The abstract elements introduced so far are still few, but they already allow to delineate a certain ‘abstract space’. Thus there are so far
Abstract elements in current memory (also ‘consciousness’) based on concrete perception,
which then can pass over into stored abstract – and dynamic – elements of potential memory,
further abstract concepts of n.th order in current as well as in potential memory,
Abstract elements in current memory (also ‘consciousness’) based on concrete perception, which function as linguistic elements,
which can then also pass over into stored abstract – and dynamic – elements of potential (linguistic) memory,
likewise abstract linguistic concepts of nth order in actual as well as in potential memory,
abstract relations between abstract linguistic elements and abstract other elements of current as well as potential memory (‘meaning relations’).
linguistic expressions for the description of factual changes and
linguistic expressions for the description of analytic changes.
The generation of abstract linguistic elements thus allows in many ways the description of changes of something given, which (i) is either only ‘described’ as an ‘unconditional’ event or (ii) works with ‘rules of change’, which clearly distinguishes between ‘condition’ and ‘effect’. This second case with change-rules can be related to many varieties of ‘logical inference’. In fact, any known form of ‘logic’ can be ’emulated’ with this general concept of change rules.
This idea, only hinted at here, will be explored in some detail and demonstrated in various applications as we proceed.
Glimpses of an Ontology
Already these few considerations about ‘abstract elements’ show that there are different forms of ‘being’.[1].
In the scheme of FIG. 1, there are those givens in the real external world which can become the trigger of perceptions. However, our brain cannot directly recognize these ‘real givens’, only their ‘effects in the nervous system’: first (i) as ‘perceptual event’, then (ii) as ‘memory construct’ distinguished into (ii.1) ‘current memory (working memory, short-term memory, …) and (ii.2) ‘potential memory’ (long-term memory, various functional classifications, …).”[2]
If one calls the ‘contents’ of perception and current memory ‘conscious’ [3], then the primary form of ‘being’, which we can directly get hold of, would be those ‘conscious contents’, which our brain ‘presents’ to us from all its neuronal calculations. Our ‘current perceptions’ then stand for the ‘reality out there’, although we actually cannot grasp ‘the reality out there’ ‘directly, immediately’, but only ‘mediated, indirectly’.
Insofar as we are ‘aware’ of ‘current contents’ that ‘potential memory’ makes ‘available’ to us (usually called ‘remembering’ in everyday life; as a result, a ‘memory’), we also have some form of ‘primary being’ available, but this primary being need not have any current perceptual counterpart; hence we classify it as ‘only remembered’ or ‘only thought’ or ‘abstract’ without ‘concrete’ perceptual reference.
For the question of the correspondence in content between ‘real givenness’ and ‘perceived givenness’ as well as between ‘perceived givenness’ and ‘remembered givenness’ there are countless findings, all of which indicate that these two relations are not ‘1-to-1’ mappings under the aspect of ‘mapping similarity’. This is due to multiple reasons.
In the case of the perceptual similarity with the triggering real givens, already the interaction between real givens and the respective sense organs plays a role, then the processing of the primary sense data by the sense organ itself as well as by the following processing in the nervous system. The brain works with ‘time slices’, with ‘selection/condensation’ and with ‘interpretation’. The latter results from the ‘echo’ from potential memory that ‘comments’ on current neural events. In addition, different ’emotions’ can influence the perceptual process. [4] The ‘final’ product of transmission, processing, selection, interpretation and emotions is then what we call ‘perceptual content’.
In the case of ‘memory similarity’ the processing of ‘abstracting’ and ‘storing’, the continuous ‘activations’ of memory contents as well as the ‘interactions’ between remembered things indicate that ‘memory contents’ can change significantly in the course of time without the respective person, who is currently remembering, being able to read this from the memory contents themselves. In order to be able to recognize these changes, one needs ‘records’ of preceding points in time (photos, films, protocols, …), which can provide clues to the real circumstances with which one can compare one’s memories.”[5]
As one can see from these considerations, the question of ‘being’ is not a trivial question. Single fragments of perceptions or memories tend to be no 1-to-1 ‘representatives’ of possible real conditions. In addition, there is the high ‘rate of change’ of the real world, not least also by the activities of humans themselves.
COMMENTS
[1] The word ‘being’ is one of the oldest and most popular concepts in philosophy. In the case of European philosophy, the concept of ‘being’ appears in the context of classical Greek philosophy, and spreads through the centuries and millennia throughout Europe and then in those cultures that had/have an exchange of ideas with the European culture. The systematic occupation with the concept ‘being’ the philosophers called and call ‘ontology’. See for this the article ‘Ontology’ in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology .
[2] On the subject of ‘perception’ and ‘memory’ there is a huge literature in various empirical disciplines. The most important may well be ‘biology’, ‘experimental pschology’ and ‘brain science’; these supplemented by philosophical ‘phenomenology’, and then combinations of these such as ‘neuro-psychology’ or ‘neuro-phenomenology’, etc. In addition there are countless other special disciplines such as ‘linguistics’ and ‘neuro-linguistics’.
[3] A question that remains open is how the concept of ‘consciousness’, which is common in everyday life, is to be placed in this context. Like the concept of ‘being’, the concept of ‘consciousness’ has been and still is very prominent in recent European philosophy, but it has also received strong attention in many empirical disciplines; especially in the field of tension between philosophical phenomenology, psychology and brain research, there is a long and intense debate about what is to be understood by ‘consciousness’. Currently (2023) there is no clear, universally accepted outcome of these discussions. Of the many available working hypotheses, the author of this text considers the connection to the empirical models of ‘current memory’ in close connection with the models of ‘perception’ to be the most comprehensible so far. In this context also the concept of the ‘unconscious’ would be easy to explain. For an overview see the entry ‘consciousness’ in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
[4] In everyday life we constantly experience that different people perceive the same real events differently, depending on which ‘mood’ they are in, which current needs they have at the moment, which ‘previous knowledge’ they have, and what their real position to the real situation is, to name just a few factors that can play a role.
[5] Classical examples for the lack of quality of memories have always been ‘testimonies’ to certain events. Testimonies almost never agree ‘1-to-1′, at best ‘structurally’, and even in this there can be ‘deviations’ of varying strength.
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.
This text is part of a philosophy of science analysis of the case of the oksimo software (oksimo.com). A specification of the oksimo software from an engineering point of view can be found in four consecutive posts dedicated to the HMI-Analysis for this software.
THE OKSIMO EVENT SPACE
The characterization of the oksimo software paradigm starts with an informal characterization of the oksimo software event space.
EVENT SPACE
An event space is a space which can be filled up by observable events fitting to the species-specific internal processed environment representations [1], [2] here called internal environments [ENVint]. Thus the same externalenvironment [ENV] can be represented in the presence of 10 different species in 10 different internal formats. Thus the expression ‘environment’ [ENV] is an abstract concept assuming an objective reality which is common to all living species but indeed it is processed by every species in a species-specific way.
In a human culture the usual point of view [ENVhum] is simultaneous with all the other points of views [ENVa] of all the other other species a.
In the ideal case it would be possible to translate all species-specific views ENVa into a symbolic representation which in turn could then be translated into the human point of view ENVhum. Then — in the ideal case — we could define the term environment [ENV] as the sum of all the different species-specific views translated in a human specific language: ∑ENVa = ENV.
But, because such a generalized view of the environment is until today not really possible by practical reasons we will use here for the beginning only expressions related to the human specific point of view [ENVhum] using as language an ordinary language [L], here the English language [LEN]. Every scientific language — e.g. the language of physics — is understood here as a sub language of the ordinary language.
EVENTS
An event [EV] within an event space [ENVa] is a change[X] which can be observed at least from the members of that species [SP] a which is part of that environment ENV which enables a species-specific event space [ENVa]. Possibly there can be other actors around in the environment ENV from different species with their specific event space [ENVa] where the content of the different event spaces can possible overlap with regard to certain events.
A behavior is some observable movement of the body of some actor.
Changes X can be associated with certain behavior of certain actors or with non-actor conditions.
Thus when there are some human or non-human actors in an environment which are moving than they show a behavior which can eventually be associated with some observable changes.
CHANGE
Besides being associated with observable events in the (species specific) environment the expression change is understood here as a kind of inner state in an actor which can comparepast (stored) states Spast with an actual state Snow. If the past and actual state differ in some observable aspect Diff(Spast, Snow) ≠ 0, then there exists some change X, or Diff(Spast, Snow) = X. Usually the actor perceiving a change X will assume that this internal structure represents something external to the brain, but this must not necessarily be the case. It is of help if there are other human actors which confirm such a change perception although even this does not guarantee that there really is a change occurring. In the real world it is possible that a whole group of human actors can have a wrong interpretation.
SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION AND MEANING
It is a specialty of human actors — to some degree shared by other non-human biological actors — that they not only can built up internal representations ENVint of the reality external to the brain (the body itself or the world beyond the body) which are mostly unconscious, partially conscious, but also they can built up structures of expressions of an internal language Lint which can be mimicked to a high degree by expressions in the body-external environment ENV called expressions of an ordinary language L.
For this to work one has to assume that there exists an internal mapping from internal representations ENVint into the expressions of the internal language Lint as
meaning : ENVint <—> Lint.
and
speaking: Lint —> L
hearing: Lint <— L
Thus human actors can use their ordinary language L to activate internal encodings/ decodings with regard to the internal representations ENVint gained so far. This is called here symbolic communication.
NO SPEECH ACTS
To classify the occurrences of symbolic expressions during a symbolic communication is a nearly infinite undertaking. First impressions of the unsolvability of such a classification task can be gained if one reads the Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. [5] Later trials from different philosophers and scientists — e.g. under the heading of speech acts [4] — can not fully convince until today.
Instead of assuming here a complete scientific framework to classify occurrences of symbolic expressions of an ordinary language L we will only look to some examples and discuss these.
KINDS OF EXPRESSIONS
In what follows we will look to some selected examples of symbolic expressions and discuss these.
(Decidable) Concrete Expressions [(D)CE]
It is assumed here that two human actors A and B speaking the same ordinary language L are capable in a concrete situation S to describeobjects OBJ and properties PROP of this situation in a way, that the hearer of a concrete expression E can decide whether the encoded meaning of that expression produced by the speakeris part of the observable situation S or not.
Thus, if A and B are together in a room with a wooden white table and there is a enough light for an observation then B can understand what A is saying if he states ‘There is a white wooden table.‘
To understand means here that both human actors are able to perceive the wooden white table as an object with properties, their brains will transform these external signals into internal neural signals forming an inner — not 1-to-1 — representationENVint which can further be mapped by the learned meaning function into expressions of the inner language Lint and mapped further — by the speaker — into the external expressions of the learned ordinary language L and if the hearer can hear these spoken expressions he can translate the external expressions into the internal expressions which can be mapped onto the learned internal representations ENVint. In everyday situations there exists a high probability that the hearer then can respond with a spoken ‘Yes, that’s true’.
If this happens that some human actor is uttering a symbolic expression with regard to some observable property of the external environment and the other human actor does respond with a confirmation then such an utterance is called here a decidable symbolic expression of the ordinary language L. In this case one can classify such an expression as being true. Otherwise the expression is classified as being not true.
The case of being not true is not a simple case. Being not true can mean: (i) it is actually simply not given; (ii) it is conceivable that the meaning could become true if the external situation would be different; (iii) it is — in the light of the accessible knowledge — not conceivable that the meaning could become true in any situation; (iv) the meaning is to fuzzy to decided which case (i) – (iii) fits.
Cognitive Abstraction Processes
Before we talk about (Undecidable) Universal Expressions [(U)UE] it has to clarified that the internal mappings in a human actor are not only non-1-to-1 mappings but they are additionally automatic transformation processes of the kind that concrete perceptions of concrete environmental matters are automatically transformed by the brain into different kinds of states which are abstracted states using the concrete incoming signals as a trigger either to start a new abstracted state or to modify an existing abstracted state. Given such abstracted states there exist a multitude of other neural processes to process these abstracted states further embedded in numerous different relationships.
Thus the assumed internal language Lint does not map the neural processes which are processing the concrete events as such but the processed abstracted states! Language expressions as such can never be related directly to concrete material because this concrete material has no direct neural basis. What works — completely unconsciously — is that the brain can detect that an actual neural pattern nn has some similarity with a given abstracted structure NN and that then this concrete pattern nn is internally classified as an instance of NN. That means we can recognize that a perceived concrete matter nn is in ‘the light of’ our available (unconscious) knowledge an NN, but we cannot argue explicitly why. The decision has been processed automatically (unconsciously), but we can become aware of the result of this unconscious process.
Universal (Undecidable) Expressions [U(U)E]
Let us repeat the expression ‘There is a white wooden table‘ which has been used before as an example of a concrete decidable expression.
If one looks to the different parts of this expression then the partial expressions ‘white’, ‘wooden’, ‘table’ can be mapped by a learned meaning function φ into abstracted structures which are the result of internal processing. This means there can be countable infinite many concrete instances in the external environment ENV which can be understood as being white. The same holds for the expressions ‘wooden’ and ‘table’. Thus the expressions ‘white’, ‘wooden’, ‘table’ are all related to abstracted structures and therefor they have to be classified as universal expressions which as such are — strictly speaking — not decidable because they can be true in many concrete situations with different concrete matters. Or take it otherwise: an expression with a meaning function φ pointing to an abstracted structure is asymmetric: one expression can be related to many different perceivable concrete matters but certain members of a set of different perceived concrete matters can be related to one and the same abstracted structure on account of similarities based on properties embedded in the perceived concrete matter and being part of the abstracted structure.
In a cognitive point of view one can describe these matters such that the expression — like ‘table’ — which is pointing to a cognitive abstracted structure ‘T’ includes a set of properties Π and every concrete perceived structure ‘t’ (caused e.g. by some concrete matter in our environment which we would classify as a ‘table’) must have a ‘certain amount’ of properties Π* that one can say that the properties Π* are entailed in the set of properties Π of the abstracted structure T, thus Π* ⊆ Π. In what circumstances some speaker-hearer will say that something perceived concrete ‘is’ a table or ‘is not’ a table will depend from the learning history of this speaker-hearer. A child in the beginning of learning a language L can perhaps call something a ‘chair’ and the parents will correct the child and will perhaps say ‘no, this is table’.
Thus the expression ‘There is a white wooden table‘ as such is not true or false because it is not clear which set of concrete perceptions shall be derived from the possible internal meaning mappings, but if a concrete situation S is given with a concrete object with concrete properties then a speaker can ‘translate’ his/ her concrete perceptions with his learned meaning function φ into a composed expression using universal expressions. In such a situation where the speaker is part of the real situation S he/ she can recognize that the given situation is an instance of the abstracted structures encoded in the used expression. And recognizing this being an instanceinterprets the universal expression in a way that makes the universal expression fitting to a real given situation. And thereby the universal expression is transformed by interpretation with φ into a concrete decidable expression.
SUMMING UP
Thus the decisive moment of turning undecidable universal expressions U(U)E into decidable concrete expressions (D)CE is a human actor A behaving as a speaker-hearer of the used language L. Without a speaker-hearer every universal expressions is undefined and neither true nor false.
makedecidable : S x Ahum x E —> E x {true, false}
This reads as follows: If you want to know whether an expression E is concrete and as being concrete is ‘true’ or ‘false’ then ask a human actor Ahum which is part of a concrete situation S and the human actor shall answer whether the expression E can be interpreted such that E can be classified being either ‘true’ or ‘false’.
The function ‘makedecidable()’ is therefore the description (like a ‘recipe’) of a real process in the real world with real actors. The important factors in this description are the meaning functions inside the participating human actors. Although it is not possible to describe these meaning functions directly one can check their behavior and one can define an abstract model which describes the observable behavior of speaker-hearer of the language L. This is an empirical model and represents the typical case of behavioral models used in psychology, biology, sociology etc.
SOURCES
[1] Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll (German: [ˈʏkskʏl])(1864 – 1944) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll
[2] Jakob von Uexküll, 1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. (Download: https://ia802708.us.archive.org/13/items/umweltundinnenwe00uexk/umweltundinnenwe00uexk.pdf )
[3] Wikipedia EN, Speech acts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act
[4] Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( 1889 – 1951): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953: Philosophische Untersuchungen [PU], 1953: Philosophical Investigations [PI], translated by G. E. M. Anscombe /* For more details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations */
Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org) eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458, February 27-March 16, 2021,
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de
Before one starts the HMI analysis some stakeholder — in our case are the users stakeholder as well as users in one role — have to present some given situation — classifiable as a ‘problem’ — to depart from and a vision as the envisioned goal to be realized.
Here we give a short description of the problem for the CM:MI paradigm and the vision, what should be gained.
Problem: Mankind on the Planet Earth
In this project the mankind on the planet earth is understood as the primary problem. ‘Mankind’ is seen here as the life form called homo sapiens. Based on the findings of biological evolution one can state that the homo sapiens has — besides many other wonderful capabilities — at least two extraordinary capabilities:
Outside to Inside
The whole body with the brain is able to convert continuously body-external events into internal, neural events. And the brain inside the body receives many events inside the body as external events too. Thus in the brain we can observe a mixup of body-external (outside 1) and body-internal events (outside 2), realized as set of billions of neural processes, highly interrelated. Most of these neural processes are unconscious, a small part is conscious. Nevertheless these unconscious and conscious events are neurally interrelated. This overall conversion from outside 1 and outside 2 into neural processes can be seen as a mapping. As we know today from biology, psychology and brain sciences this mapping is not a 1-1 mapping. The brain does all the time a kind of filtering — mostly unconscious — sorting out only those events which are judged by the brain to be important. Furthermore the brain is time-slicing all its sensory inputs, storing these time-slices (called ‘memories’), whereby these time-slices again are no 1-1 copies. The storing of time-sclices is a complex (unconscious) process with many kinds of operations like structuring, associating, abstracting, evaluating, and more. From this one can deduce that the content of an individual brain and the surrounding reality of the own body as well as the world outside the own body can be highly different. All kinds of perceived and stored neural events which can be or can become conscious are here called conscious cognitive substrates or cognitive objects.
Inside to Outside (to Inside)
Generally it is known that the homo sapiens can produce with its body events which have some impact on the world outside the body. One kind of such events is the production of all kinds of movements, including gestures, running, grasping with hands, painting, writing as well as sounds by his voice. What is of special interest here are forms of communications between different humans, and even more specially those communications enabled by the spoken sounds of a language as well as the written signs of a language. Spoken sounds as well as written signs are here called expressions associated with a known language. Expressions as such have no meaning (A non-speaker of a language L can hear or see expressions of the language L but he/she/x never will understand anything). But as everyday experience shows nearly every child starts very soon to learn which kinds of expressions belong to a language and with what kinds of shared experiences they can be associated. This learning is related to many complex neural processes which map expressions internally onto — conscious and unconscious — cognitive objects (including expressions!). This mapping builds up an internal meaning function from expressions into cognitive objects and vice versa. Because expressions have a dual face (being internal neural structures as well as being body-outside events by conversions from the inside to body-outside) it is possible that a homo sapiens can transmit its internal encoding of cognitive objects into expressions from his inside to the outside and thereby another homo sapiens can perceive the produced outside expression and can map this outside expression into an intern expression. As far as the meaning function of of the receiving homo sapiens is sufficiently similar to the meaning function of the sending homo sapiens there exists some probability that the receiving homo sapiens can activate from its memory cognitive objects which have some similarity with those of the sending homo sapiens.
Although we know today of different kinds of animals having some form of language, there is no species known which is with regard to language comparable to the homo sapiens. This explains to a large extend why the homo sapiens population was able to cooperate in a way, which not only can include many persons but also can stretch through long periods of time and can include highly complex cognitive objects and associated behavior.
Negative Complexity
In 2006 I introduced the term negative complexity in my writings to describe the fact that in the world surrounding an individual person there is an amount of language-encoded meaning available which is beyond the capacity of an individual brain to be processed. Thus whatever kind of experience or knowledge is accumulated in libraries and data bases, if the negative complexity is higher and higher than this knowledge can no longer help individual persons, whole groups, whole populations in a constructive usage of all this. What happens is that the intended well structured ‘sound’ of knowledge is turned into a noisy environment which crashes all kinds of intended structures into nothing or badly deformed somethings.
Entangled Humans
From Quantum Mechanics we know the idea of entangled states. But we must not dig into quantum mechanics to find other phenomena which manifest entangled states. Look around in your everyday world. There exist many occasions where a human person is acting in a situation, but the bodily separateness is a fake. While sitting before a laptop in a room the person is communicating within an online session with other persons. And depending from the social role and the membership in some social institution and being part of some project this person will talk, perceive, feel, decide etc. with regard to the known rules of these social environments which are represented as cognitive objects in its brain. Thus by knowledge, by cognition, the individual person is in its situation completely entangled with other persons which know from these roles and rules and following thereby in their behavior these rules too. Sitting with the body in a certain physical location somewhere on the planet does not matter in this moment. The primary reality is this cognitive space in the brains of the participating persons.
If you continue looking around in your everyday world you will probably detect that the everyday world is full of different kinds of cognitively induced entangled states of persons. These internalized structures are functioning like protocols, like scripts, like rules in a game, telling everybody what is expected from him/her/x, and to that extend, that people adhere to such internalized protocols, the daily life has some structure, has some stability, enables planning of behavior where cooperation between different persons is necessary. In a cognitively enabled entangled state the individual person becomes a member of something greater, becoming a super person. Entangled persons can do things which usually are not possible as long you are working as a pure individual person.[1]
Entangled Humans and Negative Complexity
Although entangled human persons can principally enable more complex events, structures, processes, engineering, cultural work than single persons, human entanglement is still limited by the brain capacities as well as by the limits of normal communication. Increasing the amount of meaning relevant artifacts or increasing the velocity of communication events makes things even more worse. There are objective limits for human processing, which can run into negative complexity.
Future is not Waiting
The term ‘future‘ is cognitively empty: there exists nowhere an object which can be called ‘future’. What we have is some local actual presence (the Now), which the body is turning into internal representations of some kind (becoming the Past), but something like a future does not exist, nowhere. Our knowledge about the future is radically zero.
Nevertheless, because our bodies are part of a physical world (planet, solar system, …) and our entangled scientific work has identified some regularities of this physical world which can be bused for some predictions what could happen with some probability as assumed states where our clocks are showing a different time stamp. But because there are many processes running in parallel, composed of billions of parameters which can be tuned in many directions, a really good forecast is not simple and depends from so many presuppositions.
Since the appearance of homo sapiens some hundred thousands years ago in Africa the homo sapiens became a game changer which makes all computations nearly impossible. Not in the beginning of the appearance of the homo sapiens, but in the course of time homo sapiens enlarged its number, improved its skills in more and more areas, and meanwhile we know, that homo sapiens indeed has started to crash more and more the conditions of its own life. And principally thinking points out, that homo sapiens could even crash more than only planet earth. Every exemplar of a homo sapiens has a built-in freedom which allows every time to decide to behave in a different way (although in everyday life we are mostly following some protocols). And this built-in freedom is guided by actual knowledge, by emotions, and by available resources. The same child can become a great musician, a great mathematician, a philosopher, a great political leader, an engineer, … but giving the child no resources, depriving it from important social contexts, giving it the wrong knowledge, it can not manifest its freedom in full richness. As human population we need the best out of all children.
Because the processing of the planet, the solar system etc. is going on, we are in need of good forecasts of possible futures, beyond our classical concepts of sharing knowledge. This is where our vision enters.
VISION: DEVELOPING TOGETHER POSSIBLE FUTURES
To find possible and reliable shapes of possible futures we have to exploit all experiences, all knowledge, all ideas, all kinds of creativity by using maximal diversity. Because present knowledge can be false — as history tells us –, we should not rule out all those ideas, which seem to be too crazy at a first glance. Real innovations are always different to what we are used to at that time. Thus the following text is a first rough outline of the vision:
Find a format
which allows anykinds of people
for any kind of given problem
with at least one vision of a possible improvement
together
to search and to find a path leading from the given problem (Now) to the envisioned improved state (future).
For all needed communication any kind of everyday language should be enough.
As needed this everyday language should be extendable with special expressions.
These considerations about possible paths into the wanted envisioned future state should continuously be supported by appropriate automaticsimulations of such a path.
These simulations should include automatic evaluations based on the given envisioned state.
As far as possible adaptive algorithms should be available to support the search, finding and identification of the best cases (referenced by the visions) within human planning.
REFERENCES or COMMENTS
[1] One of the most common entangled state in daily life is the usage of normal language! A normal language L works only because the rules of usage of this language L are shared by all speaker-hearer of this language, and these rules are explicit cognitive structures (not necessarily conscious, mostly unconscious!).
Last change: 23.February 2019 (continued the text)
Last change: 24.February 2019 (extended the text)
CONTEXT
In the overview of the AAI paradigm version 2 you can find this section dealing with the philosophical perspective of the AAI paradigm. Enjoy reading (or not, then send a comment :-)).
THE DAILY LIFE PERSPECTIVE
The perspective of Philosophy is rooted in the everyday life perspective. With our body we occur in a space with other bodies and objects; different features, properties are associated with the objects, different kinds of relations an changes from one state to another.
From the empirical sciences we have learned to see more details of the everyday life with regard to detailed structures of matter and biological life, with regard to the long history of the actual world, with regard to many interesting dynamics within the objects, within biological systems, as part of earth, the solar system and much more.
A certain aspect of the empirical view of the world is the fact, that some biological systems called ‘homo sapiens’, which emerged only some 300.000 years ago in Africa, show a special property usually called ‘consciousness’ combined with the ability to ‘communicate by symbolic languages’.
Figure 1: General setting of the homo sapiens species (simplified)
As we know today the consciousness is associated with the brain, which in turn is embedded in the body, which is further embedded in an environment.
Thus those ‘things’ about which we are ‘conscious’ are not ‘directly’ the objects and events of the surrounding real world but the ‘constructions of the brain’ based on actual external and internal sensor inputs as well as already collected ‘knowledge’. To qualify the ‘conscious things’ as ‘different’ from the assumed ‘real things’ ‘outside there’ it is common to speak of these brain-generated virtual things either as ‘qualia’ or — more often — as ‘phenomena’ which are different to the assumed possible real things somewhere ‘out there’.
PHILOSOPHY AS FIRST PERSON VIEW
‘Philosophy’ has many facets. One enters the scene if we are taking the insight into the general virtual character of our primary knowledge to be the primary and irreducible perspective of knowledge. Every other more special kind of knowledge is necessarily a subspace of this primary phenomenological knowledge.
There is already from the beginning a fundamental distinction possible in the realm of conscious phenomena (PH): there are phenomena which can be ‘generated’ by the consciousness ‘itself’ — mostly called ‘by will’ — and those which are occurring and disappearing without a direct influence of the consciousness, which are in a certain basic sense ‘given’ and ‘independent’, which are appearing and disappearing according to ‘their own’. It is common to call these independent phenomena ’empirical phenomena’ which represent a true subset of all phenomena: PH_emp ⊂ PH. Attention: These empirical phenomena’ are still ‘phenomena’, virtual entities generated by the brain inside the brain, not directly controllable ‘by will’.
There is a further basic distinction which differentiates the empirical phenomena into those PH_emp_bdy which are controlled by some processes in the body (being tired, being hungry, having pain, …) and those PH_emp_ext which are controlled by objects and events in the environment beyond the body (light, sounds, temperature, surfaces of objects, …). Both subsets of empirical phenomena are different: PH_emp_bdy ∩ PH_emp_ext = 0. Because phenomena usually are occurring associated with typical other phenomena there are ‘clusters’/ ‘pattern’ of phenomena which ‘represent’ possible events or states.
Modern empirical science has ‘refined’ the concept of an empirical phenomenon by introducing ‘standard objects’ which can be used to ‘compare’ some empirical phenomenon with such an empirical standard object. Thus even when the perception of two different observers possibly differs somehow with regard to a certain empirical phenomenon, the additional comparison with an ’empirical standard object’ which is the ‘same’ for both observers, enhances the quality, improves the precision of the perception of the empirical phenomena.
From these considerations we can derive the following informal definitions:
Something is ‘empirical‘ if it is the ‘real counterpart’ of a phenomenon which can be observed by other persons in my environment too.
Something is ‘standardized empirical‘ if it is empirical and can additionally be associated with a before introduced empirical standard object.
Something is ‘weak empirical‘ if it is the ‘real counterpart’ of a phenomenon which can potentially be observed by other persons in my body as causally correlated with the phenomenon.
Something is ‘cognitive‘ if it is the counterpart of a phenomenon which is not empirical in one of the meanings (1) – (3).
It is a common task within philosophy to analyze the space of the phenomena with regard to its structure as well as to its dynamics. Until today there exists not yet a complete accepted theory for this subject. This indicates that this seems to be some ‘hard’ task to do.
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BRAINS
As one can see in figure 1 a brain in a body is completely disconnected from the brain in another body. There is a real, deep ‘gap’ which has to be overcome if the two brains want to ‘coordinate’ their ‘planned actions’.
Luckily the emergence of homo sapiens with the new extended property of ‘consciousness’ was accompanied by another exciting property, the ability to ‘talk’. This ability enabled the creation of symbolic languages which can help two disconnected brains to have some exchange.
But ‘language’ does not consist of sounds or a ‘sequence of sounds’ only; the special power of a language is the further property that sequences of sounds can be associated with ‘something else’ which serves as the ‘meaning’ of these sounds. Thus we can use sounds to ‘talk about’ other things like objects, events, properties etc.
The single brain ‘knows’ about the relationship between some sounds and ‘something else’ because the brain is able to ‘generate relations’ between brain-structures for sounds and brain-structures for something else. These relations are some real connections in the brain. Therefore sounds can be related to ‘something else’ or certain objects, and events, objects etc. can become related to certain sounds. But these ‘meaning relations’ can only ‘bridge the gap’ to another brain if both brains are using the same ‘mapping’, the same ‘encoding’. This is only possible if the two brains with their bodies share a real world situation RW_S where the perceptions of the both brains are associated with the same parts of the real world between both bodies. If this is the case the perceptions P(RW_S) can become somehow ‘synchronized’ by the shared part of the real world which in turn is transformed in the brain structures P(RW_S) —> B_S which represent in the brain the stimulating aspects of the real world. These brain structures B_S can then be associated with some sound structures B_A written as a relation MEANING(B_S, B_A). Such a relation realizes an encoding which can be used for communication. Communication is using sound sequences exchanged between brains via the body and the air of an environment as ‘expressions’ which can be recognized as part of a learned encoding which enables the receiving brain to identify a possible meaning candidate.
DIFFERENT MODES TO EXPRESS MEANING
Following the evolution of communication one can distinguish four important modes of expressing meaning, which will be used in this AAI paradigm.
VISUAL ENCODING
A direct way to express the internal meaning structures of a brain is to use a ‘visual code’ which represents by some kinds of drawing the visual shapes of objects in the space, some attributes of shapes, which are common for all people who can ‘see’. Thus a picture and then a sequence of pictures like a comic or a story board can communicate simple ideas of situations, participating objects, persons and animals, showing changes in the arrangement of the shapes in the space.
Figure 2: Pictorial expressions representing aspects of the visual and the auditory sens modes
Even with a simple visual code one can generate many sequences of situations which all together can ‘tell a story’. The basic elements are a presupposed ‘space’ with possible ‘objects’ in this space with different positions, sizes, relations and properties. One can even enhance these visual shapes with written expressions of a spoken language. The sequence of the pictures represents additionally some ‘timely order’. ‘Changes’ can be encoded by ‘differences’ between consecutive pictures.
FROM SPOKEN TO WRITTEN LANGUAGE EXPRESSIONS
Later in the evolution of language, much later, the homo sapiens has learned to translate the spoken language L_s in a written format L_w using signs for parts of words or even whole words. The possible meaning of these written expressions were no longer directly ‘visible’. The meaning was now only available for those people who had learned how these written expressions are associated with intended meanings encoded in the head of all language participants. Thus only hearing or reading a language expression would tell the reader either ‘nothing’ or some ‘possible meanings’ or a ‘definite meaning’.
Figure 3: A written textual version in parallel to a pictorial version
If one has only the written expressions then one has to ‘know’ with which ‘meaning in the brain’ the expressions have to be associated. And what is very special with the written expressions compared to the pictorial expressions is the fact that the elements of the pictorial expressions are always very ‘concrete’ visual objects while the written expressions are ‘general’ expressions allowing many different concrete interpretations. Thus the expression ‘person’ can be used to be associated with many thousands different concrete objects; the same holds for the expression ‘road’, ‘moving’, ‘before’ and so on. Thus the written expressions are like ‘manufacturing instructions’ to search for possible meanings and configure these meanings to a ‘reasonable’ complex matter. And because written expressions are in general rather ‘abstract’/ ‘general’ which allow numerous possible concrete realizations they are very ‘economic’ because they use minimal expressions to built many complex meanings. Nevertheless the daily experience with spoken and written expressions shows that they are continuously candidates for false interpretations.
FORMAL MATHEMATICAL WRITTEN EXPRESSIONS
Besides the written expressions of everyday languages one can observe later in the history of written languages the steady development of a specialized version called ‘formal languages’ L_f with many different domains of application. Here I am focusing on the formal written languages which are used in mathematics as well as some pictorial elements to ‘visualize’ the intended ‘meaning’ of these formal mathematical expressions.
Fig. 4: Properties of an acyclic directed graph with nodes (vertices) and edges (directed edges = arrows)
One prominent concept in mathematics is the concept of a ‘graph’. In the basic version there are only some ‘nodes’ (also called vertices) and some ‘edges’ connecting the nodes. Formally one can represent these edges as ‘pairs of nodes’. If N represents the set of nodes then N x N represents the set of all pairs of these nodes.
In a more specialized version the edges are ‘directed’ (like a ‘one way road’) and also can be ‘looped back’ to a node occurring ‘earlier’ in the graph. If such back-looping arrows occur a graph is called a ‘cyclic graph’.
Fig.5: Directed cyclic graph extended to represent ‘states of affairs’
If one wants to use such a graph to describe some ‘states of affairs’ with their possible ‘changes’ one can ‘interpret’ a ‘node’ as a state of affairs and an arrow as a change which turns one state of affairs S in a new one S’ which is minimally different to the old one.
As a state of affairs I understand here a ‘situation’ embedded in some ‘context’ presupposing some common ‘space’. The possible ‘changes’ represented by arrows presuppose some dimension of ‘time’. Thus if a node n’ is following a node n indicated by an arrow then the state of affairs represented by the node n’ is to interpret as following the state of affairs represented in the node n with regard to the presupposed time T ‘later’, or n < n’ with ‘<‘ as a symbol for a timely ordering relation.
Fig.6: Example of a state of affairs with a 2-dimensional space configured as a grid with a black and a white token
The space can be any kind of a space. If one assumes as an example a 2-dimensional space configured as a grid –as shown in figure 6 — with two tokens at certain positions one can introduce a language to describe the ‘facts’ which constitute the state of affairs. In this example one needs ‘names for objects’, ‘properties of objects’ as well as ‘relations between objects’. A possible finite set of facts for situation 1 could be the following:
TOKEN(T1), BLACK(T1), POSITION(T1,1,1)
TOKEN(T2), WHITE(T2), POSITION(T2,2,1)
NEIGHBOR(T1,T2)
CELL(C1), POSITION(1,2), FREE(C1)
‘T1’, ‘T2’, as well as ‘C1’ are names of objects, ‘TOKEN’, ‘BACK’ etc. are names of properties, and ‘NEIGHBOR’ is a relation between objects. This results in the equation:
These facts describe the situation S1. If it is important to describe possible objects ‘external to the situation’ as important factors which can cause some changes then one can describe these objects as a set of facts in a separated ‘context’. In this example this could be two players which can move the black and white tokens and thereby causing a change of the situation. What is the situation and what belongs to a context is somewhat arbitrary. If one describes the agriculture of some region one usually would not count the planets and the atmosphere as part of this region but one knows that e.g. the sun can severely influence the situation in combination with the atmosphere.
Fig.7: Change of a state of affairs given as a state which will be enhanced by a new object
Let us stay with a state of affairs with only a situation without a context. The state of affairs is a ‘state’. In the example shown in figure 6 I assume a ‘change’ caused by the insertion of a new black token at position (2,2). Written in the language of facts L_fact we get:
Thus the new state S2 is generated out of the old state S1 by unifying S1 with the set of new facts: S2 = S1 ∪ {TOKEN(T3), BLACK(T3), POSITION(2,2), NEIGHBOR(T3,T2)}. All the other facts of S1 are still ‘valid’. In a more general manner one can introduce a change-expression with the following format:
This can be read as follows: The follow-up state S2 is generated out of the state S1 by adding to the state S1 the set of facts { … }.
This layout of a change expression can also be used if some facts have to be modified or removed from a state. If for instance by some reason the white token should be removed from the situation one could write:
These simple examples demonstrate another fact: while facts about objects and their properties are independent from each other do relational facts depend from the state of their object facts. The relation of neighborhood e.g. depends from the participating neighbors. If — as in the example above — the object token T2 disappears then the relation ‘NEIGHBOR(T1,T2)’ no longer holds. This points to a hierarchy of dependencies with the ‘basic facts’ at the ‘root’ of a situation and all the other facts ‘above’ basic facts or ‘higher’ depending from the basic facts. Thus ‘higher order’ facts should be added only for the actual state and have to be ‘re-computed’ for every follow-up state anew.
If one would specify a context for state S1 saying that there are two players and one allows for each player actions like ‘move’, ‘insert’ or ‘delete’ then one could make the change from state S1 to state S2 more precise. Assuming the following facts for the context:
PLAYER(PB1), PLAYER(PW1), HAS-THE-TURN(PB1)
In that case one could enhance the change statement in the following way:
This would read as follows: given state S1 the player PB1 inserts a black token at position (2,2); this yields a new state S2.
With or without a specified context but with regard to a set of possible change statements it can be — which is the usual case — that there is more than one option what can be changed. Some of the main types of changes are the following ones:
RANDOM
NOT RANDOM, which can be specified as follows:
With PROBABILITIES (classical, quantum probability, …)
DETERMINISTIC
Furthermore, if the causing object is an actor which can adapt structurally or even learn locally then this actor can appear in some time period like a deterministic system, in different collected time periods as an ‘oscillating system’ with different behavior, or even as a random system with changing probabilities. This make the forecast of systems with adaptive and/ or learning systems rather difficult.
Another aspect results from the fact that there can be states either with one actor which can cause more than one action in parallel or a state with multiple actors which can act simultaneously. In both cases the resulting total change has eventually to be ‘filtered’ through some additional rules telling what is ‘possible’ in a state and what not. Thus if in the example of figure 6 both player want to insert a token at position (2,2) simultaneously then either the rules of the game would forbid such a simultaneous action or — like in a computer game — simultaneous actions are allowed but the ‘geometry of a 2-dimensional space’ would not allow that two different tokens are at the same position.
Another aspect of change is the dimension of time. If the time dimension is not explicitly specified then a change from some state S_i to a state S_j does only mark the follow up state S_j as later. There is no specific ‘metric’ of time. If instead a certain ‘clock’ is specified then all changes have to be aligned with this ‘overall clock’. Then one can specify at what ‘point of time t’ the change will begin and at what point of time t*’ the change will be ended. If there is more than one change specified then these different changes can have different timings.
THIRD PERSON VIEW
Up until now the point of view describing a state and the possible changes of states is done in the so-called 3rd-person view: what can a person perceive if it is part of a situation and is looking into the situation. It is explicitly assumed that such a person can perceive only the ‘surface’ of objects, including all kinds of actors. Thus if a driver of a car stears his car in a certain direction than the ‘observing person’ can see what happens, but can not ‘look into’ the driver ‘why’ he is steering in this way or ‘what he is planning next’.
A 3rd-person view is assumed to be the ‘normal mode of observation’ and it is the normal mode of empirical science.
Nevertheless there are situations where one wants to ‘understand’ a bit more ‘what is going on in a system’. Thus a biologist can be interested to understand what mechanisms ‘inside a plant’ are responsible for the growth of a plant or for some kinds of plant-disfunctions. There are similar cases for to understand the behavior of animals and men. For instance it is an interesting question what kinds of ‘processes’ are in an animal available to ‘navigate’ in the environment across distances. Even if the biologist can look ‘into the body’, even ‘into the brain’, the cells as such do not tell a sufficient story. One has to understand the ‘functions’ which are enabled by the billions of cells, these functions are complex relations associated with certain ‘structures’ and certain ‘signals’. For this it is necessary to construct an explicit formal (mathematical) model/ theory representing all the necessary signals and relations which can be used to ‘explain’ the obsrvable behavior and which ‘explains’ the behavior of the billions of cells enabling such a behavior.
In a simpler, ‘relaxed’ kind of modeling one would not take into account the properties and behavior of the ‘real cells’ but one would limit the scope to build a formal model which suffices to explain the oservable behavior.
This kind of approach to set up models of possible ‘internal’ (as such hidden) processes of an actor can extend the 3rd-person view substantially. These models are called in this text ‘actor models (AM)’.
HIDDEN WORLD PROCESSES
In this text all reported 3rd-person observations are called ‘actor story’, independent whether they are done in a pictorial or a textual mode.
As has been pointed out such actor stories are somewhat ‘limited’ in what they can describe.
It is possible to extend such an actor story (AS) by several actor models (AM).
An actor story defines the situations in which an actor can occur. This includes all kinds of stimuli which can trigger the possible senses of the actor as well as all kinds of actions an actor can apply to a situation.
The actor model of such an actor has to enable the actor to handle all these assumed stimuli as well as all these actions in the expected way.
While the actor story can be checked whether it is describing a process in an empirical ‘sound’ way, the actor models are either ‘purely theoretical’ but ‘behavioral sound’ or they are also empirically sound with regard to the body of a biological or a technological system.
A serious challenge is the occurrence of adaptiv or/ and locally learning systems. While the actor story is a finite description of possible states and changes, adaptiv or/ and locally learning systeme can change their behavior while ‘living’ in the actor story. These changes in the behavior can not completely be ‘foreseen’!
COGNITIVE EXPERT PROCESSES
According to the preceding considerations a homo sapiens as a biological system has besides many properties at least a consciousness and the ability to talk and by this to communicate with symbolic languages.
Looking to basic modes of an actor story (AS) one can infer some basic concepts inherently present in the communication.
Without having an explicit model of the internal processes in a homo sapiens system one can infer some basic properties from the communicative acts:
Speaker and hearer presuppose a space within which objects with properties can occur.
Changes can happen which presuppose some timely ordering.
There is a disctinction between concrete things and abstract concepts which correspond to many concrete things.
There is an implicit hierarchy of concepts starting with concrete objects at the ‘root level’ given as occurence in a concrete situation. Other concepts of ‘higher levels’ refer to concepts of lower levels.
There are different kinds of relations between objects on different conceptual levels.
The usage of language expressions presupposes structures which can be associated with the expressions as their ‘meanings’. The mapping between expressions and their meaning has to be learned by each actor separately, but in cooperation with all the other actors, with which the actor wants to share his meanings.
It is assume that all the processes which enable the generation of concepts, concept hierarchies, relations, meaning relations etc. are unconscious! In the consciousness one can use parts of the unconscious structures and processes under strictly limited conditions.
To ‘learn’ dedicated matters and to be ‘critical’ about the quality of what one is learnig requires some disciplin, some learning methods, and a ‘learning-friendly’ environment. There is no guaranteed method of success.
There are lots of unconscious processes which can influence understanding, learning, planning, decisions etc. and which until today are not yet sufficiently cleared up.
An overview to the enhanced AAI theory version 2 you can find here. In this post we talk about the special topic how the actor story (AS) can be used for a modeling of the real world (RW).
AS AND REAL WORLD MODELING
In the preceding post you find a rough description how an actor story can be generated challenged by a problem P. Here I shall address the question, how this procedure can be used to model certain aspects of the real world and not some abstract ideas only.
There are two main elements of the actor story which can be related to the real world: (i) The start state of the actor story and the list of possible change expressions.
FACTS
A start state is a finite set of facts which in turn are — in the case of the mathematical language — constituted by names of objects associated with properties or relations. Primarily the possible meaning of these expressions is located in the cognitive structures of the actors. These cognitive structures are as such not empirical entities and are partially available in a state called consciousness. If some element of meaning is conscious andsimultaneously part of the inter-subjective space between different actors in a way that all participating actors can perceive these elements, then these elements are called empirical by everyday experience, if these facts can be decided between the participants of the situation. If there exist further explicit measurement procedures associating an inter-subjective property with inter-subjective measurement data then these elements are called genuineempirical data.
Thus the collection of facts constituting a state of an actor story can be realized as a set of empirical facts, at least in the format of empirical by everyday experience.
CHANGES
While a state represents only static facts, one needs an additional element to be able to model the dynamic aspect of the real world. This is realized by change expressions X.
The general idea of a change is that at least one fact f of an actual state (= NOW), is changed either by complete disappearance or by changing some of its properties or by the creation of a new fact f1. An object called ‘B1’ with the property being ‘red’ — written as ‘RED(B1)’ — perhaps changes its property from being ‘red’ to become ‘blue’ — written as ‘BLUE(B1)’ –. Then the set of facts of the actual state S0= {RED(B1)} will change to a successor state S1={BLUE(B1)}. In this case the old fact ‘RED(B1)’ has been deleted and the new fact ‘BLUE(B1)’ has been created. Another example: the object ‘B1’ has also a ‘weight’ measured in kg which changes too. Then the actual state was S0={RED(B1), WEIGHT(B1,kg,2.4)} and this state changed to the successor state S1= {BLUE(B1), WEIGHT(B1,kg,3.4)}.
The possible cause of a change can be either an object or the ‘whole state‘ representing the world.
The mapping from a given state s into a successor state s’ by subtracting facts f- and joining facts f+ is here called an action: S –> S-(f-) u (f+) or action(s) = s’ = s-(f-) u (f+) with s , s’ in S
Because an action has an actor as a carrier one can write action: S x A –> S-(f-) u (f+) or action_a(s) = s’.
The defining properties of such an action are given in the sets of facts to be deleted — written as ‘d:{f-}’ — and the sets of facts to be created — written ‘c:{f+}’ –.
A full change expression amounts then to the following format: <s,s’, obj-name, action-name, d:{…}, c:{…}>.
But this is not yet the whole story. A change can be deterministic or indeterministic.
The deterministic change is cause by a deterministic actor or by a deterministic world.
The indeterministic change can have several formats:e.g. classical probability or quantum-like probability or the an actor as cause, whose behavior is not completely deterministic.
Additionally there can be interactions between different objects which can cause a change and these changes happen in parallel, simultaneously. Depending from the assumed environment (= world) and some laws describing the behavior of this world it can happen, that different local actions can hinder each other or change the effect of the changes.
Independent of the different kinds of changes it can be required that all used change-expressions should be of that kind that one can state that they are empirical by everyday experience.
TIME
And there is even more to tell. A change has in everyday life a duration measured with certain time units generated by a technical device called a clock.
To improve the empirical precision of change expressions one has to add the duration of the change between the actual state s and the final state s’ showing all the deletes (f-) and creates (f+) which are caused by this change-expression. This can only be done if a standard clock is included in the facts represented by the actual time stamp of this clock. Thus with regard to such a standard time one can realize a change with duration (t,t’) exactly in coherence with the standard time. A special case is given when a change-expression describes the effects of its actions in a distributed manner by giving more than one time point (t,t1, …, tn) and associating different deletes and creates with different points of time. Those distributed effects can make an actor story rather complex and difficult to understand by human brains.
An overview to the enhanced AAI theory version 2 you can find here. In this post we talk about the generation of the actor story (AS).
ACTOR STORY
To get from the problem P to an improved configuration S measured by some expectation E needs a process characterized by a set of necessary states Q which are connected by necessary changes X. Such a process can be described with the aid of an actor story AS.
The target of an actor story (AS) is a full specification of all identified necessary tasks T which lead from a start state q* to a goal state q+, including all possible and necessary changes X between the different states M.
A state is here considered as a finite set of facts (F) which are structured as an expression from some language L distinguishing names of objects (like ‘D1’, ‘Un1’, …) as well as properties of objects (like ‘being open’, ‘being green’, …) or relations between objects (like ‘the user stands before the door’). There can also e a ‘negation’ like ‘the door is not open’. Thus a collection of facts like ‘There is a door D1’ and ‘The door D1 is open’ can represent a state.
Changes from one state q to another successor state q’ are described by the object whose action deletes previous facts or creates new facts.
In this approach at least three different modes of an actor story will be distinguished:
A textual mode generating a Textual Actor Story (TAS): In a textual mode a text in some everyday language (e.g. in English) describes the states and changes in plain English. Because in the case of a written text the meaning of the symbols is hidden in the heads of the writers it can be of help to parallelize the written text with the pictorial mode.
A pictorial mode generating a Pictorial Actor Story (PAS). In a pictorial mode the drawings represent the main objects with their properties and relations in an explicit visual way (like a Comic Strip). The drawings can be enhanced by fragments of texts.
A mathematical mode generating a Mathematical Actor Story (MAS): this can be done either (i) by a pictorial graph with nodes and edges as arrows associated with formal expressions or (ii) by a complete formal structure without any pictorial elements.
For every mode it has to be shown how an AAI expert can generate an actor story out of the virtual cognitive world of his brain and how it is possible to decide the empirical soundness of the actor story.
Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org) eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458
