing ‘open’.
The ‘Man-in-the-Middle’ (Last Change: 29.December 2022) What measurement means to theory-building by using mass spectroscopy.
…
COMMENTS
wkp := wikipedia
[1] Mass Spectrometry in wkp [EN] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry (Last access: 28.Dec 2022)
[2] Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry in wkp [EN] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mass_spectrometry (Last access: 28.Dec 2022)
This text is about using an ‘explicit time structure’ in addition to the ‘implicit time structure’ when describing a process in everyday life. An ‘implicit’ description of time is given when one arranges different events in the narrative one after the other without explicitly stating time (Peter is standing in front of the door. He opens the door and goes in.) An ‘explicit’ time statement uses such expressions as agreed ‘time markers’ (It is early in the morning. Peter wakes up. After 15 minutes he goes to the bathroom. At 12:00h he has to be at the store….).
A Daily Routine
Time of Natur – Machine Time
In the previous example, a process is described (going out to eat), which can be understood as ‘part of a day’: A ‘day’ is usually understood as the ‘time’ between getting up in the ‘morning’ and ‘going to bed’ in the ‘evening’, where ‘evening’ is fuzzy; for many, the time to ‘go to bed’ extends to ‘midnight’ or even later. While the activities ‘getting up’ and ‘going to bed’ as such have a reasonably concrete meaning, it is a bit more difficult with ‘morning’ and ‘evening’. Originally ‘morning’ was the time when the ‘sun rises’ and ‘evening’ when the ‘sun sets’ (‘time caused by nature’). With the progress of ‘urbanization’ and the ‘mechanization’ of the living world, a stronger and stronger uncoupling of the daily routine from ‘periodic natural events’ (sun, moon, …) takes place and simultaneously a stronger and stronger coupling to ‘artificial environments’, with ‘time machines’ (clocks) as ingredients. [1] The ‘periodic signals’ of these time machines (‘machine time’) then serve more and more as a substitute for natural periodic processes. My ‘morning’ is then perhaps no longer the ‘sunrise’ but the ‘ringing of my alarm clock’ at e.g. 7:00h. The ‘lunch time’ is then no longer the highest sun position but e.g. 12:30h to 13:30h as the ‘official lunch break’ of the respective institution. etc.
A Timely-Structured Day
If you want to work with explicit time specifications in an oksimo.R text, then these must occur as a ‘property of a situation’. A simple example:
Gerd is sitting in his office. It is 12:30h. Gerd is hungry.
One could then continue with e.g.:
Gerd decides to go to the Greek restaurant around the corner. Gerd goes to the Greek. It is 12:40h when he leaves his office.
In this way, one can let a clock run the whole day until the time when Gerd goes to sleep.
It is 23:35h. Gerd falls asleep. At 7:00h the alarm clock rings.
Let’s assume the simple case that the daily routine is largely regulated by ‘fixed points’. Then one could describe with few rules any number of daily routines one after the other.
A first demo example
Let’s assume the following simple daily routine [2]:
Morning, waking up
Leaving the apartment
Morning, office
Noon, snack
Afternoon, office
End of work
Evening errands
Late evening free time
Sleeping at night
ACTUAL description
A baseline situation could start at any point in time, e.g. at the end of work:
ACTUAL DESCRIPTION (end of work)
Name: end-of-work1 It is the end of work. Gerd leaves the office.
GOAL description(s)
The actor can have many goals at the same time, e.g.:
GOAL DESCRIPTION(s) [3].
GOAL 1 (Shopping)
Name: g-shopping1
It is the end of work. Gerd has made his purchases.
GOAL 2
It is late in the evening. Gerd has been playing music.
GOAL 3
It is after 23:00h. Gerd has gone to sleep.
Rules of change
Now you have to think about which change rules – based on the ACTUAL description – can be used to achieve the various goals.
… for GOAL 1
To achieve GOAL 1, one could perhaps adopt the following change rule(s):
CR Purchasing
IF
It is the end of work. Gerd leaves the office.
THEN
Added: Gerd goes to the store around the corner.
Away: Gerd leaves the office.
A change rule in the oksimo.R format:
Rule: cr-shop1 Conditions: It is the end of work. Gerd leaves the office. Positive Effects: Gerd goes to the store around the corner.
Negative Effects: Gerd leaves the office.
Rule name: vr-ladencr-shop2 Conditions: It is the end of work. Gerd goes to the store around the corner. Positive Effects: Gerd is in the store Gerd picks up everything he needs. Gerd goes to the cash register and pays. Gerd has made his purchases.
Negative Effects: Gerd goes to the store around the corner.
Unify the change rules so far in a rules document:
rd-shopping1
cr-shop1 cr-shop2
A first partial Simulation
name of stored simulation: shopping1-sim1
Your vision:
Gerd has made his purchases.,It is the end of work.
Initial states:
It is the end of work.,Gerd leaves the office.
Round 1
Current states: Gerd goes to the store around the corner.,It is the end of work.
Current visions: Gerd has made his purchases.,It is the end of work.
Current values:
50.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
It is the end of work.,
Round 2
Current states: Gerd has made his purchases.,Gerd picks up everything he needs.,Gerd goes to the cash register and pays.,Gerd is in the store,It is the end of work.
Current visions: Gerd has made his purchases.,It is the end of work.
Current values:
100.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
Gerd has made his purchases.,It is the end of work.,
Differentiation of the concept ‘ACTUAL description’.
It can be seen from the ACTUAL description of round 2 that in this ACTUAL description actually ‘several state descriptions’ were summarized. The individual statements {Gerd goes to the cash register and pays, Gerd collects everything he needs, It is the end of work, Gerd is in the store} are such that each describes an ACTUAL situation that can stand alone and which in everyday life ‘presuppose’ a certain sequence:
It is the end of work.
Gerd is in the store.
Gerd picks up everything he needs.
Gerd goes to the cash register and pays.
This raises the fundamental question of whether such a ‘summary’ of individual ACTUAL descriptions still constitutes an ACTUAL description that meets the following requirements: (i) A set of properties that are unchanged within a time interval. (ii) All actors involved in the situation can confirm the statements. If one introduces the distinction between ‘Elementary ACTUAL Descriptions’ and ‘Compound ACTUAL Descriptions’, then one could agree:
Def: An ‘elementary ACTUAL description’ is an ACTUAL description.
Def: A ‘composite ACTUAL description’ represents a ‘collection’ of elementary ACTUAL descriptions’.
Truth criterion: The parties involved in a common situation must decide whether they accept the elementary/composite IS descriptions.
… !! Not yet finished !! …
COMMENTS
[1] To work as part of a larger society all the individual time machines have to be ‘coordinated’ such that every single time machine’ shows every moment the same ‘time marker’.
[2] On the one hand, this daily routine is extremely simple, but at the same time, in its simplicity, it describes a daily routine that looks completely different for many other people. It would certainly be interesting to see a daily routine as a ‘building block’ of an everyday life process, by which for the acting actor is determined to a large extent what he/she/x ‘experiences’, what he/she/x ‘does’, which social and societal interactions he/she/x experiences, and so on.
[3] Normally we formulate goal descriptions as wishes, in a form in which we express what we positively want without that it having already occurred: “I want to go shopping later”, “I want to play music after shopping”, “I will go to bed after 23:00h at the latest”. In the context of an oksimo.R text you have to formulate wishes in a way that describes the ‘result of the wish’, e.g. instead of “I want to go shopping later” you have to write: “I went shopping” or instead of “I want to make music after shopping” you have to write “I made music after shopping”, etc. The ‘logic’ behind this is that an oksimo.R text is a ‘theory’ that refers to an ACTUAL situation (e.g.: “It’s the end of work. Gerd is leaving the office,”), which then applies possible ‘change rules’ to an ACTUAL situation, and by applying change rules to an ACTUAL situation, a ‘new ACTUAL situation’ then arises. And then it can happen that after a certain sequence of ACTUAL situations an ACTUAL situation occurs in which the original desire to shop has taken place, i.e. in the ACTUAL situation there can then be the property “Gerd has shopped”. If there is then a TARGET description that says “Gerd has shopped”, then the system can immediately determine that this goal has been achieved. If, however, the TARGET description would have the format “Gerd wants to shop”, then this goal could never be achieved, because it is not clear when it would then be fulfilled.
In the example (part 1+2) already a little bit of the peculiarities of an ‘oksimo.R text’ becomes visible. These refer to aspects of space and time in our linguistic communication with texts. First comments on this here. More will follow later in the concluding overall theoretical presentation.
World, Space, Time
In our everyday life we presuppose – normally – the existence of a body world, to which also our own body belongs. We know of this — for the brain external — body world only something by the sense organs of our body and insofar as our brain ‘processes’ these signals of the sense organs – in the context of many other signals from the own body -, to different internal event structures. Perceptions of so-called ‘objects’ like cups, chairs, tables, cars, also animals and other people, are therefore ‘processed products’; we can never directly perceive the ‘triggering things of the external body world’ itself. Our brain creates a ‘virtual world’ in our head, but this is for us the ‘primary real world’. As a child one learns laboriously to distinguish between ‘mere imaginations (in our head)’ and such imaginations which also ‘correspond’ with immediate sensual perception and additionally link up with many kinds of ‘concrete (= sensual)’ properties. If a child is looking for his toy teddy bear in the ‘red box’ and it is not there, then this is one of the many experiences on the subject that the ‘imagination in the head’ should not automatically be equated with a ‘real factual situation’.
If our brain in closest cooperation with our body continuously generates a ‘virtual world’ of the ‘assumed external real world’, then it is already an interesting question, which of the many properties of the real world (which we know only on the basis of ‘experiences’ and ‘scientific reconstructions’), can be found in the virtual models of the brain? The question becomes even more exciting if we look at ‘linguistic communication between humans’: it is one thing that our brain ‘fills’ us with virtual constructs (ideas), it is quite another question which of these ideas can be communicated between brains (humans) by means of language.
The ‘space-time problem’ has been discussed by many philosophers and scientists. One of the most prominent representatives, who strongly influenced the discussion in European thinking at the beginning, is surely Immanuel Kant, who tried to work out with his book “Critique of Pure Reason” in 1781 (1787 2nd edition) that the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘time’ are laid out in our human thinking in such a way that we always ‘imagine’ and ‘think’ objective things as ‘part of a space’; he assumed the same for the idea of time. More precise analyses of this point of view of his are difficult for many reasons. For the following considerations one can be ‘sensitized’ by Kant’s position to the effect that in our ‘normal perception and thinking’ as well as then especially in our linguistic communication we have to reckon with properties which have to do with ideas of space and time.
oksimo.R Text as a ‘Set’
If we want to pursue the question whether and how ‘notions of space and time’ make themselves felt within normal linguistic communication, it is perhaps advisable to start with the format of oksimo.R texts, since these give the writer and reader ‘less freedom’ than a ‘normal’ English text.[1] The format of oksimo.R texts can be described relatively easily.
The peculiarity of oksimo.R texts can be described relatively simply:
An oksimo.R text is a ‘set’ (‘collection’) of ‘linguistic expressions’ of a ‘normal language’ (e.g. German, English, Russian, Spanish, …).
As a ‘part of the set text’ each linguistic expression is an ‘element’ of the set text.
The ‘order’ of these elements in the text does not follow a certain structure. This means that the ‘sequence’ of elements in the written form has no meaning of its own. As in a usual set of the mathematical concept of a set, the elements can be ‘regrouped’ among themselves without ‘changing’ an oksimo.R text.
The elements of a ‘set oksimo.R Text’ have as such no specific meaning. A ‘meaning’ comes to the elements of an oksimo.R text only if the writer-readers of oksimo.R texts know the language of these elements (e.g. English) and assign ‘agreed meanings’ to the elements by virtue of their language competence. However, this meaning exists exclusively ‘in the minds’ of the writer-readers, not explicitly in the text itself.
With these first observations about the peculiarity of oksimo.R texts, one can make a first comparison to texts of a normal language (here: English).
Normal Text, not a mere Set
If we look at the text of a normal language (here: English), then we link the written expressions ‘automatically’ (spontaneously, …) with different ‘(linguistically induced) meanings’ while reading. These ‘linked meanings’ are on the one hand strongly dependent on the ‘individual learning history’ with specific ‘individual preconditions’, but on the other hand also on the ‘cultural patterns of the social environment’, within which a person acquires/ builds up/ develops his language competence.
While the linguistic expressions as such do not induce any particular ‘order’, the ‘switched on’ linguistic meaning structures can, however, articulate different ‘relations’ through the factual structures contained in them with their learned properties, which mutually refer to each other. Thus, for example, when speaking of a ‘cup on a table’, this implies a ‘spatial structure’ with a ‘stands-on’ or ‘is-under’ relation. Moreover, the writer-reader of a text ‘knows’ that normally a cup is not on a table, but only when someone has explicitly put the cup there. A sequence of expressions like ‘Gerd puts the cup on the table. When Peter comes in he sees that there is a cup on the table’ then appears to a reader as ‘normal/ usual/ accustomed’. But if the text would say ‘When Peter comes in, he sees that there is a cup on the table. Gerd puts the cup on the table’, then a normal reader would stop and ask himself what the text wants to say: The cup is on the table and only then it is put on the table?
This simple example demonstrates besides an ‘implicit spatial structure’ also an ‘implicit temporal structure: In everyday experience, embedded in an external body world, it is normal that properties – and thus a whole situation – can change. However, these changes do not happen (! ) in the sensory perception (the present as such is ‘absolute’), but are only revealed in the ‘downstream processing’ by the brain, which is able to ‘store’ partial aspects of a current sensory perception in such a way (a highly complex neuronal process), that it can ‘remember’ these ‘stored structures’ again (also a highly complex neuronal process) and additionally ‘compares’ them with ‘other memory contents’ in such a way (also a highly complex neuronal process) that our brain can thereby reconstruct a ‘sequence’ as well as ‘identify’ possible ‘changes between single elements of the sequence’. Because of this highly complex mechanism the brain can break up/ overcome the ‘absoluteness of the present’ by ‘remembering and comparing’.
A ‘normal text’ has many more special properties. Here, first of all, it is only important to see that it is the dimension of ‘linguistic meaning’ localized ‘in’ a human writer-reader, through which a set of linguistic expressions can induce a complex ‘network of properties’ that have their ‘own linguistically induced logic’.
Linguistic Communication
Again, the whole spectrum of possible properties of ‘linguistic communication’ shall not be described here – a ‘sea’ of articles and books would could to be cited here – but only a few aspects shall be addressed which suggest themselves from the previous considerations on texts.
If the previous ‘working hypothesis on linguistic meaning’ is correct, then written linguistic expressions have the function to enable ‘between two brains’ a a ‘medium’ suitable to make so-called ‘signs’ out of the ‘linguistic expressions’. [2] A sign is a sensually perceptible material that can be related by ‘sign users’ to an ‘agreed space of sign meanings’. These agreed sign meanings are localized as such ‘in the head’ of the respective sign users, but they have the peculiarity that the different sign users have ‘learned’ by common ‘training’ which ‘sensuously perceptible realities of the external body world’ are to be linked with certain sign (material). If such a ‘coordination’ of sign(material) and sign-meaning succeeds (all children of this world practice this form of training in spontaneous language learning), a single sign-user can ‘hint’ at certain ‘elements of his meaning-space’ by practicing certain sign-connections to another trained sign-user. Through a ‘back and forth’ of statements, questions, possibly also interpretative gestures in a real situation, a certain ‘understanding’ can then – usually – be established. The more complex the circumstances are, the further away one is from a concrete situation, the more difficult it becomes to ‘convey’ what is meant sufficiently clearly.
What does all this mean in concrete terms?
For this we look at further examples realized with oksimo.R texts.
COMMENTS
[1] Even in the area of ‘normal’ English texts, there is a great variety of texts that make very special demands on ‘filling in’.
[2] There are numerous disciplines in academia that deal more or less ‘generally’ with properties of ‘normal’ languages and communication with normal languages. The discipline that actually does this most ‘generally’, ‘semiotics’, still leads a rather ‘shadowy existence’ worldwide next to the ‘established’ other disciplines. Here, too, there exists a myriad of articles and books on the subject.
Recommended further Reading
It is recommended to continue reading from here with the section about a daily routine HERE.
In Part 1, the beginning of a simple example was presented, where an actor (here: ‘Gerd’) is sitting in his office, feels hungry, and imagines that he does not want to be hungry. In part 1, he decides to leave his office and go out to eat. Embedded in the mini-theory of this example, several concepts are explained: text types (ACTUAL description, TARGET description, CHANGE description), rule application, oksimo.R software contextualization, theory testing, inference testing, goal fulfillment testing, starting a simulation, and logical inference.
In part 2, the mini-theory will be completed. The story ends with the actor Gerd not feeling hungry anymore (at least not for the moment :-)).
Continuation of the story
An oksimo.R theory can be understood simply as a ‘story’, a kind of ‘script’, although this story has all the properties of a full empirical theory (more on theory below).
The story so far is simply told:
Starting point (Scene 1): Gerd is sitting in his office.Gerd is hungry. Target: Gerd is not hungry.
Scene 2: Gerd leaves his office.Gerd is hungry. Target achievement so far: 0%.
The transition from Scene 1 to Scene 2 was only possible because a change rule was adopted which states that Scene 1 can be changed if the condition ‘Gerd is hungry’ holds. Since this is the case, the property ‘Gerd is sitting in his office’ was removed and the new property ‘Gerd is leaving his office’ was added.
For another continuation, a rule is missing at the moment. However, the only change rule so far can be reapplied over and over again, so that scene 2 is repeated any number of times (like a record player hitting a broken groove in the record, so that the record player repeats that track endlessly until we turn it off.)
This ‘repeatability’ can become a problem if you’re not careful. Here’s an example of unwanted repetition (which we ultimately don’t want!).
Unwanted repetition(s)
Since there is a Greek bistro ‘around the corner to the left’ where Gerd could eat a snack, we write down the following new change rule:
CHANGE Description 2:
IF:
Gerd is hungry.
THEN:
Add as a property to the ACTUAL situation: Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Remove as a property from the ACTUAL situation: – Nothing -.
APPLICATION of the change description:
Since the condition ‘Gerd is hungry.’ is met, the rule could be applied and we would get the following result with this rule:
THEN:
NEW ACTUAL situation (with rule 2):
Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner. Gerd is hungry.
However, there is still rule 1, which does not disappear (as an option, however, conceivable). This rule has the same condition as rule 2 and can therefore also be applied. It would produce the following result:
NEW ACTUAL situation (with rule 1):
Gerd leaves his office. Gerd is hungry.
A ‘union’ of the continuation according to rule 1 and the continuation according to rule 2 leads to the following result:
Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner. Gerd is hungry. Gerd leaves his office.
With the oksimo.R software (level 2) this would look like this:
Entering a Change Rule
Rule:Food1-Location1 Conditions: Gerd is hungry. Positive Effects: Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Negative Effects: — Nothing —
Starting a New Simulation
With code number one you can start a new simulation. We need the following ‘ingredients’:
Your vision:
Gerd is not hungry.
Initial states:
Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is sitting in his office.
Round 1
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd leaves his office.,Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 2
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd leaves his office.,Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Already after two simulation cycles one recognizes that everything repeats itself. And with knowledge of the change rules one knows that both are ‘activated’ again and again as long as their condition is fulfilled. In the concrete example this is the case. This points to a general structure of rule-driven changes with situational reference.
On the meta-logic of situational change rules
At this point it should be remembered again that an ACTUAL description is nothing more than a ‘set of linguistic expressions’ of the respective language chosen. Here the English language is used. In the original source of the oksimo.org blog the German language is used. Any other language is also possible.
However, from the point of view of the respective actor working with such IS-descriptions, every linguistic expression used in the space of his ‘linguistic understanding’ has additionally a ‘special meaning’, which can partially be ‘correlate’ with ‘properties of the external body world’ in a ‘specific way’. So, if someone reads the expression ‘Gerd’, he will mostly associate with it the idea that it is the ‘name of an individual’. And when one reads the linguistic expression ‘… sitting in his office’, one will usually think of a ‘room in a building’. Both notions ‘name of an individual’ as well as ‘room’ in a building’ have – normally – the property that one can ‘relate’ to them concrete ‘objects of the external body world’ via ‘individual perception’. This can happen in many ways, e.g. in which someone else says to me “Look (and he points to a person), this is Gerd”, or I come into the room 204 in building 1 of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and someone says to me “Look, this is Gerd’s office”. In both cases, a concrete perception can then connect with an ‘imagined conception’ in such a way that the inherently ‘abstract’ conception of an individual person in a room connects (associates) with a bundle of sensually perceived properties.
With this background knowledge one can then understand why an IS-description as a set of linguistic expressions has ‘two faces’: (i) At first sight there are only a set of linguistic expressions without any recognizable further property, and (ii) , starting from the linguistic expressions, mediated by the linguistic meaning knowledge of a speaker-hearer of the respective language, a set of meanings appears, which in the case of an IS-description must by agreement all have at least one concrete reference to the external body world. Roughly, one can therefore say at this point that every linguistic expression of a normal language can be linked (associated) with a ‘property’ of the external body world. In this second sense, an ACTUAL description then represents not only a ‘set of linguistic expressions’ but at the same time also (language comprehension in the actor presupposed) a ‘set of body-world properties’. The removal of a linguistic expression then means at the same time the removal of a property, and the addition of a linguistic expression the addition of a property.
Due to this generally assumed ‘linguistic dimension of meaning’ in each involved actor, ACTUAL descriptions thus potentially represent a connection between the virtual images in the brain of an actor to possible sensually perceptible correlates of an external body world linked to it, for which a ‘self-driven dynamic’ is assumed. By this is meant that the world of our sensual perception (linked with our memory!), apparently constantly ‘partially changes’ and simultaneous ‘partial stays constant’. The ‘extension’ of the ‘quantity of the properties of the external body world’ seems to be almost ‘infinite’ and at the same time also the possible extent of the changes.
Against this background (largely always hypothetical), any ACTUAL description always appears as a ‘very small selection’ of this body world property set and a concrete ACTUAL description forms a kind of ‘snapshot’ of a continuously dynamic event which can only be ‘traced’ in a highly simplified way via the explicitly formulated rules of change. In particular, there is a problem of how to keep an ACTUAL description ‘up to date’ when the external body world is continuously changing due to its ‘inherent dynamics’ without any oksimo.R theory-builder actor having formulated a single rule of change. In other words, an ACTUAL description ‘becomes obsolete’ by itself if the ‘coupling’ of the ACTUAL description to the external body world is not ensured with ‘appropriate’ change rules. In order to be able to do this, one needs a ‘translator’ who continuously ‘maps’ the changes of the external body world into the linguistic meaning space of the actors and these then generate corresponding linguistic expression sets.
Further possible requirements for a process
After these meta-logical considerations about the function of ACTUAL descriptions in the interplay with an assumed external body world with its own inherent dynamics, some further aspects shall be brought up here, which are/can be significant for the creation of a ‘plan’.
So far the small oksimo.R theory – the current story – has the following format:
Initial state (Scene 0):
Gerd is hungry.Gerd is sitting in his office.
The vision:
Gerd is not hungry.
Scene 1:
Gerd is hungry.Gerd leaves his office.Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Success: 0.00 percent
Scene 2:
Gerd is hungry.Gerd leaves his office. Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner.
Success: 0.00 percent
The goal is still that the actor Gerd reaches his goal, the ‘Greek around the corner’, so that he can eat, for example, so that his feeling of hunger disappears.
For this, on the one hand, there must be rules that move the actor ‘through space’ to the ‘Greek around the corner’, on the other hand, the rules must be such that they cannot activate properties that should no longer occur in the process at all.
A rule like ‘Food-Location1′, which ensures that Gerd leaves his office, should not be applied again at a ‘later time’, similarly the rule ‘Food1-Decision1’, which describes the decision that Gerd wants to go to the ‘Greek around the corner’.
Since the activation of a change rule depends on the respective ‘condition’, this means that the condition for a rule should be such that the ‘triggering property’ is as ‘process-specific’ as possible. For the property ‘Gerd is hungry’, which is valid throughout the whole story until the actual eating, this is rather not true. Since all rules with this ‘non-specific trigger’ would be activated again and again, until at some point the eating produces the new property ‘Gerd is not hungry’.
This raises the question of how an ACTUAL description should be formatted such that, in addition to ‘long-living’ properties, there are also ‘short-living’ properties that can actually serve selectively as ‘triggers for rule activation’.
Time information is often not enough
In everyday life we are used to link events to a certain time, thereby assuming the existence of clocks that are synchronized worldwide; or the whole thing extended by a calendar with days, weeks, months and years. Such a tool can easily be introduced into an oksimo.R theory. But this solves the problem only partially. For many events one knows in advance neither ‘whether’ they occur at all, nor ‘when’ this will happen. In that case, the only possibility is to link a ‘subsequent event’ directly to a certain ‘preceding’ event: For example, it only makes sense to open the umbrella when it actually rains. There is usually no exact date when this event will occur.
Design perspectives: Goal and precision
What use are these considerations in the specific example where a ‘sequence’ is sought that leads to Gerd experiencing that his feeling of hunger disappears?
Two general considerations may be helpful here:
Thinking from the end (goal)
What ‘accuracy’ is required/desired?
If one knows a goal (which is not self-evident; often one first has to find out what a meaningful goal could be), then one can try to think ‘backwards’ from the goal by being guided by the question, ‘Which action A do I have to do to achieve result B?’. In the case of the desired goal state ‘Gerd is not hungry’, the usual experience would be to eat something ‘appropriate’, which leads to the ‘disappearance of the feeling of hunger’ (most of the time). Then you have to know what that ‘food’ might be, where to get it, and what you would have to do to get there (let’s ignore the case of someone just bringing something from home to eat). From such ‘backward-thinking’ a hypothetical sequence of actions can emerge, which can become the basis for a ‘plan’, which the actor will work out ‘in his head’ and then implement piecemeal by corresponding ‘real actions’.
The question of ‘accuracy of representation’ (of a story, of a theory) is not easy to answer. If engineers have to program a robot that is supposed to be able to perform certain operations, then this will normally require an almost merciless accuracy (apart from the case that there are already many ready-made modules that can take care of ‘small stuff’ (such as so-called ‘machine learning’ after successful training)). If it is the author of a crime novel or the author of a screenplay, then besides ‘factual aspects’ very much also the ‘effect on the readers / viewers’ must be considered. In the case of achieving a concrete goal in a concrete world, the potential success of the implementation of a description depends entirely on whether the concrete requirements of the world – here the everyday world – are completely satisfied. Of course, the reader/listener/user of a description also plays a major role: If we can assume that we are dealing with ‘experts’ who ‘know’ the process to be performed well, we can perhaps work with hints only; if we are dealing more with ‘newcomers’, then we must provide very detailed information. Sometimes a purely text-based description is not sufficient; more is then needed: pictures, videos or even your own training.
With a target and with ‘everyday’ accuracy
In the concrete case, there exists a target and ‘everyday experience’ is to be taken as a yardstick for accuracy; the latter, of course, leaves much ‘room for interpretation’.
Starting from the goal ‘thought backwards’ the following chain of actions seems plausible as a ‘hypothetical plan’:
Gerd is not hungry’ because:
‘Gerd is eating his stew’ because:
‘Gerd gets his order’ because:
‘Gerd is ordering a stew’ because:
‘Gerd is standing in front of the counter’ because:
‘Gerd enters the bistro’ because:
‘Gerd goes to the Greek around the corner’ because:
‘Gerd decides to go to the Greek around the corner’ because:
‘Gerd is hungry’, ‘Gerd is in his office’, because:
… there is a ‘cut’ here: arbitrary decision where to start the story/theory …
In fact, at any moment, there is not only one choice, and many things can happen during the ‘execution’ of this ‘plan’, which can result in a change of the plan. And, of course, there are many more possible aspects that could (or should) be relevant for the execution of this plan.
Constant and variable properties
As observed earlier, there are properties that are ‘rather constant’ and those that are ‘short-lived’. For example, in the context of the ‘plan’ above, the property ‘Gerd is hungry’ is constant from the beginning until the event ‘Gerd is not hungry’. Another property like ‘Gerd leaves his office’ is rather short-lived.
If we take the above hypothetical plan as a reference point, the following distribution of ‘rather constant’ and ‘rather short-lived’ properties suggests itself (left column ‘rather constant’, right column ‘rather short-lived’):
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd is in his office
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd decides …
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd walks …
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd enters …
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd stands in front of ..
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd orders …
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd gets …
Gerd is hungry.
Gerd eats …
Gerd is not hungry.
A simple strategy to avoid inappropriate repetitions would be the one in which the condition of a change rule refers to a ‘rather short-lived’ property that ‘automatically’ disappears with the implementation of a change rule.
Example (short form):
If: ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd is in his office’, Then: ‘Gerd decides to…’.
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd decides…’, Then add: ‘Gerd goes…’, Delete: ‘Gerd in office…’
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd goes…’, then add: ‘Gerd enters…’, delete: ‘Gerd goes…’
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd enters…’, then add: ‘Gerd stands in front of…’, delete: ‘Gerd enters…’.
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd stands in front of…’, then add: ‘Gerd orders …’, delete: ‘Gerd stands in front of …’
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd orders …’, then add: ‘Gerd gets …’, delete: ‘Gerd orders …’
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd gets …’, then add: ‘Gerd eats…’, delete: ‘Gerd gets’.
If ‘Gerd is hungry’ and ‘Gerd eats’, then add: ‘Gerd is not hungry’, delete: ‘Gerd eats…’.
This small example already shows very clearly the ‘double nature’ of our everyday reality: one is what we do ourselves, and the other is the ‘effects’ of our doing in the external body world. When someone intends to ‘walk’ and then actually walks, then one moves the body, which ‘automatically’ changes the position of the body in the external body world. Normally, one does not describe these ‘effects’ explicitly, because every person knows that this is so, based on everyday world experience. But if one wants to create a ‘description’ of the external body world with its properties, which is such that an ACTUAL description contains everything that is important for the description of a process, then one must also make some of the ‘implicit properties’ ‘explicit’ by including them in the description. Most important is the attention to ‘more ephemeral’ (temporary) properties, whose presence or absence is crucial for many actions.
Simulation extension
The extended simulation adopts the action outline from ‘backward thinking’ (see above). New change rules are formulated for this purpose.
The previous ACTUAL description is retained:
Eat1
Gerd is sitting in his office. Gerd is hungry.
The current TARGET description is retained:
Eat1-v1
Gerd is not hungry.
The following change rules are reformulated:
Eat1-Decision1
Rule name: Eat1-Decision1 Conditions: Gerd is hungry. Gerd is sitting in his office. Effects plus: Gerd goes to the Greek. Gerd decides to go to the Greek restaurant around the corner. Effects minus: Gerd is sitting in his office.
Eat1-Enter1
Rule: Eat1-Enter1 Conditions: Gerd goes to the Greek.
Positive Effects: Gerd is in the bistro. Gerd enters the bistro.
Negative Effects: Gerd goes to the Greek.
Gerd decides to go to the Greek restaurant around the corner.
Eat1-Stand-Before1
Rule: Eat1-Stand-Before1 Conditions: Gerd enters the bistro. Positive Effects: Gerd stands in front of the counter.
Negative Effects: Gerd enters the bistro.
Eat1-Order1
Rule: Eat1-Order1 Conditions: Gerd stands in front of the counter. Positive Effects: Gerd orders a stew.
Negative Effects: Gerd stands in front of the counter.
Eat1-Come1
Rule name: Eat1-Come1 Conditions: Gerd orders a stew. Effects plus: Gerd gets his stew. Effects minus: Gerd orders a stew.
Eat1-Food1
Rule: Eat1-Food1 Conditions: Gerd gets his stew. Positive Effects: Gerd eats his stew.
Negative Effects: Gerd gets his stew.
Eat1-Not-Hungry1
Rule:Eat1-Not-Hungry1 Conditions: Gerd eats his stew. Positive Effects: Gerd is not hungry.
Negative Effects: Gerd is hungry. Gerd eats his stew.
Collecting single Rules in one Rules Document
If you wanted to start a new simulation now, you would normally have to enter each rule individually. When experimenting, this can quickly become very annoying. Instead, you can combine all rules that ‘thematically’ ‘belong together’ in a ‘rule document’. Then you only need to enter the name of the rule document in the future.
In the present case, a rule document with the name ‘Eat1-RQuantity1′ is created. This document then includes the following rules:
Eat1-Decision1
Eat1-Enter1
Eat1-Stand-Before1
Eat1-Order1
Eat1-Come1
Eat1-Food1
Eat1-Not-Hungry1
To start a new simulation, you then only need to enter the following:
Your vision:
Gerd is not hungry.
Initial states:
Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is sitting in his office.
Initial math states
Round 1
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd decides to go to the Greek restaurant around the corner.,Gerd goes to the Greek.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 2
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is in the bistro.,Gerd enters the bistro.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 3
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd stands in front of the counter.,Gerd is in the bistro.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 4
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd orders a stew.,Gerd is in the bistro.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 5
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd gets his stew.,Gerd is in the bistro.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 6
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is in the bistro.,Gerd eats his stew.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
Round 7
Current states: Gerd is not hungry.,Gerd is in the bistro.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
100.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
Gerd is not hungry.,
A normal everyday scene is used to illustrate some properties of modeling (theory building) in the oksimo.R paradigm. This case is about a person who works in a university, has an office there (together with others), and ‘feels hungry’ around noon. This becomes the occasion for this person to decide to go out to eat. In this case ‘to the Greek around the corner’. The short story ends with this person no longer feeling hungry.
OKSIMO.R TEXT TYPES
Modeling (theory building) in the oksimo.R paradigm takes place by a group of people working together to formulate a text in a common language. In the concrete case, this is the German language; however, it can also be any other language.
Three types of texts are distinguished:
ACTUAL descriptions (initial situations)
TARGET descriptions (requirements)
CHANGE descriptions (rules for change)
These distinctions presuppose that a human actor can distinguish between such ideas in his head, which ‘correspond’ to experiences outside his brain (in ‘his own body’, in the ‘body world outside his body’), and such ideas in his head, which he thinks/remembers/dreams/fantasizes ‘alone’, ‘for himself’ … .
ACTUAL situation
Here, ACTUAL descriptions refer to such ideas that relate to the body world beyond the own body and that can be ‘shared’ by other human actors. For example, if someone stands outside and says “It is raining”, and all bystanders would confirm this, then this would be a case of an ACTUAL-description that can be ‘confirmed’ by all. Most of the time people then also say that this description is ‘true’. If in this situation, where it is raining, someone would say “It is not raining” then everyone – usually – would say that this ‘statement’ is ‘false’. If someone says instead “It will rain soon”, then all bystanders who understand English will be able to form an idea in their brain that it is raining, but there is then no concrete equivalent to this idea in the real interpersonal physical world. This statement would then be neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’. Its relation to the ‘common body world’ would be ‘indeterminate’: it may perhaps become true, but need not.
GOAL description
TARGET descriptions (also in the form of requirements) refer to such ‘imaginations in the minds of actors’ to which there are accepted linguistic expressions, but which at the moment of writing or saying do not yet have a correspondence in the shared physical world. The ideas belonging to a merely imagined description of a goal have a greater or lesser probability of possibly occurring ‘sometime in the future’. Either there are ‘experiences’ from the past, which suggest an occurrence or there is only the ‘wish’ that these conceptions become real.
CHANGE Descriptions
CHANGE descriptions refer to such ‘events’ or ‘measures’ of which one knows (or strongly assumes) that their occurrence or their implementation ‘changes’ a given situation (ACTUAL) in at least one property in such a way that after a ‘certain time’ (‘time interval’) the ‘old’ situation represents a ‘new’ situation due to the ‘change’, which then becomes the ‘new ACTUAL situation’ as ‘successor situation’. Further events or measures can also change this new actual situation again.
Required Text Sets
While one needs at least one ACTUAL situation and at least one CHANGE description for an oksimo.R modeling (theory building), a TARGET description is optional. If no TARGET description is given, then there is a – more or less – directed or open sequence of ACTUAL states, which can arise by – also repeated – ‘applications’ of the CHANGE descriptions to a given ACTUAL situation. If at least one TARGET description is available, then this can be used to ‘evaluate’ a current ACTUAL situation according to how many elements of the TARGET situation are already present in the ACTUAL situation. This can be between 0% and 100%.
Applying change descriptions to an ACTUAL situation.
For applying a change description to a given ACTUAL situation, one must understand that in the oksimo.R paradigm a TEXT is nothing but a set of LANGUAGE EXPRESSIONS whose ‘meaning’ is known only by the speakers. Each linguistic expression is considered as an ‘element’ of this ‘expression set’ called text , and it is assumed that each linguistic expression describes some ‘property’ of the real ACTUAL situation. An imputed ACTUAL situation has exactly as many properties as the TEXT of the ACTUAL situation contains linguistic expressions. The amount of the imputed properties of a situation represent only a true subset of the real situation. If a certain expression is removed from the text, the associated property disappears; if a new linguistic expression is added, then a new property is created in the imputed ACTUAL situation.
A CHANGE description (also ‘change rule’ or simply ‘rule’) must therefore minimally do the following:
Specify which expressions are to be added (generate new properties)
Specify which of the previous expressions should be removed (eliminate properties).
In order to keep the application of the rule ‘under control’, one should make the application of a change rule to a current ACTUAL situation dependent on CONDITIONS in such a way that one prefixes the change specifications for ‘adding’ or ‘removing’ with a set of expressions, which must be given in the ACTUAL-description; otherwise the change rule can not become ‘active’.
Simple example
ACTUAL situation:
Gerd is sitting in his office. Gerd is hungry.
TARGET situation:
Gerd is not hungry.
CHANGE Description:
IF: Gerd is hungry. THEN: Add as a property to the ACTUAL situation: Gerd leaves his office. Remove as property from the ACTUAL situation: Gerd is sitting in his office.
APPLICATION of the change description:
The CONDITION is fulfilled.
THEN:
NEW ACTUAL situation:
Gerd leaves his office. Gerd is hungry.
EVALUATION:
The property from the GOAL: ‘Gerd is not hungry’ is not yet fulfilled, so: Success so far: 0%.
REPEATED APPLICATION
Each change rule can in principle be applied as often as possible, but only as long as the CONDITION is fulfilled.
In the example above, the CONDITION ‘Gerd is hungry’ would continue to be fulfilled, but a repeated application of the rule will not change the situation any further. Thus, it is foreseeable that the TARGET condition can never be reached in this model (in this theory).
Example with oksimo.R software
Contextualization of the software
The oksimo.R software is part of the ‘oksimo.R paradigm’. The oksimo.R paradigm includes three components: (i) As an ‘application format’ a set of arbitrary citizens who see themselves as ‘natural experts’ who ‘work together scientifically’. This format is called ‘citizen science 2.0’ in the context of the oksimo.R paradigm. (ii) The ‘oksimo.R software’ that can be used by citizens to formulate (‘edit’) their scientific descriptions of the experiential world in such a way that they ‘automatically’ meet the requirements of an ’empirical theory’, so as to be able to draw ‘inferences’ at any time, practiced as ‘simulations’. (iii) A clear concept of an ’empirical theory’ compatible with all known forms of ’empirical sciences’ (in fact, the general form of the oksimo.R theory concept can also represent all forms of non-empirical theories).
The oksimo.R software is currently being developed and deployed on a server in the Internet, accessible via the address oksimo.com.
Since the theoretical concept of the oksimo.R software covers almost everything we know so far as a software application in the Internet (including the various forms of ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ and ‘Internet of Things (IoT)’), the transformation of the theoretical concept into applicable software is generally an ‘infinite process’. As of this writing (Nov 16, 2022), Level 2 is directly available and work is underway with Level 3 (and there will be much more levels in the future …)
An oksimo.R theory REALIZED WITH the software (Still level 2)
The old menu – still in command line mode – shows up as follows after logging in:
Welcome to Oksimo v2.1 02 May 2022 (ed14)
MAIN MENU 1 is NEW VISION 2 is MANAGE VISIONS 3 is VISION COLLECTIONS 4 is NEW STATE 5 is MANAGE STATES 6 is STATE COLLECTIONS 7 is NEW RULE 8 is MANAGE RULES 9 is RULE DOCUMENT 10 is NEW SIMULATION 11 is MANAGE SIMULATIONS 12 is LOAD SIMULATION 13 is COMBINE SIMULATIONS 14 is SHARE 15 is EXIT SIMULATOR Enter a Number [1-15] for Menu Option
See: oksimo.com (16.Nov. 2022)
In the old command line mode you have to enter the oksimo.R texts manually. For the ACTUAL state this looks like this:
Enter ACTUAL description
Enter a Number [1-15] for Menu Option
4
Here you can describe an actual state S related to your problem.
Enter a NAME for the new state description:
Food1
Enter an expression for your state description in plain text:
Gerd is sitting in his office.
Expressions so far: Gerd is sitting in his office.
Enter another expression or leave blank to proceed:
Gerd is hungry.
Expressions so far: Gerd is sitting in his office. Gerd is hungry.
Enter another expression or leave blank to proceed:
Name: Food1 Expressions: Gerd is sitting in his office. Gerd is hungry.
Note: In the Level 2 version an ACTUAL description is generally only called ‘state’.
Enter VISIONs text
Enter a Number [1-15] for Menu Option
1
Here you can describe your vision.
Enter a NAME for the new vision:
Food1-v1
Enter an expression for your vision in plain text:
Gerd is not hungry.
Expressions so far: Gerd is not hungry.
Enter another expression or leave blank to proceed:
Your final vision document is now: Name: Food1-v1 Expressions: Gerd is not hungry.
Enter CHANGE rule
Enter the name of the new rules document:
Food1-Decision1
Enter condition:
Gerd is hungry.
Conditions so far: Gerd is hungry.
Enter another condition or leave blank to proceed:
Enter a probability between 0.0 and 1.0:
1.0
(Comment: The ‘Probability’ feature at this point is now obsolete. Probabilities are handled more generally and flexibly. Examples follow.)
Enter positive effect:
Gerd leaves his office.
Positive Effects so far: Gerd leaves his office.
Enter another positive effect or leave blank to proceed:
Enter negative effect:
Gerd is sitting in his office.
Negative Effects so far: Gerd is sitting in his office.
Enter another negative effect or leave blank to proceed:
Summary: Rule:Food1-Decision1 Conditions:Gerd is hungry.
Probability: 1.0 Positive Effects: Gerd leaves his office.
Negative Effects: Gerd is sitting in his office.
Test the effect of the theory
Test conclusions
The ‘core of an oksimo.R theory’ consists of the two components ACTUAL situation (here: state) and CHANGE rule (here: rule). By applying a rule to a state, a successor state is created, which is ultimately an ‘inference’ (a ‘theorem’) of the theory. The more complex the initial state is and the more change rules there are, the more diverse the set of possible consequences (‘inferences’, ‘theorems’) becomes. To keep track of these consequences, especially if the rules of change can be applied again and again to a successor state, so that an ever longer sequence of states emerges out of this, this can become very difficult.
Test target fulfillment
If you use an oksimo.R theory kernel together with a TARGET description, then during the inference process (the ‘simulation’) you can also check at any point how many ‘elements of the TARGET description’ already ‘occur’ in an inferred state. If ‘all’ elements of the GOAL-description occur, the theory is able to ‘infer’ 100% of the GOAL-description, otherwise less, down to 0% goal fulfillment.
Start an oksimo.R simulation
Enter a Number [1-15] for Menu Option
10
Here you can run a simulation SIM to check what happens with your initial state S when the change rules X will be applied repeatedly on the state S.
Available vision descriptions:
…
Food1-v1
…
Enter a name for a vision description you want to load. Use prefix col to load a collection:
Food1-v1
Visions selected so far: Food1-v1
Add another vision or leave blank to proceed:
Enter a name for a state description you want to load. Use prefix col to load a collection:
Food1
States selected so far: Food1
Add another state or leave blank to proceed:
Selected states: Food1
Available rules:
…
Food1-Decision1
…
Enter a name for a rule or a ruledocument (with prefix doc) you want to load:
Food1-Decision1
Rules selected so far: Food1-Decision1 Add another rule or leave blank to proceed:
Initial states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is sitting in his office.
Round 1
…
Round 3
…
Save Simulation [S], Rerun simulation [R], export as text [T] or exit [leave blank]:
S
Enter Name for Simulation:
Food1-sim1
Saved!
Enter a Number [1-15] for Menu Option
12
Here you can load a previously saved simulation and rerun it. Add prefix dev for detailed developer-mode.
List of your saved simulations:
…
Food1-sim1
…
Restart the saved simulation with 12 Load Simulation (Comment: The math-elements are deleted from the protocol because these will be used a little bit later):
our vision:
Gerd is not hungry.
Initial states:
Gerd is hungry.,Gerd is sitting in his office.
Round 1
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd leaves his office.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
And the following math visions:
None
Round 2
Current states: Gerd is hungry.,Gerd leaves his office.
Current visions: Gerd is not hungry.
Current values:
0.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
None
And the following math visions:
None
One can easily see, that the state of round 2 is repeating. And there is no reason, that this will change in the future.
Rule application and inference concept
The preceding simple example was used to explain concretely what happens when a rule is applied to a given ACTUAL situation. A science which deals with such change processes by means of rule application(s) is ‘logic’. Logic considerations have been around for more than 2500 years, in many different forms. The most significant logic paradigms in retrospect are possibly the logic associated with the name of Aristotle, in which logical expressions were not yet considered in isolation from possible linguistic meanings, and modern formal logic, in which logical expressions have no connection to any linguistic meaning except with abstract ‘truth values’. The history of modern formal logic began in the 19th century about 150 years ago (Bool, de Morgan, Venn, Frege, Russell, …).
The central idea of any logic is to find a ‘procedure that allows the user to ‘derive’ from a set of ‘assumed to be (abstractly) true’ statements only those statements that are also ‘(abstractly) true’ again. The ‘abstract truth’ of modern formal logic is a ‘placeholder’ for an everyday language truth which cannot be expressed as such within a formal logic. Formal logic presupposes that there are ‘actors’ who ‘know’ what they are saying when they speak of a ‘true’ statement. Whether the formalization of ‘truth relations’ between different sets of expressions in the format of modern formal logic ‘adequately’ represent the meaning knowledge of the actors can therefore not be decided ‘within the logical system’, but only ‘from outside’, from the perspective of the ‘meaning knowledge of the acting actor’.
If one calls the initial set of linguistic expressions ‘assumed to be abstractly true’ an IS-description (in the style of the oksimo.R paradigm) and the set of possible ‘derived expressions assumed to be abstractly true’ the ‘inferred abstractly true expressions’, then one could formulate this in the style of formal logic as follows:
The character ‘⊢’ represents an inference term. This consists of a text describing how to apply a change rule from the set R to a given set of expressions X in such a way that a new set X’ is created as a result of the application to the given set X. The inference term must be of such a nature that it is completely unambiguous ‘what to do’.
The claim of the ‘pure formal logic’ of the modern times that all expressions, which are generated with the inference term, are also conform to the ‘assumed abstract truth value’, applies in the same way to the inference term of the oksimo.R theory software too. With the oksimo.R inference term it is guaranteed that all ‘generated expressions’ are ‘true’ in the sense of the ‘linguistically founded meaning knowledge’ of the involved ‘actors’! However, linguistically grounded meaning knowledge is ‘knowledge dependent’ and therefore can be empirically either ‘true’ or ‘false’ or ‘indeterminate’. This points to the fact that in general the actors are the ‘gatekeepers of the truth’. Actors formulate the change-rules R based on their linguistic knowledge. If these change-rules R are ‘true’, then this is also true for the linguistic expressions generated by means of inference. If the change rules R contain an ‘error’, then this error will necessarily be contained in the generated inference situation X’ as description element E. This expression element E as part of the prediction set X’ may then turn out to be either ‘true’ in the further course of comparison with the commonly shared empirical reality, or it will remain ‘indeterminate’ in the long run, since it neither becomes ‘true’ nor can be directly classified as ‘false’. In the case of modern formal logic, the empirical truth status of inferred expressions is completely indeterminate.
The oksimo.R inference concept united the formal advantages of modern formal logic with the meaning reference of Aristotelian logic and is understood as a ‘natural means of expression’ for an empirical theory with truth claim.
(Partially translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version))
During the writing it becomes apparent that it is difficult to concretely specify the concrete contents at the beginning of the writing! The ‘cloud of knowledge’, out of which this book is written, is not a static object, but a space of ‘transient events’, which – in the first moment, seen from close – appear like ‘fixed contents’, but they are only momentary states of equilibrium in a manifold network of thought processes, which all take place at the same time, largely unconsciously (the way our brain works), and which produce ‘each other’. So it can happen that in a ‘living thought’ these transient states ‘rewrite’ themselves again and again. The ‘truth’ is then the total process, which can ‘connect’ with individual empirical events. Some may be ‘disturbed’ by this state of affairs, others feel ‘liberated’ as they begin to suspect that recognition, understanding, truth belong to a completely different dimension than the seemingly ‘clear, delimited, fixed facts’.
At this point one could be tempted to use the millennium old term ‘spirit’ (rather not ‘mind’) (Greek: ‘pneuma’, ‘πνευμα’) to denote this elusive ‘more’ of knowledge, but it would not help too much, would perhaps even complicate the whole state of affairs, since one then relates with a ‘known word’ something ‘not understandable’ to classical Greek thinking, which at that time did not and could not know the ‘context of its own thinking’. [0]
[0] Which does not detract from the fact that the classical Greek authors shine with a mental brilliance that can touch anyone who tries to think for himself. I myself am, among other things, very impressed by the texts attributed to Aristotle. Every minute that one can immerse oneself in his texts is a ‘gift to thinking’.
In the introduction of the main text it has been underlined that within a sustainable empirical theory it is not only necessary to widen the scope with a maximum of diversity, but at the same time it is also necessary to enable the capability for an optimal prediction about the ‘possible states of a possible future’.
the meaning machinery
In the text after this introduction it has been outlined that between human actors the most powerful tool for the clarification of the given situation — the NOW — is the everyday language with a ‘built in’ potential in every human actor for infinite meanings. This individual internal meaning space as part of the individual cognitive structure is equipped with an ‘abstract – concrete’ meaning structure with the ability to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘not true’, and furthermore equipped with the ability to ‘play around’ with meanings in a ‘new way’.
COORDINATION
Thus every human actor can generate within his cognitive dimension some states or situations accompanied with potential new processes leading to new states. To share this ‘internal meanings’ with other brains to ‘compare’ properties of the ‘own’ thinking with properties of the thinking of ‘others’ the only chance is to communicate with other human actors mediated by the shared everyday language. If this communication is successful it arises the possibility to ‘coordinate’ the own thinking about states and possible actions with others. A ‘joint undertaking’ is becoming possible.
shared thinking
To simplify the process of communication it is possible, that a human actor does not ‘wait’ until some point in the future to communicate the content of the thinking, but even ‘while the thinking process is going on’ a human actor can ‘translate his thinking’ in language expressions which ‘fit the processed meanings’ as good as possible.Doing this another human actor can observe the language activity, can try to ‘understand’, and can try to ‘respond’ to the observations with his language expressions. Such an ‘interplay’ of expressions in the context of multiple thinking processes can show directly either a ‘congruence’ or a ‘difference’. This can help each participant in the communication to clarify the own thinking. At the same time an exchange of language expressions associated with possible meanings inside the different brains can ‘stimulate’ different kinds of memory and thinking processes and through this the space of shared meanings can be ‘enlarged’.
phenomenal space 1 and 2
Human actors with their ability to construct meaning spaces and the ability to share parts of the meaning space by language communication are embedded with their bodies in a ‘body-external environment’ usual called ‘external world’ or ‘nature’ associated with the property to be ‘real’.
Equipped with a body with multiple different kinds of ‘sensors’ some of the environmental properties can stimulate these sensors which in turn send neuronal signals to the embedded brain. The first stage of the ‘processing of sensor signals’ is usually called ‘perception’. Perception is not a passive 1-to-1 mapping of signals into the brain but it is already a highly sophisticated processing where the ‘raw signals’ of the sensors — which already are doing some processing on their own — are ‘transformed’ into more complex signals which the human actor in its perception does perceive as ‘features’, ‘properties’, ‘figures’, ‘patterns’ etc. which usually are called ‘phenomena’. They all together are called ‘phenomenal space’. In a ‘naive thinking’ this phenomenal space is taken ‘as the external world directly’. During life a human actor can learn — this must not happen! –, that the ‘phenomenal space’ is a ‘derived space’ triggered by an ‘assumed outside world’ which ’causes’ by its properties the sensors to react in a certain way. But the ‘actual nature’ of the outside world is not really known. Let us call the unknown outside world of properties ‘phenomenal space 1’ and the derived phenomenal space inside the body-brain ‘phenomenal space 2’.
TIMELY ORDERING
Due to the availability of the phenomenal space 2 the different human actors can try to ‘explore’ the ‘unknown assumed real world’ based on the available phenomena.
If one takes a wider look to the working of the brain of a human actor one can detect that the processing of the brain of the phenomenal space is using additional mechanisms:
The phenomenal space is organized in ‘time slices’ of a certain fixed duration. The ‘content’ of a time slice during the time window (t,t’) will be ‘overwritten’ during the next time slice (t’,t”) by those phenomena, which are then ‘actual’, which are then constituting the NOW. The phenomena from the time window before (t’,t”) can become ‘stored’ in some other parts of the brain usually called ‘memory’.
The ‘storing’ of phenomena in parts of the brain called ‘memory’ happens in a highly sophisticated way enabling ‘abstract structures’ with an ‘interface’ for ‘concrete properties’ typical for the phenomenal space, and which can become associated with other ‘content’ of the memory.
It is an astonishing ability of the memory to enable an ‘ordering’ of memory contents related to situations as having occurred ‘before’ or ‘after’ some other property. Therefore the ‘content of the memory’ can represent collections of ‘stored NOWs’, which can be ‘ordered’ in a ‘sequence of NOWs’, and thereby the ‘dimension of time’ appears as a ‘framing property’ of ‘remembered phenomena’.
Based on this capability to organize remembered phenomena in ‘sequences of states’ representing a so-called ‘timely order’ the brain can ‘operate’ on such sequences in various ways. It can e.g. ‘compare’ two states in such a sequence whether these are ‘the same’ or whether they are ‘different’. A difference points to a ‘change’ in the phenomenal space. Longer sequences — even including changes — can perhaps show up as ‘repetitions’ compared to ‘earlier’ sequences. Such ‘repeating sequences’ can perhaps represent a ‘pattern’ pointing to some ‘hidden factors’ responsible for the pattern.
formal representations [1]
Basic outline of human actor as part of an external world with an internal phenomenal space 2, including a memory and the capability to elaborate cognitive meta-levels using the dimension of time. There is a limited exchange medium between different brains realized by language communication. Formal models are an instrument to represent recognized timely sequences of sets of properties with typical changes.
Based on a rather sophisticated internal processing structure every human actor has the capability to compose language descriptions which can ‘represent’ with the aid of sets of language expressions different kinds of local situations. Every expression can represent some ‘meaning’ which is encoded in every human actor in an individual manner. Such a language encoding can partially becoming ‘standardized’ by shared language learning in typical everyday living situations. To that extend as language encodings (the assumed meaning) is shared between different human actors they can use this common meaning space to communicate their experience.
Based on the built-in property of abstract knowledge to have an interface to ‘more concrete’ meanings, which finally can be related to ‘concrete perceptual phenomena’ available in the sensual perceptions, every human actor can ‘check’ whether an actual meaning seems to have an ‘actual correspondence’ to some properties in the ‘real environment’. If this phenomenal setting in the phenomenal space 2 with a correspondence to the sensual perceptions is encoded in a language expression E then usually it is told that the ‘meaning of E’ is true; otherwise not.
Because the perceptual interface to an assumed real world is common to all human actors they can ‘synchronize’ their perceptions by sharing the related encoded language expressions.
If a group of human actors sharing a real situation agrees about a ‘set of language expressions’ in the sens that each expression is assumed to be ‘true’, then one can assume, that every expression ‘represents’ some encoded meanings which are related to the shared empirical situation, and therefore the expressions represent ‘properties of the assumed real world’. Such kinds of ‘meaning constructions’ can be further ‘supported’ by the usage of ‘standardized procedures’ called ‘measurement procedures’.
Under this assumption one can infer, that a ‘change in the realm of real world properties’ has to be encoded in a ‘new language expression’ associated with the ‘new real world properties’ and has to be included in the set of expressions describing an actual situation. At the same time it can happen, that an expression of the actual set of expressions is becoming ‘outdated’ because the properties, this expression has encoded, are gone. Thus, the overall ‘dynamics of a set of expressions representing an actual set of real world properties’ can be realized as follows:
Agree on a first set of expression to be a ‘true’ description of a given set of real world properties.
After an agreed period of time one has to check whether (i) the encoded meaning of an expression is gone or (ii) whether a new real world property has appeared which seems to be ‘important’ but is not yet encoded in a language expression of the set. Depending from this check either (i) one has to delete those expressions which are no longer ‘true’ or (ii) one has to introduce new expressions for the new real world properties.
In a strictly ‘observational approach’ the human actors are only observing the course of events after some — regular or spontaneous –time span, making their observations (‘measurements’) and compare these observations with their last ‘true description’ of the actual situation. Following this pattern of behavior they can deduce from the series of true descriptions <D1, D2, …, Dn> for every pair of descriptions (Di,Di+1) a ‘difference description’ as a ‘rule’ in the following way: (i) IF x is a subset of expressions in Di+1, which are not yet members of the set of expressions in Di, THEN ‘add’ these expressions to the set of expressions in Di. (ii) IF y is a subset of expressions in Di, which are no more members of the set of expressions in Di+1, THEN ‘delete’ these expressions from the set of expressions in Di. (iii) Construct a ‘condition-set’ of expressions as subset of Di, which has to be fulfilled to apply (i) and (ii).
Doing this for every pair of descriptions then one is getting a set of ‘change rules’ X which can be used, to ‘generate’ — starting with the first description D0 — all the follow-up descriptions only by ‘applying a change rule Xi‘ to the last generated description.
This first purely observational approach works, but every change rule Xi in this set of change rules X can be very ‘singular’ pointing to a true singularity in the mathematical sense, because there is not ‘common rule’ to predict this singularity.
It would be desirable to ‘dig into possible hidden factors’ which are responsible for the observed changes but they would allow to ‘reduce the number’ of individual change rules of X. But for such a ‘rule-compression’ there exists from the outset no usable knowledge. Such a reduction will only be possible if a certain amount of research work will be done hopefully to discover the hidden factors.
All the change rules which could be found through such observational processes can in the future be re-used to explore possible outcomes for selected situations.
COMMENTS
[1] For the final format of this section I have got important suggestions from René Thom by reading the introduction of his book “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models” (1972, 1989). See my review post HERE : https://www.uffmm.org/2022/08/22/rene-thom-structural-stability-and-morphogenesis-an-outline-of-a-general-theory-of-models-original-french-edition-1972-updated-by-the-author-and-translated-into-english-by-d-h-fowler-1989/
In the uffmm review section the different papers and books are discussed from the point of view of the oksimo paradigm, which is embedded in the general view of a generalized ‘citizen science’ as a ‘computer aided sustainable applied empirical theory’ (CSAET). In the following text the author will discuss parts of the book “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models” from René Thom, originally as a French edition 1972, after several new editions updated in 1988 by the author and translated by H.D.Fowler 1988 into English, published 1989.
CONTEXT
In the foundational post with the title “COMMON SCIENCE as Sustainable Applied Empirical Theory, besides ENGINEERING, in a SOCIETY” a central idea is that a sustainable society has besides the challenge of the right usage of resources the other big challenge related to the ‘cognitive dimension’ as medium of its coordinated actions addressing a sufficiently well prepared planet for the survival of the biosphere in the future. Part of the cognitive dimension is the ability to ‘predict’ a — hopefully — ‘optimal’ course of events leading into the future as a guideline for the life today. It appears to the author of this review that the book of René Thom can give some ‘advice’ for a deeper understanding of the nature of ‘prediction’ using ideas of mathematics, especially ‘topology’ and ‘catastrophe theory’.
Mapping Nature into Formal Models
This figure shows some part of the introduction of René Thom’s book. Look to the text for a comment.
the big picture first
There are multiple ways to approach the ideas of René Thom in his introduction. Let us try an approach coming from the ‘outside’ and then ‘digging into the hidden structures’.
The outside framework is characterized by nature, the ‘real world outside’, by human actors occurring in this world with their bodies, and ‘language communication’ between human actors.
With regard to ‘language’ Thom cites many different ‘variants of language’ besides the ‘everyday language’ like ‘formal logic’, ‘formal systems’, ‘propositions’ etc., but he does not give a systematic account of these different variants; he does not explain the systematic relationships between these different variants.
The inward interaction between the real world outside and a human actor is characterized by ‘perception’. Perception maps properties of the outside world into the inner states of the body, especially into the brain, but Thom never mentions the brain explicitly. These mapped properties from the outside world inside the body are circumscribed for instance as ‘local situations’, ‘beings, objects, things’, ‘change of forms’, ‘degree of stability’, ‘different guises’. But because Thom doesn’t offer some explicit conceptual framework of the ‘inner space’ of a human actor, these concepts have no clear meaning. They only ‘trigger’ in the reader some associations in his everyday language understanding of some possible related meanings without a clear context.
Thom’s remark of a ‘phenomenological space’ remains a bit ‘cryptic’. In science it is common to associate the ‘phenomenological space’ with the way how the ‘world outside’ ‘appears to us’, but — using philosophical reasoning enhanced by brain science and experimental psychology — the properties of the outside world ‘as such’ are not available for the brain in the body. Only the ‘transformation’ of the outside world properties to the different perceptional organs of the body and their processing during ‘perception’ — thereby interacting at least with the memory — enables some ‘neuronal signals’ which are the ‘base ground’ for our brain to ‘compute’ some structures which we are using as ‘phenomena’ in our ‘conscious thinking’. Thus from the point of view of modern philosophy the ‘phenomenal space’ appears to be a space ‘inside the brain’, and this space is accompanied by the ‘unconscious space of cognition’, who is doing the ‘real job’; the ‘phenomenal space’ seems — today — to be a function of this unconscious cognitive space.
Despite the ‘vagueness’ of the descriptive wordings so far Thom introduces more concepts of the ‘inner world’, which seem to be intended as to differentiate the other words a little bit more.
Thus, the ‘infinite manifestations’ of the ‘appearing different guises’ of things can be ‘recognized as the same structure’, or that we ‘assume the existence of the outside world’ ‘independent of our own observation’.
With regard to ‘local situations’ which we can recognize, he reflects about the possible ‘influence of unknown/ unobservable factors’ which can cause ‘different outcomes’, that means different changes in the local situations.
More generally he thinks about the ‘universe’ as a ‘ceaseless creation’, which manifests itself in an ‘evolution’, which is accompanied by a ‘destruction of forms’. The destruction of forms is the same as the ‘change of forms’, which Thom classifies as ‘not rigorous deterministic’, hence ‘indeterministic’. The other aspect of ongoing changes is a ‘temporal dimension’ showing up; translated in a certain kind of ‘ordering’ these changes can be ‘translated’ into a formalization as a succession of states. Each state will be represented by a ‘set of properties’. With the aid of some logical inference mechanism it is possible to ‘transform’ one set of properties into another set of properties, including a measure for the probability, that the next set of properties will be inferred.
While the real world as such appears to us as some infinite source of phenomena with an unknown number of hidden factors are the elements of the outside world in general somehow infinite and indeterministic in their occurrence. But a human actor looking into this phenomenal space he can decide to assume the open character of phenomena as being describable as clear-cut finite things — as in ‘classical mechanics’ –, which allows a ‘deterministic’ handling of the phenomena. With other conceptual strategies — like in ‘quantum mechanics’ — the primary phenomena are classified as ‘indeterministic by nature’ which translates into logical inferences which are also ‘indeterministic’.
The overall purpose of science sees Thom as given in the intention to ‘foresee change of form’ and to ‘explain change of form’.
observables – local models – ultimate natuRe of reality
Thom points out that finally for a ‘macroscopic description of a system’ only the ‘observables’ of a local system are available.(cf. p.6f) What is ‘behind’ these observables, what exactly has to be understood by the ‘ultimate nature of reality’, this cannot completely be covered by a local system, by no local system.(cf. p.6f) Whether all local systems can finally be integrated into one coherent global system is an open question.(p.7)
a mathematics of discontinuities?
Thom considers further the fact that in common everyday experience we encounter many phenomena which appear in themselves to be very trivial but which are opposing a simple mathematical description.(cf. p.9) The main characteristic of these everyday phenomena is ‘discontinuity’. Because all applicable quantitative mathematical models rely on ‘continuity’ and ‘continuous functions’ this reduces the probability that science starts to describe ‘discontinuity’.(cf. p.9) Nevertheless there are more and more disciplines which are confronted with ‘discontinuous’ phenomena, which are ‘unstable’, show nearly ‘no repetition’ and do not fit easily in a mathematical model.(cf. p.9)
Thom gives a short outline of an idea how to cope with discontinuity by constructing a model of a set M of ‘observables’ which as such are ‘stable’, but they include a closed subset K of ‘catastrophes’ which manifest themselves as ‘singularities’ provoking a ‘discontinuity’ which can cause a ‘change’ on the observables, which constitutes the global phenomenon of ‘morphogenesis’.(cf. p.7) By not knowing in advance the ‘dynamics’ X underlying these changes it is possible to ‘reconstruct’ (step-wise) the underlying dynamics X by observing the global morphogenesis by recurring to the local changes too.(cf. p.7)
Thom underlines that it is not the local singularity as such which manifests the underlying dynamics X but the ‘accumulation’ of all singularities into ‘one global phenomenon’, which has to be explained.(cf. p.8) And because the ‘statistics’ of the local changes, which can be correlated with the local accidents, is determined by the underlying dynamics, it will not suffice to rely only on a local change; all changes together have to be explained. This can imply more than three dimensions of an euclidean space.(cf. p.8)
Discussion of Thom’s Position
There are some aspects which could be discussed in front of Thom’s position.
One major point could be his ‘vagueness’ with regard to the inner structure and processing of a human actor. Since 1972 (1989) many new deep insights have been revealed by disciplines like brain sciences in connection with experimental psychology and biology. I will not discuss this point here. There are several posts in the uffmm.org blog which are dealing with these topics.
What catches the attention of the reviewer here is the position of Thom considering the phenomenon of ‘discontinuities’ (changes) which not as a ‘single change’ represent a phenomenon but as a ‘series of changes’ which can not be classified as a ‘classical quantitative continuous’ phenomenon.
He thinks that especially ‘topological thinking’ can be of help here.
Comparing Thom’s position with the position of the the concept of a ‘sustainable empirical theory’ as it is outlined in the uffmm.org blog, especially condensed as a ‘theory producing process’ called ‘oksimo-R process paradigm’, it seems to be not only possible to solve the problem without topology, but — perhaps — even better without topology.
This results from the fact that the oksimo-R process paradigm presupposes a conceptual framework where not only the human actor as ‘theory producer’ is assumed to be located with his body in a ‘body-external empirical world’, but there exist also some additional assumptions about the ‘internal structure’ and the ‘internal processing’ of human actors, which are ‘explaining’ to a certain degree how a human actor can process properties of his environment — including his own body — within a cognitive and emotional space as well how he can ‘map’ parts of these spaces into sets of expressions of his everyday language. Based on such a ‘process model’ of a human actor it is possible to ‘explain’ additionally the language-based communication between different human actors whereby the different brains in the bodies can share some knowledge and emotions and can coordinate their actions.
The concept of a formal model which Thom introduced before can in the light of a more advanced actor model be interpreted in a way, that it allows all the solutions which Thom claims for his topological minded approach.
Which series of ‘changes’ (maybe ‘catastrophes’) will attract the attention of some researchers, the researcher are every time capable to do the following:
Write a series of texts representing the observed phenomena at location L and time T in accordance with their learned and agreed meaning functions (a set of propositions).
This will result in a series of texts (documents) <D1, D2, …, Dn>, whose logical ordering represents the timely order.
Because every ‘difference’ between two consecutive documents (Di,Di+1) is directly observable in the language expressions one can ‘translate’ these differences directly by a rule following a general format: (i) IF x is a subset of expressions in Di+1, which are not yet members of the set of expressions in Di, THEN ‘add’ these expressions to the set of expressions in Di. (ii) IF y is a subset of expressions in Di, which are no more members of the set of expressions in Di+1, THEN ‘delete’ these expressions from the set of expressions in Di. (iii) Construct a ‘condition-set’ of expressions as subset of Di, which has to be fulfilled to apply (i) and (ii).
After the translation of all observed differences between consecutive documents one has a set of ‘change rules X’, which together with the ‘Start Document’ D0 define an ‘accumulated rule’ for a series of discontinuous changes: <D0, X>
Probably a first ‘guess’ of an accumulated rules will be not too ‘precise’. Thus by collecting more ‘observations’ one can try to ‘refine’ the rules, even including local probabilities, which during ‘processing’ (inference, simulation) can produce an ‘accumulated and composed’ probability of some ‘weird’ kind.[1]
COMMENTS
[1] This view of composed probabilities is in a good agreement with the ideas of the late Karl Popper discussing ‘propensities’ (see several posts in this uffmm.org blog: https://www.uffmm.org/2021/03/15/philosophy-of-science/)
The words ‘science’, ‘theory’, and ‘scientific theory’ are well known passengers travelling through the times with different meanings, depending from the circumstances, from the minds of different people.[2]-[4] In modern times we have learned a lot about the nature of ‘signs’ and ‘sign-based’ communication as it happens when we are using a ‘language’. And, becoming more sensitive about the dynamics of sign-based communication, we can detect that it is exactly our human use of language which provides the key to a deeper understanding of how our brains are working, located in our bodies, where the brains are playing the roles of ‘spin doctors’ of the pictures in our heads, which are ‘showing’ our mind a ‘virtual world’ of an assumed ‘real world’ somewhere ‘out there’.[14]
Until today we have no final explanation of how exactly this ability of human actors has developed through the times stretching to millions of years ago. And until today there exists no complete description of a living language with the involved structures, meanings, and dynamics. One reason for this ‘fundamental inability’ of describing with a language exactly this language roots is the fact, that language is not a ‘single fixed object’ in front of your eyes, but a dynamic reality happening between many, many different human actors simultaneously; every brain has only some fragments of this assumed ‘whole thing’ called ‘language’, and every communicative act between humans embraces besides ‘rather stable parts’ always a lot of ‘incidental’, ‘casual’ moments of a complex dynamic situation, which constitutes — mostly unconscious — the working of language communication, possible meanings and connotations of meaning. Thus, all the known scientific endeavors until today trying to describe this phenomenon of language communication are more reminding some ‘stuttering’ than a final ‘ordered’ theory.
One lesson we can learn from this tells us, that the so-called ‘everyday language’, the ‘ordinary language’, the ‘natural language’ is the ‘basic’ pattern of language communication. But, as mentioned just before, on account of the fundamental distributed and dynamical character of everyday language, a natural language has no clear cut ‘boundaries’. Never you can tell with certainty where a language ends and where this language just in that moment ‘evolves’, ‘expands’, is ‘changing’.
For people which are looking for ‘clear statements’, for ‘finite views’, for a ‘stable truth’ this situation is terrifying. It can cause ‘anxious feelings’. People who like to ‘control’ life don’t like such a ‘living dynamics’ which can not be owned by a single person alone, not even by ‘many’…
One basic property of ordinary language is it’s ‘expandability’: at every time someone can introduce new expressions embedded within new contexts following new patterns of usage. If other human actors start to follow this usage, this ‘new’ behavior is ‘spreading’ through the ‘population of language users’ and by this new growing practice the ordinary language is expanding and thereby changing.
One ‘part’ of ordinary language is called ‘logic’ [6],[7], with various different realizations through history. Another part of ordinary language is ‘mathematics’, especially what is today assumed as being the ‘kernel’ of mathematics, the ‘Theory of Sets’.(cf. [8], [9]) Because ordinary language can always be used to speak ‘about ordinary language’, it is possible to extend an ordinary language with arbitrary many new ‘artificial languages’ like a ‘logic language’ or a ‘mathematical language’.[10] After introducing a special language like a mathematical language’ by using ordinary language one can apply this special language ‘as if it is the only language’, but if you start to ‘look consciously’ to your real practice of speaking, you can easily detect, that this impression ‘it is the only language’ is a fake! Cutting away the ordinary language you will be lost with your special language. The ordinary language is the ‘meta language’ to every special language. This can be used as a ‘hint’ to something really great: the mystery of the ‘self-creating’ power of the ordinary language which for most people is unknown although it happens every moment.
From the everyday language we know that we can talk ‘about the world’, and even more, we can even ‘act’ with the language. [11] – [13] Saying “Give me the butter, please”, in that case a ‘normal’ [*2] speaker would ‘hear’ the ‘sound of the statement’, he can ‘translate the sound’ into some internal meaning constructs related to the sounds of the language, which in turn will — usually — be ‘matched against’ meaning constructs ‘actually provided’ by the ‘perception’. If there happens to be a ‘sufficiently well match’ then the hearer can identify ‘something concrete’ located on the table which he can associate with the ‘activated language related meaning’ and he then ‘knows’, that this concrete something on the table seems to be an ‘instance’ of those things which are called ‘butter’. But there can exist many different ‘concrete things’ which we agree to accept as ‘instances’ of the meaning construct ‘butter’. Thus, already in very usual everyday situations we encounter the fact, that our perceptions can create signals from ‘something concrete in our perceptions’ and our ‘language-mediated understanding’ can create ‘meaning structures’ which can ‘match’ nearly uncountable different concrete things. [*3] Those meaning constructs — activated by the language, but different from the language — which can match more than one concrete perception, will here be called ‘abstract meaning’ or ‘abstract concept’. And ‘words’ (= expressions) of a language which can activate such abstract meanings are understood as ‘abstract words’, ‘general words’, ‘category words’ or the like. [*4]
Knowing this you will probably detect, that nearly all words of a language are ‘abstract words’ activating ‘abstract meanings’. This is in one sense ‘wonderful’, because the real empirical world consists of uncountable many concrete perceivable properties and to relate every concrete property with an individually matching word would turn the project of language into an infeasible task. Thus with only a few abstract words language users can talk about ‘nearly everything’. This makes language communication possible. The ‘dark side’ of this wonderful ability is the necessity to provide real situations, if you want to demonstrate which of all these concrete properties of a real situation you want to be understood as ‘related’ to the one used word (= language expression) with an abstract meaning. If you cannot provide such ‘concrete situations’ the intended meaning of your abstract words will stay ‘unclear’: they can mean ‘nothing or all’, depending from the decoding of the hearer.
— draft version —
Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org) eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458
