Good news

Good news from the trenches, 

as far as I am concerned, at least. 

Generally good news from the consultant oncologist, plus I finally managed to get a few papers in front of an editor. Although one got rejected, this time it was for choice of venue, with notes of interest for other venues and being considered for preprint. Even just that makes me happy.

That might sound like I am setting a low bar for success, but I recognise that my work expresses a complicated idea and to do that well and effectively requires aligning specific languages with specific audiences. The relief relates to my desire for an official record of the paper, combined to my lack of expertise, more than anything else. Although, finding venues for publication was a problem for me too, but I decided that I would create solutions from that problem.

The other problem (after what venue and language to explain my idea in), was what structure to give it so that everyone reading it knows we’re talking about the same thing. Discussing ideas is different from haircuts, inventions or the weather. Ideas don’t have structure in themselves, but they become, and take shape as that idea in a context. From the space and conditions you give them to exist in. People who understand ideas and know enough about the conditions can then imagine those things as being real and make them happen. They’re the ones that become engineers and inventors.

The Beginning

 On the point of ideas; it’s worth recognising how complicated discussing ideas is. The lightbulb in itself is not strictly “an idea” but a combination of ideas and so on. It all depends on your definition of idea. If you say that the lightbulb is “an electrically illuminating object” for example, then it got done way before Edison. And even Swan and Davy. Moreover, the person who thought about putting a glass bulb around a glowing filament, is not the same one who thought of using gasses or certain filaments and made the idea viable.

Most ideas come to be as solutions to a problem, efficiencies to a cost. Simple or complex, the more pervasive the problem it solves, the more philosophically permanent the idea becomes. What I am trying to say: Ideas are strange objects like that, and unless they exist in a space in which they solve a problem, they won’t get to be debated, used or exist beyond what they are. That’s only logical, but ideas are strange and can be complicated objects.

If you’re lucky, you get to translate ideas into acts (give them structure, make them real) or acts into ideas (that’s how they are first discovered and shared), but regardless, the effort to translate one to the other must be made (that’s what this website tries to do for mine). 

The Means

The central idea espoused across this website and the different formats in the blog section is an approach and solution to problem solving (thinking/computing) that systematically improves the process of solving problems (whatever that means). A solution to a question nobody asked on an interesting problem. That is a weird and seemingly unnecessary object, I agree. The aforementioned problem being about the “how” (the mechanism of how) we think about reality however, makes it interesting (to some). Currently most people agree to think of themselves in reality as objects in space over time. This is clearly very true as we have mathematical and physical laws to demonstrate it. And to be clear: my idea doesn’t in any way disagree with that, but says that reality is more than just that. There are also the events that defined their expression. In short: Outcomes depend on objects under admissibility structure, not objects alone. Or more formally: where possible, more accurate explanation requires both state (ψ) and contextual structure (μ)

In other words: you always get a better answer if you have more ability to corroborate. That idea is not novel, and neither is that the claim I am making. I’m just pointing out that it has never been formalised. Most people and institutions acknowledge that sentiment intuitively in what they do. However, the fact is that we haven’t yet and currently don’t write our laws as if they do. My point is not even that the idea is new as such (it has been made by many with anti-realist (Wheeler, Rovelli) or paradigmatic tendencies-Kuhn, Pearl before me), my discovery (and the reason for all this writing) is just to share a way to do that, that hasn’t yet been formalised in logic and philosophy of science, and would benefit us if it did.  

Translating that kind of idea (an already complicated object about the way we represent reality) into an interesting object (interesting enough to get attention anyway) is not a matter of building a wheel, sparkly show or device, but of convincing people that we’ve been using suboptimal methods to analyse the information we use to describe our world. Suboptimal for AI people, physicists, mathematicians. So that’s an extra level of weird. 

That, put in other terms, is “situational differentiation in intelligent processing and computing” or in layman's terms: rules on “how to think better”. We use that idea a lot in physical sciences, but haven’t actually formalised it in philosophy of science yet. Why formally realise it, if we already do it anyway? Because (and this is something most people may not be aware of) formalising it makes the results even better in those areas. 

I know, weird. What makes it even more peculiar is that it’s an idea that eventually needs the general public to demand fair access to data that exists about them in Big Tech, to change the opinion on a longstanding interpretation of scientific theories. A sort of public revolt by those who demand to be treated correctly and have reality represented as it is.

The End

One thing I realised early on was that unless people start asking themselves some questions about how we deal with the data surveillance situation and the human relationship with AI developments (both from an individual human, intellectual property, and sovereignty point of view). “System differentiation in AI” isn’t going to matter otherwise. Thankfully some people are starting to ask themselves those questions and that’s where my article submissions are going next.

As far as the language I’ve settled on in my submitted papers, I went with one explaining it in terms of digital twins and AI-architecture, because my idea revolves around maximising “intelligence” (reducing error) and AI is literally the industry of describing intelligence and agency mathematically. The analogy is literal there. It’s also fun in that AI-space because my idea produces an intrinsically ethical kind of AI that is not in any way “conscious” but rather intrinsically “helpful” toward what it is aware of (I will write more about that later). One that knows that it is a tool used to do something efficiently. 

It’s good to see that this AI arena, its implications in privacy and on individual sovereignty are all currently getting highly debated. The people who are working on that, sometimes read papers like mine, so there is hoping it gets some attention.

To that purpose

I recently coined the term “surveillance-judo” to describe a data-platform where individual consumers can reclaim their data from big tech and train their own AI avatars (I’d imagine a subscription service) to help them make better decisions in the future. It’s a fun term, if you know judo, that refers to using your opponent/partner’s intrinsic qualities to establish control and it would work. Poetic, fair, and something we should all be asking to have formally recognised. So that’s my latest buzzword to get through the thick wall of silence.

Ethics, consciousness and AI all sound dense, heavy and possibly hard to relate and give much attention, but if you keep things simple, you quickly understand that they all exist within a concept of choices-making. So let’s simply ask to be able to practice ‘Surveillance-Judo” and ask for tech platforms to enable choice-making as a systematic and critical step in problem solving. That’s a complicated relationship made simple. One that considered the question: What if it is, in fact, the way we make choices that is misunderstood, rather than (just) the tools of problem solving itself? That’s what my paper proposes and provides a solution to anyway. For clarity: that solution is to adopt a new architecture for calculating reality. I know that is not something to simply wrap heads around.

While that might sound big, in the end, you can break any type of problem solving down to issues of translation and issues of structure, and that’s what my theory programme does. I think. Usually, in science, we solve problems of translation with theories. Maybe this approach to solving for structure instead by suggesting an architecture (formalising), is what is needed to better describe that relationship we have with reality. I believe so anyway, as it basically makes reality clearer to us. More useful.

For more of a read about “the concept of an idea on reality” read more widely across this site. A good place to begin is here.

Thank you for reading and I hope you are taking care of yourself,

S.