Category Archives: neural process

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 */

HMI Analysis for the CM:MI paradigm. Part 2. Problem and Vision

Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org)
eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458, February 27-March 16, 2021,
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

Last change: March 16, 2021 (minor corrections)

HISTORY

As described in the uffmm eJournal  the wider context of this software project is an integrated  engineering theory called Distributed Actor-Actor Interaction [DAAI] further extended to the Collective Man-Machine Intelligence [CM:MI] paradigm.  This document is part of the Case Studies section.

HMI ANALYSIS, Part 2: Problem & Vision

Context

This text is preceded by the following texts:

Introduction

Before one starts the HMI analysis  some stakeholder  — in our case are the users stakeholder as well as  users in one role —  have to present some given situation — classifiable as a ‘problem’ — to depart from and a vision as the envisioned goal to be realized.

Here we give a short description of the problem for the CM:MI paradigm and the vision, what should be gained.

Problem: Mankind on the Planet Earth

In this project  the mankind  on the planet earth is  understood as the primary problem. ‘Mankind’ is seen here  as the  life form called homo sapiens. Based on the findings of biological evolution one can state that the homo sapiens has — besides many other wonderful capabilities — at least two extraordinary capabilities:

Outside to Inside

The whole body with the brain is  able to convert continuously body-external  events into internal, neural events. And  the brain inside the body receives many events inside the body as external events too. Thus in the brain we can observe a mixup of body-external (outside 1) and body-internal events (outside 2), realized as set of billions of neural processes, highly interrelated.  Most of these neural processes are unconscious, a small part is conscious. Nevertheless  these unconscious and conscious events are  neurally interrelated. This overall conversion from outside 1 and outside 2 into neural processes  can be seen as a mapping. As we know today from biology, psychology and brain sciences this mapping is not a 1-1 mapping. The brain does all the time a kind of filtering — mostly unconscious — sorting out only those events which are judged by the brain to be important. Furthermore the brain is time-slicing all its sensory inputs, storing these time-slices (called ‘memories’), whereby these time-slices again are no 1-1 copies. The storing of time-sclices is a complex (unconscious) process with many kinds of operations like structuring, associating, abstracting, evaluating, and more. From this one can deduce that the content of an individual brain and the surrounding reality of the own body as well as the world outside the own body can be highly different. All kinds of perceived and stored neural events which can be or can become conscious are  here called conscious cognitive substrates or cognitive objects.

Inside to Outside (to Inside)

Generally it is known that the homo sapiens can produce with its body events which have some impact on the world outside the body.  One kind of such events is the production of all kinds of movements, including gestures, running, grasping with hands, painting, writing as well as sounds by his voice. What is of special interest here are forms of communications between different humans, and even more specially those communications enabled by the spoken sounds of a language as well as the written signs of a language. Spoken sounds as well as written signs are here called expressions associated with a known language. Expressions as such have no meaning (A non-speaker of a language L can hear or see expressions of the language L but he/she/x  never will understand anything). But as everyday experience shows nearly every child  starts very soon to learn which kinds of expressions belong to a language and with what kinds of shared experiences they can be associated. This learning is related to many complex neural processes which map expressions internally onto — conscious and unconscious — cognitive objects (including expressions!). This mapping builds up an internal  meaning function from expressions into cognitive objects and vice versa. Because expressions have a dual face (being internal neural structures as well as being body-outside events by conversions from the inside to body-outside) it is possible that a homo sapiens  can transmit its internal encoding of cognitive objects into expressions from his  inside to the outside and thereby another homo sapiens can perceive the produced outside expression and  can map this outside expression into an intern expression. As far as the meaning function of of the receiving homo sapiens  is sufficiently similar to the meaning function of  the sending homo sapiens there exists some probability that the receiving homo sapiens can activate from its memory cognitive objects which have some similarity with those of  the sending  homo sapiens.

Although we know today of different kinds of animals having some form of language, there is no species known which is with regard to language comparable to  the homo sapiens. This explains to a large extend why the homo sapiens population was able to cooperate in a way, which not only can include many persons but also can stretch through long periods of time and  can include highly complex cognitive objects and associated behavior.

Negative Complexity

In 2006 I introduced the term negative complexity in my writings to describe the fact that in the world surrounding an individual person there is an amount of language-encoded meaning available which is beyond the capacity of an  individual brain to be processed. Thus whatever kind of experience or knowledge is accumulated in libraries and data bases, if the negative complexity is higher and higher than this knowledge can no longer help individual persons, whole groups, whole populations in a constructive usage of all this. What happens is that the intended well structured ‘sound’ of knowledge is turned into a noisy environment which crashes all kinds of intended structures into nothing or badly deformed somethings.

Entangled Humans

From Quantum Mechanics we know the idea of entangled states. But we must not dig into quantum mechanics to find other phenomena which manifest entangled states. Look around in your everyday world. There exist many occasions where a human person is acting in a situation, but the bodily separateness is a fake. While sitting before a laptop in a room the person is communicating within an online session with other persons. And depending from the  social role and the  membership in some social institution and being part of some project this person will talk, perceive, feel, decide etc. with regard to the known rules of these social environments which are  represented as cognitive objects in its brain. Thus by knowledge, by cognition, the individual person is in its situation completely entangled with other persons which know from these roles and rules  and following thereby  in their behavior these rules too. Sitting with the body in a certain physical location somewhere on the planet does not matter in this moment. The primary reality is this cognitive space in the brains of the participating persons.

If you continue looking around in your everyday world you will probably detect that the everyday world is full of different kinds of  cognitively induced entangled states of persons. These internalized structures are functioning like protocols, like scripts, like rules in a game, telling everybody what is expected from him/her/x, and to that extend, that people adhere to such internalized protocols, the daily life has some structure, has some stability, enables planning of behavior where cooperation between different persons  is necessary. In a cognitively enabled entangled state the individual person becomes a member of something greater, becoming a super person. Entangled persons can do things which usually are not possible as long you are working as a pure individual person.[1]

Entangled Humans and Negative Complexity

Although entangled human persons can principally enable more complex events, structures,  processes, engineering, cultural work than single persons, human entanglement is still limited by the brain capacities as well as by the limits of normal communication. Increasing the amount of meaning relevant artifacts or increasing the velocity of communication events makes things even more worse. There are objective limits for human processing, which can run into negative complexity.

Future is not Waiting

The term ‘future‘ is cognitively empty: there exists nowhere an object which can  be called ‘future’. What we have is some local actual presence (the Now), which the body is turning into internal representations of some kind (becoming the Past), but something like a future does not exist, nowhere. Our knowledge about the future is radically zero.

Nevertheless, because our bodies are part of a physical world (planet, solar system, …) and our entangled scientific work has identified some regularities of this physical world which can be bused for some predictions what could happen with some probability as assumed states where our clocks are showing a different time stamp. But because there are many processes running in parallel, composed of billions of parameters which can be tuned in many directions, a really good forecast is not simple and depends from so many presuppositions.

Since the appearance of homo sapiens some hundred thousands years ago in Africa the homo sapiens became a game changer which makes all computations nearly impossible. Not in the beginning of the appearance of the homo sapiens, but in the course of time homo sapiens enlarged its number, improved its skills in more and more areas, and meanwhile we know, that homo sapiens indeed has started to crash more and more  the conditions of its own life. And principally thinking points out, that homo sapiens could even crash more than only planet earth. Every exemplar of a homo sapiens has a built-in freedom which allows every time to decide to behave in a different way (although in everyday life we are mostly following some protocols). And this built-in freedom is guided by actual knowledge, by emotions, and by available resources. The same child can become a great musician, a great mathematician, a philosopher, a great political leader, an engineer, … but giving the child no resources, depriving it from important social contexts,  giving it the wrong knowledge, it can not manifest its freedom in full richness. As human population we need the best out of all children.

Because  the processing of the planet, the solar system etc.  is going on, we are in need of good forecasts of possible futures, beyond our classical concepts of sharing knowledge. This is where our vision enters.

VISION: DEVELOPING TOGETHER POSSIBLE FUTURES

To find possible and reliable shapes of possible futures we have to exploit all experiences, all knowledge, all ideas, all kinds of creativity by using maximal diversity. Because present knowledge can be false — as history tells us –, we should not rule out all those ideas, which seem to be too crazy at a first glance. Real innovations are always different to what we are used to at that time. Thus the following text is a first rough outline of the vision:

  1. Find a format
  2. which allows any kinds of people
  3. for any kind of given problem
  4. with at least one vision of a possible improvement
  5. together
  6. to search and to find a path leading from the given problem (Now) to the envisioned improved state (future).
  7. For all needed communication any kind of  everyday language should be enough.
  8. As needed this everyday language should be extendable with special expressions.
  9. These considerations about possible paths into the wanted envisioned future state should continuously be supported  by appropriate automatic simulations of such a path.
  10. These simulations should include automatic evaluations based on the given envisioned state.
  11. As far as possible adaptive algorithms should be available to support the search, finding and identification of the best cases (referenced by the visions)  within human planning.

REFERENCES or COMMENTS

[1] One of the most common entangled state in daily life is the usage of normal language! A normal language L works only because the rules of usage of this language L are shared by all speaker-hearer of this language, and these rules are explicit cognitive structures (not necessarily conscious, mostly unconscious!).

Continuation

Yes, it will happen 🙂 Here.