The Semantic Sphere 1 E-Book

Pierre Lévy

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 718

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. General Introduction

1.1. The vision: to enhance cognitive processes

1.2. A transdisciplinary intellectual adventure

1.3. The result: toward hypercortical cognition

1.4. General plan of this book

PART 1 The Philosophy of Information

Chapter 2. The Nature of Information

2.1. Orientation

2.2. The information paradigm

2.3. Layers of encoding

2.4. Evolution in information nature

2.5. The unity of nature

Chapter 3. Symbolic Cognition

3.1. Delimitation of the field of symbolic cognition

3.2. The secondary reflexivity of symbolic cognition

3.3. Symbolic power and its manifestations

3.4. The reciprocal enveloping of the phenomenal world and semantic world

3.5. The open intelligence of culture

3.6. Differences between animal and human collective intelligence

Chapter 4. Creative Conversation

4.1. Beyond “collective stupidity”

4.2. Reflexive explication and sharing of knowledge

4.3. The symbolic medium of creative conversation

Chapter 5. Toward an Epistemological Transformation of the Human Sciences

5.1. The stakes of human development

5.2. Critique of the human sciences

5.3. The threefold renewal of the human sciences

5.4. The Ouroboros

Chapter 6. The Information Economy

6.1. The symbiosis of knowledge capital and cognitive labor

6.2. Toward scientific self-management of collective intelligence

6.3. Flows of symbolic energy

6.4. Ecosystems of ideas and the semantic information economy

6.5. The semantic information economy in the digital medium

PART 1 Modeling Cognition

Chapter 7. Introduction to the Scientific Knowledge of the Mind

7.1. Research program

7.2. The mind in nature

7.3. The three symbolic functions of the cortex

7.4. The IEML model of symbolic cognition

7.5. The architecture of the Hypercortex

7.6. Overview: toward a reflexive collective intelligence

Chapter 8. The Computer Science Perspective: Toward a Reflexive Intelligence

8.1. Augmented collective intelligence

8.2. The purpose of automatic manipulation of symbols: cognitive modeling and self-knowledge

8.3. The means of automatic manipulation of symbols: beyond probabilities and logic

Chapter 9. General Presentation of the IEML Semantic Sphere

9.1. Ideas

9.2. Concepts

9.3. Unity and calculability

9.4. Symmetry

9.5. Internal coherence

9.6. Inexhaustible complexity

Chapter 10. The IEML Metalanguage

10.1. The problem of encoding concepts

10.2. Text units

10.3. Circuits of meaning

10.4. Between text and circuits

Chapter 11. The IEML Semantic Machine

11.1. Overview of the functions involved in symbolic cognition

11.2. Requirements for the construction of the IEML semantic machine

11.3. The IEML textual machine (S)

11.4. The STAR (Semantic Tool for Augmented Reasoning) linguistic engine (B)

11.5. The conceptual machine (T)

11.6. Conclusion

Chapter 12. The Hypercortex

12.1. The role of media and symbolic systems in cognition

12.2. The digital medium

12.3. The evolution of the layers of addressing in the digital medium

12.4. Between the Cortex and the Hypercortex

12.5. Toward an observatory of collective intelligence

12.6. Conclusion: the computability and interoperability of semantic and hermeneutic functions

Chapter 13. Hermeneutic Memory

13.1. Toward a semantic organization of memory

13.2. The layers of complexity of memory

13.3. Radical hermeneutics

13.4. The hermeneutics of information

13.5. The hermeneutics of knowledge

13.6. Wisdom

13.7. Collective interpretation games

Chapter 14. The Perspective of the Humanities: Toward Explicit Knowledge

14.1. Context.

14.2. Methodology: the digital humanities

14.3. Epistemology: explicating symbolic cognition

Chapter 15. Observing Collective Intelligence

15.1. The semantic sphere as a mirror of concepts

15.2. The structure of the cognitive image

15.3. The two eyes of reflexive observation

Bibliography

Index

First published 2011 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA

www.iste.co.uk

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© ISTE Ltd 2011

The rights of Pierre Lévy to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lévy, Pierre, 1956-

The semantic sphere 1 : computation, cognition, and information economy / Pierre Levy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84821-251-0 (hardback)

1. Semantic Web. 2. Information society. 3. Human information processing. 4. Metalanguage. I. Title. TK5105.88815.L485 2011

025.04'27--dc23

2011029149

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84821-251-0

Acknowledgements

The work presented here has been subsidized since 2002 mainly by the Canadian Government through the Canada Research Chairs Program. I also received two research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. I would like to thank Michel Biezunski and Steve Newcomb (who programmed the first version of the IEML1 dictionary and parser), Andrew Roczniak (who helped me formalize the mathematical theory of IEML), Christian Desjardins (who programmed an IEML-oriented database) and Samuel Szoniecky for their contributions.

My wife, Darcia Labrosse, has supported me in every possible way over the many years I have been working on the creation of IEML. She assisted and advised me in creating the diagrams and was an attentive, perceptive and tireless editor of this book. Without her, this book and even the IEML metalanguage would not have seen the light of day.

1 Information Economy Meta Language.

Chapter 1

General Introduction

A participatory digital memory common to all humanity is on its way. But at the beginning of the 21st Century, the use of this memory is limited by problems of semantic opacity, incompatibility of classification systems, and linguistic and cultural fragmentation. Lacking computable models, we are unable to automate most cognitive operations of analyzing, filtering, synthesizing and interconnecting information so as to take full advantage of the huge mass of data available. We do not yet know how to systematically turn this ocean of data into knowledge, and still less how to turn the digital medium into an observatory that reflects our collective intelligence. The primary goal of this book is to present to the scientific community and the informed public a new system for encoding meanings that will allow operations on meaning in the new digital memory to become transparent, interoperable and computable. This system of semantic coding is called IEML (Information Economy Meta Language). Its use could help eliminate the obstacles that now impede the optimal exploitation of the digital medium to serve human development in its social and personal dimensions. If a dynamic community of semanticists and linguists were to enrich and develop this language, a group of engineers were to program and maintain a collection of software tools exploiting its computational potential, and a critical mass of users and social media were to take possession of these tools, I believe we would have embarked on a new scientific, technical and cultural path leading in the long term to a significant enhancement of human cognitive processes.

In this book I will show that there is no scientific, technical or ethical reason preventing us from using a calculable symbolic system such as IEML on a broad scale. Just as there are impossibility theorems in mathematics (the most famous of which is probably that of Gdel), I will provide what I believe to be mathematical proof accompanied by solid technical and philosophical arguments that a new possibility, unsuspected by previous generations, is now opening up for the human mind.

IEML is one of many formal languages that exist today. Its originality and value lay in the fact that all its valid expressions model semantic circuits for channeling information flows. The IEML semantic sphere is a huge, coherent, calculable graph that connects all these circuits and can therefore be used as a system of coordinates for the common digital memory that is being created.

This general introduction is organized in three main sections. Section 1.1 presents the coherent vision that has gradually crystallized over the many years I have devoted to constructing IEML. Section 1.2 recounts, in the first person, my journey of discovery, the intellectual adventure that led me to develop the metalanguage. Finally, section 1.3 summarizes the result of that adventure, a result that I believe meets the challenges of my vision.

1.1. The vision: to enhance cognitive processes

In conceiving the IEML semantic sphere, I was responding to three closely interdependent challenges: a strictly semantic imperative, an ethical imperative and a technical imperative.

1.1.1. The semantic imperative

The immediate goal of IEML is to solve the problem of semantic interoperability the digital chaos resulting from the multitude of natural languages, classification systems and ontologies. IEML functions as a bridge language, an addressing system for concepts that is capable of linking different systems for classifying and organizing data that would otherwise be incompatible. I am well aware that the very idea of a universal system for encoding meaning can conjure up the worst images of totalitarianism, or at least the potential impoverishment of the diversity of meanings. I would therefore like to remind the reader that digital sound encoding and the use of universal file formats for recording music has in no way standardized musical messages, but rather has increased the diversity of productions, variations, mixes, exchanges and explorations in the world of music. In the same way, far from standardizing the world of icons, digital encoding of images by means of pixels1 has stimulated computer-assisted production, automated processing and open creation and distribution of images of all kinds. Finally, digital encoding of the letters of the alphabet is the basis of all word-processing programs, and no one has ever claimed that these programs limit the freedom to write. Using an open, collaborative dictionary, a set of basic recombinable operations and a practically infinite transformation groupoid, the IEML encoding should present any determinate meaning as a moment in a whole range of cycles of transformation, a node within a multitude of networks or a figure that only appears as such against a background that can be explored infinitely. That is to say, the inscription of a concept in the semantic sphere will have the effect of opening up its horizons of meaning rather than closing them.

The IEML semantic sphere is an intellectual protocol for expanding the possibilities for interpretive dialog around a common digital memory. This dialog should be understood as translinguistic, transcultural, transreligious, transpartisan, transdisciplinary and transinstitutional. This is why the semantic topology opened up by IEML welcomes all practical, ontological or philosophical points of view and considers them equally legitimate. The only attitude that is disallowed by this generalized perspectivism is denial of the legitimacy of another persons point of view, refusal of dialog, hermeneutic closure2.

Its aim is to establish a space that accommodates in a single system of coordinates a capacity to make meaning that is virtually infinite in its diversity, so the semantic imperative essentially necessitates maximum multidirectional openness, or equanimity. Thus it is not necessary to believe in the philosophical principles that inspired the invention of IEML in order to use it for your own purposes or to benefit from the enhanced individual and collective possibilities for creating and managing knowledge offered by the semantic sphere. But there is a caveat! I am not claiming that all semantic architectures that can be built in IEML are equally valid, or that everyone has to accept the perspectives of others. The semantic imperative assumes only two elementary dialectical principles: first, that all interpretations are in principle equally valid; and second that everyone must accept the right of others to hold points of view different from his or her own. Indeed, individuals and communities that decide to use IEML will be able to choose goals, objectives, sizes and degrees of transdisciplinarity or transculturalism that are as varied as they like. Only specialists in semantic engineering will have to be united by a common mission: to maintain and expand the hermeneutic equanimity of the semantic sphere.