The Semantic Sphere 1

Computation, Cognition and Information Economy

Pierre Lévy

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848212510
• eBook ISBN: 9781118601518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

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.

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 Gödel), 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 person’s 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.

1.1.2. The ethical imperative

The best use we could make of the contemporary infrastructure of memory, communication and digital processing would be to serve human development. The goal of human development is a reason of the heart, in the sense that “the heart has its own reasons, of which reason knows nothing”³. Rather than deal with each distinct aspect of human development separately (e.g. economic growth, education, public health, human rights, scientific and technical innovation), I propose that we focus our efforts on what a growing community of researchers considers its critical point: knowledge management through a free creative conversation. Knowledge management can be envisaged from two complementary perspectives: first, personal control of information flows with autonomous development of learning strategies; and second, collaborative use of data and sharing of knowledge. A multitude of creative conversations collaborating on indexing the digital data available in IEML and the subsequent use of the information thus produced would make it possible to initiate an autocatalytic virtuous circle between the two aspects – personal and social – of knowledge management. I invented the IEML semantic sphere in the hope of bringing about a socio-technical environment conducive to this creative dialectic.

I am certainly not able at this stage to rigorously demonstrate that a better technology for extracting and refining knowledge based on common digital data will have positive effects on human development. I do, however, sense that the scientific observation of its own functioning in the mirror of a digital Hypercortex will result in the maturation of human collective intelligence. I anticipate that new opportunities for collaborative learning and the expansion of individual intelligence will result from this new situation.

1.1.3. The technical imperative

As humanity is a social species with a highly developed ability to manipulate symbols, the availability of automata capable of increasing our capacity to process symbols, coupled with telecommunications and the large-scale storage of information, presages a huge transformation. The inevitable global cultural metamorphosis, of which we have only seen the timid beginnings as we enter the 21st Century, will necessarily extend over many generations. A philosophy that is concerned with fostering cultural creativity in this new technocultural environment thus has an interest in avoiding looking at the digital transformation through the wrong end of the telescope (sector by sector) or in the rear-view mirror of institutions and concepts suited to the era (now past) of static writing systems and one-way communication.

The technical imperative of my philosophy may be formulated as follows: let us automate the symbolic operations that increase cognitive capacities as much as possible and thus in the end enhance the power and autonomy of individuals and communities. I would like to point out that the automation I am speaking of here is not limited to logical reasoning and statistical analysis. Ideally, it encompasses other cognitive processes, particularly those involving huge quantities of data: management and filtering of information flows, simulations of complex processes, perception of analogies, creative synthesis, discovery of blind spots, questioning of established models, etc. This technical imperative induced me to seek as much benefit as possible from the growing power of the automation of symbolic operations, even if this meant to some extent anticipating the calculation, memory and transmission capacities that will be available to future generations. In any case, the transparency of thought processes to calculation – in other words, the emphasis on computational models of cognition – is a cognitive scientist and programmer’s ideal that users of IEML are obviously not obliged to share with me in order to take advantage of the practical benefits of the research program proposed here⁴.

1.2. A transdisciplinary intellectual adventure

1.2.1. The years of training, 1975-1992

The IEML semantic sphere is the result of a long quest, the main stages of which I would now like to recount. I have decided to present this brief intellectual autobiography only because I think it may help my readers to better understand my purpose.

At a very young age, I was interested in the natural sciences, in particular cosmology. I was also fascinated by what was then called cybernetics and “electronic brains”. I have maintained these two interests. I went into the human sciences, however, and after a short time in economics I took a university course in history. In the 1970s, Paris offered students a rich intellectual landscape. The French school of history, known as the Annales school, initiated by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and so admirably exemplified by Fernand Braudel and Georges Duby, was at the height of its productivity. Structuralism in anthropology, championed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, was still a powerful intellectual current, and it was used by Roland Barthes to analyze the present. At that time the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida were already providing a stimulating counterpoint to structuralism. In the excitement following May 1968, all kinds of Marxist, Freudo- Marxist and Sartrian schools, as well as the Frankfurt school, were putting forward their points of view. To understand communications and the media, I read Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. Through Edgar Morin, I discovered systems theory, theories of self-organization and constructivist epistemologies. In the exact sciences, I had immense intellectual respect for the mathematics of Bourbaki. The young field of molecular biology convincingly explained the mechanisms of evolution and the functioning of organisms; I was particularly impressed by the “cybernetic” form that Jacques Monod gave to biology by bringing information theory into the heart of the living cell⁵. Debating with Jacques Monod, Illya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers led me to discover in the Order out of Chaos (1984)⁶ an evolving, complex, indeterminate and self-organizing nature, a thousand miles from a dead mechanism swinging between chance and necessity.

It was with Michel Ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: General Introduction
• Part 1. The Philosophy of Iinformation
• Part 2. Modeling Cognition
• Bibliography
• Index