Discussion 12: The Intellectual Organism
As the resolution of contradictions in the semantic models (forming in individuals) became a communal affair, where those breakdowns, or present contradictions, in the semantic models of one individual are restructured with the potentially infinite memory aid of “communication”, another evolutionary feedback cycle emerged.
Within the social structures organized around the entropic product of speech, “virtual semantic objects” began to emerge, objects carried in the physical sense within the very communication, or the social exchange of the entropy passed on from the restructuring of individual semantic contradictions. These lingual objects, which emerged within social collectives to absorb the entropy which was being ejected by individuals, these virtual semantics, formed what we now call intellectual knowledge. The resultant evolutionary feedback mechanism emerged as the social collectives themselves began to take on an organic character, by virtue of the “second-hand, pass-me-down” entropy of the environment (via social individuals) they were now absorbing into these virtual, lingual semantics.
And like biological organisms, social organisms must self-organize, or face the universal fate of returning to an inorganic state. And just like biological organisms, this self-organizing can only occur as these “virtual semantic objects” were themselves somehow re-organized, and that resulting entropy passed back into the environment. This social organic re-organization, first carried on by the primal elders and “priests” of prehistoric collectives, and later, the philosophers and scholars of “enlightened” societies, was successful as long as an individual was capable of keeping the entropic equation for a particular social semantic in balance. When this became impossible (for that particular virtual semantic of a social organization), the virtual semantic object being marshaled could no longer be entropically re-structured and simply fragmented, into two or sometimes multiple successor social semantic objects, to be marshaled now by multiple individuals, who individually possessed the lingual particulars of their now fragmented semantic.
Although the social implication of this fragmentation was negligible, typically occurring across generational boundaries, and subject only to the musings of philosophers, the evolutionary implication of intellectual fragmentation was much more considerable.
In the process of its abstraction, intellectual knowledge separates the context of a semantic away from the background from which it is assimilated. And in the course of re-organizing social organics, (the collection of the fragmented semantic objects in a culture), the individual marshals the entropy for a singular social semantic object, but as it eventually fragments, the entropy in the parent semantic can no longer be marshaled, becoming an accumulated layer over previous layers. And this accretion, the accumulated, stratified entropy entrenched from generation after generation of semantic fragmentation, is what we call science.
In the history of mankind, there have been a tremendous number of religious dogmas, and later, “scientific” disciplines established to provide the literal continuity of fragmented social semantics. And in this history, many individuals, characterized as “scientists”, took on the charge of the social continuity of a selected semantic fragment.
And occasionally, a certain one of these “scientists” would have an inspiration which assembles the semantic of his “study” with an analog of the background which was lost in the abstraction of the semantic fragment prior to its fragmentation, reuniting it in time and space in an effort to reconcile the semantic conflict which brought about its fragmentation to begin with, and releasing its accumulated entropy in an act of semantic reorganization.
Each of these “scientific discoveries”, which are essentially a pruning back on the tree of semantic fragmentation, is an emergent act of Gestalt Abstraction, the one intellectual act of man that does not localize entropy, the only intellectual act which returns entropy to the environment, being the reunification of a semantic in time and space with an analog of the background which was lost in its intellectual abstraction.
Vast libraries have been written about the rise of the intellect in Man, for which this dialog need not further add to. The discussions to this point in the Organon Sutra have focused on an exposition of how Nature evolved the core, native behaviors which provided a substrate for the emergent behavior of Natural Intelligence, but the conversation has revealed that intellectual knowledge is not solely a product of the intellect of one individual, and so the bottom-up engineer might rightly question whether the engineering of artificial agents should be modeled entirely by the behaviors of the unitary central nervous system that Nature has evolved. But if we are to use a natural model for our artificial agent, the bottom-up engineer must know at what point the mechanization of that model can commence.
Throughout the three fundamental precepts, the dialog illustrated how Nature developed the behaviors of elementary abstraction, perceptual abstraction, and cognitive abstraction, and how social man used those abstractions to create social semantic objects representing cause and effect idioms in the environment around him. In this current discussion, the dialog has so far described the endeavors of “scientists” as strictly an intellectual affair, utilizing tools which merely augmented their observational power, which it has been for most of the millenniums of human history. But with the advent of the information age, intellectual man has produced tools to augment his very semantic abstraction, or so that is what the marketing says. Although there have been numerous implementations of automation which purport to demonstrate elementary, perceptive, and even cognitive abstraction, none of the many systematics heralded as “artificial intelligence” to date, as powerful as they may appear, can demonstrate the emergent behavior of gestalt abstraction, to assist even the common man in the reversal of the entropy accumulated in the vast well of his everyday semantics. “True” artificial intelligence must demonstrate this emergent behavior, or be relegated to the growing collection of ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence, that Amir Husain speaks about in his book The Sentient Machine.
So, before Science can learn really new concepts, and cease the semantic fragmentation of intellectual knowledge, it must first archeologically unwind the entropy in its current concepts. Therefore, just as societal organizations were developed to aid rational man in reversing the entropy in his individual semantic structures, true AI must demonstrate the emergent behavior of gestalt abstraction to aid those very societal organizations in reversing their Entropy of the Ages. This will be the telling test of “true” AI.
The engineering approach for artificial intelligence forming to this point in the dialog, from a life cycle perspective, has been allopoietic, in that the Organon Sutra has been characterizing an externally described systematic for an agent whose self-organization does not begin until immersion in the environment which shapes it. Although differing from autopoiesis (self-creation), which is a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself, the internally produced organization of artificial agents comes from the interaction and entropic cycle with its environment.
However, because of the infinite variety of the environment, the self-organization of an artificial agent is never complete. So, like color constancy in human vision, almost all of their higher order processes are influenced by expectations based on past experience. But there is always, lurking in the environment, that perception which has never been experienced before, which is entropy’s Trojan horse, and, curiously, the thing that excites rational man the most. In fact, it has been observed that the human mind craves novelty.
In the two concepts which form the beginnings of symbolic thought, (where numerosity is the expression of sameness, and semantic dichotomy is the expression of difference), rational man attempts to deal with that most pricey experience of all, the perception of something never experienced before, but symbolic thought fails to reverse the entropy in any semantic structure abstracted from that perception, because of symbolics’ very separation of sameness and difference, distancing rational man from expressing the apprehension of existence as a whole. Gestalt abstraction is the antithesis of symbolic thought, and the only defense against entropy’s Trojan horse that the environment will predictably roll to the gate outside of our rational fortresses, but unfortunately, rational mans’ conduit for symbolic thought, his language, cannot directly express the process of reunification in gestalt abstraction, which essentially prevents its semantic communication.
Which should lead the bottom-up engineer to the real conceptualizations of gestalt abstraction, as part communication medium between rational men seeking to reverse the fragmentation of intellectual knowledge, and part intellectual tool, to shine a different light on those existing, fragmented intellectual semantics.
However, before this dialog can further define the communication aspect of gestalt abstraction and true artificial intelligence, (it has little to do with natural language comprehension), the Organon Sutra will now provide the formal definition for artificial intelligence itself, promised in the Introduction. And this definition, which is surprisingly succinct, is, at its most fundamental level, the imposition of temporal order on the individual units of a massively asynchronous assembly, through the multiple levels of abstraction.
And since that leaves a tremendous amount of pragmatic distance between theory and implementation, the remaining exposition of the Organon Sutra and its mechanical fulfillment will also require the societal conversation on AI itself.
As we come to the present day in that lengthy imagination scenario that began with our primordial metazoan, more than a half a billion years ago, human scientists of the information age, armed with simple (programmed) machines providing simple semantic buffers, are investigating those questions concerning a universe that they can see.
However, to reverse the deep entropy of Man’s collective semantics, to solve the questions regarding a universe that light never reveals, rational man will need the tools of true artificial intelligence to resolve the semantics that exist beyond perception, the very semantics that define existence itself.
Rational Man has been pondering the difference between ‘being’ and ‘existence’ throughout recorded history. But perhaps it will take the power of true artificial intelligence to unify the organic semantics of being and existence into its singular semantic of universal knowledge, and provide Evolved Man with the ultimate defense against that entropy still lurking in the infinitely variable environment.
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