Cognition Is (and isn't):

What is really going on in cognition, thinking, intelligence, processing?

At base cognition is two things:

1. Physical storage of an abstraction

2. Processing across that abstraction

Key to an understanding of cognition of any kind is persistence. An abstraction must be physical and it must be stable. In this case, stability means, at minimum, the structural resistance necessary to allow processing without that processing undoly changing the data's original order or structural layout.

The causal constraints and limits of both systems, abstraction and processing, must work such that neither prohibits or destroys the other.

Riding on top of this abstraction storage/processing dance is the necessity of a cognition system to be energy agnostic with regard to syntactic mapping. This means that it shouldn't take more energy to store and process the string "I ate my lunch" than it takes to store and process the string, "I ate my house".

Syntactic mapping (abstraction storage) and walking those maps (abstraction processing) must be energy agnostic. The abstraction space must be topologically flat with respect to the energy necessary to both store and process.

Thermodynamically, such a system, allows maximum variability and novelty at minimum cost.

What if's… playing out, at a safe distance, simulations, virtualizations of events and situations which would, in actuality, result in huge and direct consequences, is the great advantage of any abstraction system. A powerful cognition system is one that can propagate endless variations on a theme, and do so at low energy cost.

And yet. And yet… syntactical topological flatness carries its own obvious disadvantages. If it takes no more energy to write and read "I ate my house" than it does to write or process the statement, "I ate my lunch", how does one go about measure validity in an abstraction? How does one store and process the very necessary topological inequality that leads to semantic landscapes… to causal distinction?

The flexibility necessary in an optimal syntactic system, topological flatness, works against the validity mapping that makes semantics topologically rugged, that gives an abstraction syntactic fidelity.

This problem is solved by biology, by mind, though learning. Learning is a physical process. As such it is sensitive to the direction of time. Learning is growth. Growth is directional. Growth is additive. Learning takes aggregate structures from any present and builds super-aggragate structures that can be further aggregated in the next moment.

I will go so far as suggesting that definitions of both evolution and complexity are hinged on the some metric of a system to physically abstract salient aspects of the environment in which it is situated. This abstraction might be as complex as experience stored as memory in mind, and it may be as simple as a shape that maximizes (or minimizes) surface area.

A growth system is a system that can not help but to be organized ontologically. A system that is laid up through time is a system that reflects the hierarchy of influence from which its environment is organized. Think of it this way, the strongest forces effecting an environment will overwhelm and wipe out structures based on less energetic forces. Cosmological evolution provides an easy to understand example. The heat and pressure right after the big bang only allow aggregates based on the most powerful forces. Quarks form first, this lowers the temperature and pressure enough for sub atomic particles, then atoms. Once the heat and pressure is low enough, once the environmental energy is less than the relatively weak electrical bonds of chemistry, molecules can precipitate from the atomic soup. The point is that evolved systems (all systems) are morphological ontologies that accurately abstract the energy histories of the environments from which they evolved. The layered grammars that define the shape and structure (and behavior) of any molecule, reflect the energy epochs from which they were formed. This is learning. It is exactly the same phenomenon that produces any abstraction and processing system. Mind and molecule, at least with regard to structure (data) and processing (environment), are the result of identical process, and as a result, will (statistically) represent the energy ontology that is the environment from which they were formed.

It is for this reason that the ontological structure of any growth system is always and necessarily organized semantically. Regardless of domain, if a system grew into existence, an observer can assume overwhelming semantic relevance that differentiates those things that appeared earlier (causally more energetic) from those things that appeared later (causally less energetic).

This is true of all systems. All systems exhibit semantic contingency as a result of growth. Cognition system's included (but not special). The mind (a mind, any mind), is an evolving system. Intelligence evolves over the life span of an individual in the same way that the proclivity towards intelligence evolves over the life-span of the species (or deeper). Evolving systems can not be expressed as equation. If they could, evolution wouldn't be necessary, wouldn't happen. Math-obsessed people have a tendency to confuse the feeling of the concept of pure abstraction with the causal reality of processing (that allows them to experience this confusion).

Just as important, data is only intelligible, (process-able, representative, model, abstraction) if it is made of parts in a specific and stable arrangement to one another. The zeroith law of computation is that information or data or abstraction must be made of physical parts. The crazies who advocate a "pure math" form of mind or information simply sidestep this most important aspect of information. This is why quantum computing is in reality something completely different than the information-as-ether inclination of the duelists and metaphysics nuts. Where it may indeed be true that the universe (any universe) has to, by principle, be describable, abstract-able by self consistent system of logic, that is not the same what's so ever as the claim that the universe IS (purely and only) math.

Logic is an abstraction. As such it needs a physical realm in which to hold its concepts as parts in steady and constant and particular relation to each-other.

My guess is that we confuse the FEELING of math as ethereal and non-corporal pure-concept with the reality which of course necessitates both a physical REPRESENTATION (in neural memory or on paper or chip or disc) and a set of physical PROCESSING MACHINERY to crawl it and perform transforms on it.

What feels like "pure math" only FEELS like anything because of the physicality that is our brains as copular machinery as they represent and process a very physical entity that IS logic.

We make this mistake all day long. When the only access to reality we have is through our abstraction mechanism, we begin to confuse the theater that is processing with that which is being processed and ultimately with that which that which is being processed represents.

Some of the things the mind (any mind) processes are abstractions, stand-ins for other external objects and processes. Other things the mind processes only and ever exist in the mind. But that doesn't make them any less physical. Alfred Korzybski is famous for declaring truthfully, "The map is not the territory!" But this statement is not logically similar to the false declaration, "The map is not territory!". Abstractions are always and only physical things. The physics of a map, an abstraction system, a language, a grammar, is rarely the same as the physics of the things that map is meant to represent, but the map always obeys and is consistent with some set of physical causal forces and structures built of them.

What one can say is that abstraction systems are either lossy or they aren't useful as abstraction systems. The point of an abstraction is flexibility and processing efficiency. A map of a mountain range could be built out of rocks and made larger than the original it represents. But that would very much defeat the purpose. On the other hand, one is advised to understand that the tradeoff of the flexibility of an effective map is that a great deal of detail has been excluded.

Yet, again and again, we ourselves, as abstraction machines, confuse the all too important difference between representation and what is represented.

Until we get clear on this, any and all attempts at merely squaring up against the problem of machine intelligence will fail.

[more later…]

Randall Reetz

If It Doesn't Scale, It Isn't A Solution

[note: this post is a work in progress]

You've met the private school freaks. They can't believe anyone would put their kids in a public school. What with all of the riffraff, the minority students, the dropout rates, the low performance on standardized tests, the poor state of school grounds and facilities, the struggle for funding for special programs like music, art, and sports, the lack of emphasis on college preparation, etc. Man, look at that list! Those are some strong and obvious arguments against public school education. Or are they?

What people who advocate private or limited solutions fail to calculate is what I call the "boutique effect". If for instance, there isn't enough money in a culture to give everyone a rich and safe childhood and education, it is absolutely expectable that those who are given those resources will excel (at least when compared to the scores of the less fortunate masses).

However, there is a real societal cost to exceptionality, and this goes to my "solutions that don't scale" thesis. With regard to exclusive schools for the rich, that cost has to do with the fact that the parents of rich kids just happen also to be the people with the most political and economic influence. When their kids are not part of the public education system, neither is their protective passion, experience, knowledge… or influence. They don't care about public education. Why should they? Their kids are not dependent upon it.

From another angle, when money goes to elite institutions, it is not being put where it is needed the most. Rich kids already live in information-ally rich environments. Rich kids are already live in safe and calm environments where learning works. Rich kids are much more likely to have direct access to positive role models… their environment is chock full of success stories. Rich kids are not as likely to live in families broken apart by drugs and prison terms and gang deaths and violence and people struggling with a second language or a culture that is not in step with the larger population. Rich kids have educated parents around them who can help them with their homework! Rich kids can afford to think about learning and succeeding, their world is devoid of the concentration-destroying stresses that poor kids deal with all day long.

And the whole reason people can get richer in this country than they can anywhere else, is because our population is more competitive (or used to be) than every other country. Why? Because we did this obscenely radical thing 150 years ago, we decided that everyone had a right to a publicly funded education! Educated people build factories and high tech energy delivery systems, they build transportation systems and are more likely to participate in advancements and the types of change that increase productivity. Productivity is the key. If you can get more value, more product, out of the average hour worked by your population, you can produce more wealth. Education is the radical difference that gave America its high per/hour, per/person productivity, it is why the rich are rich and why they can afford to borrow from the equity that is american productive wealth, even though that borrowing actually destroys wealth on a national scale in the process.

But these are not factors that have anything to do with a valid comparison of private education vs. public education. These are strictly socio-economic factors. The problem is when desperate parents look at the performance divide that exists between public and private schools and concludes that public schools should do exactly what private schools do. Private schools could be significantly worse than public schools and still produce higher test scores, more college acceptances, fewer drop outs, and lower crime rates. All of the intangibles work in their favor. In fact, it is often true that private schools employ teachers with less education and training than their public school counterparts.

Private school programs tend to spend less time on basic subjects (math, reading, etc.) and get better results! That is why they can spend a higher percentage of their student's time on extra-curricular activities (music, art, sports, theater, community projects, etc.). Obviously, if a public school would fail if it decided that it should therefore shorten the instructional time devoted to math and reading. Private exclusive schooling is not a solution that scales. It is obvious that it is a solution that only works for a very small percentage of the population of a society, and that it works only at the expense of the whole country as a whole. There are lots of examples out there of countries with very good exclusive education systems and very very very poor economies embedded within extremely unstable social chaos dominated by poverty. Most central African nations play this game, Myanmar, The United Arab Emeritus, South Africa (before apartheid was upended), Iran, North Korea, Brunei, etc, etc, etc. Exclusivity is the norm in the poorest nations on Earth. If exclusivity worked, these would be the most productive nations.

Lets look at China. Until recently, from a strictly financial perspective, China has done all of wrong things, it has restricted entrepreneurship, it has restricted credit, it has promoted an exclusively top-down decision and influence structure… everything that works against the kinds of fluid business environment that are attributable to a growing and healthy post industrial economy. And yet… and yet, despite all of these huge shortcomings and mistakes, China succeeds like no other country. Why, because it has spent an inordinate percentage of its wealth on its public education system. China's people are well educated by any global standards. Not some of its people. Not the exclusive elite. Everyone. And given China's huge population, that is a lot of educated people to compete en-mass with the rest of the world. When they finally turn the last capitalist stone, when they finally create a legal structure to support personal liberty, property ownership, and unfettered personal expression, watch out! Even without these capitalist standards, China reaps such benefits from its non-exclusive infrastructural investments. Meanwhile, those of us in the west have all but forgotten which factors really matter, and which, in comparison, are just fluff.

But, if you happen to live in a nation that has paid attention to productivity, has produced wealth as a result of a fair and solid infrastructure (transportation, energy, safety, medicine, credit, agriculture, justice, and education… for everyone!), you can play the exclusive game in limited numbers, even though it destroys wealth on a national scale.

Now let's switch gears. Inoculation. How did inoculation get to be such hotbed of superstitious thought? Inoculations have been blamed for hyper-activity, for cancer, for Asperger, and MS, for Attention Deficit Disorder, even for AIDS, etc. What inoculations are never blamed for is the one thing they are most definitely and unequivocally guilty of… preventing pandemic spread of disease! But inoculation programs only work when a certain minimum threshold of the population participate. Each vaccine (/disease combination) has its own special number… correlating to a specific minimum percentage of the population that must be inoculated. If a smaller slice of the population are given the vaccine, an outbreak is certain. When a parent makes the decision not to get their kid vaccinated, what they are really doing is passing the responsibility and risk (if there is any) to the kids who do get vaccinated. They reap the rewords but pay none of the price!

This is a great example of a solution that doesn't scale. While the vast majority of parents accept the shared responsibility a few parents can get by without inoculating their kids. It is a solution. But it isn't a solution that scales. Obviously, it doesn't work if everyone chooses this solution. It doesn't even work if more than a few choose not to inoculate. This type of solution only works because others are not choosing to shirk their share of the responsibility (and risk). In fact, if more and more people choose the non-solution option, there will become a point where everyone will suffer, even those who did take the vaccine. Most of these vaccines only work when the exposure to the pathogen is very low level. If a pandemic took hold, and if many people got really sick, high concentrations of the pathogen could overwhelm the immune resistance afforded through inoculations.

Any of this remind you of the "libertarian" platform? It should. The libertarian program is the very definition of a solution that doesn't scale.

[more to come…]

Randall Reetz