In part 1, I offered some context and my definition of ’semantics’ as being the system of relationships that are important or significant to people and which are symptomatic of human experience. In this part, I will flush out what this means.
Though most people may be familiar with that famous quote: I think, therefore I am, from the chapter Discourse on Method in Rene Descartes’ philosophical classic, he changed his mind later in his life. Looking at later works of his, we can find that he really was not looking for truth through the lens of reason or inference. He was looking for a certainty so clear on its face that it is self-evident.
“So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.” –from: Meditations of First Philosophy (from Wikipedia entry Cogito Ergo Sum ).
This kind of certainty grounds us or anchors us in reality. It is only a small step to go from I am, I exist to I am, I physically exist– the body being self-evident. It makes sense and seems quite reasonable that if a computational model is to formulate an outlook similar to the human perspective it must reckon with the conditions imposed on the physical being. Being primarily a body positioned in space, is a condition most certain of being human.
An ontology of the human condition begins by addressing the conditions of being human that are symptomatic of the physical state of existence of the human being. For this we can leave all philosophy, linguistics and psychology behind for the time being. I can describe my physical existence in simple first-person terms. The description is simple and characteristic of people I know.
I have weight and mass and I exist in a three-dimensional space. Most human beings have a body with a head, neck and torso and limbs. I have two arms with hands and two legs with feet, this is considered normal for a human. I have a front and a rear. I have a left side and a right side. I have a face on the front side of my head, an ear on each side and only hair on the back of my head. Usually, I am sitting or standing vertically with my feet on the ground beneath me and the sky overhead. All of this is self-evident.
Moreover, I have power and I can control myself. I can move my eyes to see at wide angles. I can move my limbs and my entire body through space within limits. I can only move in one direction at a time, for example
I have the power to exert a physical influence in the space surrounding my body. I can reach out in front or to the side within limits. I can grasp things, pull them to me or push them or throw them away.
Given that description of physically being human, let’s consider the semantic elements of human experience from this perspective. These are none other than the several elements of our human experience that are symptoms, or characteristic signs, of individual physical existence.
Remember, we are looking for universal semantic elements. These will not be a part of us, like our faculties or our eyes or opposing thumbs. They must be so indispensable that if we were without these elements we could not exist. These elements will be part of the natural state or condition of being human. It should be something that most certainly affects our ways or has the power to influence our perspective. In my view, there should be two sets of universal semantic elements.
The first of these semantic elements stems from our body-centered horizontal and vertical reference in three-dimensional space (four- if you count time as a dimension). This quality is not unique to human beings though it is universal property of the existence and experience of human beings. The significant fact here is that by being a point or center of reference, one’s orientation in space influences one’s view and perspective. Orientation affects every person, i.e., it is symptomatic of anybody and it is important to physical and psychological and interpersonal relationships.
The second of these semantic elements is might. Being out-of-control, or even experiencing a loss of control can be one of the most dreadful experiences for anyone. Control is very significant to people. People go after and forcefully exercise control. They get control or take control and hold on to control. Personal power is symptomatic of anybody.
Again, though it is not unique, it is a universal property of the experience of being human. Having the power control our limbs, to stand upright, to move, is important to everyone. For most people self-control is necessary for the purpose of meeting personal goals, and controlling their relationships to situations as well as their relationships with others. Once again, all of this is self-evident.
So we can conclude that there are at least two sets of semantic elements that are symptomatic or characteristic signs of the human condition and all the things and events that make up the human experience: One set of elements pertains to power and control (over life and limb) and the other set pertains to body-centered orientation in a physical space as well as a psychological space. While these may be self-evident properties, they have never been formalized into a computational model by other scientists working in the field.
What is not self-evident is the ways thinking processes seem to be interrelated with movement of the body and parts of the body. Thinking processes seem to be related to stages and processes involved in motion and movement. Not many scientists investigating the mind, language and human psychology would endorse this view. One need only peruse the Wikipedia entries for linguistics, cognitive science, human psychology, studies of mind to see what I mean. Not that it matters much, when engineers get together and talk about methods and procedures, best practices and the development of standards, they tend to stick to more concrete science.
Computational engineering is an engineering discipline and so when we started, we were looking for concrete grounds that neither linguists nor philosophers could deliver. We were not looking for the foundation of interpersonal relations between people, though we were looking for abstract relations within human expressions in a natural language. We were looking for certainty and an anchor even though we did not know what it looked like. This required the faith that we would know it when we found it and it took years of dedication and hard work to turn it into an semantic search and information filtering system for computers.
When Tom Adi began his scientific investigation into natural languages he was determined to search for natural laws instead of relying on linguistics or philosophy or any social science. The original scientific study that led Tom to produce his semantic theory was recently published in the book Semiotics and Intelligent Systems Development. The natural laws Tom was looking for were needed to satisfy his original premise that the elements and relations of natural languages correspond with the elements and relations of other natural systems at all times.
As I demonstrated above, the notions of Orientation and Control can be abstracted directly from human nature. They abstractly name universal properties of a natural, physical and human system of relationships. They correspond to the idea of polarity in language and to the strata of power and control enumerated in Adi’s theory of semantics. So the result is that we have something very solid, a concrete basis, for enlisting computational assistance in the interpretation of perceptions and intelligence and interpersonal understanding.
I will get into specific examples in the next part though it should not be difficult to recognize these semantic elements as the basis for the way we see and perceive the world. They also influence the actions we take and the interactions we cause to take place. For those that cannot wait, there is a formalization of this framework we call the “semantic matrix” that we have been using since 1986. The semantic matrix formalizes these elements according to their phonetic correspondents and the linked paper is a good introduction into some of the mathematical aspects of Tom Adi’s semantic theory.
Understanding humans and human events, society and culture, is about understanding their semantic elements and their relationships to the symphony of life and survival in an unforgiving and non-subjective world. The motivation for searching for certainty and universal elements of human relationships are the benefits afforded by finding harmony, simplicity and clarity in one’s understanding.
Universal properties are common tools in mathematical, i.e., computational, algorithms. By understanding their abstract properties, one obtains information about any constructions and can avoid repeating the same analysis for each individual instance. Readware technology applies this concrete foundation in its indexing and search algorithms.
When we began writing our first search engine, in 1985, we were breaking new ground in information science. For the first time, we would index text not by keywords but by abstract concepts corresponding to the way we naturally interpret the world. By fixing the boundaries of the information to the space enveloped by relations framed by orientation and control and by mapping syntactic elements from text in corresponding ways, we predicated we could map queries onto text and classify documents with more relevance than other methods.
I cannot say that I knew the exact correspondence then, as I feel do now, though I could see how it would affect relevance because it better related to the human condition. We tested Readware’s capability for achieving relevance in independently judged recall and retrieval exercises. We also tested Readware for commercial endeavors and we have worked on several commercial ventures with big and small companies.
One of these, commercial ventures had us working on RSS news feeds while we hosted Feedster’s service for a short while. I wrote about this experience in an earlier post. Internet statistics show that Readware had a substantial impact on page views and reach for Feedster. Like all business ventures, this one was subject to forces that had little to do with technology and technology alone was not able to save it.
In the third and final part, I will present additional references and depending on the disciplines of those following this article, I will add some additional and anecdotal information. As usual, I would like to hear what you think. While you are welcome to email me your comments, you can leave your comments for everyone to see by clicking on comments at the top of the page.
