Category Archives: meaning

There exists only one big Problem for the Future of Human Mankind: The Belief in false Narratives

Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch

Time: Jan 5, 2024 – Jan 8, 2024 (09:45 a.m. CET)

Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

TRANSLATION: The following text is a translation from a German version into English. For the translation I am using the software deepL.com as well as chatGPT 4. The English version is a slightly revised version of the German text.

This blog entry will be completed today. However, it has laid the foundations for considerations that will be pursued further in a new blog entry.

CONTEXT

This text belongs to the topic Philosophy (of Science).

Introduction

Triggered by several reasons I started some investigation in the phenomenon of ‘propaganda’ to sharpen my understanding. My strategy was first to try to characterize the phenomenon of ‘general communication’ in order to find some ‘harder criteria’ that would allow to characterize the concept of ‘propaganda’ to stand out against this general background in a somewhat comprehensible way.

The realization of this goal then actually led to an ever more fundamental examination of our normal (human) communication, so that forms of propaganda become recognizable as ‘special cases’ of our communication. The worrying thing about this is that even so-called ‘normal communication’ contains numerous elements that can make it very difficult to recognize and pass on ‘truth’ (*). ‘Massive cases of propaganda’ therefore have their ‘home’ where we communicate with each other every day. So if we want to prevent propaganda, we have to start in everyday life.

(*) The concept of ‘truth’ is examined and explained in great detail in the following long text below. Unfortunately, I have not yet found a ‘short formula’ for it. In essence, it is about establishing a connection to ‘real’ events and processes in the world – including one’s own body – in such a way that they can, in principle, be understood and verified by others.

DICTATORIAL CONTEXT

However, it becomes difficult when there is enough political power that can set the social framework conditions in such a way that for the individual in everyday life – the citizen! – general communication is more or less prescribed – ‘dictated’. Then ‘truth’ becomes less and less or even non-existent. A society is then ‘programmed’ for its own downfall through the suppression of truth. ([3], [6]).

EVERYDAY LIFE AS A DICTATOR ?
The hour of narratives

But – and this is the far more dangerous form of ‘propaganda’ ! – even if there is not a nationwide apparatus of power that prescribes certain forms of ‘truth’, a mutilation or gross distortion of truth can still take place on a grand scale. Worldwide today, in the age of mass media, especially in the age of the internet, we can see that individuals, small groups, special organizations, political groups, entire religious communities, in fact all people and their social manifestations, follow a certain ‘narrative’ [*11] when they act.

Typical for acting according to a narrative is that those who do so individually believe that it is ‘their own decision’ and that their narrative is ‘true’, and that they are therefore ‘in the right’ when they act accordingly. This ‘feeling to be right’ can go as far as claiming the right to kill others because they ‘act wrongly’ in the light of their own ‘narrative’. We should therefore speak here of a ‘narrative truth’: Within the framework of the narrative, a picture of the world is drawn that ‘as a whole’ enables a perspective that ‘as such’ is ‘found to be good’ by the followers of the narrative, as ‘making sense’. Normally, the effect of a narrative, which is experienced as ‘meaningful’, is so great that the ‘truth content’ is no longer examined in detail.

RELIGIOUS NARRATIVES

This has existed at all times in the history of mankind. Narratives that appeared as ‘religious beliefs’ were particularly effective. It is therefore no coincidence that almost all governments of the last millennia have adopted religious beliefs as state doctrines; an essential component of religious beliefs is that they are ‘unprovable’, i.e. ‘incapable of truth’. This makes a religious narrative a wonderful tool in the hands of the powerful to motivate people to behave in certain ways without the threat of violence.

POPULAR NARRATIVES

In recent decades, however, we have experienced new, ‘modern forms’ of narratives that do not come across as religious narratives, but which nevertheless have a very similar effect: People perceive these narratives as ‘giving meaning’ in a world that is becoming increasingly confusing and therefore threatening for everyone today. Individual people, the citizens, also feel ‘politically helpless’, so that – even in a ‘democracy’ – they have the feeling that they cannot directly influence anything: the ‘people up there’ do what they want. In such a situation, ‘simplistic narratives’ are a blessing for the maltreated soul; you hear them and have the feeling: yes, that’s how it is; that’s exactly how I ‘feel’!

Such ‘popular narratives’, which enable ‘good feelings’, are gaining ever greater power. What they have in common with religious narratives is that the ‘followers’ of popular narratives no longer ask the ‘question of truth’; most of them are also not sufficiently ‘trained’ to be able to clarify the truth of a narrative at all. It is typical for supporters of narratives that they are generally hardly able to explain their own narrative to others. They typically send each other links to texts/videos that they find ‘good’ because these texts/videos somehow seem to support the popular narrative, and tend not to check the authors and sources because they are in the eyes of the followers such ‘decent people’, which always say exactly the ‘same thing’ as the ‘popular narrative’ dictates.

NARRATIVES ARE SEXY FOR POWER

If you now take into account that the ‘world of narratives’ is an extremely tempting offer for all those who have power over people or would like to gain power over people, then it should come as no surprise that many governments in this world, many other power groups, are doing just that today: they do not try to coerce people ‘directly’, but they ‘produce’ popular narratives or ‘monitor’ already existing popular narratives’ in order to gain power over the hearts and minds of more and more people via the detour of these narratives. Some speak here of ‘hybrid warfare’, others of ‘modern propaganda’, but ultimately, I guess, these terms miss the core of the problem.

THE NARRATIVE AS A BASIC CULTURAL PATTERN
The ‘irrational’ defends itself against the ‘rational’

The core of the problem is the way in which human communities have always organized their collective action, namely through narratives; we humans have no other option. However, such narratives – as the considerations further down in the text will show – are extremely susceptible to ‘falsity’, to a ‘distortion of the picture of the world’. In the context of the development of legal systems, approaches have been developed during at least the last 7000 years to ‘improve’ the abuse of power in a society by supporting truth-preserving mechanisms. Gradually, this has certainly helped, with all the deficits that still exist today. Additionally, about 500 years ago, a real revolution took place: humanity managed to find a format with the concept of a ‘verifiable narrative (empirical theory)’ that optimized the ‘preservation of truth’ and minimized the slide into untruth. This new concept of ‘verifiable truth’ has enabled great insights that before were beyond imagination .

The ‘aura of the scientific’ has meanwhile permeated almost all of human culture, almost! But we have to realize that although scientific thinking has comprehensively shaped the world of practicality through modern technologies, the way of scientific thinking has not overridden all other narratives. On the contrary, the ‘non-truth narratives’ have become so strong again that they are pushing back the ‘scientific’ in more and more areas of our world, patronizing it, forbidding it, eradicating it. The ‘irrationality’ of religious and popular narratives is stronger than ever before. ‘Irrational narratives’ are for many so appealing because they spare the individual from having to ‘think for themselves’. Real thinking is exhausting, unpopular, annoying and hinders the dream of a simple solution.

THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF HUMANITY

Against this backdrop, the widespread inability of people to recognize and overcome ‘irrational narratives’ appears to be the central problem facing humanity in mastering the current global challenges. Before we need more technology (we certainly do), we need more people who are able and willing to think more and better, and who are also able to solve ‘real problems’ together with others. Real problems can be recognized by the fact that they are largely ‘new’, that there are no ‘simple off-the-shelf’ solutions for them, that you really have to ‘struggle’ together for possible insights; in principle, the ‘old’ is not enough to recognize and implement the ‘true new’, and the future is precisely the space with the greatest amount of ‘unknown’, with lots of ‘genuinely new’ things.

The following text examines this view in detail.

MAIN TEXT FOR EXPLANATION

MODERN PROPAGANDA ?

As mentioned in the introduction the trigger for me to write this text was the confrontation with a popular book which appeared to me as a piece of ‘propaganda’. When I considered to describe my opinion with own words I detected that I had some difficulties: what is the difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘everyday communication’? This forced me to think a little bit more about the ingredients of ‘everyday communication’ and where and why a ‘communication’ is ‘different’ to our ‘everyday communication’. As usual in the beginning of some discussion I took a first look to the various entries in Wikipedia (German and English). The entry in the English Wikipedia on ‘Propaganda [1b] attempts a very similar strategy to look to ‘normal communication’ and compared to this having a look to the phenomenon of ‘propaganda’, albeit with not quite sharp contours. However, it provides a broad overview of various forms of communication, including those forms that are ‘special’ (‘biased’), i.e. do not reflect the content to be communicated in the way that one would reproduce it according to ‘objective, verifiable criteria’.[*0] However, the variety of examples suggests that it is not easy to distinguish between ‘special’ and ‘normal’ communication: What then are these ‘objective verifiable criteria’? Who defines them?

Assuming for a moment that it is clear what these ‘objectively verifiable criteria’ are, one can tentatively attempt a working definition for the general (normal?) case of communication as a starting point:

Working Definition:

The general case of communication could be tentatively described as a simple attempt by one person – let’s call them the ‘author’ – to ‘bring something to the attention’ of another person – let’s call them the ‘interlocutor’. We tentatively call what is to be brought to their attention ‘the message’. We know from everyday life that an author can have numerous ‘characteristics’ that can affect the content of his message.

Here is a short list of properties that characterize the author’s situation in a communication. Then corresponding properties for the interlocutor.

The Author:

  1. The available knowledge of the author — both conscious and unconscious — determines the kind of message the author can create.
  2. His ability to discern truth determines whether and to what extent he can differentiate what in his message is verifiable in the real world — present or past — as ‘accurate’ or ‘true’.
  3. His linguistic ability determines whether and how much of his available knowledge can be communicated linguistically.
  4. The world of emotions decides whether he wants to communicate anything at all, for example, when, how, to whom, how intensely, how conspicuously, etc.
  5. The social context can affect whether he holds a certain social role, which dictates when he can and should communicate what, how, and with whom.
  6. The real conditions of communication determine whether a suitable ‘medium of communication’ is available (spoken sound, writing, sound, film, etc.) and whether and how it is accessible to potential interlocutors.
  7. The author’s physical constitution decides how far and to what extent he can communicate at all.

The Interlocutor:

  1. In general, the characteristics that apply to the author also apply to the interlocutor. However, some points can be particularly emphasized for the role of the interlocutor:
  2. The available knowledge of the interlocutor determines which aspects of the author’s message can be understood at all.
  3. The ability of the interlocutor to discern truth determines whether and to what extent he can also differentiate what in the conveyed message is verifiable as ‘accurate’ or ‘true’.
  4. The linguistic ability of the interlocutor affects whether and how much of the message he can absorb purely linguistically.
  5. Emotions decide whether the interlocutor wants to take in anything at all, for example, when, how, how much, with what inner attitude, etc.
  6. The social context can also affect whether the interlocutor holds a certain social role, which dictates when he can and should communicate what, how, and with whom.
  7. Furthermore, it can be important whether the communication medium is so familiar to the interlocutor that he can use it sufficiently well.
  8. The physical constitution of the interlocutor can also determine how far and to what extent the interlocutor can communicate at all.

Even this small selection of factors shows how diverse the situations can be in which ‘normal communication’ can take on a ‘special character’ due to the ‘effect of different circumstances’. For example, an actually ‘harmless greeting’ can lead to a social problem with many different consequences in certain roles. A seemingly ‘normal report’ can become a problem because the contact person misunderstands the message purely linguistically. A ‘factual report’ can have an emotional impact on the interlocutor due to the way it is presented, which can lead to them enthusiastically accepting the message or – on the contrary – vehemently rejecting it. Or, if the author has a tangible interest in persuading the interlocutor to behave in a certain way, this can lead to a certain situation not being presented in a ‘purely factual’ way, but rather to many aspects being communicated that seem suitable to the author to persuade the interlocutor to perceive the situation in a certain way and to adopt it accordingly. These ‘additional’ aspects can refer to many real circumstances of the communication situation beyond the pure message.

Types of communication …

Given this potential ‘diversity’, the question arises as to whether it will even be possible to define something like normal communication?

In order to be able to answer this question meaningfully, one should have a kind of ‘overview’ of all possible combinations of the properties of author (1-7) and interlocutor (1-8) and one should also have to be able to evaluate each of these possible combinations with a view to ‘normality’.

It should be noted that the two lists of properties author (1-7) and interlocutor (1-8) have a certain ‘arbitrariness’ attached to them: you can build the lists as they have been constructed here, but you don’t have to.

This is related to the general way in which we humans think: on one hand, we have ‘individual events that happen’ — or that we can ‘remember’ —, and on the other hand, we can ‘set’ ‘arbitrary relationships’ between ‘any individual events’ in our thinking. In science, this is called ‘hypothesis formation’. Whether or not such formation of hypotheses is undertaken, and which ones, is not standardized anywhere. Events as such do not enforce any particular hypothesis formations. Whether they are ‘sensible’ or not is determined solely in the later course of their ‘practical use’. One could even say that such hypothesis formation is a rudimentary form of ‘ethics’: the moment one adopts a hypothesis regarding a certain relationship between events, one minimally considers it ‘important’, otherwise, one would not undertake this hypothesis formation.

In this respect, it can be said that ‘everyday life’ is the primary place for possible working hypotheses and possible ‘minimum values’.

The following diagram demonstrates a possible arrangement of the characteristics of the author and the interlocutor:

FIGURE : Overview of the possible overlaps of knowledge between the author and the interlocutor, if everyone can have any knowledge at its disposal.

What is easy to recognize is the fact that an author can naturally have a constellation of knowledge that draws on an almost ‘infinite number of possibilities’. The same applies to the interlocutor. In purely abstract terms, the number of possible combinations is ‘virtually infinite’ due to the assumptions about the properties Author 1 and Interlocutor 2, which ultimately makes the question of ‘normality’ at the abstract level undecidable.


However, since both authors and interlocutors are not spherical beings from some abstract angle of possibilities, but are usually ‘concrete people’ with a ‘concrete history’ in a ‘concrete life-world’ at a ‘specific historical time’, the quasi-infinite abstract space of possibilities is narrowed down to a finite, manageable set of concretes. Yet, even these can still be considerably large when related to two specific individuals. Which person, with their life experience from which area, should now be taken as the ‘norm’ for ‘normal communication’?


It seems more likely that individual people are somehow ‘typified’, for example, by age and learning history, although a ‘learning history’ may not provide a clear picture either. Graduates from the same school can — as we know — possess very different knowledge afterwards, even though commonalities may be ‘minimally typical’.

Overall, the approach based on the characteristics of the author and the interlocutor does not seem to provide really clear criteria for a norm, even though a specification such as ‘the humanistic high school in Hadamar (a small German town) 1960 – 1968’ would suggest rudimentary commonalities.


One could now try to include the further characteristics of Author 2-7 and Interlocutor 3-8 in the considerations, but the ‘construction of normal communication’ seems to lead more and more into an unclear space of possibilities based on the assumptions of Author 1 and Interlocutor 2.

What does this mean for the typification of communication as ‘propaganda’? Isn’t ultimately every communication also a form of propaganda, or is there a possibility to sufficiently accurately characterize the form of ‘propaganda’, although it does not seem possible to find a standard for ‘normal communication’? … or will a better characterization of ‘propaganda’ indirectly provide clues for ‘non-propaganda’?

TRUTH and MEANING: Language as Key

The spontaneous attempt to clarify the meaning of the term ‘propaganda’ to the extent that one gets a few constructive criteria for being able to characterize certain forms of communication as ‘propaganda’ or not, gets into ever ‘deeper waters’. Are there now ‘objective verifiable criteria’ that one can work with, or not? And: Who determines them?

Let us temporarily stick to working hypothesis 1, that we are dealing with an author who articulates a message for an interlocutor, and let us expand this working hypothesis by the following addition 1: such communication always takes place in a social context. This means that the perception and knowledge of the individual actors (author, interlocutor) can continuously interact with this social context or ‘automatically interacts’ with it. The latter is because we humans are built in such a way that our body with its brain just does this, without ‘us’ having to make ‘conscious decisions’ for it.[*1]

For this section, I would like to extend the previous working hypothesis 1 together with supplement 1 by a further working hypothesis 2 (localization of language) [*4]:

  1. Every medium (language, sound, image, etc.) can contain a ‘potential meaning’.
  2. When creating the media event, the ‘author’ may attempt to ‘connect’ possible ‘contents’ that are to be ‘conveyed’ by him with the medium (‘putting into words/sound/image’, ‘encoding’, etc.). This ‘assignment’ of meaning occurs both ‘unconsciously/automatically’ and ‘(partially) consciously’.
  3. In perceiving the media event, the ‘interlocutor’ may try to assign a ‘possible meaning’ to this perceived event. This ‘assignment’ of meaning also happens both ‘unconsciously/automatically’ and ‘(partially) consciously’.
  4. The assignment of meaning requires both the author and the interlocutor to have undergone ‘learning processes’ (usually years, many years) that have made it possible to link certain ‘events of the external world’ as well as ‘internal states’ with certain media events.
  5. The ‘learning of meaning relationships’ always takes place in social contexts, as a media structure meant to ‘convey meaning’ between people belongs to everyone involved in the communication process.
  6. Those medial elements that are actually used for the ‘exchange of meanings’ all together form what is called a ‘language’: the ‘medial elements themselves’ form the ‘surface structure’ of the language, its ‘sign dimension’, and the ‘inner states’ in each ‘actor’ involved, form the ‘individual-subjective space of possible meanings’. This inner subjective space comprises two components: (i) the internally available elements as potential meaning content and (ii) a dynamic ‘meaning relationship’ that ‘links’ perceived elements of the surface structure and the potential meaning content.


To answer the guiding question of whether one can “characterize certain forms of communication as ‘propaganda’ or not,” one needs ‘objective, verifiable criteria’ on the basis of which a statement can be formulated. This question can be used to ask back whether there are ‘objective criteria’ in ‘normal everyday dialogue’ that we can use in everyday life to collectively decide whether a ‘claimed fact’ is ‘true’ or not; in this context, the word ‘true’ is also used. Can this be defined a bit more precisely?

For this I propose an additional working hypotheses 3:

  1. At least two actors can agree that a certain meaning, associated with the media construct, exists as a sensibly perceivable fact in such a way that they can agree that the ‘claimed fact’ is indeed present. Such a specific occurrence should be called ‘true 1’ or ‘Truth 1.’ A ‘specific occurrence’ can change at any time and quickly due to the dynamics of the real world (including the actors themselves), for example: the rain stops, the coffee cup is empty, the car from before is gone, the empty sidewalk is occupied by a group of people, etc.
  2. At least two actors can agree that a certain meaning, associated with the media construct, is currently not present as a real fact. Referring to the current situation of ‘non-occurrence,’ one would say that the statement is ‘false 1’; the claimed fact does not actually exist contrary to the claim.
  3. At least two actors can agree that a certain meaning, associated with the media construct, is currently not present, but based on previous experience, it is ‘quite likely’ to occur in a ‘possible future situation.’ This aspect shall be called ‘potentially true’ or ‘true 2’ or ‘Truth 2.’ Should the fact then ‘actually occur’ at some point in the future, Truth 2 would transform into Truth 1.
  4. At least two actors can agree that a certain meaning associated with the media construct does not currently exist and that, based on previous experience, it is ‘fairly certain that it is unclear’ whether the intended fact could actually occur in a ‘possible future situation’. This aspect should be called ‘speculative true’ or ‘true 3’ or ‘truth 3’. Should the situation then ‘actually occur’ at some point, truth 3 would change into truth 1.
  5. At least two actors can agree that a certain meaning associated with the medial construct does not currently exist, and on the basis of previous experience ‘it is fairly certain’ that the intended fact could never occur in a ‘possible future situation’. This aspect should be called ‘speculative false’ or ‘false 2’.

A closer look at these 5 assumptions of working hypothesis 3 reveals that there are two ‘poles’ in all these distinctions, which stand in certain relationships to each other: on the one hand, there are real facts as poles, which are ‘currently perceived or not perceived by all participants’ and, on the other hand, there is a ‘known meaning’ in the minds of the participants, which can or cannot be related to a current fact. This results in the following distribution of values:

REAL FACTsRelationship to Meaning
Given1Fits (true 1)
Given2Doesn’t fit (false 1)
Not given3Assumed, that it will fit in the future (true 2)
Not given4Unclear, whether it would fit in the future (true 3)
Not given5Assumed, that it would not fit in the future (false 2)

In this — still somewhat rough — scheme, ‘the meaning of thoughts’ can be qualified in relation to something currently present as ‘fitting’ or ‘not fitting’, or in the absence of something real as ‘might fit’ or ‘unclear whether it can fit’ or ‘certain that it cannot fit’.

However, it is important to note that these qualifications are ‘assessments’ made by the actors based on their ‘own knowledge’. As we know, such an assessment is always prone to error! In addition to errors in perception [*5], there can be errors in one’s own knowledge [*6]. So contrary to the belief of an actor, ‘true 1’ might actually be ‘false 1’ or vice versa, ‘true 2’ could be ‘false 2’ and vice versa.

From all this, it follows that a ‘clear qualification’ of truth and falsehood is ultimately always error-prone. For a community of people who think ‘positively’, this is not a problem: they are aware of this situation and they strive to keep their ‘natural susceptibility to error’ as small as possible through conscious methodical procedures [*7]. People who — for various reasons — tend to think negatively, feel motivated in this situation to see only errors or even malice everywhere. They find it difficult to deal with their ‘natural error-proneness’ in a positive and constructive manner.

TRUTH and MEANING : Process of Processes

In the previous section, the various terms (‘true1,2’, ‘false 1,2’, ‘true 3’) are still rather disconnected and are not yet really located in a tangible context. This will be attempted here with the help of working hypothesis 4 (sketch of a process space).

FIGURE 1 Process : The process space in the real world and in thinking, including possible interactions

The basic elements of working hypothesis 4 can be characterized as follows:

  1. There is the real world with its continuous changes, and within an actor which includes a virtual space for processes with elements such as perceptions, memories, and imagined concepts.
  2. The link between real space and virtual space occurs through perceptual achievements that represent specific properties of the real world for the virtual space, in such a way that ‘perceived contents’ and ‘imagined contents’ are distinguishable. In this way, a ‘mental comparison’ of perceived and imagined is possible.
  3. Changes in the real world do not show up explicitly but are manifested only indirectly through the perceivable changes they cause.
  4. It is the task of ‘cognitive reconstruction’ to ‘identify’ changes and to describe them linguistically in such a way that it is comprehensible, based on which properties of a given state, a possible subsequent state can arise.
  5. In addition to distinguishing between ‘states’ and ‘changes’ between states, it must also be clarified how a given description of change is ‘applied’ to a given state in such a way that a ‘subsequent state’ arises. This is called here ‘successor generation rule’ (symbolically: ⊢). An expression like Z ⊢V Z’ would then mean that using the successor generation rule ⊢ and employing the change rule V, one can generate the subsequent state Z’ from the state Z. However, more than one change rule V can be used, for example, ⊢{V1, V2, …, Vn} with the change rules V1, …, Vn.
  6. When formulating change rules, errors can always occur. If certain change rules have proven successful in the past in derivations, one would tend to assume for the ‘thought subsequent state’ that it will probably also occur in reality. In this case, we would be dealing with the situation ‘true 2’. If a change rule is new and there are no experiences with it yet, we would be dealing with the ‘true 3’ case for the thought subsequent state. If a certain change rule has failed repeatedly in the past, then the case ‘false 2’ might apply.
  7. The outlined process model also shows that the previous cases (1-5 in the table) only ever describe partial aspects. Suppose a group of actors manages to formulate a rudimentary process theory with many states and many change rules, including a successor generation instruction. In that case, it is naturally of interest how the ‘theory as a whole’ ‘proves itself’. This means that every ‘mental construction’ of a sequence of possible states according to the applied change rules under the assumption of the process theory must ‘prove itself’ in all cases of application for the theory to be said to be ‘generically true’. For example, while the case ‘true 1’ refers to only a single state, the case ‘generically true’ refers to ‘very many’ states, as many until an ‘end state’ is reached, which is supposed to count as a ‘target state’. The case ‘generically contradicted’ is supposed to occur when there is at least one sequence of generated states that keeps generating an end state that is false 1. As long as a process theory has not yet been confirmed as true 1 for an end state in all possible cases, there remains a ‘remainder of cases’ that are unclear. Then a process theory would be called ‘generically unclear’, although it may be considered ‘generically true’ for the set of cases successfully tested so far.

FIGURE 2 Process : The individual extended process space with an indication of the dimension ‘META-THINKING’ and ‘EVALUATION’.

If someone finds the first figure of the process room already quite ‘challenging’, they he will certainly ‘break into a sweat’ with this second figure of the ‘expanded process room’.

Everyone can check for himself that we humans have the ability — regardless of what we are thinking — to turn our thinking at any time back onto our own thinking shortly before, a kind of ‘thinking about thinking’. This opens up an ‘additional level of thinking’ – here called the ‘meta-level’ – on which we thinkers ‘thematize’ everything that is noticeable and important to us in the preceding thinking. [*8] In addition to ‘thinking about thinking’, we also have the ability to ‘evaluate’ what we perceive and think. These ‘evaluations’ are fueled by our ’emotions’ [*9] and ‘learned preferences’. This enables us to ‘learn’ with the help of our emotions and learned preferences: If we perform certain actions and suffer ‘pain’, we will likely avoid these actions next time. If we go to restaurant X to eat because someone ‘recommended’ it to us, and the food and/or service were really bad, then we will likely not consider this suggestion in the future. Therefore, our thinking (and our knowledge) can ‘make possibilities visible’, but it is the emotions that comment on what happens to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when implementing knowledge. But beware, emotions can also be mistaken, and massively so.[*10]

TRUTH AND MEANING – As a collective achievement

The previous considerations on the topic of ‘truth and meaning’ in the context of individual processes have outlined that and how ‘language’ plays a central role in enabling meaning and, based on this, truth. Furthermore, it was also outlined that and how truth and meaning must be placed in a dynamic context, in a ‘process model’, as it takes place in an individual in close interaction with the environment. This process model includes the dimension of ‘thinking’ (also ‘knowledge’) as well as the dimension of ‘evaluations’ (emotions, preferences); within thinking there are potentially many ‘levels of consideration’ that can relate to each other (of course they can also take place ‘in parallel’ without direct contact with each other (the unconnected parallelism is the less interesting case, however).

As fascinating as the dynamic emotional-cognitive structure within an individual actor can be, the ‘true power’ of explicit thinking only becomes apparent when different people begin to coordinate their actions by means of communication. When individual action is transformed into collective action in this way, a dimension of ‘society’ becomes visible, which in a way makes the ‘individual actors’ ‘forget’, because the ‘overall performance’ of the ‘collectively connected individuals’ can be dimensions more complex and sustainable than any one individual could ever realize. While a single person can make a contribution in their individual lifetime at most, collectively connected people can accomplish achievements that span many generations.

On the other hand, we know from history that collective achievements do not automatically have to bring about ‘only good’; the well-known history of oppression, bloody wars and destruction is extensive and can be found in all periods of human history.

This points to the fact that the question of ‘truth’ and ‘being good’ is not only a question for the individual process, but also a question for the collective process, and here, in the collective case, this question is even more important, since in the event of an error not only individuals have to suffer negative effects, but rather very many; in the worst case, all of them.

To be continued …

COMMENTS

[*0] The meaning of the terms ‘objective, verifiable’ will be explained in more detail below.

[*1] In a system-theoretical view of the ‘human body’ system, one can formulate the working hypothesis that far more than 99% of the events in a human body are not conscious. You can find this frightening or reassuring. I tend towards the latter, towards ‘reassurance’. Because when you see what a human body as a ‘system’ is capable of doing on its own, every second, for many years, even decades, then this seems extremely reassuring in view of the many mistakes, even gross ones, that we can make with our small ‘consciousness’. In cooperation with other people, we can indeed dramatically improve our conscious human performance, but this is only ever possible if the system performance of a human body is maintained. After all, it contains 3.5 billion years of development work of the BIOM on this planet; the building blocks of this BIOM, the cells, function like a gigantic parallel computer, compared to which today’s technical supercomputers (including the much-vaunted ‘quantum computers’) look so small and weak that it is practically impossible to express this relationship.

[*2] An ‘everyday language’ always presupposes ‘the many’ who want to communicate with each other. One person alone cannot have a language that others should be able to understand.

[*3] A meaning relation actually does what is mathematically called a ‘mapping’: Elements of one kind (elements of the surface structure of the language) are mapped to elements of another kind (the potential meaning elements). While a mathematical mapping is normally fixed, the ‘real meaning relation’ can constantly change; it is ‘flexible’, part of a higher-level ‘learning process’ that constantly ‘readjusts’ the meaning relation depending on perception and internal states.

[*4] The contents of working hypothesis 2 originate from the findings of modern cognitive sciences (neuroscience, psychology, biology, linguistics, semiotics, …) and philosophy; they refer to many thousands of articles and books. Working hypothesis 2 therefore represents a highly condensed summary of all this. Direct citation is not possible in purely practical terms.

[*5] As is known from research on witness statements and from general perception research, in addition to all kinds of direct perception errors, there are many errors in the ‘interpretation of perception’ that are largely unconscious/automated. The actors are normally powerless against such errors; they simply do not notice them. Only methodically conscious controls of perception can partially draw attention to these errors.

[*6] Human knowledge is ‘notoriously prone to error’. There are many reasons for this. One lies in the way the brain itself works. ‘Correct’ knowledge is only possible if the current knowledge processes are repeatedly ‘compared’ and ‘checked’ so that they can be corrected. Anyone who does not regularly check the correctness will inevitably confirm incomplete and often incorrect knowledge. As we know, this does not prevent people from believing that everything they carry around in their heads is ‘true’. If there is a big problem in this world, then this is one of them: ignorance about one’s own ignorance.

[*7] In the cultural history of mankind to date, it was only very late (about 500 years ago?) that a format of knowledge was discovered that enables any number of people to build up fact-based knowledge that, compared to all other known knowledge formats, enables the ‘best results’ (which of course does not completely rule out errors, but extremely minimizes them). This still revolutionary knowledge format has the name ’empirical theory’, which I have since expanded to ‘sustainable empirical theory’. On the one hand, we humans are the main source of ‘true knowledge’, but at the same time we ourselves are also the main source of ‘false knowledge’. At first glance, this seems like a ‘paradox’, but it has a ‘simple’ explanation, which at its root is ‘very profound’ (comparable to the cosmic background radiation, which is currently simple, but originates from the beginnings of the universe).

[*8] In terms of its architecture, our brain can open up any number of such meta-levels, but due to its concrete finiteness, it only offers a limited number of neurons for different tasks. For example, it is known (and has been experimentally proven several times) that our ‘working memory’ (also called ‘short-term memory’) is only limited to approx. 6-9 ‘units’ (whereby the term ‘unit’ must be defined depending on the context). So if we want to solve extensive tasks through our thinking, we need ‘external aids’ (sheet of paper and pen or a computer, …) to record the many aspects and write them down accordingly. Although today’s computers are not even remotely capable of replacing the complex thought processes of humans, they can be an almost irreplaceable tool for carrying out complex thought processes to a limited extent. But only if WE actually KNOW what we are doing!

[*9] The word ’emotion’ is a ‘collective term’ for many different phenomena and circumstances. Despite extensive research for over a hundred years, the various disciplines of psychology are still unable to offer a uniform picture, let alone a uniform ‘theory’ on the subject. This is not surprising, as much of the assumed emotions takes place largely ‘unconsciously’ or is only directly available as an ‘internal event’ in the individual. The only thing that seems to be clear is that we as humans are never ’emotion-free’ (this also applies to so-called ‘cool’ types, because the apparent ‘suppression’ or ‘repression’ of emotions is itself part of our innate emotionality).

[*10] Of course, emotions can also lead us seriously astray or even to our downfall (being wrong about other people, being wrong about ourselves, …). It is therefore not only important to ‘sort out’ the factual things in the world in a useful way through ‘learning’, but we must also actually ‘keep an eye on our own emotions’ and check when and how they occur and whether they actually help us. Primary emotions (such as hunger, sex drive, anger, addiction, ‘crushes’, …) are selective, situational, can develop great ‘psychological power’ and thus obscure our view of the possible or very probable ‘consequences’, which can be considerably damaging for us.

[*11] The term ‘narrative’ is increasingly used today to describe the fact that a group of people use a certain ‘image’, a certain ‘narrative’ in their thinking for their perception of the world in order to be able to coordinate their joint actions. Ultimately, this applies to all collective action, even for engineers who want to develop a technical solution. In this respect, the description in the German Wikipedia is a bit ‘narrow’: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrativ_(Sozialwissenschaften)

REFERENCES

The following sources are just a tiny selection from the many hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, books, audio documents and films on the subject. Nevertheless, they may be helpful for an initial introduction. The list will be expanded from time to time.

[1a] Propaganda, in the German Wikipedia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

[1b] Propaganda in the English Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda /*The English version appears more systematic, covers larger periods of time and more different areas of application */

[3] Propaganda der Russischen Föderation, hier: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_der_Russischen_F%C3%B6deration (German source)

[6] Mischa Gabowitsch, Mai 2022, Von »Faschisten« und »Nazis«, https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2022/mai/von-faschisten-und-nazis#_ftn4 (German source)

REVIEW: Keith E.Stanovich, Richard F.West, Maggie E.Toplak, “The Rational Quotient. Towards a Test of Rational Thinking”, MIT Press, 2016

(Last change: Nov 1, 2023)

CONTEXT

This text belongs to the overall theme REVIEWS.

In the last months I was engaged with the topic of text-generating algorithms and the possible impact for a scientific discourse (some first notices to this discussion you can find here (https://www.uffmm.org/2023/08/24/homo-sapiens-empirical-and-sustained-empirical-theories-emotions-and-machines-a-sketch/)). In this context it is important to clarify the role and structure of human actors as well as the concept of Intelligence. Meanwhile I have abandoned the word Intelligence completely because the inflationary use in today mainstream pulverises any meaning. Even in one discipline — like psychology — you can find many different concepts. In this context I have read the book of Stanovich et.al to have a prominent example of using the concept of intelligence, there combined with the concept of rationality, which is no less vague.

Introduction

The book “The Rationality Quotient” from 2016 represents not the beginning of a discourse but is a kind of summary of a long lasting discourse with many publications before. This makes this book interesting, but also difficult to read in the beginning, because the book is using nearly on every page theoretical terms, which are assumed to be known to the reader and cites other publications without giving sufficient explanations why exactly these cited publications are important. This is no argument against this book but sheds some light on the reader, who has to learn a lot to understand the text.

A text with the character of summing up its subject is good, because it has a confirmed meaning about the subject which enables a kind of clarity which is typical for that state of elaborated point of view.

In the following review it is not the goal to give a complete account of every detail of this book but only to present the main thesis and then to analyze the used methods and the applied epistemological framework.

Main Thesis of the Book

The reviewing starts with the basic assumptions and the main thesis.

FIGURE 1 : The beginning. Note: the number ‘2015’ has to be corrected to ‘2016’.

FIGURE 2 : First outline of cognition. Note: the number ‘2015’ has to be corrected to ‘2016’.

As mentioned in the introduction you will in the book not find a real overview about the history of psychological research dealing with the concept of Intelligence and also no overview about the historical discourse to the concept of Rationality, whereby the last concept has also a rich tradition in Philosophy. Thus, somehow you have to know it.

There are some clear warnings with regard to the fuzziness of the concept rationality (p.3) as well as to the concept of intelligence (p.15). From a point of view of Philosophy of Science it could be interesting to know what the circumstances are which are causing such a fuzziness, but this is not a topic of the book. The book talks within its own selected conceptual paradigm. Being in the dilemma, of what kind of intelligence paradigm one wants to use, the book has decided to work with the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CTC) paradigm, which some call a theory. [1]

Directly from the beginning it is explained that the discussion of Intelligence is missing a clear explanation of the full human model of cognition (p.15) and that intelligence tests therefore are mostly measuring only parts of human cognitive functions. (p.21)

Thus let us have a more detailed look to the scenario.

[1] For a first look to the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93Carroll_theory, a first overview.

Which point of View?

The book starts with a first characterization of the concept of Rationality within a point of view which is not really clear. From different remarks one gets some hints to modern Cognitive Science (4,6), to Decision Theory (4) and Probability Calculus (9), but a clear description is missing.

And it is declared right from the beginning, that the main aim of the book is the Construction of a rational Thinking Test (4), because for the authors the used Intelligence Tests — later reduced to the Carroll-Horn-Carroll (CHC) type of intelligence test (16) — are too narrow in what they are measuring (15, 16, 21).

Related to the term Rationality the book characterizes some requirements which the term rationality should fulfill (e.g. ‘Rationality as a continuum’ (4), ’empirically based’ (4), ‘operationally grounded’ (4), a ‘strong definition’ (5), a ‘normative one’ (5), ‘normative model of optimum judgment’ (5)), but it is more or less open, what these requirements imply and what tacit assumptions have to be fulfilled, that this will work.

The two requirements ’empirically based’ as well as ‘operationally grounded’ point in the direction of an tacitly assumed concept of an empirical theory, but exactly this concept — and especially in association with the term cognitive science — isn’t really clear today.

Because the authors make in the next pages a lot of statements which claim to be serious, it seems to be important for the discussion in this review text to clarify the conditions of the ‘meaning of language expressions’ and of being classified as ‘being true’.

If we assume — tentatively — that the authors assume a scientific theory to be primarily a text whose expressions have a meaning which can transparently be associated with an empirical fact and if this is the case, then the expression will be understood as being grounded and classified as true, then we have characterized a normal text which can be used in everyday live for the communication of meanings which can become demonstrated as being true.

Is there a difference between such a ‘normal text’ and a ‘scientific theory’? And, especially here, where the context should be a scientific theory within the discipline of cognitive science: what distinguishes a normal text from a ‘scientific theory within cognitive science’?

Because the authors do not explain their conceptual framework called cognitive science we recur here to a most general characterization [2,3] which tells us, that cognitive science is not a single discipline but an interdisciplinary study which is taking from many different disciplines. It has not yet reached a state where all used methods and terms are embedded in one general coherent framework. Thus the relationship of the used conceptual frameworks is mostly fuzzy, unclear. From this follows directly, that the relationship of the different terms to each other — e.g. like ‘underlying preferences’ and ‘well ordered’ — is within such a blurred context rather unclear.

Even the simple characterization of an expression as ‘having an empirical meaning’ is unclear: what are the kinds of empirical subjects and the used terms? According to the list of involved disciplines the disciplines linguistics [4], psychology [5] or neuroscience [6] — besides others — are mentioned. But every of these disciplines is itself today a broad field of methods, not integrated, dealing with a multifaceted subject.

Using an Auxiliary Construction as a Minimal Point of Reference

Instead of becoming somehow paralyzed from these one-and-all characterizations of the individual disciplines one can try to step back and taking a look to basic assumptions about empirical perspectives.

If we take a group of Human Observers which shall investigate these subjects we could make the following assumptions:

  1. Empirical Linguistics is dealing with languages, spoken as well as written by human persons, within certain environments, and these can be observed as empirical entities.
  2. Empirical Psychology is dealing with the behavior of human persons (a kind of biological systems) within certain environments, and these can be observed.
  3. Empirical Neuroscience is dealing with the brain as part of a body which is located in some environment, and this all can be observed.

The empirical observations of certain kinds of empirical phenomena can be used to define more abstract concepts, relations, and processes. These more abstract concepts, relations, and processes have ‘as such’ no empirical meaning! They constitute a formal framework which has to become correlated with empirical facts to get some empirical meaning. As it is known from philosophy of science [7] the combination of empirical concepts within a formal framework of abstracts terms can enable ‘abstract meanings’ which by logical conclusions can produce statements which are — in the moment of stating them — not empirically true, because ‘real future’ has not yet happened. And on account of the ‘generality’ of abstract terms compared to the finiteness and concreteness of empirical facts it can happen, that the inferred statements never will become true. Therefore the mere usage of abstract terms within a text called scientific theory does not guarantee valid empirical statements.

And in general one has to state, that a coherent scientific theory including e.g. linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, is not yet in existence.

To speak of cognitive science as if this represents a clearly defined coherent discipline seems therefore to be misleading.

This raises questions about the project of a constructing a coherent rational thinking test (CART).

[2] See ‘cognitive science’ in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science

[3] See too ‘cognitive science’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/

[4] See ‘linguistics’ in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

[5] See ‘psychology’ in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology

[6] See ‘neuroscience’ in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience

[7] See ‘philosophy of science’ in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

‘CART’ TEST FRAMEWORK – A Reconstruction from the point of View of Philosophy of Science

Before I will dig deeper into the theory I try to understand the intended outcome of this theory as some point of reference. The following figure 3 gives some hints.

FIGURE 3 : Outline of the Test Framework based on the Appendix in Stanovich et.al 2016. This Outline is a Reconstruction by the author of this review.

It seems to be important to distinguish at least three main parts of the whole scientific endeavor:

  1. The group of scientists which has decided to process a certain problem.
  2. The generated scientific theory as a text.
  3. The description of a CART Test, which describes a procedure, how the abstract terms of the theory can be associated with real facts.

From the group of scientists (Stanovich et al.) we know that they understand themselves as cognitive scientists (without having a clear characterization, what this means concretely).

The intended scientific theory as a text is here assumed to be realized in the book, which is here the subject of a review.

The description of a CART Test is here taken from the appendix of the book.

To understand the theory it is interesting to see, that in the real test the test system (assumed here as a human person) has to read (and hear?) a instruction, how to proceed with a task form, and then the test system (a human person) has to process the test form in the way it has understood the instructions and the test form as it is.

The result is a completed test form.

And it is then this completed test form which will be rated according to the assumed CART theory.

This complete paradigm raises a whole bunch of questions which to answer here in full is somehow out of range.

Mix-Up of Abstract Terms

Because the Test Scenario presupposes a CART theory and within this theory some kind of a model of intended test users it can be helpful to have a more closer look to this assumed CART model, which is located in a person.

FIGURE 4 : General outline of the logic behind CART according to Stanovich et al. (2016).

The presented cognitive architecture shall present a framework for the CART (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking), whereby this framework is including a model. The model is not only assumed to contextualize and classify heuristics and tasks, but it also presents Rationality in a way that one can deduce mental characteristics included in rationality.(cf. 37)

Because the term Rationality is not an individual empirical fact but an abstract term of a conceptual framework, this term has as such no meaning. The meaning of this abstract term has to be arranged by relations to other abstract terms which themselves are sufficiently related to concrete empirical statements. And these relations between abstract terms and empirical facts (represented as language expressions) have to be represented in a manner, that it is transparent how the the measured facts are related to the abstract terms.

Here Stanovich et al. is using another abstract term Mind, which is associated with characteristics called mental characteristics: Reflective mind, Algorithmic Level, and Mindware.

And then the text tells that Rationality is presenting mental characteristics. What does this mean? Is rationality different from the mind, who has some characteristics, which can be presented from rationality using somehow the mind, or is rationality nevertheless part of the mind and manifests themself in these mental characteristics? But what kind of the meaning could this be for an abstract term like rationality to be part of the mind? Without an explicit model associated with the term Mind which arranges the other abstract term Rationality within this model there exists no meaning which can be used here.

These considerations are the effect of a text, which uses different abstract terms in a way, which is rather unclear. In a scientific theory this should not be the case.

Measuring Degrees of Rationality

In the beginning of chapter 4 Stanovich et al. are looking back to chapter 1. Here they built up a chain of arguments which illustrate some general perspective (cf. 63):

  1. Rationality has degrees.
  2. These degrees of rationality can be measured.
  3. Measurement is realized by experimental methods of cognitive science.
  4. The measuring is based on the observable behavior of people.
  5. The observable behavior can manifest whether the individual actor (a human person) follows assumed preferences related to an assumed axiom of choice.
  6. Observable behavior which is classified as manifesting assumed internal preferences according to an assumed internal axiom of choice can show descriptive and procedural invariance.
  7. Based on these deduced descriptive and procedural invariance, it can be inferred further, that these actors are behaving as if they are maximizing utility.
  8. It is difficult to assess utility maximization directly.
  9. It is much easier to assess whether one of the axioms of rational choice is being violated.

These statements characterize the Logic of the CART according to Stanovich et al. (cf.64)

A major point in this argumentation is the assumption, that observable behavior is such, that one can deduce from the properties of this behavior those attributes/ properties, which point (i) to an internal model of an axiom of choice, (ii) to internal processes, which manifest the effects of this internal model, (iii) to certain characteristics of these internal processes which allow the deduction of the property of maximizing utility or not.

These are very strong assumptions.

If one takes further into account the explanations from the pages 7f about the required properties for an abstract term axiom of choice (cf. figure 1) then these assumptions appear to be very demanding.

Can it be possible to extract the necessary meaning out of observable behavior in a way, which is clear enough by empirical standards, that this behavior shows property A and not property B ?

As we know from the description of the CART in the appendix of the book (cf. figure 3) the real behavior assumed for an CART is the (i) reading (or hearing?) of an instruction communicated by ordinary English, and then (ii) a behavior deduced from the understanding of the instruction, which (iii) manifests themself in the reading of a form with a text and filling out this form in predefined positions in a required language.

This described procedure is quite common throughout psychology and similar disciplines. But it is well known, that the understanding of language instructions is very error-prone. Furthermore, the presentation of a task as a text is inevitably highly biased and additionally too very error-prone with regard to the understanding (this is a reason why in usability testing purely text-based tests are rather useless).

The point is, that the empirical basis is not given as a protocol of observations of language free behavior but of a behavior which is nearly completely embedded in the understanding and handling of texts. This points to the underlying processes of text understanding which are completely internal to the actor. There exists no prewired connection between the observable strings of signs constituting a text and the possible meaning which can be organized by the individual processes of text understanding.

Stopping Here

Having reached this point of reading and trying to understand I decided to stop here: to many questions on all levels of a scientific discourse and the relationships between main concepts and terms appear in the book of Stanovich et al. to be not clear enough. I feel therefore confirmed in my working hypothesis from the beginning, that the concept of intelligence today is far too vague, too ambiguous to contain any useful kernel of meaning any more. And concepts like Rationality, Mind (and many others) seem to do not better.

Chatting with chatGPT4

Since April 2023 I have started to check the ability of chatGPT4 to contribute to a philosophical and scientific discourse. The working hypothesis is, that chatGPT4 is good in summarizing the common concepts, which are used in public texts, but chatGPT is not able for critical evaluations, not for really new creative ideas and in no case for systematic analysis of used methods, used frameworks, their interrelations, their truth-conditons and much more, what it cannot. Nevertheless, it is a good ‘common sense check’. Until now I couldn’t learn anything new from these chats.

If you have read this review with all the details and open questions you will be perhaps a little bit disappointed about the answers from chatGPT4. But keep calm: it is a bit helpful.

Protocol with chatGPT4

Collective human-machine intelligence and text generation. A transdisciplinary analysis.

Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch

Email: info@uffmm.org

Time: Sept 25, 2023 – Oct 3, 2023

Translation: This text is a translation from the German Version into English with the aid of the software deepL.com as well as with chatGPT4, moderated by the author. The style of the two translators is different. The author is not good enough to classify which translator is ‘better’.

CONTEXT

This text is the outcome of a conference held at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) with the title: Discourses of disruptive digital technologies using the example of AI text generators ( https://zevedi.de/en/topics/ki-text-2/ ). A German version of this article will appear in a book from de Gruyter as open access in the beginning of 2024.

Collective human-machine intelligence and text generation. A transdisciplinary analysis.

Abstract

Based on the conference theme “AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourse?” as well as the special topic “Collective human-machine intelligence using the example of text generation”, the possible interaction relationship between text generators and a scientific discourse will be played out in a transdisciplinary analysis. For this purpose, the concept of scientific discourse will be specified on a case-by-case basis using the text types empirical theory as well as sustained empirical theory in such a way that the role of human and machine actors in these discourses can be sufficiently specified. The result shows a very clear limitation of current text generators compared to the requirements of scientific discourse. This leads to further fundamental analyses on the example of the dimension of time with the phenomenon of the qualitatively new as well as on the example of the foundations of decision-making to the problem of the inherent bias of the modern scientific disciplines. A solution to the inherent bias as well as the factual disconnectedness of the many individual disciplines is located in the form of a new service of transdisciplinary integration by re-activating the philosophy of science as a genuine part of philosophy. This leaves the question open whether a supervision of the individual sciences by philosophy could be a viable path? Finally, the borderline case of a world in which humans no longer have a human counterpart is pointed out.

AUDIO: Keyword Sound

STARTING POINT

This text takes its starting point from the conference topic “AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourses?” and adds to this topic the perspective of a Collective Human-Machine Intelligence using the example of text generation. The concepts of text and validity, AI text generators, scientific discourse, and collective human-machine intelligence that are invoked in this constellation represent different fields of meaning that cannot automatically be interpreted as elements of a common conceptual framework.

TRANSDISCIPLINARY

In order to be able to let the mentioned terms appear as elements in a common conceptual framework, a meta-level is needed from which one can talk about these terms and their possible relations to each other. This approach is usually located in the philosophy of science, which can have as its subject not only single terms or whole propositions, but even whole theories that are compared or possibly even united. The term transdisciplinary [1] , which is often used today, is understood here in this philosophy of science understanding as an approach in which the integration of different concepts is redeemed by introducing appropriate meta-levels. Such a meta-level ultimately always represents a structure in which all important elements and relations can gather.

[1] Jürgen Mittelstraß paraphrases the possible meaning of the term transdisciplinarity as a “research and knowledge principle … that becomes effective wherever a solely technical or disciplinary definition of problem situations and problem solutions is not possible…”. Article Methodological Transdisciplinarity, in LIFIS ONLINE, www.leibniz-institut.de, ISSN 1864-6972, p.1 (first published in: Technology Assessment – Theory and Practice No.2, 14.Jg., June 2005, 18-23). In his text Mittelstrass distinguishes transdisciplinarity from the disciplinary and from the interdisciplinary. However, he uses only a general characterization of transdisciplinarity as a research guiding principle and scientific form of organization. He leaves the concrete conceptual formulation of transdisciplinarity open. This is different in the present text: here the transdisciplinary theme is projected down to the concreteness of the related terms and – as is usual in philosophy of science (and meta-logic) – realized by means of the construct of meta-levels.

SETTING UP A STRUCTURE

Here the notion of scientific discourse is assumed as a basic situation in which different actors can be involved. The main types of actors considered here are humans, who represent a part of the biological systems on planet Earth as a kind of Homo sapiens, and text generators, which represent a technical product consisting of a combination of software and hardware.

It is assumed that humans perceive their environment and themselves in a species-typical way, that they can process and store what they perceive internally, that they can recall what they have stored to a limited extent in a species-typical way, and that they can change it in a species-typical way, so that internal structures can emerge that are available for action and communication. All these elements are attributed to human cognition. They are working partially consciously, but largely unconsciously. Cognition also includes the subsystem language, which represents a structure that on the one hand is largely species-typically fixed, but on the other hand can be flexibly mapped to different elements of cognition.

In the terminology of semiotics [2] the language system represents a symbolic level and those elements of cognition, on which the symbolic structures are mapped, form correlates of meaning, which, however, represent a meaning only insofar as they occur in a mapping relation – also called meaning relation. A cognitive element as such does not constitute meaning in the linguistic sense. In addition to cognition, there are a variety of emotional factors that can influence both cognitive processes and the process of decision-making. The latter in turn can influence thought processes as well as action processes, consciously as well as unconsciously. The exact meaning of these listed structural elements is revealed in a process model [3] complementary to this structure.

[2] See, for example, Winfried Nöth: Handbuch der Semiotik. 2nd, completely revised edition. Metzler, Stuttgart/Weimar, 2000

[3] Such a process model is presented here only in partial aspects.

SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION SUB-PROCESS

What is important for human actors is that they can interact in the context of symbolic communication with the help of both spoken and written language. Here it is assumed – simplistically — that spoken language can be mapped sufficiently accurately into written language, which in the standard case is called text. It should be noted that texts only represent meaning if the text producers involved, as well as the text recipients, have a meaning function that is sufficiently similar.
For texts by human text producers it is generally true that, with respect to concrete situations, statements as part of texts can be qualified under agreed conditions as now matching the situation (true) or as now not now matching the situation (false). However, a now-true can become a now-not-true again in the next moment and vice versa.

This dynamic fact refers to the fact that a punctual occurrence or non-occurrence of a statement is to be distinguished from a structural occurrence/ non-occurrence of a statement, which speaks about occurrence/ non-occurrence in context. This refers to relations which are only indirectly apparent in the context of a multitude of individual events, if one considers chains of events over many points in time. Finally, one must also consider that the correlates of meaning are primarily located within the human biological system. Meaning correlates are not automatically true as such, but only if there is an active correspondence between a remembered/thought/imagined meaning correlate and an active perceptual element, where an intersubjective fact must correspond to the perceptual element. Just because someone talks about a rabbit and the recipient understands what a rabbit is, this does not mean that there is also a real rabbit which the recipient can perceive.

TEXT-GENERATORS

When distinguishing between the two different types of actors – here biological systems of the type Homo sapiens and there technical systems of the type text-generators – a first fundamental asymmetry immediately strikes the eye: so-called text-generators are entities invented and built by humans; furthermore, it is humans who use them, and the essential material used by text-generators are furthermore texts, which are considered human cultural property, created and used by humans for a variety of discourse types, here restricted to scientific discourse.


In the case of text generators, let us first note that we are dealing with machines that have input and output, a minimal learning capability, and whose input and output can process text-like objects.
Insofar as text generators can process text-like objects as input and process them again as output, an exchange of texts between humans and text generators can take place in principle.

At the current state of development (September 2023), text generators do not yet have an independent real-world perception within the scope of their input, and the entire text generator system does not yet have such processes as those that enable species-typical cognitions in humans. Furthermore, a text generator does not yet have a meaning function as it is given with humans.

From this fact it follows automatically that text generators cannot decide about selective or structural correctness/not correctness in the case of statements of a text. In general, they do not have their own assignment of meaning as with humans. Texts generated by text generators only have a meaning if a human as a recipient automatically assigns a meaning to a text due to his species-typical meaning relation, because this is the learned behavior of a human. In fact, the text generator itself has never assigned any meaning to the generated text. Salopp one could also formulate that a technical text generator works like a parasite: it collects texts that humans have generated, rearranges them combinatorially according to formal criteria for the output, and for the receiving human a meaning event is automatically triggered by the text in the human, which does not exist anywhere in the text generator.
Whether this very restricted form of text generation is now in any sense detrimental or advantageous for the type of scientific discourse (with texts), that is to be examined in the further course.

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

There is no clear definition for the term scientific discourse. This is not surprising, since an unambiguous definition presupposes that there is a fully specified conceptual framework within which terms such as discourse and scientific can be clearly delimited. However, in the case of a scientific enterprise with a global reach, broken down into countless individual disciplines, this does not seem to be the case at present (Sept 2023). For the further procedure, we will therefore fall back on core ideas of the discussion in philosophy of science since the 20th century [4]and we will introduce working hypotheses on the concept of empirical theory as well as sustainable empirical theory, so that a working hypothesis on the concept of scientific discourse will be possible, which has a minimal sharpness.

[4] A good place to start may be: F. Suppe, Editor. The Structure of Scientific Theories. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2 edition, 1979.

EMPIRICAL THEORY

The following assumptions are made for the notion of an empirical theory:

  1. an empirical theory is basically a text, written in a language that all participants understand.
  2. one part of the theory contains a description of an initial situation, the statements of which can be qualified by the theory users as now matching (true) or now not matching (false).
  3. another part of the theory contains a text that lists all changes that, to the knowledge of the participants, occur in the context of the initial situation and can change parts of the initial situation.
  4. changes in the initial situation are expressed by replacing certain statements of the initial situation with other statements. The resulting new text replaces the previous text.
  5. through the possibility of generating new initial situations, there is the possibility of making predictions (forming expectations) by applying rules of change to an applicable initial situation several times (at least once) in succession. The texts that are generated in each case induce in the minds of the participants, on the basis of the available meaning functions, the idea of a situation that is demanded to become qualified as now matching with intersubjective reality, should it occur. In the case of occurrence, the situation must correspond to the conception in the mind via perception. Whether such a correspondence can be established, after how long time and to what extent, this is basically open in the presence of the prediction making (the formation of an expectation) (autonomy of the object!).

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE NEW

Even before the introduction of the notion of a sustainable empirical theory, the notion of an empirical theory just introduced allows for initial statements about what a scientific discourse could or should be.
It is assumed here that the participants in a scientific discourse exchange their opinions about the world in the form of texts, all of which meet the requirements of an empirical theory.

WITH HUMANS

Insofar as the participants in the discourse are human beings, we know that they have basic species-typical abilities to generate subjective meanings by means of language, which can be decided as now true or now not true by reference to a real situation.

WITH TEXT GENERATORS

Insofar as the discourse participants would be text generators lacking these elementary skills (meaning, reality reference), they drop out as independent actors for a scientific discourse.
To illustrate this, here is a self-assessment of chatGPT4, a current text generator:

ChatGPT

Yes, your summary of our previous dialogue is accurate based on the points you’ve listed:

  1. I cannot read a book in the same way a human does, meaning I don’t interpret or comprehend in the same manner.
  2. My knowledge is up to September 2021, which means that I might not be aware of events, advancements, or publications after that point.
  3. My “learning” is different from human learning. I don’t learn from new experiences or information after my last update. Instead, I generate responses based on patterns in the data I was trained on.
  4. I don’t cite individual sources in my responses. I provide information based on the patterns recognized during my training.
  5. Responses I give can vary slightly even if the same question is posed multiple times.
  6. I can’t directly attribute my statements to specific, individual sources.
  7. The specifics about my training data and the processes that determine my responses are not transparently provided in each interaction.

You’ve captured the essence of our prior conversation well. If you have further questions or need clarifications on any of these points, please let me know. [5]

[5] This text is from a chat experiment conducted by the author with chatGPT4 on August 31, 2023. The citation can be found in: Gerd Doeben-Henisch, CONTINUE EXPERIMENT WITH CHATGPT4: Science, Empirical Science, Philosophy of Science, uffmm, Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor, eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458,
8/31/2023 in [https://www.uffmm.org/2023/08/31/continue-experiment-with-chatgpt4-science-empirical-science-philosophy-of-science/ ] (accessed 9/27/2023).

The question then arises whether (current) text generators, despite their severely limited capabilities, could nevertheless contribute to scientific discourse, and what this contribution means for human participants. Since text generators fail for the hard scientific criteria (decidable reality reference, reproducible predictive behavior, separation of sources), one can only assume a possible contribution within human behavior: since humans can understand and empirically verify texts, they would in principle be able to rudimentarily classify a text from a text generator within their considerations.

For hard theory work, these texts would not be usable, but due to their literary-associative character across a very large body of texts, the texts of text generators could – in the positive case – at least introduce thoughts into the discourse through texts as stimulators via the detour of human understanding, which would stimulate the human user to examine these additional aspects to see if they might be important for the actual theory building after all. In this way, the text generators would not participate independently in the scientific discourse, but they would indirectly support the knowledge process of the human actors as aids to them.[6]

[6] A detailed illustration of this associative role of a text generator can also be found in (Doeben-Henisch, 2023) on the example of the term philosophy of science and on the question of the role of philosophy of science.

CHALLENGE DECISION

The application of an empirical theory can – in the positive case — enable an expanded picture of everyday experience, in that, related to an initial situation, possible continuations (possible futures) are brought before one’s eyes.
For people who have to shape their own individual processes in their respective everyday life, however, it is usually not enough to know only what one can do. Rather, everyday life requires deciding in each case which continuation to choose, given the many possible continuations. In order to be able to assert themselves in everyday life with as little effort as possible and with – at least imagined – as little risk as possible, people have adopted well-rehearsed behavior patterns for as many everyday situations as possible, which they follow spontaneously without questioning them anew each time. These well-rehearsed behavior patterns include decisions that have been made. Nevertheless, there are always situations in which the ingrained automatisms have to be interrupted in order to consciously clarify the question for which of several possibilities one wants to decide.

The example of an individual decision-maker can also be directly applied to the behavior of larger groups. Normally, even more individual factors play a role here, all of which have to be integrated in order to reach a decision. However, the characteristic feature of a decision situation remains the same: whatever knowledge one may have at the time of decision, when alternatives are available, one has to decide for one of many alternatives without any further, additional knowledge at this point. Empirical science cannot help here [7]: it is an indisputable basic ability of humans to be able to decide.

So far, however, it remains rather hidden in the darkness of not knowing oneself, which ultimately leads to deciding for one and not for the other. Whether and to what extent the various cultural patterns of decision-making aids in the form of religious, moral, ethical or similar formats actually form or have formed a helpful role for projecting a successful future appears to be more unclear than ever.[8]

[7] No matter how much detail she can contribute about the nature of decision-making processes.

[8] This topic is taken up again in the following in a different context and embedded there in a different solution context.

SUSTAINABLE EMPIRICAL THEORY

Through the newly flared up discussion about sustainability in the context of the United Nations, the question of prioritizing action relevant to survival has received a specific global impulse. The multitude of aspects that arise in this discourse context [9] are difficult, if not impossible, to classify into an overarching, consistent conceptual framework.

[9] For an example see the 17 development goals: [https://unric.org/de/17ziele/] (Accessed: September 27, 2023)

A rough classification of development goals into resource-oriented and actor-oriented can help to make an underlying asymmetry visible: a resource problem only exists if there are biological systems on this planet that require a certain configuration of resources (an ecosystem) for their physical existence. Since the physical resources that can be found on planet Earth are quantitatively limited, it is possible, in principle, to determine through thought and science under what conditions the available physical resources — given a prevailing behavior — are insufficient. Added to this is the factor that biological systems, by their very existence, also actively alter the resources that can be found.

So, if there should be a resource problem, it is exclusively because the behavior of the biological systems has led to such a biologically caused shortage. Resources as such are neither too much, nor too little, nor good, nor bad. If one accepts that the behavior of biological systems in the case of the species Homo sapiens can be controlled by internal states, then the resource problem is primarily a cognitive and emotional problem: Do we know enough? Do we want the right thing? And these questions point to motivations beyond what is currently knowable. Is there a dark spot in the human self-image here?

On the one hand, this questioning refers to the driving forces for a current decision beyond the possibilities of the empirical sciences (trans-empirical, meta-physical, …), but on the other hand, this questioning also refers to the center/ core of human competence. This motivates to extend the notion of empirical theory to the notion of a sustainable empirical theory. This does not automatically solve the question of the inner mechanism of a value decision, but it systematically classifies the problem. The problem thus has an official place. The following formulation is suggested as a characterization for the concept of a sustainable empirical theory:

  1. a sustainable empirical theory contains an empirical theory as its core.
    1. besides the parts of initial situation, rules of change and application of rules of change, a sustainable theory also contains a text with a list of such situations, which are considered desirable for a possible future (goals, visions, …).
    2. under the condition of goals, it is possible to minimally compare each current situation with the available goals and thereby indicate the degree of goal achievement.

Stating desired goals says nothing about how realistic or promising it is to pursue those goals. It only expresses that the authors of this theory know these goals and consider them optimal at the time of theory creation. [10] The irrationality of chosen goals is in this way officially included in the domain of thought of the theory creators and in this way facilitates the extension of the rational to the irrational without already having a real solution. Nobody can exclude that the phenomenon of bringing forth something new, respectively of preferring a certain point of view in comparison to others, can be understood further and better in the future.

[10] Something can only be classified as optimal if it can be placed within an overarching framework, which allows for positioning on a scale. This refers to a minimal cognitive model as an expression of rationality. However, the decision itself takes place outside of such a rational model; in this sense, the decision as an independent process is pre-rational.

EXTENDED SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

If one accepts the concept of a sustainable empirical theory, then one can extend the concept of a scientific discourse in such a way that not only texts that represent empirical theories can be introduced, but also those texts that represent sustainable empirical theories with their own goals. Here too, one can ask whether the current text generators (September 2023) can make a constructive contribution. Insofar as a sustainable empirical theory contains an empirical theory as a hard core, the preceding observations on the limitations of text generators apply. In the creative part of the development of an empirical theory, they can contribute text fragments through their associative-combinatorial character based on a very large number of documents, which may inspire the active human theory authors to expand their view. But what about that part that manifests itself in the selection of possible goals? At this point, one must realize that it is not about any formulations, but about those that represent possible solution formulations within a systematic framework; this implies knowledge of relevant and verifiable meaning structures that could be taken into account in the context of symbolic patterns. Text generators fundamentally do not have these abilities. But it is – again – not to be excluded that their associative-combinatorial character based on a very large number of documents can still provide one or the other suggestion.

In retrospect of humanity’s history of knowledge, research, and technology, it is suggested that the great advances were each triggered by something really new, that is, by something that had never existed before in this form. The praise for Big Data, as often heard today, represents – colloquially speaking — exactly the opposite: The burial of the new by cementing the old.[11]

[11] A prominent example of the naive fixation on the old as a standard for what is right can be seen, for example, in the book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut. Using Data Instead of Instinct To Make Better Choices, London – Oxford New York et al., 2022.

EXISTENTIALLY NEW THROUGH TIME

The concept of an empirical theory inherently contains the element of change, and even in the extended concept of a sustainable empirical theory, in addition to the fundamental concept of change, there is the aspect of a possible goal. A possible goal itself is not a change, but presupposes the reality of changes! The concept of change does not result from any objects but is the result of a brain performance, through which a current present is transformed into a partially memorable state (memory contents) by forming time slices in the context of perception processes – largely unconsciously. These produced memory contents have different abstract structures, are networked differently with each other, and are assessed in different ways. In addition, the brain automatically compares current perceptions with such stored contents and immediately reports when a current perception has changed compared to the last perception contents. In this way, the phenomenon of change is a fundamental cognitive achievement of the brain, which thus makes the character of a feeling of time available in the form of a fundamental process structure. The weight of this property in the context of evolution is hardly to be overestimated, as time as such is in no way perceptible.

[12] The modern invention of machines that can generate periodic signals (oscillators, clocks) has been successfully integrated into people’s everyday lives. However, the artificially (technically) producible time has nothing to do with the fundamental change found in reality. Technical time is a tool that we humans have invented to somehow structure the otherwise amorphous mass of a phenomenon stream. Since structure itself shows in the amorphous mass, which manifest obviously for all, repeating change cycles (e.g., sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, seasons, …), a correlation of technical time models and natural time phenomena was offered. From the correlations resulting here, however, one should not conclude that the amorphous mass of the world phenomenon stream actually behaves according to our technical time model. Einstein’s theory of relativity at least makes us aware that there can be various — or only one? — asymmetries between technical time and world phenomenon stream.


Assuming this fundamental sense of time in humans, one can in principle recognize whether a current phenomenon, compared to all preceding phenomena, is somehow similar or markedly different, and in this sense indicates something qualitatively new.[13]

[13] Ultimately, an individual human only has its individual memory contents available for comparison, while a collective of people can in principle consult the set of all records. However, as is known, only a minimal fraction of the experiential reality is symbolically transformed.

By presupposing the concept of directed time for the designation of qualitatively new things, such a new event is assigned an information value in the Shannonian sense, as well as the phenomenon itself in terms of linguistic meaning, and possibly also in the cognitive area: relative to a spanned knowledge space, the occurrence of a qualitatively new event can significantly strengthen a theoretical assumption. In the latter case, the cognitive relevance may possibly mutate to a sustainable relevance if the assumption marks a real action option that could be important for further progress. In the latter case, this would provoke the necessity of a decision: should we adopt this action option or not? Humans can accomplish the finding of qualitatively new things. They are designed for it by evolution. But what about text generators?

Text generators so far do not have a sense of time comparable to that of humans. Their starting point would be texts that are different, in such a way that there is at least one text that is the most recent on the timeline and describes real events in the real world of phenomena. Since a text generator (as of September 2023) does not yet have the ability to classify texts regarding their applicability/non-applicability in the real world, its use would normally end here. Assuming that there are people who manually perform this classification for a text generator [14] (which would greatly limit the number of possible texts), then a text generator could search the surface of these texts for similar patterns and, relative to them, for those that cannot be compared. Assuming that the text generator would find a set of non-comparable patterns in acceptable time despite a massive combinatorial explosion, the problem of semantic qualification would arise again: which of these patterns can be classified as an indication of something qualitatively new? Again, humans would have to become active.

[14] Such support of machines by humans in the field of so-called intelligent algorithms has often been applied (and is still being applied today, see: [https://www.mturk.com/] (Accessed: September 27, 2023)), and is known to be very prone to errors.

As before, the verdict is mixed: left to itself, a text generator will not be able to solve this task, but in cooperation with humans, it may possibly provide important auxiliary services, which could ultimately be of existential importance to humans in search of something qualitatively new despite all limitations.

THE IMMANENT PREJUDICE OF THE SCIENCES

A prejudice is known to be the assessment of a situation as an instance of a certain pattern, which the judge assumes applies, even though there are numerous indications that the assumed applicability is empirically false. Due to the permanent requirement of everyday life that we have to make decisions, humans, through their evolutionary development, have the fundamental ability to make many of their everyday decisions largely automatically. This offers many advantages, but can also lead to conflicts.

Daniel Kahneman introduced in this context in his book [15] the two terms System 1 and System 2 for a human actor. These terms describe in his concept of a human actor two behavioral complexes that can be distinguished based on some properties.[16] System 1 is set by the overall system of human actor and is characterized by the fact that the actor can respond largely automatically to requirements by everyday life. The human actor has automatic answers to certain stimuli from his environment, without having to think much about it. In case of conflicts within System 1 or from the perspective of System 2, which exercises some control over the appropriateness of System 1 reactions in a certain situation in conscious mode, System 2 becomes active. This does not have automatic answers ready, but has to laboriously work out an answer to a given situation step by step. However, there is also the phenomenon that complex processes, which must be carried out frequently, can be automated to a certain extent (bicycling, swimming, playing a musical instrument, learning language, doing mental arithmetic, …). All these processes are based on preceding decisions that encompass different forms of preferences. As long as these automated processes are appropriate in the light of a certain rational model, everything seems to be OK. But if the corresponding model is distorted in any sense, then it would be said that these models carry a prejudice.

[15] Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking Fast and Slow, Pinguin Boooks Random House, UK, 2012 (zuerst 2011)

[16] See the following Chapter 1 in Part 1 of (Kahnemann, 2012, pages 19-30).

In addition to the countless examples that Kahneman himself cites in his book to show the susceptibility of System 1 to such prejudices, it should be pointed out here that the model of Kahneman himself (and many similar models) can carry a prejudice that is of a considerably more fundamental nature. The division of the behavioral space of a human actor into a System 1 and 2, as Kahneman does, obviously has great potential to classify many everyday events. But what about all the everyday phenomena that fit neither the scheme of System 1 nor the scheme of System 2?

In the case of making a decision, System 1 comments that people – if available – automatically call up and execute an available answer. Only in the case of conflict under the control of System 2 can there be lengthy operations that lead to other, new answers.

In the case of decisions, however, it is not just about reacting at all, but there is also the problem of choosing between known possibilities or even finding something new because the known old is unsatisfactory.

Established scientific disciplines have their specific perspectives and methods that define areas of everyday life as a subject area. Phenomena that do not fit into this predefined space do not occur for the relevant discipline – methodically conditioned. In the area of decision-making and thus the typical human structures, there are not a few areas that have so far not found official entry into a scientific discipline. At a certain point in time, there are ultimately many, large phenomenon areas that really exist, but methodically are not present in the view of individual sciences. For a scientific investigation of the real world, this means that the sciences, due to their immanent exclusions, are burdened with a massive reservation against the empirical world. For the task of selecting suitable sustainable goals within the framework of sustainable science, this structurally conditioned fact can be fatal. Loosely formulated: under the banner of actual science, a central principle of science – the openness to all phenomena – is simply excluded, so as not to have to change the existing structure.

For this question of a meta-reflection on science itself, text generators are again only reduced to possible abstract text delivery services under the direction of humans.

SUPERVISION BY PHILOSOPHY

The just-described fatal dilemma of all modern sciences is to be taken seriously, as without an efficient science, sustainable reflection on the present and future cannot be realized in the long term. If one agrees that the fatal bias of science is caused by the fact that each discipline works intensively within its discipline boundaries, but does not systematically organize communication and reflection beyond its own boundaries with a view to other disciplines as meta-reflection, the question must be answered whether and how this deficit can be overcome.

There is only one known answer to this question: one must search for that conceptual framework within which these guiding concepts can meaningfully interact both in their own right and in their interaction with other guiding concepts, starting from those guiding concepts that are constitutive for the individual disciplines.

This is genuinely the task of philosophy, concretized by the example of the philosophy of science. However, this would mean that each individual science would have to use a sufficiently large part of its capacities to make the idea of the one science in maximum diversity available in a real process.

For the hard conceptual work hinted at here, text generators will hardly be able to play a central role.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Since so far there is no concept of intelligence in any individual science that goes beyond a single discipline, it makes little sense at first glance to apply the term intelligence to collectives. However, looking at the cultural achievements of humanity as a whole, and here not least with a view to the used language, it is undeniable that a description of the performance of an individual person, its individual performance, is incomplete without reference to the whole.

So, if one tries to assign an overarching meaning to the letter combination intelligence, one will not be able to avoid deciphering this phenomenon of the human collective in the form of complex everyday processes in a no less complex dynamic world, at least to the extent that one can identify a somewhat corresponding empirical something for the letter combination intelligence, with which one could constitute a comprehensible meaning.

Of course, this term should be scalable for all biological systems, and one would have to have a comprehensible procedure that allows the various technical systems to be related to this collective intelligence term in such a way that direct performance comparisons between biological and technical systems would be possible.[17]

[17] The often quoted and popular Turing Test (See: Alan M. Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In: Mind. Volume LIX, No. 236, 1950, 433–460, [doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433] (Accessed: Sept 29, 2023) in no way meets the methodological requirements that one would have to adhere to if one actually wanted to come to a qualified performance comparison between humans and machines. Nevertheless, the basic idea of Turing in his meta-logical text from 1936, published in 1937 (see: A. M. Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. In: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. s2-42. Volume, No. 1, 1937, 230–265 [doi:10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230] (Accessed: Sept 29, 2023) seems to be a promising starting point, since he, in trying to present an alternative formulation to Kurt Gödel’s (1931) proof on the undecidability of arithmetic, leads a meta-logical proof, and in this context Turing introduces the concept of a machine that was later called Universal Turing Machine.

Already in this proof approach, it can be seen how Turing transforms the phenomenon of a human bookkeeper at a meta-level into a theoretical concept, by means of which he can then meta-logically examine the behavior of this bookkeeper in a specific behavioral space. His meta-logical proof not only confirmed Gödel’s meta-logical proof, but also indirectly indicates how ultimately any phenomenal complexes can be formalized on a meta-level in such a way that one can then argue formally demanding with it.

CONCLUSION STRUCTURALLY

The idea of philosophical supervision of the individual sciences with the goal of a concrete integration of all disciplines into an overall conceptual structure seems to be fundamentally possible from a philosophy of science perspective based on the previous considerations. From today’s point of view, specific phenomena claimed by individual disciplines should no longer be a fundamental obstacle for a modern theory concept. This would clarify the basics of the concept of Collective Intelligence and it would surely be possible to more clearly identify interactions between human collective intelligence and interactive machines. Subsequently, the probability would increase that the supporting machines could be further optimized, so that they could also help in more demanding tasks.

CONCLUSION SUBJECTIVELY

Attempting to characterize the interactive role of text generators in a human-driven scientific discourse, assuming a certain scientific model, appears to be somewhat clear from a transdisciplinary (and thus structural) perspective. However, such scientific discourse represents only a sub-space of the general human discourse space. In the latter, the reception of texts from the perspective of humans inevitably also has a subjective view [18]: People are used to suspecting a human author behind a text. With the appearance of technical aids, texts have increasingly become products, which increasingly gaining formulations that are not written down by a human author alone, but by the technical aids themselves, mediated by a human author. With the appearance of text generators, the proportion of technically generated formulations increases extremely, up to the case that ultimately the entire text is the direct output of a technical aid. It becomes difficult to impossible to recognize to what extent a controlling human share can still be spoken of here. The human author thus disappears behind a text; the sign reality which does not prevent an existential projection of the inner world of the human reader into a potential human author, but threatens to lose itself or actually loses itself in the real absence of a human author in the face of a chimeric human counterpart. What happens in a world where people no longer have human counterparts?

[18] There is an excellent analysis on this topic by Hannes Bajohr titled “Artifizielle und postartifizielle Texte. Über Literatur und Künstliche Intelligenz” (Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts: On Literature and Artificial Intelligence). It was the Walter-Höllerer-Lecture 2022, delivered on December 8, 2022, at the Technical University of Berlin. The lecture can be accessed here [ https://hannesbajohr.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Hoellerer-Vorlesung-2022.pdf ] (Accessed: September 29, 2023). The reference to this lecture was provided to me by Jennifer Becker.

State Change from Non-Writing to Writing. Working with chatGPT4 in parallel. An Exploration

Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch

Email: info@uffmm.org

Aug 28, 2023 – Aug 28, 2023 (18:10h CET)

CONTEXT: Man and Machine. One head against Billions of documents …

The author has started an experiment writing two tracks in parallel: the first track is his own writing without chatGPT4, and the next track ist a chat with chatGPT4. The motivation behind this experiment is to get a better estimate how the writing of chatGPT4 differs. While chatGPT4 is working only by statistical patterns of the ‘surface’ of language communications, the author is exploiting his individual ‘meaning knowledge’ built up in his inner states by many years of individual learning as part of certain ‘cultures’ and ‘everyday situations’. Clearly the knowledge of the individual author about texts available is extremely smaller than compared with the knowledge base of chatGPT4. Thus it is an interesting question whether an individual knowledge is generally too bad compared to the text generation capacity of the chatGPT4 software?

While the premises of the original article cannot be easily transferred to the dialog with chatGPT4, one can still get some sense of where chatGPT4’s strengths lie on the one hand, and its weaknesses on the other. For ‘authentic’ writing a replacement by chatGPT4 is not an option, but a ‘cooperation’ between ‘authentic’ writing and chatGPT seems possible and in some contexts certainly even fruitful.

What the Author did Write:

CONTINUOUS REBIRTH – Now. Silence does not help …Exploration

(This text is a translation from a German source using for nearly 90-95% the deepL software without the need to make any changes afterwards. [*])

CONTEXT

As written in the previous blog entry, the last blog entry with the topic “Homo Sapiens: empirical and sustainable-empirical theories, emotions, and machines. A Sketch” [1] as a draft speech for the conference “AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourse?” [2] Due to the tight time frame (20 min for the talk), this text was very condensed. However, despite its brevity, the condensed text contains a many references to fundamental issues. One of them will be briefly taken up here.

Localization in the text of the lecture

A first hint is found in the section headed “FUTURE AND EMOTIONS” and then in the section “SUSTAINABLE EMPIRICAL THEORY”.

In these sections of the text, attention is drawn to the fact that every explicit worldview is preceded by a phase of ’emergence’ of that worldview, in which there is a characteristic ‘transition’ between the ‘result’ in the form of a possible text and a preceding state in which that text is not yet ‘there’. Of course, in this ‘pre-text phase’ – according to the assumptions in the section “MEANING” – there are many facts of knowledge and emotions in the brain of the ‘author’, all of which are ‘not conscious’, but from which the possible effects in the form of a text emanate. How exactly ‘impact’ is supposed to emanate from this ‘pre-conscious’ knowledge and emotions is largely unclear.

We know from everyday life that external events can trigger ‘perceptions’, which in turn can ‘stimulate’ a wide variety of reactions as ‘triggers’. If we disregard such reactions, which are ‘pre-trained’ in our brain due to frequent practice and which are then almost always ‘automatically’ evoked, it is as a rule hardly predictable whether and how we react.

From non-action to action

This potential transition from non-action to action is omnipresent in everyday life. As such, we normally do not notice it. In special situations, however, where we are explicitly challenged to make decisions, we then suddenly find ourselves in a quasi ‘undefined state’: the situation appears to us as if we are supposed to decide. Should we do anything at all (eat something or not)? Which option is more important (go to the planned meeting or rather finish a certain task)? We want to implement a plan, but which of the many options should we ‘choose’ (… there are at least three alternatives; all have pros and cons)? Choosing one option as highly favored would involve significant changes in one’s life situation; do I really want this? Would it be worth it? The nature of the challenges is as varied as everyday life in many different areas.

What is important, more important?

As soon as one or more than one option appears before the ‘mind’s eye’, one involuntarily asks oneself how ‘seriously’ one should take the options? Are there arguments for or against? Are the reasons ‘credible’? What ‘risks’ are associated with them? What can I expect as ‘positive added value’? What changes for my ‘personal situation’ are associated with it? What does this mean for my ‘environment’? …

What do I do if the ‘recognizable’ (‘rational’) options do not provide a clear result, it ‘contradicts’ my ‘feeling for life’, ‘me’, and I ‘spontaneously’ reject it, spontaneously ‘don’t want’ it, it triggers various ‘strong feelings’ that may ‘overwhelm’ me (anger, fear, disappointment, sadness, …)? …

The transition from non-action to action can ‘activate’ a multitude of ‘rational’ and ’emotional’ aspects, which can – and mostly do – influence each other, to the point that one experiences a ‘helplessness’ entangled in a ‘tangle’ of considerations and emotions: one has the feeling of being ‘stuck’, a ‘clear solution’ seems distant. …

If one can ‘wait’ (hours, days, weeks, …) and/or one has the opportunity to talk about it with other people, then this can often – not always – clarify the situation so far that one thinks to know what one ‘wants now’. But such ‘clarifications’ usually do not get the ‘challenge of a ‘decision’ out of the way. Besides, the ‘escape’ into ‘repressing’ the situation is always an option; sometimes it helps; if it doesn’t help, then the ‘everyday’ situation becomes worse by the ‘repressing’, quite apart from the fact that ‘unsolved problems’ do not ‘disappear’, but live on ‘inside’ and can unfold ‘special effects’ there in many ways, which are very ‘destructive’.

Rebirth?

The variety of possible – emotional as well as rational – aspects of the transition from non-action to action are fascinating, but possibly even more fascinating is the basic process itself: at any given moment, every human being lives in a certain everyday situation with a variety of experiences already made, a mixture of ‘rational explanations’ and ’emotional states’. And, depending on the nature of everyday life, one can ‘drift along’ or one has to perceive daily ‘strenuous activities’ in order to maintain the situation of everyday life; in other cases, one has to constantly ‘fight’ in real terms for the continuance in everyday life. One experiences here that the ‘conditions of everyday life’ are largely given to the individual and one can only change them to a limited extent and with a corresponding ‘effort’.

External events (fire, water, violence, war, drought, accident, life forms of a community, workplace, company policy, diseases, aging, …) can of course strongly influence the personal everyday life ‘against one’s will’, but in the end a fundamental autonomy of decision-making remains in the individual: one can decide differently in the next moment than before, even without it being completely clear to oneself in this moment ‘why’ one does it. Whether one calls this ‘not being able to explain’ then ‘goot feeling’ or ‘intuition’ or … all these words only circumscribe a ‘not knowing’ about the processes ‘in us’ that take place and ‘motivate’ us. And even if one has a ‘linguistic explanation’ available, this does not have to mean that a ‘clear insight’ is also connected with these words. The proportion of ‘preconscious/ unconscious’ ‘inner processes’ is high and ultimately these are not explainable ‘out of themselves’: they take place, move us, and we ‘implement them’.

Yes, in every moment we can behave ‘as usual’ and thereby ‘preserve’ the world (or thereby prevent it from becoming different?). But we can also sometimes ‘deviate’ from the usual (and thereby ‘destroy’ something or make something ‘new possible?). All in all, the ‘space of the inside’ remains largely ‘unilluminated’. We hardly if at all understand why we do this; this requires trust in ourselves and the situation. Is the difference to the ‘original birth’ only gradual? Are we in a continuing process of birth that constantly enables the construction of something ‘new’, can support ‘life’ or also ‘weaken’ it?

COMMENTS

[Exploration] The format ‘exploration’ is newly introduced in the blog from now on, since there is often the situation that the author at the transition point from ‘non-action to action’, from ‘non-writing to writing’ tries out which emotional and rational ‘reactions’ from the ‘inside’ are ‘spontaneously’ available for a certain question/idea. This is to be distinguished from a ‘systematic elaboration’ of a thought, although the influence of the ‘inside’ is of course never completely excluded. The ‘difference’ between ‘exploratory’ and ‘systematic’ writing has to do with the fact that systematic writing tries to bring the ‘rational dimension’ of the thought to the fore.

[*] German source: https://www.cognitiveagent.org/2023/08/28/staendige-wiedergeburt-jetzt-schweigen-hilft-nicht-exploration/ ,

[deepL translator]: https://www.deepl.com

[1] https://www.uffmm.org/2023/08/24/homo-sapiens-empirical-and-sustained-empirical-theories-emotions-and-machines-a-sketch/

[2] https://zevedi.de/en/topics/ki-text-2/

Dealing with the topic using chatGPT4

Author: What happens inside a person when it changes from the state of non-writing to the state of writing? Which kinds of factors are involved in this change?

ChatGPT

The shift from a state of non-writing to writing is a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional, and physical processes. Several factors contribute to this transformation:

  1. Cognitive Factors:
    • Intent and Purpose: The most immediate factor that leads to writing is the intent. The individual decides there’s a need to communicate or record something. This purpose could be to share knowledge, express emotions, or any other myriad reasons.
    • Idea Formation: The brain begins to formulate ideas, organize thoughts, and consider the message it wants to convey.
    • Recall: The brain accesses stored knowledge about language, grammar, and the topic at hand.
    • Decision Making: Choices are made about wording, tone, and structure.
  2. Emotional Factors:
    • Motivation: An internal or external motivation prompts the writer. This could be intrinsic (like the joy of writing) or extrinsic (like a job requirement).
    • Confidence: A person’s self-efficacy regarding writing can influence their willingness and approach. A confident writer might start without hesitation, while someone less confident might procrastinate or struggle with where to begin.
    • Mood and Emotion: A person’s emotional state can shape the content and tone of their writing. For instance, someone in a cheerful mood might use more positive and lively language.
  3. Physiological and Neuromotor Factors:
    • Fine Motor Skills: The act of writing requires coordination between the brain and muscles, whether it’s holding a pen or typing on a keyboard.
    • Visual Processing: Reading what’s written, planning spatially on the page or screen, and adjusting based on visual feedback are integral to the writing process.
    • Brain Activation: Certain areas of the brain, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are particularly active during language production.
  4. Environmental Factors:
    • Physical Environment: The availability of tools (pen, paper, computer), a conducive atmosphere, and a comfortable workspace can influence the transition to writing.
    • Cultural and Social Environment: The societal context, intended audience, and cultural norms can shape what and how a person writes.
  5. Educational and Experiential Factors:
    • Training and Practice: A person’s prior experience with writing, including their education, can influence their ease and style of writing.
    • Feedback and Iteration: Previous feedback on one’s writing can affect future attempts. Someone who has been praised might approach writing with more enthusiasm, while critical feedback might make another more cautious or reflective.
  6. External Stimuli:
    • Inspiration: Often, external stimuli—like reading a book, a conversation, a personal experience, or even a sunset—can spark the urge to write.
    • Prompts: In some situations, a specific prompt or question might initiate the writing process.

Understanding these factors and their interplay can be beneficial for educators, writers, and anyone looking to refine or understand their writing process.

AUTHOR

Can you describe more the subjective experience of a person, which is changing from the state of non-writing to writing?

chatGPT4

Certainly! The transition from non-writing to writing, when viewed from a subjective lens, involves a cascade of internal experiences. Here’s a more in-depth dive into the intimate, often ineffable stages a writer might traverse:

  1. Initial Restlessness: Before the act of writing commences, there’s often a sense of unease or urgency. It’s akin to a pressure building up, a compulsion to get something out, or a feeling that there’s something “there” that needs to be expressed.
  2. Incubation and Percolation: Many writers describe a period where ideas are “brewing” or “stewing” inside them. They might not be actively thinking about these ideas, but somewhere in the backdrop, the mind is processing and refining them. This can feel like daydreaming or being lost in thought.
  3. Flash of Insight: This is the ‘Eureka!’ moment when clarity emerges. It’s the point when the idea crystallizes, and the writer feels an impetus to put pen to paper. It can be a sudden realization or a slow dawning.
  4. Overcoming the Inertia: This is the mental “deep breath” before diving in. There’s a brief struggle, often described as “writer’s block” or resistance, where the weight of the blank page feels daunting.
  5. Entering the Flow: As words start pouring out, many writers describe a state known as “flow” – a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In this state, writers lose track of time, their surroundings, and sometimes even themselves. They feel as if they are merely a conduit for the words, with the writing almost writing itself.
  6. Bouts of Doubt and Reassurance: Especially in longer writing stints, waves of self-doubt might wash over the writer. Questions like “Is this good enough?” or “Does this make sense?” arise. These periods might be interspersed with moments of confidence and reassurance, where the writer feels they’re on the right track.
  7. Physical Sensations: There might be heightened awareness of the tactile sensation of the pen moving on paper or fingers dancing on the keyboard. Some writers describe a kind of rhythm they get into, almost like a meditative state.
  8. Emotional Catharsis: Particularly for personal or emotive subjects, the act of writing can be cathartic. It’s a release, a way to process feelings, and often brings relief or deeper understanding.
  9. Completion and Exhaustion: As the writing draws to a close, there’s a sense of accomplishment, but also, often, a feeling of emptiness or exhaustion. The mental and emotional energy expended in writing can leave one drained.
  10. Reflection and Revision: Once the initial draft is out, there’s a period of reflection. Reading one’s own words can be an enlightening experience. This phase might involve editing, but it’s also a moment of self-confrontation, seeing one’s thoughts and feelings laid out bare.

The subjective experience of writing is deeply personal and can vary greatly from person to person. Some find it therapeutic, others see it as work, and for many, it’s a passionate craft. Regardless of the perspective, the journey from non-writing to writing is an intimate dance between the conscious and subconscious, emotion and reason, art and discipline.

End of this first small experiment.

Homo Sapiens: empirical and sustained-empirical theories, emotions, and machines. A sketch

Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch

Email: info@uffmm.org

Aug 24, 2023 — Aug 29, 2023 (10:48h CET)

Attention: This text has been translated from a German source by using the software deepL for nearly 97 – 99% of the text! The diagrams of the German version have been left out.

CONTEXT

This text represents the outline of a talk given at the conference “AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourse?” (August 25/26, 2023, TU Darmstadt). [1] A publication of all lectures is planned by the publisher Walter de Gruyter by the end of 2023/beginning of 2024. This publication will be announced here then.

Start of the Lecture

Dear Auditorium,

This conference entitled “AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourses?” is centrally devoted to scientific discourses and the possible influence of AI text generators on these. However, the hot core ultimately remains the phenomenon of text itself, its validity.

In this conference many different views are presented that are possible on this topic.

TRANSDISCIPLINARY

My contribution to the topic tries to define the role of the so-called AI text generators by embedding the properties of ‘AI text generators’ in a ‘structural conceptual framework’ within a ‘transdisciplinary view’. This helps the specifics of scientific discourses to be highlighted. This can then result further in better ‘criteria for an extended assessment’ of AI text generators in their role for scientific discourses.

An additional aspect is the question of the structure of ‘collective intelligence’ using humans as an example, and how this can possibly unite with an ‘artificial intelligence’ in the context of scientific discourses.

‘Transdisciplinary’ in this context means to span a ‘meta-level’ from which it should be possible to describe today’s ‘diversity of text productions’ in a way that is expressive enough to distinguish ‘AI-based’ text production from ‘human’ text production.

HUMAN TEXT GENERATION

The formulation ‘scientific discourse’ is a special case of the more general concept ‘human text generation’.

This change of perspective is meta-theoretically necessary, since at first sight it is not the ‘text as such’ that decides about ‘validity and non-validity’, but the ‘actors’ who ‘produce and understand texts’. And with the occurrence of ‘different kinds of actors’ – here ‘humans’, there ‘machines’ – one cannot avoid addressing exactly those differences – if there are any – that play a weighty role in the ‘validity of texts’.

TEXT CAPABLE MACHINES

With the distinction in two different kinds of actors – here ‘humans’, there ‘machines’ – a first ‘fundamental asymmetry’ immediately strikes the eye: so-called ‘AI text generators’ are entities that have been ‘invented’ and ‘built’ by humans, it are furthermore humans who ‘use’ them, and the essential material used by so-called AI generators are again ‘texts’ that are considered a ‘human cultural property’.

In the case of so-called ‘AI-text-generators’, we shall first state only this much, that we are dealing with ‘machines’, which have ‘input’ and ‘output’, plus a minimal ‘learning ability’, and whose input and output can process ‘text-like objects’.

BIOLOGICAL — NON-BIOLOGICAL

On the meta-level, then, we are assumed to have, on the one hand, such actors which are minimally ‘text-capable machines’ – completely human products – and, on the other hand, actors we call ‘humans’. Humans, as a ‘homo-sapiens population’, belong to the set of ‘biological systems’, while ‘text-capable machines’ belong to the set of ‘non-biological systems’.

BLANK INTELLIGENCE TERM

The transformation of the term ‘AI text generator’ into the term ‘text capable machine’ undertaken here is intended to additionally illustrate that the widespread use of the term ‘AI’ for ‘artificial intelligence’ is rather misleading. So far, there exists today no general concept of ‘intelligence’ in any scientific discipline that can be applied and accepted beyond individual disciplines. There is no real justification for the almost inflationary use of the term AI today other than that the term has been so drained of meaning that it can be used anytime, anywhere, without saying anything wrong. Something that has no meaning can be neither true’ nor ‘false’.

PREREQUISITES FOR TEXT GENERATION

If now the homo-sapiens population is identified as the original actor for ‘text generation’ and ‘text comprehension’, it shall now first be examined which are ‘those special characteristics’ that enable a homo-sapiens population to generate and comprehend texts and to ‘use them successfully in the everyday life process’.

VALIDITY

A connecting point for the investigation of the special characteristics of a homo-sapiens text generation and a text understanding is the term ‘validity’, which occurs in the conference topic.

In the primary arena of biological life, in everyday processes, in everyday life, the ‘validity’ of a text has to do with ‘being correct’, being ‘appicable’. If a text is not planned from the beginning with a ‘fictional character’, but with a ‘reference to everyday events’, which everyone can ‘check’ in the context of his ‘perception of the world’, then ‘validity in everyday life’ has to do with the fact that the ‘correctness of a text’ can be checked. If the ‘statement of a text’ is ‘applicable’ in everyday life, if it is ‘correct’, then one also says that this statement is ‘valid’, one grants it ‘validity’, one also calls it ‘true’. Against this background, one might be inclined to continue and say: ‘If’ the statement of a text ‘does not apply’, then it has ‘no validity’; simplified to the formulation that the statement is ‘not true’ or simply ‘false’.

In ‘real everyday life’, however, the world is rarely ‘black’ and ‘white’: it is not uncommon that we are confronted with texts to which we are inclined to ascribe ‘a possible validity’ because of their ‘learned meaning’, although it may not be at all clear whether there is – or will be – a situation in everyday life in which the statement of the text actually applies. In such a case, the validity would then be ‘indeterminate’; the statement would be ‘neither true nor false’.

ASYMMETRY: APPLICABLE- NOT APPLICABLE

One can recognize a certain asymmetry here: The ‘applicability’ of a statement, its actual validity, is comparatively clear. The ‘not being applicable’, i.e. a ‘merely possible’ validity, on the other hand, is difficult to decide.

With this phenomenon of the ‘current non-decidability’ of a statement we touch both the problem of the ‘meaning’ of a statement — how far is at all clear what is meant? — as well as the problem of the ‘unfinishedness of our everyday life’, better known as ‘future’: whether a ‘current present’ continues as such, whether exactly like this, or whether completely different, depends on how we understand and estimate ‘future’ in general; what some take for granted as a possible future, can be simply ‘nonsense’ for others.

MEANING

This tension between ‘currently decidable’ and ‘currently not yet decidable’ additionally clarifies an ‘autonomous’ aspect of the phenomenon of meaning: if a certain knowledge has been formed in the brain and has been made usable as ‘meaning’ for a ‘language system’, then this ‘associated’ meaning gains its own ‘reality’ for the scope of knowledge: it is not the ‘reality beyond the brain’, but the ‘reality of one’s own thinking’, whereby this reality of thinking ‘seen from outside’ has something like ‘being virtual’.

If one wants to talk about this ‘special reality of meaning’ in the context of the ‘whole system’, then one has to resort to far-reaching assumptions in order to be able to install a ‘conceptual framework’ on the meta-level which is able to sufficiently describe the structure and function of meaning. For this, the following components are minimally assumed (‘knowledge’, ‘language’ as well as ‘meaning relation’):

KNOWLEDGE: There is the totality of ‘knowledge’ that ‘builds up’ in the homo-sapiens actor in the course of time in the brain: both due to continuous interactions of the ‘brain’ with the ‘environment of the body’, as well as due to interactions ‘with the body itself’, as well as due to interactions ‘of the brain with itself’.

LANGUAGE: To be distinguished from knowledge is the dynamic system of ‘potential means of expression’, here simplistically called ‘language’, which can unfold over time in interaction with ‘knowledge’.

MEANING RELATIONSHIP: Finally, there is the dynamic ‘meaning relation’, an interaction mechanism that can link any knowledge elements to any language means of expression at any time.

Each of these mentioned components ‘knowledge’, ‘language’ as well as ‘meaning relation’ is extremely complex; no less complex is their interaction.

FUTURE AND EMOTIONS

In addition to the phenomenon of meaning, it also became apparent in the phenomenon of being applicable that the decision of being applicable also depends on an ‘available everyday situation’ in which a current correspondence can be ‘concretely shown’ or not.

If, in addition to a ‘conceivable meaning’ in the mind, we do not currently have any everyday situation that sufficiently corresponds to this meaning in the mind, then there are always two possibilities: We can give the ‘status of a possible future’ to this imagined construct despite the lack of reality reference, or not.

If we would decide to assign the status of a possible future to a ‘meaning in the head’, then there arise usually two requirements: (i) Can it be made sufficiently plausible in the light of the available knowledge that the ‘imagined possible situation’ can be ‘transformed into a new real situation’ in the ‘foreseeable future’ starting from the current real situation? And (ii) Are there ‘sustainable reasons’ why one should ‘want and affirm’ this possible future?

The first requirement calls for a powerful ‘science’ that sheds light on whether it can work at all. The second demand goes beyond this and brings the seemingly ‘irrational’ aspect of ’emotionality’ into play under the garb of ‘sustainability’: it is not simply about ‘knowledge as such’, it is also not only about a ‘so-called sustainable knowledge’ that is supposed to contribute to supporting the survival of life on planet Earth — and beyond –, it is rather also about ‘finding something good, affirming something, and then also wanting to decide it’. These last aspects are so far rather located beyond ‘rationality’; they are assigned to the diffuse area of ’emotions’; which is strange, since any form of ‘usual rationality’ is exactly based on these ’emotions’.[2]

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE AND EVERYDAY SITUATIONS

In the context of ‘rationality’ and ’emotionality’ just indicated, it is not uninteresting that in the conference topic ‘scientific discourse’ is thematized as a point of reference to clarify the status of text-capable machines.

The question is to what extent a ‘scientific discourse’ can serve as a reference point for a successful text at all?

For this purpose it can help to be aware of the fact that life on this planet earth takes place at every moment in an inconceivably large amount of ‘everyday situations’, which all take place simultaneously. Each ‘everyday situation’ represents a ‘present’ for the actors. And in the heads of the actors there is an individually different knowledge about how a present ‘can change’ or will change in a possible future.

This ‘knowledge in the heads’ of the actors involved can generally be ‘transformed into texts’ which in different ways ‘linguistically represent’ some of the aspects of everyday life.

The crucial point is that it is not enough for everyone to produce a text ‘for himself’ alone, quite ‘individually’, but that everyone must produce a ‘common text’ together ‘with everyone else’ who is also affected by the everyday situation. A ‘collective’ performance is required.

Nor is it a question of ‘any’ text, but one that is such that it allows for the ‘generation of possible continuations in the future’, that is, what is traditionally expected of a ‘scientific text’.

From the extensive discussion — since the times of Aristotle — of what ‘scientific’ should mean, what a ‘theory’ is, what an ’empirical theory’ should be, I sketch what I call here the ‘minimal concept of an empirical theory’.

  1. The starting point is a ‘group of people’ (the ‘authors’) who want to create a ‘common text’.
  2. This text is supposed to have the property that it allows ‘justifiable predictions’ for possible ‘future situations’, to which then ‘sometime’ in the future a ‘validity can be assigned’.
  3. The authors are able to agree on a ‘starting situation’ which they transform by means of a ‘common language’ into a ‘source text’ [A].
  4. It is agreed that this initial text may contain only ‘such linguistic expressions’ which can be shown to be ‘true’ ‘in the initial situation’.
  5. In another text, the authors compile a set of ‘rules of change’ [V] that put into words ‘forms of change’ for a given situation.
  6. Also in this case it is considered as agreed that only ‘such rules of change’ may be written down, of which all authors know that they have proved to be ‘true’ in ‘preceding everyday situations’.
  7. The text with the rules of change V is on a ‘meta-level’ compared to the text A about the initial situation, which is on an ‘object-level’ relative to the text V.
  8. The ‘interaction’ between the text V with the change rules and the text A with the initial situation is described in a separate ‘application text’ [F]: Here it is described when and how one may apply a change rule (in V) to a source text A and how this changes the ‘source text A’ to a ‘subsequent text A*’.
  9. The application text F is thus on a next higher meta-level to the two texts A and V and can cause the application text to change the source text A.
  1. The moment a new subsequent text A* exists, the subsequent text A* becomes the new initial text A.
  2. If the new initial text A is such that a change rule from V can be applied again, then the generation of a new subsequent text A* is repeated.
  3. This ‘repeatability’ of the application can lead to the generation of many subsequent texts <A*1, …, A*n>.
  4. A series of many subsequent texts <A*1, …, A*n> is usually called a ‘simulation’.
  5. Depending on the nature of the source text A and the nature of the change rules in V, it may be that possible simulations ‘can go quite differently’. The set of possible scientific simulations thus represents ‘future’ not as a single, definite course, but as an ‘arbitrarily large set of possible courses’.
  6. The factors on which different courses depend are manifold. One factor are the authors themselves. Every author is, after all, with his corporeality completely himself part of that very empirical world which is to be described in a scientific theory. And, as is well known, any human actor can change his mind at any moment. He can literally in the next moment do exactly the opposite of what he thought before. And thus the world is already no longer the same as previously assumed in the scientific description.

Even this simple example shows that the emotionality of ‘finding good, wanting, and deciding’ lies ahead of the rationality of scientific theories. This continues in the so-called ‘sustainability discussion’.

SUSTAINABLE EMPIRICAL THEORY

With the ‘minimal concept of an empirical theory (ET)’ just introduced, a ‘minimal concept of a sustainable empirical theory (NET)’ can also be introduced directly.

While an empirical theory can span an arbitrarily large space of grounded simulations that make visible the space of many possible futures, everyday actors are left with the question of what they want to have as ‘their future’ out of all this? In the present we experience the situation that mankind gives the impression that it agrees to destroy the life beyond the human population more and more sustainably with the expected effect of ‘self-destruction’.

However, this self-destruction effect, which can be predicted in outline, is only one variant in the space of possible futures. Empirical science can indicate it in outline. To distinguish this variant before others, to accept it as ‘good’, to ‘want’ it, to ‘decide’ for this variant, lies in that so far hardly explored area of emotionality as root of all rationality.[2]

If everyday actors have decided in favor of a certain rationally lightened variant of possible future, then they can evaluate at any time with a suitable ‘evaluation procedure (EVAL)’ how much ‘percent (%) of the properties of the target state Z’ have been achieved so far, provided that the favored target state is transformed into a suitable text Z.

In other words, the moment we have transformed everyday scenarios into a rationally tangible state via suitable texts, things take on a certain clarity and thereby become — in a sense — simple. That we make such transformations and on which aspects of a real or possible state we then focus is, however, antecedent to text-based rationality as an emotional dimension.[2]

MAN-MACHINE

After these preliminary considerations, the final question is whether and how the main question of this conference, “How do AI text generators change scientific discourse?” can be answered in any way?

My previous remarks have attempted to show what it means for humans to collectively generate texts that meet the criteria for scientific discourse that also meets the requirements for empirical or even sustained empirical theories.

In doing so, it becomes apparent that both in the generation of a collective scientific text and in its application in everyday life, a close interrelation with both the shared experiential world and the dynamic knowledge and meaning components in each actor play a role.

The aspect of ‘validity’ is part of a dynamic world reference whose assessment as ‘true’ is constantly in flux; while one actor may tend to say “Yes, can be true”, another actor may just tend to the opposite. While some may tend to favor possible future option X, others may prefer future option Y. Rational arguments are absent; emotions speak. While one group has just decided to ‘believe’ and ‘implement’ plan Z, the others turn away, reject plan Z, and do something completely different.

This unsteady, uncertain character of future-interpretation and future-action accompanies the Homo Sapiens population from the very beginning. The not understood emotional complex constantly accompanies everyday life like a shadow.

Where and how can ‘text-enabled machines’ make a constructive contribution in this situation?

Assuming that there is a source text A, a change text V and an instruction F, today’s algorithms could calculate all possible simulations faster than humans could.

Assuming that there is also a target text Z, today’s algorithms could also compute an evaluation of the relationship between a current situation as A and the target text Z.

In other words: if an empirical or a sustainable-empirical theory would be formulated with its necessary texts, then a present algorithm could automatically compute all possible simulations and the degree of target fulfillment faster than any human alone.

But what about the (i) elaboration of a theory or (ii) the pre-rational decision for a certain empirical or even sustainable-empirical theory ?

A clear answer to both questions seems hardly possible to me at the present time, since we humans still understand too little how we ourselves collectively form, select, check, compare and also reject theories in everyday life.

My working hypothesis on the subject is: that we will very well need machines capable of learning in order to be able to fulfill the task of developing useful sustainable empirical theories for our common everyday life in the future. But when this will happen in reality and to what extent seems largely unclear to me at this point in time.[2]

COMMENTS

[1] https://zevedi.de/en/topics/ki-text-2/

[2] Talking about ’emotions’ in the sense of ‘factors in us’ that move us to go from the state ‘before the text’ to the state ‘written text’, that hints at very many aspects. In a small exploratory text “State Change from Non-Writing to Writing. Working with chatGPT4 in parallel” ( https://www.uffmm.org/2023/08/28/state-change-from-non-writing-to-writing-working-with-chatgpt4-in-parallel/ ) the author has tried to address some of these aspects. While writing it becomes clear that very many ‘individually subjective’ aspects play a role here, which of course do not appear ‘isolated’, but always flash up a reference to concrete contexts, which are linked to the topic. Nevertheless, it is not the ‘objective context’ that forms the core statement, but the ‘individually subjective’ component that appears in the process of ‘putting into words’. This individual subjective component is tentatively used here as a criterion for ‘authentic texts’ in comparison to ‘automated texts’ like those that can be generated by all kinds of bots. In order to make this difference more tangible, the author decided to create an ‘automated text’ with the same topic at the same time as the quoted authentic text. For this purpose he used chatGBT4 from openAI. This is the beginning of a philosophical-literary experiment, perhaps to make the possible difference more visible in this way. For purely theoretical reasons, it is clear that a text generated by chatGBT4 can never generate ‘authentic texts’ in origin, unless it uses as a template an authentic text that it can modify. But then this is a clear ‘fake document’. To prevent such an abuse, the author writes the authentic text first and then asks chatGBT4 to write something about the given topic without chatGBT4 knowing the authentic text, because it has not yet found its way into the database of chatGBT4 via the Internet.

chatGPT – How drunk do you have to be …

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 14.February 2023 – 17.April 2023
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This is a text in the context of ‘Different Findings about chatGPT’ (https://www.uffmm.org/2023/02/23/chatgbt-different-findings/).

Since the release of the chatbot ‘chatGPT’ to the larger public, a kind of ‘earthquake’ has been going through the media, worldwide, in many areas, from individuals to institutions, companies, government agencies …. everyone is looking for the ‘chatGPT experience’. These reactions are amazing, and frightening at the same time.

Remark: The text of this post represents a later ‘stage’ of my thinking about the usefulness of the chatGPT algorithm, which started with my first reflections in the text entitled “chatGBT about Rationality: Emotions, Mystik, Unconscious, Conscious, …” from 15./16.January 2023. The main text to this version is an English translation from an originally German text partially generated with the www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).

FORM

The following lines form only a short note, since it is hardly worthwhile to discuss a ‘surface phenomenon’ so intensively, when the ‘deep structures’ should be explained. Somehow the ‘structures behind chatGPT’ seem to interest hardly anybody (I do not mean technical details of the used algorithms).

chatGPT as an object


The chatbot named ‘chatGPT’ is a piece of software, an algorithm that (i) was invented and programmed by humans. When (ii) people ask it questions, then (iii) it searches the database of documents known to it, which in turn have been created by humans, (iv) for text patterns that have a relation to the question according to certain formal criteria (partly given by the programmers). These ‘text finds’ are (v) also ‘arranged’ according to certain formal criteria (partly given by the programmers) into a new text, which (vi) should come close to those text patterns, which a human reader is ‘used’ to accept as ‘meaningful’.

Text surface – text meaning – truthfulness

A normal human being can distinguish – at least ‘intuitively’ – between the (i) ‘strings’ used as ‘expressions of a language’ and those (ii) ‘knowledge elements’ (in the mind of the hearer-speaker) which are as such ‘independent’ of the language elements, but which (iii) can be ‘freely associated’ by speakers-hearers of a language, so that the correlated ‘knowledge elements’ become what is usually called the ‘meaning’ of the language elements. [1] Of these knowledge elements (iv), every language participant already ‘knows’ ‘pre-linguistically’, as a learning child [2], that some of these knowledge elements are ‘correlatable’ with circumstances of the everyday world under certain circumstances. And the normal language user also ‘intuitively’ (automatically, unconsciously) has the ability to assess such correlation – in the light of the available knowledge – as (v) ‘possible’ or (vi) as rather ‘improbable’ or (vi) as ‘mere fancifulness’.”[3]

The basic ability of a human being to be able to establish a ‘correlation’ of meanings with (intersubjective) environmental facts is called – at least by some – philosophers ‘truth ability’ and in the execution of truth ability one then also can speak of ‘true’ linguistic utterances or of ‘true statements’.[5]

Distinctions like ‘true’, ‘possibly true’, ‘rather not true’ or ‘in no case true’ indicate that the reality reference of human knowledge elements is very diverse and ‘dynamic’. Something that was true a moment ago may not be true the next moment. Something that has long been dismissed as ‘mere fantasy’ may suddenly appear as ‘possible’ or ‘suddenly true’. To move in this ‘dynamically correlated space of meaning’ in such a way that a certain ‘inner and outer consistency’ is preserved, is a complex challenge, which has not yet been fully understood by philosophy and the sciences, let alone even approximately ‘explained’.

The fact is: we humans can do this to a certain extent. Of course, the more complex the knowledge space is, the more diverse the linguistic interactions with other people become, the more difficult it becomes to completely understand all aspects of a linguistic statement in a situation.

‘Air act’ chatGPT

Comparing the chatbot chatGPT with these ‘basic characteristics’ of humans, one can see that chatGPT can do none of these things. (i) It cannot ask questions meaningfully on its own, since there is no reason why it should ask (unless someone induces it to ask). (ii) Text documents (of people) are sets of expressions for him, for which he has no independent assignment of meaning. So he could never independently ask or answer the ‘truth question’ – with all its dynamic shades. He takes everything at ‘face value’ or one says right away that he is ‘only dreaming’.

If chatGPT, because of its large text database, has a subset of expressions that are somehow classified as ‘true’, then the algorithm can ‘in principle’ indirectly determine ‘probabilities’ that other sets of expressions that are not classified as ‘true’ then do ‘with some probability’ appear to be ‘true’. Whether the current chatGPT algorithm uses such ‘probable truths’ explicitly is unclear. In principle, it translates texts into ‘vector spaces’ that are ‘mapped into each other’ in various ways, and parts of these vector spaces are then output again in the form of a ‘text’. The concept of ‘truth’ does not appear in these mathematical operations – to my current knowledge. If, then it would be also only the formal logical concept of truth [4]; but this lies with respect to the vector spaces ‘above’ the vector spaces, forms with respect to these a ‘meta-concept’. If one wanted to actually apply this to the vector spaces and operations on these vector spaces, then one would have to completely rewrite the code of chatGPT. If one would do this – but nobody will be able to do this – then the code of chatGPT would have the status of a formal theory (as in mathematics) (see remark [5]). From an empirical truth capability chatGPT would then still be miles away.

Hybrid illusory truths

In the use case where the algorithm named ‘chatGPT’ uses expression sets similar to the texts that humans produce and read, chatGPT navigates purely formally and with probabilities through the space of formal expression elements. However, a human who ‘reads’ the expression sets produced by chatGPT automatically (= unconsciously!) activates his or her ‘linguistic knowledge of meaning’ and projects it into the abstract expression sets of chatGBT. As one can observe (and hears and reads from others), the abstract expression sets produced by chatGBT are so similar to the usual text input of humans – purely formally – that a human can seemingly effortlessly correlate his meaning knowledge with these texts. This has the consequence that the receiving (reading, listening) human has the ‘feeling’ that chatGPT produces ‘meaningful texts’. In the ‘projection’ of the reading/listening human YES, but in the production of chatGPT NO. chatGBT has only formal expression sets (coded as vector spaces), with which it calculates ‘blindly’. It does not have ‘meanings’ in the human sense even rudimentarily.

Back to the Human?

(Last change: 27.February 2023)

How easily people are impressed by a ‘fake machine’ to the point of apparently forgetting themselves in face of the machine by feeling ‘stupid’ and ‘inefficient’, although the machine only makes ‘correlations’ between human questions and human knowledge documents in a purely formal way, is actually frightening [6a,b], [7], at least in a double sense: (i)Instead of better recognizing (and using) one’s own potentials, one stares spellbound like the famous ‘rabbit at the snake’, although the machine is still a ‘product of the human mind’. (ii) This ‘cognitive deception’ misses to better understand the actually immense potential of ‘collective human intelligence’, which of course could then be advanced by at least one evolutionary level higher by incorporating modern technologies. The challenge of the hour is ‘Collective Human-Machine Intelligence’ in the context of sustainable development with priority given to human collective intelligence. The current so-called ‘artificial (= machine) intelligence’ is only present by rather primitive algorithms. Integrated into a developed ‘collective human intelligence’ quite different forms of ‘intelligence’ could be realized, ones we currently can only dream of at most.

Commenting on other articles from other authors about chatGPT

(Last change: 14.April 2023)

[7], [8],[9],[11],[12],[13],[14]

Comments

(Last change: 3.April 2023)

wkp-en: en.wikipedia.org

[1] In the many thousands of ‘natural languages’ of this world one can observe how ‘experiential environmental facts’ can become ‘knowledge elements’ via ‘perception’, which are then correlated with different expressions in each language. Linguists (and semioticians) therefore speak here of ‘conventions’, ‘freely agreed assignments’.

[2] Due to physical interaction with the environment, which enables ‘perceptual events’ that are distinguishable from the ‘remembered and known knowledge elements’.

[3] The classification of ‘knowledge elements’ as ‘imaginations/ fantasies’ can be wrong, as many examples show, like vice versa, the classification as ‘probably correlatable’ can be wrong too!

[4] Not the ‘classical (Aristotelian) logic’ since the Aristotelian logic did not yet realize a stricCommenting on other articles from other authors about chatGPTt separation of ‘form’ (elements of expression) and ‘content’ (meaning).

[5] There are also contexts in which one speaks of ‘true statements’ although there is no relation to a concrete world experience. For example in the field of mathematics, where one likes to say that a statement is ‘true’. But this is a completely ‘different truth’. Here it is about the fact that in the context of a ‘mathematical theory’ certain ‘basic assumptions’ were made (which must have nothing to do with a concrete reality), and one then ‘derives’ other statements starting from these basic assumptions with the help of a formal concept of inference (the formal logic). A ‘derived statement’ (usually called a ‘theorem’), also has no relation to a concrete reality. It is ‘logically true’ or ‘formally true’. If one would ‘relate’ the basic assumptions of a mathematical theory to concrete reality by – certainly not very simple – ‘interpretations’ (as e.g. in ‘applied physics’), then it may be, under special conditions, that the formally derived statements of such an ’empirically interpreted abstract theory’ gain an ’empirical meaning’, which may be ‘correlatable’ under certain conditions; then such statements would not only be called ‘logically true’, but also ’empirically true’. As the history of science and philosophy of science shows, however, the ‘transition’ from empirically interpreted abstract theories to empirically interpretable inferences with truth claims is not trivial. The reason lies in the used ‘logical inference concept’. In modern formal logic there are almost ‘arbitrarily many’ different formal inference terms possible. Whether such a formal inference term really ‘adequately represents’ the structure of empirical facts via abstract structures with formal inferences is not at all certain! This pro’simulation’blem is not really clarified in the philosophy of science so far!

[6a] Weizenbaum’s 1966 chatbot ‘Eliza’, despite its simplicity, was able to make human users believe that the program ‘understood’ them even when they were told that it was just a simple algorithm. See the keyword  ‚Eliza‘ in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

[6b] Joseph Weizenbaum, 1966, „ELIZA. A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language. Communication Between Man And Machine“, Communications of the ACM, Vol.9, No.1, January 1966, URL: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1966.pdf . Note: Although the program ‘Eliza’ by Weizenbaum was very simple, all users were fascinated by the program because they had the feeling “It understands me”, while the program only mirrored the questions and statements of the users. In other words, the users were ‘fascinated by themselves’ with the program as a kind of ‘mirror’.

[7] Ted Chiang, 2023, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?”, The NEW YORKER, February 9, 2023. URL: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web . Note: Chang looks to the chatGPT program using the paradigm of a ‘compression algorithm’: the abundance of information is ‘condensed/abstracted’ so that a slightly blurred image of the text volumes is created, not a 1-to-1 copy. This gives the user the impression of understanding at the expense of access to detail and accuracy. The texts of chatGPT are not ‘true’, but they ‘mute’.

[8] Dietmar Hansch, 2023, “The more honest name would be ‘Simulated Intelligence’. Which deficits bots like chatGBT suffer from and what that must mean for our dealings with them.”, FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 1, 2023, p.N1 . Note: While Chiang (see [7]) approaches the phenomenon chatGPT with the concept ‘compression algorithm’ Hansch prefers the terms ‘statistical-incremental learning’ as well as ‘insight learning’. For Hansch, insight learning is tied to ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’, for which he postulates ‘equivalent structures’ in the brain. Regarding insight learning, Hansch further comments “insight learning is not only faster, but also indispensable for a deep, holistic understanding of the world, which grasps far-reaching connections as well as conveys criteria for truth and truthfulness.” It is not surprising then when Hansch writes “Insight learning is the highest form of learning…”. With reference to this frame of reference established by Hansch, he classifies chatGPT in the sense that it is only capable of ‘statistical-incremental learning’. Further, Hansch postulates for humans, “Human learning is never purely objective, we always structure the world in relation to our needs, feelings, and conscious purposes…”. He calls this the ‘human reference’ in human cognition, and it is precisely this what he also denies for chatGPT. For common designation ‘AI’ as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ he postulates that the term ‘intelligence’ in this word combination has nothing to do with the meaning we associate with ‘intelligence’ in the case of humans, so in no case has the term intelligence anything to do with ‘insight learning’, as he has stated before. To give more expression to this fact of mismatch he would rather use the term ‘simulated intelligence’ (see also [9]). This conceptual strategy seems strange, since the term simulation [10] normally presupposes that there is a clear state of affairs, for which one defines a simplified ‘model’, by means of which the behavior of the original system can then be — simplified — viewed and examined in important respects. In the present case, however, it is not quite clear what the original system should be, which is to be simulated in the case of AI. There is so far no unified definition of ‘intelligence’ in the context of ‘AI’! As far as Hansch’s terminology itself is concerned, the terms ‘statistical-incremental learning’ as well as ‘insight learning’ are not clearly defined either; the relation to observable human behavior let alone to the postulated ‘equivalent brain structures’ is arbitrarily unclear (which is not improved by the relation to terms like ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ which are not defined yet).

[9] Severin Tatarczyk, Feb 19, 2023, on ‘Simulated Intelligence’: https://www.severint.net/2023/02/19/kompakt-warum-ich-den-begriff-simulierte-intelligenz-bevorzuge-und-warum-chatbots-so-menschlich-auf-uns-wirken/

[10] See the term ‘simulation’ in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

[11] Doris Brelowski pointed me to the following article: James Bridle, 16.March 2023, „The stupidity of AI. Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous“, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/16/the-stupidity-of-ai-artificial-intelligence-dall-e-chatgpt?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other . Comment: An article that knowledgeably and very sophisticatedly describes the interplay between forms of AI that are being ‘unleashed’ on the entire Internet by large corporations, and what this is doing to human culture and then, of course, to humans themselves. Two quotes from this very readable article: Quote 1: „The entirety of this kind of publicly available AI, whether it works with images or words, as well as the many data-driven applications like it, is based on this wholesale appropriation of existing culture, the scope of which we can barely comprehend. Public or private, legal or otherwise, most of the text and images scraped up by these systems exist in the nebulous domain of “fair use” (permitted in the US, but questionable if not outright illegal in the EU). Like most of what goes on inside advanced neural networks, it’s really impossible to understand how they work from the outside, rare encounters such as Lapine’s aside. But we can be certain of this: far from being the magical, novel creations of brilliant machines, the outputs of this kind of AI is entirely dependent on the uncredited and unremunerated work of generations of human artists.“ Quote 2: „Now, this didn’t happen because ChatGPT is inherently rightwing. It’s because it’s inherently stupid. It has read most of the internet, and it knows what human language is supposed to sound like, but it has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is dreaming sentences that sound about right, and listening to it talk is frankly about as interesting as listening to someone’s dreams. It is very good at producing what sounds like sense, and best of all at producing cliche and banality, which has composed the majority of its diet, but it remains incapable of relating meaningfully to the world as it actually is. Distrust anyone who pretends that this is an echo, even an approximation, of consciousness. (As this piece was going to publication, OpenAI released a new version of the system that powers ChatGPT, and said it was “less likely to make up facts”.)“

[12] David Krakauer in an Interview with Brian Gallagher in Nautilus, March 27, 2023, Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying?, URL: https://nautil.us/does-gpt-4-really-understand-what-were-saying-291034/?_sp=d9a7861a-9644-44a7-8ba7-f95ee526d468.1680528060130. David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist and president of the Santa Fe Institute for complexity science, analyzes the role of chat-GPT-4 models compared to the human language model and a more differentiated understanding of what ‘understanding’ and ‘Intelligence’ could mean. His main points of criticism are in close agreement with the position int he text above. He points out that (i) one has clearly to distinguish between the ‘information concept’ of Shannon and the concept of ‘meaning’. Something can represent a high information load but can nevertheless be empty of any meaning. Then he points out (ii) that there are several possible variants of the meaning of ‘understanding’. Coordinating with human understanding can work, but to understand in a constructive sense: no. Then Krakauer (iii) relates GPT-4 to the standard model of science which he characterizes as ‘parsimony’; chat-GPT-4 is clearly the opposite. Another point (iv) is the fact, that human experience has an ’emotional’ and a ‘physical’ aspect based on somato-sensory perceptions within its body. This is missing with GPT-4. This is somehow related (v) to the fact, that the human brain with its ‘algorithms’ is the product of millions of years of evolution in a complex environment. The GPT-4 algorithms have nothing comparable; they have only to ‘convince’ humans. Finally (vi) humans can generate ‘physical models’ inspired by their experience and can quickly argue by using such models. Thus Krakauer concludes “So the narrative that says we’ve rediscovered human reasoning is so misguided in so many ways. Just demonstrably false. That can’t be the way to go.”

[13] By Marie-José Kolly (text) and Merlin Flügel (illustration), 11.04.2023, “Chatbots like GPT can form wonderful sentences. That’s exactly what makes them a problem.” Artificial intelligence fools us into believing something that is not. A plea against the general enthusiasm. Online newspaper ‘Republik’ from Schweiz, URL: https://www.republik.ch/2023/04/11/chatbots-wie-gpt-koennen-wunderbare-saetze-bilden-genau-das-macht-sie-zum-problem? Here are some comments:

The text by Marie-José Kolly stands out because the algorithm named chatGPT(4) is characterized here both in its input-output behavior and additionally a comparison to humans is made at least to some extent.

The basic problem of the algorithm chatGPT(4) is (as also pointed out in my text above) that it has as input data exclusively text sets (also those of the users), which are analyzed according to purely statistical procedures in their formal properties. On the basis of the analyzed regularities, arbitrary text collages can then be generated, which are very similar in form to human texts, so much so that many people take them for ‘human-generated texts’. In fact, however, the algorithm lacks what we humans call ‘world knowledge’, it lacks real ‘thinking’, it lacks ‘own’ value positions, and the algorithm ‘does not understand’ its own text.

Due to this lack of its own reference to the world, the algorithm can be manipulated very easily via the available text volumes. A ‘mass production’ of ‘junk texts’, of ‘disinformation’ is thus very easily possible.

If one considers that modern democracies can only function if the majority of citizens have a common basis of facts that can be assumed to be ‘true’, a common body of knowledge, and reliable media, then the chatGPT(4) algorithm can massively destroy precisely these requirements for a democracy.

The interesting question then is whether chatGPT(4) can actually support a human society, especially a democratic society, in a positive-constructive way?

In any case, it is known that humans learn the use of their language from childhood on in direct contact with a real world, largely playfully, in interaction with other children/people. For humans ‘words’ are never isolated quantities, but they are always dynamically integrated into equally dynamic contexts. Language is never only ‘form’ but always at the same time ‘content’, and this in many different ways. This is only possible because humans have complex cognitive abilities, which include corresponding memory abilities as well as abilities for generalization.

The cultural-historical development from spoken language, via writing, books, libraries up to enormous digital data memories has indeed achieved tremendous things concerning the ‘forms’ of language and therein – possibly – encoded knowledge, but there is the impression that the ‘automation’ of the forms drives them into ‘isolation’, so that the forms lose more and more their contact to reality, to meaning, to truth. Language as a central moment of enabling more complex knowledge and more complex action is thus increasingly becoming a ‘parasite’ that claims more and more space and in the process destroys more and more meaning and truth.

[14] Gary Marcus, April 2023, Hoping for the Best as AI Evolves, Gary Marcus on the systems that “pose a real and imminent threat to the fabric of society.” Communications of the ACM, Volume 66, Issue 4, April 2023 pp 6–7, https://doi.org/10.1145/3583078 , Comment: Gary Marcus writes on the occasion of the effects of systems like chatGPT(OpenAI), Dalle-E2 and Lensa about the seriously increasing negative effects these tools can have within a society, to an extent that poses a serious threat to every society! These tools are inherently flawed in the areas of thinking, facts and hallucinations. At near zero cost, they can be used to create and execute large-scale disinformation campaigns very quickly. Looking to the globally important website ‘Stack Overflow’ for programmers as an example, one could (and can) see how the inflationary use of chatGPT due to its inherent many flaws pushes the Stack Overflow’s management team having to urge its users to completely stop using chatGPT in order to prevent the site’s collapse after 14 years. In the case of big players who specifically target disinformation, such a measure is ineffective. These players aim to create a data world in which no one will be able to trust anyone. With this in mind, Gary Marcus sets out 4 postulates that every society should implement: (1) Automatically generated not certified content should be completely banned; (2) Legally effective measures must be adopted that can prevent ‘misinformation’; (3) User accounts must be made tamper-proof; (4) A new generation of AI tools is needed that can verify facts. (Translated with partial support from www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version))

FORECASTING – PREDICTION: What?

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 19.August 2022 – 25 August 2022, 14:26h
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This text is part of the subject COMMON SCIENCE as Sustainable Applied Empirical Theory, besides ENGINEERING, in a SOCIETY. It is a preliminary version, which is intended to become part of a book.

FORECASTING – PREDICTION: What?

optimal prediction

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:

  1. 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’.
  2. 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.
  3. 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’.
  4. 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:

  1. Agree on a first set of expression to be a ‘true’ description of a given set of real world properties.
  2. 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/

COMMON SCIENCE as Sustainable Applied Empirical Theory, besides ENGINEERING, in a SOCIETY

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 19.Juni 2022 – 30.December 2022
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This text is part of the Philosophy of Science theme within the the uffmm.org blog.

This is work in progress:

  1. The whole text shows a dynamic, which induces many changes. Difficult to plan ‘in advance’.
  2. Perhaps, some time, it will look like a ‘book’, at least ‘for a moment’.
  3. I have started a ‘book project’ in parallel. This was motivated by the need to provide potential users of our new oksimo.R software with a coherent explanation of how the oksimo.R software, when used, generates an empirical theory in the format of a screenplay. The primary source of the book is in German and will be translated step by step here in the uffmm.blog.

INTRODUCTION

In a rather foundational paper about an idea, how one can generalize ‘systems engineering’ [*1] to the art of ‘theory engineering’ [1] a new conceptual framework has been outlined for a ‘sustainable applied empirical theory (SAET)’. Part of this new framework has been the idea that the classical recourse to groups of special experts (mostly ‘engineers’ in engineering) is too restrictive in the light of the new requirement of being sustainable: sustainability is primarily based on ‘diversity’ combined with the ‘ability to predict’ from this diversity probable future states which keep life alive. The aspect of diversity induces the challenge to see every citizen as a ‘natural expert’, because nobody can know in advance and from some non-existing absolut point of truth, which knowledge is really important. History shows that the ‘mainstream’ is usually to a large degree ‘biased’ [*1b].

With this assumption, that every citizen is a ‘natural expert’, science turns into a ‘general science’ where all citizens are ‘natural members’ of science. I will call this more general concept of science ‘sustainable citizen science (SCS)’ or ‘Citizen Science 2.0 (CS2)’. The important point here is that a sustainable citizen science is not necessarily an ‘arbitrary’ process. While the requirement of ‘diversity’ relates to possible contents, to possible ideas, to possible experiments, and the like, it follows from the other requirement of ‘predictability’/ of being able to make some useful ‘forecasts’, that the given knowledge has to be in a format, which allows in a transparent way the construction of some consequences, which ‘derive’ from the ‘given’ knowledge and enable some ‘new’ knowledge. This ability of forecasting has often been understood as the business of ‘logic’ providing an ‘inference concept’ given by ‘rules of deduction’ and a ‘practical pattern (on the meta level)’, which defines how these rules have to be applied to satisfy the inference concept. But, looking to real life, to everyday life or to modern engineering and economy, one can learn that ‘forecasting’ is a complex process including much more than only cognitive structures nicely fitting into some formulas. For this more realistic forecasting concept we will use here the wording ‘common logic’ and for the cognitive adventure where common logic is applied we will use the wording ‘common science’. ‘Common science’ is structurally not different from ‘usual science’, but it has a substantial wider scope and is using the whole of mankind as ‘experts’.

The following chapters/ sections try to illustrate this common science view by visiting different special views which all are only ‘parts of a whole’, a whole which we can ‘feel’ in every moment, but which we can not yet completely grasp with our theoretical concepts.

CONTENT

  1. Language (Main message: “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.”)
  2. Concrete Abstract Statements (Main message: “… you will probably detect, that nearly all words of a language are ‘abstract words’ activating ‘abstract meanings’. …If you cannot provide … ‘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.”)
  3. True False Undefined (Main message: “… it reveals that ’empirical (observational) evidence’ is not necessarily an automatism: it presupposes appropriate meaning spaces embedded in sets of preferences, which are ‘observation friendly’.
  4. Beyond Now (Main message: “With the aid of … sequences revealing possible changes the NOW is turned into a ‘moment’ embedded in a ‘process’, which is becoming the more important reality. The NOW is something, but the PROCESS is more.“)
  5. Playing with the Future (Main message: “In this sense seems ‘language’ to be the master tool for every brain to mediate its dynamic meaning structures with symbolic fix points (= words, expressions) which as such do not change, but the meaning is ‘free to change’ in any direction. And this ‘built in ‘dynamics’ represents an ‘internal potential’ for uncountable many possible states, which could perhaps become ‘true’ in some ‘future state’. Thus ‘future’ can begin in these potentials, and thinking is the ‘playground’ for possible futures.(but see [18])”)
  6. Forecasting – Prediction: What? (This chapter explains the cognitive machinery behind forecasting/ predictions, how groups of human actors can elaborate shared descriptions, and how it is possible to start with sequences of singularities to built up a growing picture of the empirical world which appears as a radical infinite and indeterministic space. )
  7. !!! From here all the following chapters have to be re-written !!!
  8. THE LOGIC OF EVERYDAY THINKING. Lets try an Example (Will probably be re-written too)
  9. Boolean Logic (Explains what boolean logic is, how it enables the working of programmable machines, but that it is of nearly no help for the ‘heart’ of forecasting.)
  10. … more re-writing will probably happen …
  11. Everyday Language: German Example
  12. Everyday Language: English
  13. Natural Logic
  14. Predicate Logic
  15. True Statements
  16. Formal Logic Inference: Preserving Truth
  17. Ordinary Language Inference: Preserving and Creating Truth
  18. Hidden Ontologies: Cognitively Real and Empirically Real
  19. AN INFERENCE IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY A FORECAST
  20. EMPIRICAL THEORY
  21. Side Trip to Wikipedia
  22. SUSTAINABLE EMPIRICAL THEORY
  23. CITIZEN SCIENCE 2.0
  24. … ???

COMMENTS

wkp-en := Englisch Wikipedia

/* Often people argue against the usage of the wikipedia encyclopedia as not ‘scientific’ because the ‘content’ of an entry in this encyclopedia can ‘change’. This presupposes the ‘classical view’ of scientific texts to be ‘stable’, which presupposes further, that such a ‘stable text’ describes some ‘stable subject matter’. But this view of ‘steadiness’ as the major property of ‘true descriptions’ is in no correspondence with real scientific texts! The reality of empirical science — even as in some special disciplines like ‘physics’ — is ‘change’. Looking to Aristotle’s view of nature, to Galileo Galilei, to Newton, to Einstein and many others, you will not find a ‘single steady picture’ of nature and science, and physics is only a very simple strand of science compared to the live-sciences and many others. Thus wikipedia is a real scientific encyclopedia give you the breath of world knowledge with all its strengths and limits at once. For another, more general argument, see In Favour for Wikipedia */

[*1] Meaning operator ‘…’ : In this text (and in nearly all other texts of this author) the ‘inverted comma’ is used quite heavily. In everyday language this is not common. In some special languages (theory of formal languages or in programming languages or in meta-logic) the inverted comma is used in some special way. In this text, which is primarily a philosophical text, the inverted comma sign is used as a ‘meta-language operator’ to raise the intention of the reader to be aware, that the ‘meaning’ of the word enclosed in the inverted commas is ‘text specific’: in everyday language usage the speaker uses a word and assumes tacitly that his ‘intended meaning’ will be understood by the hearer of his utterance as ‘it is’. And the speaker will adhere to his assumption until some hearer signals, that her understanding is different. That such a difference is signaled is quite normal, because the ‘meaning’ which is associated with a language expression can be diverse, and a decision, which one of these multiple possible meanings is the ‘intended one’ in a certain context is often a bit ‘arbitrary’. Thus, it can be — but must not — a meta-language strategy, to comment to the hearer (or here: the reader), that a certain expression in a communication is ‘intended’ with a special meaning which perhaps is not the commonly assumed one. Nevertheless, because the ‘common meaning’ is no ‘clear and sharp subject’, a ‘meaning operator’ with the inverted commas has also not a very sharp meaning. But in the ‘game of language’ it is more than nothing 🙂

[*1b] That the main stream ‘is biased’ is not an accident, not a ‘strange state’, not a ‘failure’, it is the ‘normal state’ based on the deeper structure how human actors are ‘built’ and ‘genetically’ and ‘cultural’ ‘programmed’. Thus the challenge to ‘survive’ as part of the ‘whole biosphere’ is not a ‘partial task’ to solve a single problem, but to solve in some sense the problem how to ‘shape the whole biosphere’ in a way, which enables a live in the universe for the time beyond that point where the sun is turning into a ‘red giant’ whereby life will be impossible on the planet earth (some billion years ahead)[22]. A remarkable text supporting this ‘complex view of sustainability’ can be found in Clark and Harvey, summarized at the end of the text. [23]

[*2] The meaning of the expression ‘normal’ is comparable to a wicked problem. In a certain sense we act in our everyday world ‘as if there exists some standard’ for what is assumed to be ‘normal’. Look for instance to houses, buildings: to a certain degree parts of a house have a ‘standard format’ assuming ‘normal people’. The whole traffic system, most parts of our ‘daily life’ are following certain ‘standards’ making ‘planning’ possible. But there exists a certain percentage of human persons which are ‘different’ compared to these introduced standards. We say that they have a ‘handicap’ compared to this assumed ‘standard’, but this so-called ‘standard’ is neither 100% true nor is the ‘given real world’ in its properties a ‘100% subject’. We have learned that ‘properties of the real world’ are distributed in a rather ‘statistical manner’ with different probabilities of occurrences. To ‘find our way’ in these varying occurrences we try to ‘mark’ the main occurrences as ‘normal’ to enable a basic structure for expectations and planning. Thus, if in this text the expression ‘normal’ is used it refers to the ‘most common occurrences’.

[*3] Thus we have here a ‘threefold structure’ embracing ‘perception events, memory events, and expression events’. Perception events represent ‘concrete events’; memory events represent all kinds of abstract events but they all have a ‘handle’ which maps to subsets of concrete events; expression events are parts of an abstract language system, which as such is dynamically mapped onto the abstract events. The main source for our knowledge about perceptions, memory and expressions is experimental psychology enhanced by many other disciplines.

[*4] Characterizing language expressions by meaning – the fate of any grammar: the sentence ” … ‘words’ (= expressions) of a language which can activate such abstract meanings are understood as ‘abstract words’, ‘general words’, ‘category words’ or the like.” is pointing to a deep property of every ordinary language, which represents the real power of language but at the same time the great weakness too: expressions as such have no meaning. Hundreds, thousands, millions of words arranged in ‘texts’, ‘documents’ can show some statistical patterns’ and as such these patterns can give some hint which expressions occur ‘how often’ and in ‘which combinations’, but they never can give a clue to the associated meaning(s). During more than three-thousand years humans have tried to describe ordinary language in a more systematic way called ‘grammar’. Due to this radically gap between ‘expressions’ as ‘observable empirical facts’ and ‘meaning constructs’ hidden inside the brain it was all the time a difficult job to ‘classify’ expressions as representing a certain ‘type’ of expression like ‘nouns’, ‘predicates’, ‘adjectives’, ‘defining article’ and the like. Without regressing to the assumed associated meaning such a classification is not possible. On account of the fuzziness of every meaning ‘sharp definitions’ of such ‘word classes’ was never and is not yet possible. One of the last big — perhaps the biggest ever — project of a complete systematic grammar of a language was the grammar project of the ‘Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR’ (‘Academy of Sciences of the GDR’) from 1981 with the title “Grundzüge einer Deutschen Grammatik” (“Basic features of a German grammar”). A huge team of scientists worked together using many modern methods. But in the preface you can read, that many important properties of the language are still not sufficiently well describable and explainable. See: Karl Erich Heidolph, Walter Flämig, Wolfgang Motsch et al.: Grundzüge einer deutschen Grammatik. Akademie, Berlin 1981, 1028 Seiten.

[*5] Differing opinions about a given situation manifested in uttered expressions are a very common phenomenon in everyday communication. In some sense this is ‘natural’, can happen, and it should be no substantial problem to ‘solve the riddle of being different’. But as you can experience, the ability of people to solve the occurrence of different opinions is often quite weak. Culture is suffering by this as a whole.

[1] Gerd Doeben-Henisch, 2022, From SYSTEMS Engineering to THEORYEngineering, see: https://www.uffmm.org/2022/05/26/from-systems-engineering-to-theory-engineering/(Remark: At the time of citation this post was not yet finished, because there are other posts ‘corresponding’ with that post, which are too not finished. Knowledge is a dynamic network of interwoven views …).

[1d] ‘usual science’ is the game of science without having a sustainable format like in citizen science 2.0.

[2] Science, see e.g. wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

Citation = “Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[1][2]

Citation = “In modern science, the term “theory” refers to scientific theories, a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with the scientific method, and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science. Such theories are described in such a way that scientific tests should be able to provide empirical support for it, or empirical contradiction (“falsify“) of it. Scientific theories are the most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge,[1] in contrast to more common uses of the word “theory” that imply that something is unproven or speculative (which in formal terms is better characterized by the word hypothesis).[2] Scientific theories are distinguished from hypotheses, which are individual empirically testable conjectures, and from scientific laws, which are descriptive accounts of the way nature behaves under certain conditions.”

Citation = “New knowledge in science is advanced by research from scientists who are motivated by curiosity about the world and a desire to solve problems.[27][28] Contemporary scientific research is highly collaborative and is usually done by teams in academic and research institutions,[29] government agencies, and companies.[30][31] The practical impact of their work has led to the emergence of science policies that seek to influence the scientific enterprise by prioritizing the ethical and moral development of commercial productsarmamentshealth carepublic infrastructure, and environmental protection.”

[2b] History of science in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science#Scientific_Revolution_and_birth_of_New_Science

[3] Theory, see wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#:~:text=A%20theory%20is%20a%20rational,or%20no%20discipline%20at%20all.

Citation = “A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be scientific, belong to a non-scientific discipline, or no discipline at all. Depending on the context, a theory’s assertions might, for example, include generalized explanations of how nature works. The word has its roots in ancient Greek, but in modern use it has taken on several related meanings.”

[4] Scientific theory, see: wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

Citation = “In modern science, the term “theory” refers to scientific theories, a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with the scientific method, and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science. Such theories are described in such a way that scientific tests should be able to provide empirical support for it, or empirical contradiction (“falsify“) of it. Scientific theories are the most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge,[1] in contrast to more common uses of the word “theory” that imply that something is unproven or speculative (which in formal terms is better characterized by the word hypothesis).[2] Scientific theories are distinguished from hypotheses, which are individual empirically testable conjectures, and from scientific laws, which are descriptive accounts of the way nature behaves under certain conditions.”

[4b] Empiricism in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism

[4c] Scientific method in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Citation =”The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries). It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based statistical testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.[1][2][3] [4c]

and

Citation = “The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations[A][a][b] agree with or conflict with the expectations deduced from a hypothesis.[6]: Book I, [6.54] pp.372, 408 [b] Experiments can take place anywhere from a garage to a remote mountaintop to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a formulaic statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, it represents rather a set of general principles.[7] Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (nor to the same degree), and they are not always in the same order.[8][9]

[5] Gerd Doeben-Henisch, “Is Mathematics a Fake? No! Discussing N.Bourbaki, Theory of Sets (1968) – Introduction”, 2022, https://www.uffmm.org/2022/06/06/n-bourbaki-theory-of-sets-1968-introduction/

[6] Logic, see wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

[7] W. C. Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford University Press (1962)

[8] Set theory, in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory

[9] N.Bourbaki, Theory of Sets , 1968, with a chapter about structures, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9ments_de_math%C3%A9matique

[10] = [5]

[11] Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( 1889 – 1951): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

[12] 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 */

[13] Wikipedia EN, Speech acts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act

[14] While the world view constructed in a brain is ‘virtual’ compared to the ‘real word’ outside the brain (where the body outside the brain is also functioning as ‘real world’ in relation to the brain), does the ‘virtual world’ in the brain function for the brain mostly ‘as if it is the real world’. Only under certain conditions can the brain realize a ‘difference’ between the triggering outside real world and the ‘virtual substitute for the real world’: You want to use your bicycle ‘as usual’ and then suddenly you have to notice that it is not at that place where is ‘should be’. …

[15] Propositional Calculus, see wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus#:~:text=Propositional%20calculus%20is%20a%20branch,of%20arguments%20based%20on%20them.

[16] Boolean algebra, see wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra

[17] Boolean (or propositional) Logic: As one can see in the mentioned articles of the English wikipedia, the term ‘boolean logic’ is not common. The more logic-oriented authors prefer the term ‘boolean calculus’ [15] and the more math-oriented authors prefer the term ‘boolean algebra’ [16]. In the view of this author the general view is that of ‘language use’ with ‘logic inference’ as leading idea. Therefore the main topic is ‘logic’, in the case of propositional logic reduced to a simple calculus whose similarity with ‘normal language’ is widely ‘reduced’ to a play with abstract names and operators. Recommended: the historical comments in [15].

[18] Clearly, thinking alone can not necessarily induce a possible state which along the time line will become a ‘real state’. There are numerous factors ‘outside’ the individual thinking which are ‘driving forces’ to push real states to change. But thinking can in principle synchronize with other individual thinking and — in some cases — can get a ‘grip’ on real factors causing real changes.

[19] This kind of knowledge is not delivered by brain science alone but primarily from experimental (cognitive) psychology which examines observable behavior and ‘interprets’ this behavior with functional models within an empirical theory.

[20] Predicate Logic or First-Order Logic or … see: wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic#:~:text=First%2Dorder%20logic%E2%80%94also%20known,%2C%20linguistics%2C%20and%20computer%20science.

[21] Gerd Doeben-Henisch, In Favour of Wikipedia, https://www.uffmm.org/2022/07/31/in-favour-of-wikipedia/, 31 July 2022

[22] The sun, see wkp-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun (accessed 8 Aug 2022)

[23] By Clark, William C., and Alicia G. Harley – https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012420-043621, Clark, William C., and Alicia G. Harley. 2020. “Sustainability Science: Toward a Synthesis.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 45 (1): 331–86, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109026069

[24] Sustainability in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability#Dimensions_of_sustainability

[25] Sustainable Development in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development

[26] Marope, P.T.M; Chakroun, B.; Holmes, K.P. (2015). Unleashing the Potential: Transforming Technical and Vocational Education and Training (PDF). UNESCO. pp. 9, 23, 25–26. ISBN978-92-3-100091-1.

[27] SDG 4 in wkp-en: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_4

[28] Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines. A Cybernetic History, W.W.Norton & Company, 2016, New York – London

[29] Doeben-Henisch, G., 2006, Reducing Negative Complexity by a Semiotic System In: Gudwin, R., & Queiroz, J., (Eds). Semiotics and Intelligent Systems Development. Hershey et al: Idea Group Publishing, 2006, pp.330-342

[30] Döben-Henisch, G.,  Reinforcing the global heartbeat: Introducing the planet earth simulator project, In M. Faßler & C. Terkowsky (Eds.), URBAN FICTIONS. Die Zukunft des Städtischen. München, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006, pp.251-263

[29] The idea that individual disciplines are not good enough for the ‘whole of knowledge’ is expressed in a clear way in a video of the theoretical physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovell: Carlo Rovelli on physics and philosophy, June 1, 2022, Video from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Theoretical physicist, philosopher, and international bestselling author Carlo Rovelli joins Lauren and Colin for a conversation about the quest for quantum gravity, the importance of unlearning outdated ideas, and a very unique way to get out of a speeding ticket.

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Comment by Gerd Doeben-Henisch:

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Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Observations
, Proceedings of the 36 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Long Beach, California, PMLR 97, 2019. Copyright 2019 by the author(s): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.06387.pdf

Abstract: Extrapolating Beyond Suboptimal Demonstrations via
Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Observations
Daniel S. Brown * 1 Wonjoon Goo * 1 Prabhat Nagarajan 2 Scott Niekum 1
You can read in the abstract:
“A critical flaw of existing inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods is their inability to significantly outperform the demonstrator. This is because IRL typically seeks a reward function that makes the demonstrator appear near-optimal, rather than inferring the underlying intentions of the demonstrator that may have been poorly executed in practice. In this paper, we introduce
a novel reward-learning-from-observation algorithm, Trajectory-ranked Reward EXtrapolation (T-REX), that extrapolates beyond a set of (ap-
proximately) ranked demonstrations in order to infer high-quality reward functions from a set of potentially poor demonstrations. When combined
with deep reinforcement learning, T-REX outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning and IRL methods on multiple Atari and MuJoCo bench-
mark tasks and achieves performance that is often more than twice the performance of the best demonstration. We also demonstrate that T-REX
is robust to ranking noise and can accurately extrapolate intention by simply watching a learner noisily improve at a task over time.”

[] Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B. Brown, Miljan Martic, Shane Legg, Dario Amodei, (2017), Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences, https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741

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[] Melanie Mitchell,(2021), Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial
Intelligence
, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.10717.pdf

In the abstract you can read: “Conceptual abstraction and analogy-making are key abilities underlying humans’ abilities to learn, reason, and robustly adapt their knowledge to new domains. Despite of a long history of research on constructing AI systems with these abilities, no current AI system is anywhere close to a capability of forming humanlike abstractions or analogies. This paper reviews the advantages and limitations of several approaches toward this goal, including symbolic methods, deep learning, and probabilistic program induction. The paper concludes with several proposals for designing
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[] Melanie Mitchell, (2021), Why AI is Harder Than We Think, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.10717.pdf

In the abstract you can read: “Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment (“AI spring”) and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding (“AI winter”). Even with today’s seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense.”

[] Stuart Russell, (2019), Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control, Penguin books, Allen Lane; 1. Edition (8. Oktober 2019)

In the preface you can read: “This book is about the past , present , and future of our attempt to understand and create intelligence . This matters , not because AI is rapidly becoming a pervasive aspect of the present but because it is the dominant technology of the future . The world’s great powers are waking up to this fact , and the world’s largest corporations have known it for some time . We cannot predict exactly how the technology will develop or on what timeline . Nevertheless , we must plan for the possibility that machines will far exceed the human capacity for decision making in the real world . What then ? Everything civilization has to offer is the product of our intelligence ; gaining access to considerably greater intelligence would be the biggest event in human history . The purpose of the book is to explain why it might be the last event in human history and how to make sure that it is not .”

[] David Adkins, Bilal Alsallakh, Adeel Cheema, Narine Kokhlikyan, Emily McReynolds, Pushkar Mishra, Chavez Procope, Jeremy Sawruk, Erin Wang, Polina Zvyagina, (2022), Method Cards for Prescriptive Machine-Learning Transparency, 2022 IEEE/ACM 1st International Conference on AI Engineering – Software Engineering for AI (CAIN), CAIN’22, May 16–24, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, pp. 90 – 100, Association for Computing Machinery, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9275-4/22/05, New York, NY, USA, https://doi.org/10.1145/3522664.3528600

In the abstract you can read: “Specialized documentation techniques have been developed to communicate key facts about machine-learning (ML) systems and the datasets and models they rely on. Techniques such as Datasheets,
AI FactSheets, and Model Cards have taken a mainly descriptive
approach, providing various details about the system components.
While the above information is essential for product developers
and external experts to assess whether the ML system meets their
requirements, other stakeholders might find it less actionable. In
particular, ML engineers need guidance on how to mitigate po-
tential shortcomings in order to fix bugs or improve the system’s
performance. We propose a documentation artifact that aims to
provide such guidance in a prescriptive way. Our proposal, called
Method Cards, aims to increase the transparency and reproducibil-
ity of ML systems by allowing stakeholders to reproduce the models,
understand the rationale behind their designs, and introduce adap-
tations in an informed way. We showcase our proposal with an
example in small object detection, and demonstrate how Method
Cards can communicate key considerations that help increase the
transparency and reproducibility of the detection model. We fur-
ther highlight avenues for improving the user experience of ML
engineers based on Method Cards.”

[] John H. Miller, (2022),  Ex Machina: Coevolving Machines and the Origins of the Social Universe, The SFI Press Scholars Series, 410 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1947864429 , DOI: 10.37911/9781947864429

In the announcement of the book you can read: “If we could rewind the tape of the Earth’s deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew—would social behavior arise yet again? While the study of origins is foundational to many scientific fields, such as physics and biology, it has rarely been pursued in the social sciences. Yet knowledge of something’s origins often gives us new insights into the present. In Ex Machina, John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive, interacting, choice-making agents, and uses this approach to identify conditions sufficient for the emergence of social behavior. Miller combines ideas from biology, computation, game theory, and the social sciences to evolve a set of interacting automata from asocial to social behavior. Readers will learn how systems of simple adaptive agents—seemingly locked into an asocial morass—can be rapidly transformed into a bountiful social world driven only by a series of small evolutionary changes. Such unexpected revolutions by evolution may provide an important clue to the emergence of social life.”

[] Stefani A. Crabtree, Global Environmental Change, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102597

In the abstract you can read: “Analyzing the spatial and temporal properties of information flow with a multi-century perspective could illuminate the sustainability of human resource-use strategies. This paper uses historical and archaeological datasets to assess how spatial, temporal, cognitive, and cultural limitations impact the generation and flow of information about ecosystems within past societies, and thus lead to tradeoffs in sustainable practices. While it is well understood that conflicting priorities can inhibit successful outcomes, case studies from Eastern Polynesia, the North Atlantic, and the American Southwest suggest that imperfect information can also be a major impediment
to sustainability. We formally develop a conceptual model of Environmental Information Flow and Perception (EnIFPe) to examine the scale of information flow to a society and the quality of the information needed to promote sustainable coupled natural-human systems. In our case studies, we assess key aspects of information flow by focusing on food web relationships and nutrient flows in socio-ecological systems, as well as the life cycles, population dynamics, and seasonal rhythms of organisms, the patterns and timing of species’ migration, and the trajectories of human-induced environmental change. We argue that the spatial and temporal dimensions of human environments shape society’s ability to wield information, while acknowledging that varied cultural factors also focus a society’s ability to act on such information. Our analyses demonstrate the analytical importance of completed experiments from the past, and their utility for contemporary debates concerning managing imperfect information and addressing conflicting priorities in modern environmental management and resource use.”



OKSIMO APPLICATIONS – Simple Examples – Citizens of a County

eJournal: uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458

27.March 2022 – 27.March 2022
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

BLOG-CONTEXT

This post is part of the Oksimo Application theme which is part of the uffmm blog.

PREFACE

This post shows a simple simulation example with the beta-version of the new Version 2 of the oksimo programming environment. This example shall illustrate the concept of an ‘Everyday Empirical Theory‘ as described in this blog 11 days before. It is intentionally as ‘simple as possible’. Probably some more examples will be shown.

FROM THEORY TO AN APPLICATION

To apply a theory concept in an everyday world there are many formats possible. In this text it will be shown how such an application would look like if one is applying the oksimo programming environment. Until now there exists only a German Blog (oksimo.org) describing the oksimo paradigm a little bit. But the examples there are written with oksimo version 1, which didn’t allow to use math. In version 2 this is possible, accompanied by some visual graph features.

Everyday Experts – Basic Ideas

This figure shows a simple outline of the basic assumptions of the oksimo programming environment constituting the oksimo paradigm: (i) Every human person is assumed to be a ‘natural expert’ being member of a bigger population which shares the same ‘everyday language’ including basic math. (ii) An actor is embedded in some empirical environment including the own body and other human actors. (iii) Human actors are capable of elaborating as inner states different kinds of ‘mental (cognitive) models’ based on their experience of the environment and their own body. (iv) Human actors are further capable to use symbolic languages to ‘represent’ properties of these mental models encoded in symbolic expressions. Such symbolic encoding presupposes an ‘inner meaning function’ which has to be learned. (v) In the oksimo programming environment one needs for the description of a ‘given state’ two kinds of symbolic expressions: (v.1) Language expressions to describe general properties and relations which are assumed to be ‘given’ (= ‘valid by experience’); (v.2) Language expressions to name concrete quantitative properties (simple math expressions).

This figure shows the idea how to change a given state (situation) by so-called ‘change rules’. A change rule encodes experience from the everyday world under which conditions some properties of a given situation S can be ‘changed’ in a way, that a ‘new situation’ S* comes into being. Generally a given state can change if either language expression is ‘deleted’ from the description or ‘contributed’. Another possibility is realized if one of the given quantitative expressions changes its value. In the above simple situation the only change happens by changing the number of citizens by some growth effect. But, as other examples will demonstrate, everything is possible what is possible in the empirical world.

SOME MORE FEATURES

The basic schema of the oksimo paradigm assumes the following components:

  1. The description of a ‘given situation’ as a ‘start state’.
  2. The description of a ‘vision’ functioning as a ‘goal’ which allows a basic ‘Benchmarking’.
  3. A list of ‘change rules’ which describe the assumed possible changes
  4. An ‘inference engine’ called ‘simulator’: Depending from the number of wanted ‘simulation cycles’ (‘inferences’) the simulator applies the change rules onto a given state S and thereby it is producing a ‘follow up state’ S*, which becomes the new given state. The series of generated states represents the ‘history’ of a simulation. Every follow up state is an ‘inference’ and by definition also a ‘forecast’.

All these features (1) – (4) together constitute a full empirical theory in the sense of the mentioned theory post before.

Let us look to a real simulation.

A REAL SIMULATION

The following example has been run with Oksimo v2.0 (Pre-Release) (353e5). Hopefully we can finish the pre-release to a full release the next few weeks.

A VISION

Name: v2026

Expressions:

The Main-Kinzig County exists.

Math expressions:

YEAR>2025 and YEAR<2027

This simple goal assumes the existence of the Main-Kinzig County for the year 2026.

GIVEN START STATE

Name: StartSimple1

Expressions:

The Main-Kinzig County exists.

The number of citizens is known.

Comparing the number of different years one has computed a growth rate.

Math expressions:

YEAR=2018Number

CITIZENS=418950Amount

GROWTH=0.0023Percentage

The start state makes some simple statements which are assumed to be ‘valid’ in a ‘real given situation’ by the participating natural experts.

CHANGE RULES

In this example there is only one change rules (In principle there can be as many change rules as wanted).

Rule name: Growth1

Probability: 1.0

Conditions:

The Main-Kinzig County exists.

Math conditions:

CITIZENS < 450000

Effects plus:

Effects minus:

Effects math:

CITIZENS=CITIZENS+(CITIZENS*GROWTH)

YEAR=YEAR+1

This change rules is rather simple. It looks only to the fact whether the Main-Kinzig County exists and wether the number of citizens is still below 450000. If this is the case, then the year will be incremented and the number of citizens will be incremented according to an extremely simple formula.

For every named quantity in this simulation (YEAR, GROWTH, CITIZENS) the values are collected for every simulation cycle and therefore can be used for evaluations. In this simple case only the quantities of YEAR and CITIZENS have changes:

Simple linear graph for the quantity named YEAR
Simple linear graph for the quantity named CITIZENS

Here the quick log of simulation cycle round 7 – 9:

Round 7

State rules:
Vision rules:
Current states: The number of citizens is known.,Comparing the number of different years one has computed a growth rate.,The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current visions: The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current values:
YEAR: 2025Number
CITIZENS: 425741.8149741673Amount
GROWTH: 0.0023Percentage

50.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
The Main-Kinzig County exists.,
And the following math visions:
None

Round 8

State rules:
Vision rules:
Current states: The number of citizens is known.,Comparing the number of different years one has computed a growth rate.,The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current visions: The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current values:
YEAR: 2026Number
CITIZENS: 426721.0211486079Amount
GROWTH: 0.0023Percentage

100.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
The Main-Kinzig County exists.,
And the following math visions:
YEAR>2025 and YEAR<2027,

Round 9

State rules:
Vision rules:
Current states: The number of citizens is known.,Comparing the number of different years one has computed a growth rate.,The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current visions: The Main-Kinzig County exists.
Current values:
YEAR: 2027Number
CITIZENS: 427702.4794972497Amount
GROWTH: 0.0023Percentage

50.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states:
The Main-Kinzig County exists.,
And the following math visions:
None

In round 8 one can see, that the simulation announces:

100.00 percent of your vision was achieved by reaching the following states: The Main-Kinzig County exists., And the following math visions: YEAR>2025 and YEAR<2027

From this the natural expert can conclude that his requirements given in the vision are ‘fulfilled’/’satisfied’.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

In a loosely order more examples will follow. Here you find the next one.

OKSIMO and BOURBAKI. A Metamathematical Perspective on Oksimo. Part 1

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 22.Sept – 24.Sept  2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

(Some minor corrections: 23.Sept 2021)

(A substantial extension: 24.Sept.2021)

CONTEXT

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 BOOK: THEORY OF SETS

Covered under the pseudonym of N.Bourbaki [1] appeared 1970 the French edition of a book which 1968 already had been translated into English  (reprinted 1970) called  Theory of Sets.[2] This book is the first book of a series about ELEMENTS OF MATHEMATICS.

To classify this book about set theory as a book of Metamathematics and as such as a book in the perspective of Philosophy of Science will become clear if one starts reading the book.[3]

MATHEMATICS WITH ONE LANGUAGE

It is the basic conviction of the Bourbaki book, that “… it is known to be possible … to derive practically the whole of known mathematics from a single source the Theory of Sets.” (p.9) And from this Bourbaki concludes, that it will be sufficient “… to describe the principles of a single formalized language, to indicate how the Thory of Sets could be written in this language, and then to show how the various branches of mathematics  … fit into this framework.”(p.9)

Thus, the content of mathematics — whatever it is — can according to Bourbaki be described in one single language [Lm] and the content will be called Theory of Sets [T] .

METAMATHEMATICS

Because the one single language Lm used to describe the Theory of Sets shall be a language with certain properties one has to define these properties with some other language, which is talking about Lm. As language for this job Bourbaki is using the ordinary language [Lo].(p.9) But the reasoning within which one is using this ordinary language is called metamathematics (cf. P.10f). Within the metamathematical point of view the language Lm under investigation is seen as a set of previously given objetcs without any kind of meaning, where only the assigned order is of importance.(cf. p.10): “… metamathematical ‘arguments’ usually assert that when a succession of operations has been performed on a text of a given type, then the final text will be of another given type.”(p.10)

What looks here at first glance  as the complete formalization of mathematics it is not. Bourbaki states clearly that “formalized mathematics cannot in practice be written down in full“(p.11) There has to be assumed as ‘last resort’ the assumption of a common sense of the mathematician and the intuition of the reader. (cf. p.11)

COGNITIVE-SEMIOTIC TURN

This conflict between at one hand of  the idea of a formalization of  Mathematics by a formalized language Lm  and on the other hand by the well known proof of Gödel [4] of the incompleteness of the axioms for classical arithmetic  (cf. p.12) is not a real conflict as long as one takes into account — as Bourbaki points out — that the ‘content of mathematics’ is only given in different layers of languages (Lm, Lo, …) which again are embedded in a presupposed ‘common sense’ which is nothing else as the cognitive machinery of human persons including an embedded meaning function relating different kinds of knowledge into different kinds of — internal as well as external — expressions of some language L. Thus any kind of a  ‘reduction of meaning’ seems never to be a ‘complete reduction’ but only a ‘technical reduction’ to introduce some ‘artificial (abstract) objetcs’ which can only work because of their embedding in some richer context.

This new perspective can be called the cognitive-semiotic turn which became possible by new insights of modern brain sciences in connection with pysychology and semiotics.

From this new point of view one can derive the idea of embedding metamathemics in a more advanced actor theory providing all the ingredients to make metamathematics more ‘rational’.

OUTLINE OF ACTOR THEORY

Actor theory first outline
Figure 1: Actor theory first outline

The details of the Actor Theory [AT] can become quite complex. Here a first outline of the basic ideas and what this can mean for a metamathematical point of view of mathematics.

World is not World

The main idea is founded in the new insights of Biology and Neuro-Psychology of the handling of body-world interactions as exercised by humans. One of the main insights is rooted back to von Uexküll [5] more than 100 years ago, when he described how every biological organism perceives and handles some world outside of the body  with the inner neuronal structures given! Thus different life forms in the same outside world  W will peceive and act neuronally in different worlds! Brain X acts in world X which is somehow related to the outside world W as well as Brain Y acts in world Y which also is  somehow related to the outside world W.

These basic insights relate as well to more developed life forms as such as  humans are. We as humans do not perceive and think the world W outside of our bodies ‘as it is’ but only as our brain inside our body can process all the body states related to the outside world in the mode of the inside brain. Thus if the different human individuals would have different brains they would live in different worlds and their would be no chance of a simple communication. But as we know from physiological and behavioral  studies humans can to some extend communicate successfully. Thus there exists inside of every human individual a human-processed world h(W) which is different from other life-forms like a rat, a worm, an octopus, etc.

From this basic insight it follows that if we speak about the world W we do indeed  not speak about the world  W directly but about the world W as it is processed in a human-specific manner, the  world h(W). This has many implications.

  1. Because we know already that the world h(W) is not a static but a dynamic world depending from our learning history it can happen — and it happens all the time — that different individuals have different learning histories.  This can result in quite strong differences of experience and knowledge attached to different individuals, which can prevent a simple understanding between such individuals: the learned world h1(W) can to some degree be different from the learned world  h2(W) such that a simple and direct understanding will not be possible.
  2. This difference between the outside world W and the processed inside world h(W) relates to the communication too! The spoken or written expressions E of some language L are belonging to the outside world. They have a counterpart in the inner world as inner expressions E*, which can be associated with all kinds of processed inner states of the inner world h(W) = W*. These possible — and learned — associations between inner expressions and inner states belonging to h(W) is assumed here to be that what commonly is called meaning. Thus one has to assume an internal meaning function μ which maps the internal expressions E* of some internal language L*  into parts of the internally processed world h(W)=W* and vice versa. Thus we have μ: E* <—> W*. Thus μ(e*) would point to some part w* of the internally processed world W* as the ‘meaning’ of the internal expression e*.
  3. This semiotic architecture of human beings enables a nearly infinite space of expressions as well as associated meanings definable during learning processes. This is powerful, but it is also very demanding for the speaker-hearer: to enable a succesful communication between different speaker-hearer these have to train their language usage under sufficient similar conditions thereby constructing individual meaning functions which work — hopefully — sufficiently similar. If not then communication can slow down, can produce lots of misunderstandings or can even break down completely. [6]
  4. In the case of mathematics it is a long debated question whether mathematics can be reduced to the expressions Em of some mathematical language Lm or if mathematics has some mathematical objects on its own which are different from the expressions. If one would assume that mathematics has no objects on its own but only some expressions Em, then it would become difficult to argue whether exactly these expressions Em should be used and not some other expressions Ex. Moreover to classify expressions as ‘axioms’ or ‘theorems’ would be completely arbitrary.   The only ‘anchor’ of non-arbitrariness would consist in some formal criteria of a formal consistency which would disable the formal generation of pairs of expressions {a,a*} where one is excluding the other. But even such a formal consistency presupposes some criteria which are beyond the expressions as such! Thus mathematics would need some criteria outside mathematics. This can be understood as an argument for metamathematics.  But according to Bourbaki  metamathematics is defined as a set of operations on given expressions without a specific meaning.  This is not enough to establish formal consistency! Thus even metamathematics is pointing to something outside of given mathematical expressions.  What can this be?
PART 2

To be continued …

COMMENTS

[*] More recent versions of the specification of the oksimo oftware can be found in the bolg oksimo.org. Unfortunately are the texts in that blog  — at the time if this writing — still only in German. Hopefully this will change in the future.

[1] Bourbaki group in Wikipedia [EN]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

[2] N.Bourbaki (1970), Theory of Sets, Series: ELEMENTS OF MATHEMATICS, Springer, Berlin — Heidelberg — New York (Engl. Translation from the French edition 1970)

[3] The first time when the author of this text has encountered the book was some time between 1984 – 1987 while being a PhD-student at the Ludwig-Maximilians Univesty [LMU] in Munich. It was in a seminar with Prof. Peter Hinst about structural approaches to Philosophy of Science. The point of view at that time was completely different to the point of view applied in this text.

[4] Kurt Goedel. Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia
Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, i. Monatshefte fuer
Mathematik und Physik, 38:173–98, 1931.

[5] Jakob von Uexküll, 1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J.Springer.

[6] Probably everybody has made the experience in his life of being part of a situation where nobody speaks a language, which one is used to speak …

 

 

LOGIC. The Theory Of Inquiry (1938) by John Dewey – An oksimo Review – Part 2

eJournal: uffmm.org, ISSN 2567-6458, Aug 17-18, 2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

SCOPE

In the uffmm review section the different papers and books are discussed from the point of view of the oksimo paradigm. [2] Here the author reads the book “Logic. The Theory Of Inquiry” by John Dewey, 1938. [1]

DISCUSSION after the PREFACE DEWEY 1938/9

 

Following the description and interpretation of Dewey’s preface the author takes here the time for a short discussion how one can describe the first idea of Dewey about the view of inquiry as a continuum, as a process with some outcome.

Dewey's view of an inquiry as a continuous process slightly interpreted
FIGURE 1: Dewey’s view of an inquiry as a continuous process slightly interpreted

In the interpretation of Dewey the author takes the starting point with the view of Dewey of an inquiry as a  continuous process.(cf. figure 1)

In his description of such an inquiry in the spirit of pragmatism Dewey claims that the process ends up in a situation which is caused by the preceding parts of the process. He calls the ‘end’ of such an inquiry process a consequence (or: consequences) which can be used as a test of the validity of the assumed propositions.

Validity of the proposition

Taking only the words of Dewey “validity of the …  propositions” this can be interpreted in many ways. The author of this texts interprets these words with a conceptual framework based on the today knowledge about cognitive processing, which is also used in the oksimo paradigm.

In this modern framework of cognitive processing we know that one has at least to distinguish the dimension of the real world with real situations and as part of the real situation real objects, real actions (and more) on the one hand and inner states of an actor on the other  hand.

As part of this overall scenario one has to distinguish at least the following main dimensions: (i) the overall observable real behavior of an actor and real expressions as part of the observable behavior, which can be classified (by learned knowledge) as expressions of some normal language, and (ii) the not-observable inner states of the actor reflecting in a special way the observable situation as such as well as the perceivable (by hearing, reading, …) expressions of the known language as part of the observable situation.

The main point here in the case of an actor of the life form homo sapiens is the fact that a homo sapiens actor is able to map the inner counterpart of the external expressions into the inner counterpart of the perceived real situation as part of a cognitive machinery (including memory) in a way that this internal mapping — here called meaning function — encodes part of the cognitive states into expressions (and vice versa).

Using this knowledge about the cognitive closure of expressions known as part of a learned language one can understand, why arbitrary aspects of the observable real situation can be encoded by the (built-in as well as learned ) meaning function into certain expressions in a way, that a hearer-reader of these expressions can decode these expressions (with his individual meaning function) to some extend into the inner cognitive states corresponding to the perceivable world.

In the light of this modern cognitive framework can a proposition be interpreted as part of the inner cognitive states corresponding either actually to some perceived real situation (then it is qualified as being valid) or not. And because the meaning function can encode such propositions with some expressions we can have external expressions as a real counterpart to such propositions.

Inquiry as a process

Thus inquiry understood by Dewey as a continuous process starts with some starting real situation which can be accompanied by appropriate (encoded) expressions of the selected language. During the course of inquiry the situation can change caused by actions which after some finite period of time lead to a final situation (‘final’ is not an absolute’ category here; it depends from the decision of the researchers what they think has to be understood as ‘final’).

While the possible process of inquiry in the beginning is quite unclear, open, undefined, turns the real process of actions (including speaking/ writing expressions) this undefined/ possibly infinite situation step by step into some real defined finite process by making decisions which enable selections of concrete actions/ things out of many options.

Test of the validity

Dewey speaks about the end of an inquiry process as a consequence which can be seen as a test of the validity of the propositions. If the ‘validity of a proposition’ is a qualification of the relation between a proposition as a cognitive counterpart of some perceivable real situation and this real situation then the wording ‘test of’ could be interpreted in the way that the reached situation by  an inquiry  process is in a sufficient agreement with an assumed proposition. But this would require that the researchers have in the beginning of their research have an idea of the intended/ wanted outcome. This sounds a bit strange: Why doing some inquiry if I already have an idea of the outcome?

This leads to the everyday life situation where we encounter permanently the following situations: (i) We know of situations which we qualify as being unsatisfying by some reasons (‘Gerd is hungry’, ‘Peter is tired’, ‘Ada is unhappy’, ‘John needs some money’, ‘Mary has a question’, ‘Bill looks for some new flat’, …); and (ii) some kind of visions/ goals, which we want to achieve. At the moment of having a vision/ goal within our inner cognitive states we can decide to achieve it through a real process of real actions. In some cases (being hungry) we probably have some options how to accomplish the goal by starting a series of concrete actions to get some food. And then the food is a consequence of the preceding process of searching and at the same time an answer to the triggering proposition. In other cases (‘being unhappy’ it can be difficult to find a good answer:  what really is missing? What can I do? If Ada would decide to clarify her state it could happen that she tries a lot of options eventually lasting a long time (days, weeks, months, …). But nevertheless one day  it can  happen that she suddenly  has the feeling, that she is no longer unhappy. In that case she can qualify the reached situation as a consequence of her preceding process of inquiry and indeed as an answer to the triggering proposition of being unhappy.  In this case ‘feeling happy’ as an answer to ‘feeling unhappy’ has not been a clear expectation in the beginning, but a causing proposition which has lead Ada into a search process which finally produced a situation which enabled this new feeling of ‘being happy’ which — perhaps –is a quite ‘new’ feeling which nevertheless is understood by her as an ‘answer’.

Goals: defined and undefined

These simple examples point at the fact that homo sapiens actors can start inquiries either by somehow clearly defined goals or with ‘undefined goals‘ but caused by a ‘defined problem‘.

While the wording ‘undefined goal’ seems a little bit ‘fuzzy’ in the beginning, it is of great importance for the case of  inquiry. This has to do with the concept of a possible future.

While the actual real world — and even those parts of it, which we have memorized somehow — is something we can perceive and where we can point at, is ‘future’ a non-object: we have strictly no chance to perceive directly any kind of future. Future is the radical unknown. What we can do — and in our everyday life we do it often — is, that we try to imagine by our past knowledge to get some hints out of the past for some patterns, regularities which can be used as ‘hints’ what perhaps can happen again with some probability as an upcoming situation because there exist some hidden mechanism in the real world which is causing a repetition (e.g. we have learned about phenomena which we call ‘gravity’ which we use as a cognitive tool to make some forecasts).  But such learned patterns of the past do not explain everything and there is no absolute guarantee that these patterns will work ever. Moreover, we are living in a world which is maximal complex because of a multitude of patterns simultaneously at work, and there are many patterns (the behavior of biological systems) which are inherently non-linear, nondeterministic.

Thus doing inquiries into future states which are caused by defined problems where the answer is not yet known are radically different to inquiries with defined problems already accompanied with a clear goal. Although defined problems with defined goals can be quite difficult (e.g. searching for better material, better production processes etc. to get a better electrical battery for everyday usage) the case of an undefined goal is much more demanding. This case is the standard case for real research (as in the case of Ada: What makes her happy?).

COMMENTS

[1] John Dewey, Logic. The Theory Of Inquiry, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1938  (see: https://archive.org/details/JohnDeweyLogicTheTheoryOfInquiry with several formats; I am using the kindle (= mobi) format: https://archive.org/download/JohnDeweyLogicTheTheoryOfInquiry/%5BJohn_Dewey%5D_Logic_-_The_Theory_of_Inquiry.mobi . This is for the direct work with a text very convenient.  Additionally I am using a free reader ‘foliate’ under ubuntu 20.04: https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate/releases/). Additionally I am using a free reader ‘foliate’ under ubuntu 20.04: https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate/releases/). The page numbers in the text of the review — like (p.13) — are the page numbers of the ebook as indicated in the ebook-reader foliate.(There exists no kindle-version for linux (although amazon couldn’t work without linux servers!))

[2] Gerd Doeben-Henisch, 2021, uffmm.org, THE OKSIMO PARADIGM
An Introduction (Version 2), https://www.uffmm.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/oksimo-v1-part1-v2.pdf

Continuation

Part 3 (Last change: 20.Aug.2021)

MEDIA

Here is another talk completely unplugged about Dewey’s Logic. It’s focus is on a hypothetical conceptual framework for the wording of ‘valid propositions’ in the context of an inquiry.

 

OKSIMO MEETS POPPER. Popper’s Position

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 31.March – 31.March  2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

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.

POPPERs POSITION IN THE CHAPTERS 1-17

In my reading of the chapters 1-17 of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1] I see the following three main concepts which are interrelated: (i) the concept of a scientific theory, (ii) the point of view of a meta-theory about scientific theories, and (iii) possible empirical interpretations of scientific theories.

Scientific Theory

A scientific theory is according to Popper a collection of universal statements AX, accompanied by a concept of logical inference , which allows the deduction of a certain theorem t  if one makes  some additional concrete assumptions H.

Example: Theory T1 = <AX1,>

AX1= {Birds can fly}

H1= {Peter is  a bird}

: Peter can fly

Because  there exists a concrete object which is classified as a bird and this concrete bird with the name ‘Peter’ can  fly one can infer that the universal statement could be verified by this concrete bird. But the question remains open whether all observable concrete objects classifiable as birds can fly.

One could continue with observations of several hundreds of concrete birds but according to Popper this would not prove the theory T1 completely true. Such a procedure can only support a numerical universality understood as a conjunction of finitely many observations about concrete birds   like ‘Peter can fly’ & ‘Mary can fly’ & …. &’AH2 can fly’.(cf. p.62)

The only procedure which is applicable to a universal theory according to Popper is to falsify a theory by only one observation like ‘Doxy is a bird’ and ‘Doxy cannot fly’. Then one could construct the following inference:

AX1= {Birds can fly}

H2= {Doxy is  a bird, Doxy cannot fly}

: ‘Doxy can fly’ & ~’Doxy can fly’

If a statement A can be inferred and simultaneously the negation ~A then this is called a logical contradiction:

{AX1, H2}  ‘Doxy can fly’ & ~’Doxy can fly’

In this case the set {AX1, H2} is called inconsistent.

If a set of statements is classified as inconsistent then you can derive from this set everything. In this case you cannot any more distinguish between true or false statements.

Thus while the increase of the number of confirmed observations can only increase the trust in the axioms of a scientific theory T without enabling an absolute proof  a falsification of a theory T can destroy the ability  of this  theory to distinguish between true and false statements.

Another idea associated with this structure of a scientific theory is that the universal statements using universal concepts are strictly speaking speculative ideas which deserve some faith that these concepts will be provable every time one will try  it.(cf. p.33, 63)

Meta Theory, Logic of Scientific Discovery, Philosophy of Science

Talking about scientific theories has at least two aspects: scientific theories as objects and those who talk about these objects.

Those who talk about are usually Philosophers of Science which are only a special kind of Philosophers, e.g. a person  like Popper.

Reading the text of Popper one can identify the following elements which seem to be important to describe scientific theories in a more broader framework:

A scientific theory from a point of  view of Philosophy of Science represents a structure like the following one (minimal version):

MT=<S, A[μ], E, L, AX, , ET, E+, E-, true, false, contradiction, inconsistent>

In a shared empirical situation S there are some human actors A as experts producing expressions E of some language L.  Based on their built-in adaptive meaning function μ the human actors A can relate  properties of the situation S with expressions E of L.  Those expressions E which are considered to be observable and classified to be true are called true expressions E+, others are called false expressions  E-. Both sets of expressions are true subsets of E: E+ ⊂ E  and E- ⊂ E. Additionally the experts can define some special  set of expressions called axioms  AX which are universal statements which allow the logical derivation of expressions called theorems of the theory T  ET which are called logically true. If one combines the set of axioms AX with some set of empirically true expressions E+ as {AX, E+} then one can logically derive either  only expressions which are logically true and as well empirically true, or one can derive logically true expressions which are empirically true and empirically false at the same time, see the example from the paragraph before:

{AX1, H2}  ‘Doxy can fly’ & ~’Doxy can fly’

Such a case of a logically derived contradiction A and ~A tells about the set of axioms AX unified with the empirical true expressions  that this unified set  confronted with the known true empirical expressions is becoming inconsistent: the axioms AX unified with true empirical expressions  can not  distinguish between true and false expressions.

Popper gives some general requirements for the axioms of a theory (cf. p.71):

  1. Axioms must be free from contradiction.
  2. The axioms  must be independent , i.e . they must not contain any axiom deducible from the remaining axioms.
  3. The axioms should be sufficient for the deduction of all statements belonging to the theory which is to be axiomatized.

While the requirements (1) and (2) are purely logical and can be proved directly is the requirement (3) different: to know whether the theory covers all statements which are intended by the experts as the subject area is presupposing that all aspects of an empirical environment are already know. In the case of true empirical theories this seems not to be plausible. Rather we have to assume an open process which generates some hypothetical universal expressions which ideally will not be falsified but if so, then the theory has to be adapted to the new insights.

Empirical Interpretation(s)

Popper assumes that the universal statements  of scientific theories   are linguistic representations, and this means  they are systems of signs or symbols. (cf. p.60) Expressions as such have no meaning.  Meaning comes into play only if the human actors are using their built-in meaning function and set up a coordinated meaning function which allows all participating experts to map properties of the empirical situation S into the used expressions as E+ (expressions classified as being actually true),  or E- (expressions classified as being actually false) or AX (expressions having an abstract meaning space which can become true or false depending from the activated meaning function).

Examples:

  1. Two human actors in a situation S agree about the  fact, that there is ‘something’ which  they classify as a ‘bird’. Thus someone could say ‘There is something which is a bird’ or ‘There is  some bird’ or ‘There is a bird’. If there are two somethings which are ‘understood’ as being a bird then they could say ‘There are two birds’ or ‘There is a blue bird’ (If the one has the color ‘blue’) and ‘There is a red bird’ or ‘There are two birds. The one is blue and the other is red’. This shows that human actors can relate their ‘concrete perceptions’ with more abstract  concepts and can map these concepts into expressions. According to Popper in this way ‘bottom-up’ only numerical universal concepts can be constructed. But logically there are only two cases: concrete (one) or abstract (more than one).  To say that there is a ‘something’ or to say there is a ‘bird’ establishes a general concept which is independent from the number of its possible instances.
  2. These concrete somethings each classified as a ‘bird’ can ‘move’ from one position to another by ‘walking’ or by ‘flying’. While ‘walking’ they are changing the position connected to the ‘ground’ while during ‘flying’ they ‘go up in the air’.  If a human actor throws a stone up in the air the stone will come back to the ground. A bird which is going up in the air can stay there and move around in the air for a long while. Thus ‘flying’ is different to ‘throwing something’ up in the air.
  3. The  expression ‘A bird can fly’ understood as an expression which can be connected to the daily experience of bird-objects moving around in the air can be empirically interpreted, but only if there exists such a mapping called meaning function. Without a meaning function the expression ‘A bird can fly’ has no meaning as such.
  4. To use other expressions like ‘X can fly’ or ‘A bird can Y’ or ‘Y(X)’  they have the same fate: without a meaning function they have no meaning, but associated with a meaning function they can be interpreted. For instance saying the the form of the expression ‘Y(X)’ shall be interpreted as ‘Predicate(Object)’ and that a possible ‘instance’ for a predicate could be ‘Can Fly’ and for an object ‘a bird’ then we could get ‘Can Fly(a Bird)’ translated as ‘The object ‘a Bird’ has the property ‘can fly” or shortly ‘A Bird can fly’. This usually would be used as a possible candidate for the daily meaning function which relates this expression to those somethings which can move up in the air.
Axioms and Empirical Interpretations

The basic idea with a system of axioms AX is — according to Popper —  that the axioms as universal expressions represent  a system of equations where  the  general terms   should be able to be substituted by certain values. The set of admissible values is different from the set of  inadmissible values. The relation between those values which can be substituted for the terms  is called satisfaction: the values satisfy the terms with regard to the relations! And Popper introduces the term ‘model‘ for that set of admissible terms which can satisfy the equations.(cf. p.72f)

But Popper has difficulties with an axiomatic system interpreted as a system of equations  since it cannot be refuted by the falsification of its consequences ; for these too must be analytic.(cf. p.73) His main problem with axioms is,  that “the concepts which are to be used in the axiomatic system should be universal names, which cannot be defined by empirical indications, pointing, etc . They can be defined if at all only explicitly, with the help of other universal names; otherwise they can only be left undefined. That some universal names should remain undefined is therefore quite unavoidable; and herein lies the difficulty…” (p.74)

On the other hand Popper knows that “…it is usually possible for the primitive concepts of an axiomatic system such as geometry to be correlated with, or interpreted by, the concepts of another system , e.g . physics …. In such cases it may be possible to define the fundamental concepts of the new system with the help of concepts which were originally used in some of the old systems .”(p.75)

But the translation of the expressions of one system (geometry) in the expressions of another system (physics) does not necessarily solve his problem of the non-empirical character of universal terms. Especially physics is using also universal or abstract terms which as such have no meaning. To verify or falsify physical theories one has to show how the abstract terms of physics can be related to observable matters which can be decided to be true or not.

Thus the argument goes back to the primary problem of Popper that universal names cannot not be directly be interpreted in an empirically decidable way.

As the preceding examples (1) – (4) do show for human actors it is no principal problem to relate any kind of abstract expressions to some concrete real matters. The solution to the problem is given by the fact that expressions E  of some language L never will be used in isolation! The usage of expressions is always connected to human actors using expressions as part of a language L which consists  together with the set of possible expressions E also with the built-in meaning function μ which can map expressions into internal structures IS which are related to perceptions of the surrounding empirical situation S. Although these internal structures are processed internally in highly complex manners and  are — as we know today — no 1-to-1 mappings of the surrounding empirical situation S, they are related to S and therefore every kind of expressions — even those with so-called abstract or universal concepts — can be mapped into something real if the human actors agree about such mappings!

Example:

Lets us have a look to another  example.

If we take the system of axioms AX as the following schema:  AX= {a+b=c}. This schema as such has no clear meaning. But if the experts interpret it as an operation ‘+’ with some arguments as part of a math theory then one can construct a simple (partial) model m  as follows: m={<1,2,3>, <2,3,5>}. The values are again given as  a set of symbols which as such must not ave a meaning but in common usage they will be interpreted as sets of numbers   which can satisfy the general concept of the equation.  In this secondary interpretation m is becoming  a logically true (partial) model for the axiom Ax, whose empirical meaning is still unclear.

It is conceivable that one is using this formalism to describe empirical facts like the description of a group of humans collecting some objects. Different people are bringing  objects; the individual contributions will be  reported on a sheet of paper and at the same time they put their objects in some box. Sometimes someone is looking to the box and he will count the objects of the box. If it has been noted that A brought 1 egg and B brought 2 eggs then there should according to the theory be 3 eggs in the box. But perhaps only 2 could be found. Then there would be a difference between the logically derived forecast of the theory 1+2 = 3  and the empirically measured value 1+2 = 2. If one would  define all examples of measurement a+b=c’ as contradiction in that case where we assume a+b=c as theoretically given and c’ ≠ c, then we would have with  ‘1+2 = 3′ & ~’1+2 = 3’ a logically derived contradiction which leads to the inconsistency of the assumed system. But in reality the usual reaction of the counting person would not be to declare the system inconsistent but rather to suggest that some unknown actor has taken against the agreed rules one egg from the box. To prove his suggestion he had to find this unknown actor and to show that he has taken the egg … perhaps not a simple task … But what will the next authority do: will the authority belief  the suggestion of the counting person or will the authority blame the counter that eventually he himself has taken the missing egg? But would this make sense? Why should the counter write the notes how many eggs have been delivered to make a difference visible? …

Thus to interpret some abstract expression with regard to some observable reality is not a principal problem, but it can eventually be unsolvable by purely practical reasons, leaving questions of empirical soundness open.

SOURCES

[1] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, First published 1935 in German as Logik der Forschung, then 1959 in English by  Basic Books, New York (more editions have been published  later; I am using the eBook version of Routledge (2002))

 

 

THE OKSIMO CASE as SUBJECT FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. Part 2. makedecidable()

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 23.March – 23.March 2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

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.

STARTING WITH SOMETHING ‘REAL’

A basic idea of the oksimo behavior space is to bring together different human actors, let them share their knowledge and experience of some real part of their world and then they are invited to  think about, how one can   improve this part.

What sounds so common — some real part of their world — isn’t necessarily  easy to define.

As has been discussed in the  preceding post to make language expressions decidable this is only possible if certain practical requirements are fulfilled. The ‘practical recipe’

makedecidable :  S x Ahum x E —> E x {true, false}

given in the preceding post claims that you —  if you want to know whether an expression E is concrete and can be classified as   ‘true’ or ‘false’ —   have to ask  a human actor Ahum , which is part of the same  concrete situation S as you, and he/ she  should confirm or disclaim   whether the expression E can be interpreted as  being  ‘true’ or ‘false’ in this situation S.

Usually, if  there is a real concrete situation S with you and some other human actor A, then you both will have a perception of the situation, you will both have internal abstraction processes with abstract states, you will have mappings from such abstracted states into some expressions of your internal language Lint and you and the other human actor A can exchange external expressions corresponding to the inner expressions and thereby corresponding to the internal abstracted states of the situation S. Even if the used language expressions E — like for instance ‘There is a white wooden table‘ — will contain abstract expressions/ universal expressions like ‘white’, ‘wooden’, ‘table’, even then you and the other human actor  will be able to decide whether there are properties of the concrete situation which are fitting as accepted instances the universal parts  of the language expression ‘There is a white wooden table‘.

Thus being in a real situation S with the other human actors enables usually all participants of the situation to decide language expressions which are related to the situation.

But what consequences does it have  if you are somehow abroad, if you are not actually part of the situation S? Usually — if you are hearing or reading an expression like  ‘There is a white wooden table‘ — you will be able to get an idea of the intended meaning only by your learned meaning function φ which maps the external expression into an internal expression and further maps the internal expression into the learned abstracted states.  While the expressions ‘white’ and  ‘wooden’ are perhaps rather ‘clear’ the expression  ‘table’ is today associated with many, many different possible concrete matters and only by hearing or reading it is not possible to decide which of all these are the intended concrete matter. Thus although if you would be able to decided in the real situation S which of these many possible instances are given in the real situation, with the expression only disconnected from the situation, you are not able to decide whether  the expression is true or not. Thus the expression has the cognitive status that it perhaps can be true but actually you cannot decide.

REALITY SUPPORTERS

Between the two cases (i) being part of he real situation S or (ii) being disconnected from the real situation S there are many variants of situations which can be understood as giving some additional support to decide whether an expression E is rather true or not.

The main weakness for not being  able to decide is  the lack of hints to narrow down the set of possible interpretations of learned  meanings by counter examples. Thus while a human actor could  have learned that the expression ‘table’ can be associated with for instance  25 different concrete matters, then he/ she needs some hints/ clues which of these possibilities can be ruled out and thereby the actor could narrow down the set of possible learned meanings to then only for instance left possibly 5 of 25.

While the real situation S can not be send along with the expression it is possible to send for example a drawing of the situation  S or a photo. If properties are involved which deserve different senses like smelling or hearing or touching or … then a photo would not suffice.

Thus to narrow down the possible interpretations of an expression for someone who is not part of the situation it can be of help to give additional  ‘clues’ if possible, but this is not always possible and moreover it is always more or less incomplete.

 

 

 

 

THE OKSIMO CASE as SUBJECT FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. Part 1

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 22.March – 23.March 2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

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 external environment [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 compare past (stored) states Spast with an actual state SnowIf 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 describe objects  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 speaker is 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 — representation ENVint 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 instance interprets 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 */

KOMEGA REQUIREMENTS: Start with a Political Program

Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org) eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458, Nov 23-28, 2020
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

As described in the uffmm eJournal  the wider context of this software project is a generative theory of cultural anthropology [GCA] which is an extension of the engineering theory called Distributed Actor-Actor Interaction [DAAI]. In  the section Case Studies of the uffmm eJournal there is also a section about Python co-learning – mainly
dealing with python programming – and a section about a web-server with
Dragon. This document is part of the Case Studies section.

CONTENT

Applying the original P-V-Pref Document structure to real cases it became clear that the everyday logic behind the classification of facts into problems [P] or  visions [V] follows a kind of logic hidden in the semantic space of the used expressions. This text explains this hidden logic and what this means for our application.

PDF DOCUMENT

VIDEO [DE]

REMARK

(After first presentations of this video)

(Last change: November 28, 2020)

Confusion by different meanings

While the general view of the whole process is quite clear there arose some hot debate about the everyday situation of the experts (here: citizens)  and the concepts ‘reality [R]‘, ‘vision [V] (imagination of a  state which is not yet real)’, ‘problem [P]‘, and ‘preference [Pref]‘. The members of my zevedi-working group (located at the INM (Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany) as well as a citizen from Dieburg (Hessen, Germany) associated with ‘reality’ also the different kinds of emotions being active in a person and they classified an imagination about a future state also as being real in a concrete person. With such a setting of the concepts it became difficult to motivate the logic illustrated in the video. The video — based on the preceding paper — talks about  a vision v, which can turn a reality r into a problem p, and thereby generating a preference Pref = (v,r). A preference can possibly become a trigger of  some change process.

Looking ahead

Before clarifying this discussion let as have a look ahead to the overall change process which constitutes the heart of the komega-software.  Beginning with October 18, 2020 the idea of this overall change process has been described in this blog. Having some given situation S, the komega software allows the construction of change rules X,  which can be applied onto a given situation S and a builtin simulator [sim] will generate a follow up situation S’ like sim(X,S)=S’ — or short: X(S) = S’ –, a process which can be repeated by using the output S’ as new input for a new cycle. At any time of this cyclic process one can ask whether the actual output S’ can be classified as successful. What is called ‘successful’ depends from the applied criteria. For the komega software at least two criteria are used. The most basic one looks to the ectual end state S’ of the simulation and computes the difference between the occurences of vision statements V in S’ and the occurrences of real statements R having been declared at the beginning as problems P as part of the  start situation S. Ideally the real statements classified as problems should have been disappeared and the vision statements should be present.  If the difference is bigger than some before agreed threshold theta  than the actual end state S’ will be classified as a success, as a goal state in the light of the visions of the preferences, which triggered the change process.

Vision statement

In the context of the whole change process a vision statement is an expression e associated with some everyday language L and which describes in the understanding of the experts a state, which is in our mindes conceivable, imaginable, which is not given as a real state, but can eventually  become a real state in some future. This disctinction presupposes that the expert can distinguish between an idea in his consciousness which is associated with some real state outside his consciousness — associated with a real state — and an idea, which is only inside his consciousness — associated with an imaginated state –.  Looking from a second person to the expert this second person can observe the body of the expert and the world surrounding the body and can speak of the real world and the real body of the expert, but the inner states of the expert are hidden for this second person. Thus from the point of view of this second person there are no real imaginations, no real future states. But the expert can utter some expression e which has a meaning describing some state, which as such is not yet real, but which possibly could become real if one would change the actual reality (the actual everyday life, the actual city …) accordingly.  Thus a vision statement is understood here as an expression e from the everyday language L uttered by some expert having a meaning which can be understood by the other persons describing some imginated state, which is not yet real but could eventually become real in some future ahead.

Creating problems, composing preferences

If at least one vision statement v is known by some experts, then it can happen, that an expert does relate this vision with some given reality r as part of the everyday life or with some absent reality r. Example: if an expert classifies some part of the city as having too much traffic (r1) and he has the vision of changing this into a situation where the traffic is lowered down by X% (v1), then this vision statement v1 can help to understand other experts to interpret the reality r1 in the light of the visiin v1 as a problem v1(r1) = p1. Classifying some reality r1 into a problem p1 is understood in the context of the komega software as making the reality r1 a candidate for a possible change in the sense that r1 should be replaced by v1. Having taken this stance — seeing the reality r1 as a problem p1 by the vision v1 –, than the experts  have created a so-called preference Pref = (v1, p1) saying that the experts are preferring the imaginated possibly future state v1 more than the actual problem p1.

There is the special case, that an expert has uttered a vision statement v but there is no given reality which can be stated in a real statement r. Example: A company thinks that it can produce some vaccine against the  disease Y in two years from now, like  v2=’there is a vaccine against disease Y in yy’. Actually there exists no vaccine, but a disease is attacking the people. Because it is known, that the people can be made immune against the disease by an appropriate vaccine it makes sense to state r2=’There is no vaccine against the disease Y available’. Having the vision v2 this can turn the reality r2 into a problem p2 allowing the preference Pref=(v2,p2).

Triggering actions

If a group of experts generated a vision v — by several and different reaons (including emotions) –, having  associated this with some given eality r, and they decided to generate by v(r)=p  a preference Pr =(v,p),  then it can happen , that these experts decide to start a change process beginning now with the given problem p and ending up with a situation in some future where the problem p disappeared and the vision has become real.

Summing up

The komega software allows the planning and testing of change processes  if the acting experts have at least one preference Pref based on at least one  vision statement v and at least one real statement r.

BITS OF PHILOSOPHY

Shows the framework for the used concepts from the point of view of philosophy
Philosophical point of view

The above video (in German, DE) and the following  lengthy remark after the video how to understand the basic concepts vision statement [v],  real statement [r], problem statement [p], as well as preference [Pref] presuppose both a certain kind of philosophy. This philosophical point of view is outlined above in a simple drawing.

Basically there is a real human person (an actor) with a real brain embedded in some everyday world. The person can perceive parts of the every day world at every point of time. The most important reference point  in time is the actual moment called NOW.

Inside the brain the human person can generate some cognitive structure triggered by perception, by  memory and by some thinking.  Having learned some everyday language L the human person can map the cognitive structure into an expression E associated with the language L. If the cognitive structure correlates with some real situation outside the body then the meaning of the expression E is classified as being a real statement, here named E1.  But the brain can generate also cognitive structures and mapping these in expressions E without being actually correlated with some real situation outside. Such a statement is here called a vision statement, here named E2. A vision statement can eventually become correlated with some real situation outside in some future. In that case the vision statement transforms into a real statement E2, while the before mentioned real statement E1 can lose its correlation with a real situation.

FURTHER DISCUSSIONS

For further discussions have a look to this page too.