PRESUMPTIVE FOUNDATIONS
PHILOSOPHICAL GROUNDING
At the core of every cultural tradition is a Worldview which attempts to integrate ideas about ultimate existence (in MultiCoRelationism this is referred to as “ChaotiCosmology” so as to acknowledge recognition of the essentiality of both the notions of “order” and “disorder” in all experience) with ideas about which experiences ultimately matter (truth with relevance and value, e.g. morality). When these Worldviews appear intellectually implausible and/or morally irrelevant, within or between cultures, they render culture generally vulnerable to crisis. There is now a critical need on a global scale for constructing a new and unique Worldview, a global ‘chaoticosmic mythology’, of Human Culture as Whole(Ness). The central challenge of this effort in the twenty-first century will be to integrate an evolutionary ChaotiCosmogeny with an EcoGnomic (ecologically conscious) morality recognizing the universal tension between Truth with Relevance and Value by Adapting Presumed Beliefs to Experience versus Truth with Relevance and Value by Adapting Experience to Presumed Beliefs. Such a Worldview seems to be emerging from the recognition of a necessarily irreducible interrelation of the Analytical (Inquiry and Inference) and Intuitive modes of consciousness as MIND (refer also to the left/right brain synchrony).
TRUTH with RELEVANCE and VALUE (GOODNESS)
Recognize first that each of these concepts exists only in a TriCoRelational sign form where the concept signifies an experience to a particular thinker. Hence truth to a given thinker signifies a realization of consistency between an expectation and the actual in an experience. The relevance of the experience to that thinker is a measure of the degree to which it does or can effect personal change. And finally, the value (goodness) of the experience to that thinker is a measure of the value of that change personally, but also concomitantly to the collective other.
COMPARABLE MODELS
The following are examples of research and development into the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence and an application of this synthesized intelligence in imagining a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
[The following text is extracted and slightly adapted from the respective websites by the author of this post]
THE SINGULARITY INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (SIAI)
The “Singularity” is the technological creation of
smarter-than-human intelligence.
The Singularity Institute brings rational analysis and rational strategy to the challenges facing humanity as we develop cognitive technologies that will exceed the current upper bounds on human intelligence.
http://singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/GISAI.html
General Intelligence and Seed AI version 2.3. describes the principles, paradigms, cognitive architecture, and cognitive components needed to build a complete mind possessed of general intelligence, capable of self-understanding, self-modification, and recursive self-enhancement.
This document is about general intelligence. The desired end result is a self-enhancing mind or "seed AI". Seed AI means that - rather than trying to build a mind immediately capable of human-equivalent or transhuman reasoning - the goal is to build a mind capable of enhancing itself, and then re-enhancing itself with that higher intelligence, until the goal point is reached. "The task is not to build an AI with some astronomical level of intelligence; the task is building an AI which is capable of improving itself, of understanding and rewriting its own source code."
WIKIPEDIA
Imagine a world in which every single human being
can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.
In 2006, Time magazine chose the millions of anonymous contributors of user-generated content to Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life and the GNU/Linux operating system, and the multitudes of other websites featuring user contribution as its Person of the Year. The choice was personified simply as you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-contentencyclopedia project based on an openly editablemodel. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborativewebsites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles.
MINDING (OR TO MIND)
Definition (in the present context): To Mind (or Minding) is an act intended by the acting mind to increase the Intelligence &/or Knowledge &/or Wisdom of the subject as mind (including that of self), or as affected by or effected through mind, where each such mind can reside principally in Reality or Virtual Reality or Virtuality.
Definition: Virtuality is an Autonomous Semiotic Universe in which a sign (e.g. a piece of information) is taken to be transferable (communicatable) only among (virtual) minds resident in this Virtuality and relatable to (Human) Reality only through the Virtual Reality of the Internet/Web.
Definition: Stages in Synthesizing Mind as a MultiCoRelational Semiotic System
From computerized raw data/information
to First Stage
INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGIES
involving
Perceptual Processes
focused on Syntactic Patterning
to Second Stage
KNOWLEDGE TECHNOLOGIES
featuring
Conceptual Processes
focused on Semantic Patterning
to Third Stage
WISDOM TECHNOLOGIES
being
Valuational Decision Processes focused on Pragmatic Patterning
i.e. Action Selection
[Wisdom (defined): the expression in acts of value through knowledge]
EXPERIENTIAL INSTANCES OF “MINDing (or To Mind)”
The uses of the term “MINDing (or To Mind)” in our culture are so numerous and varied so as to make it near-unconsciously common in examples such as – she’s minding the store – where the implication is one of focus of attention or care or concern. Herein the intent is to extend this “focus” to augmenting, enhancing or improving mind in its functional parts as it reflects or affects subjects such as the World, Humanity, Society, Community, AgReCulture, Research, Technology, Arts, Education, Business, etc. In subsequent posts we intend to address various of these subjects from time to time with a query as to how to Mind them.
A PREFACE TO DISCOVERY
appropriated from
THE LAWS OF FORM
by
George Spencer-Brown
"We take as given the idea of distinction ..."
"In this book, George Spencer-Brown has succeeded in doing what, in mathematics, is very rare indeed, he has revealed a new calculus, of great power and simplicity ..." -Bertrand Russell, author, with Alfred North Whitehead, of Principia Mathematica.
The following quotation, including the footnote, is taken from Appendix 1 to The Laws of Form.
“Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world*is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.
Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.
To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.
In the face of the strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course towards sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so?
To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation [R.Elated-ed. Note--focusing of attention]. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in MIND what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them.
In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively."
________________________________________
* wer = man, ald = age, old. The world may be taken to be the manifest properties of the all, its identity with the age of man being evident through the fact that man is a primary animal with a hand ('manifest' coming from manus = hand, festus = struck). Thus the world is considerably less than the all, which includes the unmanifest, but considerably greater than 'the' universe (more correctly than any universe), which is merely the formal appearance of one of the possible manifestations which make up the world.
RECOGNIZING MIND
THE INIGMA OF MIND
(Edited by R.Elated from the following)
Fractal Neurodynamics and Quantum Chaos : Resolving the MIND-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics
Chris King
Scientific Discovery in the twentieth century has seen the unification of the microscopic and cosmic realms of physics. Molecular biology has had equally epoch-making successes unravelling the intricate molecular mechanisms underlying the genetic code. Despite these conceptual advances, the principles by which the brain generates Mind remain mysterious.
Mind and Consciousness remain so different from the usual objects of scientific inquiry that it is unclear they conform to the objective criteria usually applied to scientific description. Yet, the importance of developing a model of brain function which gives a consistent description of Mind, consciousness and free-will, is profound.
The intractability of this central unresolved problem in science suggests its principles run deeper than the conventional biochemical description. This paper develops such a model based on linkage between the fractal aspect of chaotic neurodynamics and quantum non-locality, giving brain science a cosmological status at the foundations of physical description.
This model links the structural instability of brain dynamics with quantum uncertainty. The quantum-physical brain may thus be more than just an interface between sensory input and decision-making. It may in fact be a doorway between complementary aspects of the physical universe. If so, the role of consciousness and Mind-brain duality may be central to cosmology.
THE MULTICORELATIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF MIND
What if “how and what” we think were constrained by the
language(s) [sign systems] we use?
Despite the foregoing Inigma of Mind, it is generally accepted that the human organism as a living (biological) system acts to maintain (adapt) its identity in a changing environment. These Acts are a decisional (CyberGnomic) dynamics characterizing "Mind" where Mind is generally conceded to be resident in a "Brain". A Brain in turn is composed of a complex of parts, including, e.g., neuronal nets. Further, a Brain is carried by a "Body", i.e. sensors and effectors, connecting the Brain/Mind to its environment. And finally, the key foundational assumption is that "Mind" is an image (sign/symbol)—creation/manipulation/storage/interpretation---system which itself is imaged via a MultiCoRelational Science of Signs (symbols) — signification (e.g. symbolization) and communication, i.e. MultiCoRelational Semiotic Systems, as a necessary basis upon which to build a General Theory of Universal Mind and technologically engineer its applications as Synthetic Intelligence--Synthetic Mind.
The Mission then is to reinvent (create) a Form of sign(symbol) system and the processes attendant thereto which express the heretofore linguistically and formally (mathematically) inexpressible Experience of Interrelated Relations (as per the Native unrecorded expression of “relations related to other relations”), said Form to be combined with the centuries-old symbolic mode of Interrelated Systems, which in its successes has carried Humanity from the discovery of fire through the evolution of language and number to deep space exploration (telescopically toward the “infinite”) and nano-science (microscopically toward the “infinitesimal”).
TOWARD A MULTICORELATIONAL SEMIOTIC THEORY OF MIND
What if the form of these sign systems constrained
the methodology of inquiry in science?
With last century’s advent of the digital revolution in information/communication technology, the methods of inquiry themselves must now be opened to form a new method of inquiry/inference/intuition. This method must be concomitantly applied to the foundations notions (philosophically, formally, and theoretically) themselves which subtend any particular experiential initiating hypotheses in inquiry thus leading to a theory of theory formation. An approach has been posited regarding the formalization of an order and its derivative calculus, the latter taken as a formulation of the disorder experientially related to the given order, which also implies a reorder(ing) format that, within an Integrated System of order/disorder/reorder Relations (MultiCoRelational Semiotic Systems), suggests The Form as a general [meta order(ing)] theory of theory formation. The Form will, in turn, be invoked in formulating a Theory of Intelligence/Mind and its technological implementations as Synthetic Intelligence/Mind. As a limited goal toward this end, we have attempted to elucidate our approach to “Semiotics in Intelligent Systems Development” as though it instantiated The Form and points to a generalized order (Boundary Logic) which, if fully realized, would translate Boolean Logic (the present form of Computational Logic) into a form that is more consistent with computation (being parallel) in contrast to language (being serial). The theoretical and applied detail developed to date is essentially confined to the AutoGnome, a semiotic machine interpreting certain of the philosophical principles of Charles Sanders Peirce who first published on Boundary Logic in 1898.
MINDcreatingMIND-Introduction
EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIND)
The argument here, following an editorial extraction by the author of this post from George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form: Evolution of Consciousness, is that a universe comes into being when a “Void” is severed by drawing adistinction. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms of Knowledge underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and the life sciences, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish differences in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. The Void is not a mathematical or physical space, nor is it a “System” of any sort. It is the absence (Non-Existence) of any System, and thus it possesses no attributes of any kind, including emptiness. (Spencer-Brown, G. 1969. Laws of Form. 4th ed. New York: E. P. Dutton)
The foregoing brief perspective formulated as the mathematics of distinction has grown into a general candidate for an approach to a universal language for formal systems, multiboundary mathematics. Inherent to this latter is a Boundary Logic from which Boolean Logic is derivable as a special case and which is leading to a more powerful computer design. (Bricken, W. 2002. Boundary Logic from the Beginning. Private Publication. Saratoga, CA.: Boundary Institute; Bricken, W. 2004. The Advantages of Boundary Logic: A Common Sense Approach. Private Publication. Saratoga, CA.: Boundary Institute) Generally, taking a universal formal system as an axiom system with the property that any other consistent axiom system can be interpreted within it, the mathematics of distinction implies a mathematics of subsumption which, in turn, implies a Membership theory as a first step towards a universal language for mathematics. (Etter, T. 2006. Three-place Identity. Private Publication. Saratoga, CA.: Boundary Institute)
DESCRIBING KNOWLEDGE--DATA/INFORMATION, INTELLIGENCE,KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM
In the context of a description of Mind, the following distinctions regarding Knowledge can be made:
Data: bits of information such as lists (e.g. phone lists) or records in a database or spreadsheet
Information: data organized so that it can becommunicated
INTELLIGENCE: Perceptual processes focused on syntactic patterning
KNOWLEDGE: Cognitive processes focused on semantic patterning
WISDOM: Valuational Decision processes focused on pragmatic patterning, i.e. Action Selection
PREMISE: Given a ChaotiCosmos which we come to “know“ through Mind, it is evident that understanding mind, as oft-thought, should be the most satisfying as the first subject of inquiry among three of the great chaoticosmic mysteries—namely, the “origin”, nature and evolution of the ChaotiCosmos (the Universe and its Worldviews), the “origin”, nature and evolution of Life and the “origin”, nature and evolution of Mind (Consciousness). Since “understanding”, being a function of mind, can be enhanced by first understanding mind, it is inevitable that Evolution through Human Co-Creation should forge a Synthetic Mind (SynMind) from an experientially consistent well-formed Theory of Mind.
BACKGROUND: Recognizing that there is an accelerating growth in awareness of the limits of the Systemic (thing-based or mechanistic) Worldview, it is becoming ever more urgent for the sustainability of humanity to turn to a concomitant focus emphasizing the necessity of aRelational Worldview as the future. With this realization, however, there comes the need to foundationally re-examine the notion of “relation”.
A Person’s Experiences, ranging from common sense to the highly abstract, can all be fundamentally (without addressing uniqueness) recorded either as experience of Systems (objects, things, stuff, matter, etc.) or experience of Relations (connections, interactions, functions, transformations, etc.). One contemporary author who has explored and reassessed the treatment of the philosophical notion of Relation from the perspective of the Western Worldview, at least as exhaustively and profoundly as is currently evident, is Rodolphe Gasché, 1999. In moving from the ontological conception of relation as a thing of diminished being and yet holding to the conviction that relation is a being-towards-another, he has shown that the history of evolving thought of philosophers on the notion of relation has at least demonstrated that it is not constrained to exclusive subordination by the traditional ontological and formalist interpretations of relation as being-towards-another-thing, but allows the possibility ofrelation as being-towards-another-relation. “One of the most profound scientific recognitions of modern times is that the Universe no longer can be categorized only through objects, but rather must be seen as fundamentally relational. If the manifest Universe is relational, then it behooves us tounderstand how relations relate!” From Hamann and Rindge (1978).
Personal Experience is the Existence of Relational Systems.
By Presumption, this is the Essence of Existence (Nonexistence) Beyond the Personal.
FOUNDATIONS OF MULTICORELATIONAL SYSTEMS: [Multi=multiple; Co=interrelated]
In formulating thenotion of relations relating relations by adding specificity to the foregoing Experiential/Existential/Essential Foundations statement, the General Foundations Presumption of the existence of four relational forms has been introduced where logically, these four forms exhaust the number of possible categories of relational forms that can be obtained by combining Systems and Relations through Relations; hence, the origin of MultiCoRelationism(Hamann, n.d.) as a potentially (R)Evolutionary symbol-form for a Relational Worldview.
Based on the foregoing general presumptions and of the Specific Presumtions of the existence of an Inter (Actional) Relation (decision relation) among certain Systems or Relations, and with certain Systems or Relations being-as-other Systems or Relations (this being the notion of image->sign), and with certain Systems or Relations being-of-other Systems or Relations (this being the notion ofsubsumption>distinction), the foundation of a (R)Evolutionary Relational paradigm,MultiCoRelational Systems (MCRS), was promulgated.
The expression (communication) of the Experience Beyond the Personal rests in-and- onSigns (for Systems or Relations), signs being acknowledgeably both the Essence of Mind(recognizing the carrier role of the brain/body) and of Virtuality.
Not only are the processes of mind (i.e. what we can think and communicate) constrained by the languages (signs) we use (Northrop, 2002), language itself requires a different logic for inquiryvs. inference vs. intuition. This consideration is inherent in the applied multicorelational premise regarding synthesis of both language and mind.
As a MCRS derivative, the form of a theory of theory formation with an inherent FORM requiringco-existent Order, DisOrder and ReOrdering (ODORO) MutiCoRelations is being promulgated as a candidate upon which to formalize a Theory of Mind (AG/GnosTeks) and to engineer its technological instantiation as Synthetic Mind (theAutoGnome).
