Philoinformatics Manifesto

I wrote this draft philoinformatics "manifesto" in April and have been meaning to polish it up and post it.

Yeah... it's July now.

I still intend to clean it up, but I decided to post my draft, as is, just to get it out there for now. Call it the beta version... actually more like alpha. All comments very welcome at this point.

Philoinformatics is a scientific, philosophical, and most of all an engineering discipline with the single goal of radically enhancing philosophy using information systems. If you're thinking about Artificial Intelligence that does philosophy for us then you've got the wrong (but awesome) idea. I'm talking about philosophy being done by people, but being done better, with the whole philosophical process being enhanced from end to end with helpful software made possible by underlying information systems.

We all need to recognize that philosophy as a discipline is devastatingly problematic and requires new life. Philosophy is known to lack proper resolution to patently philosophical problems and is fraught with pervasive disagreement among its experts, among other major problems. Just consider the thousands of man-years of thought put into the Free Will and Determinism topic, for example. Many philosophers do recognize that these and other problems exist and even usually spend some time thinking about them and/or joking about them, but also essentially practice a kind of denial about there existence. Maybe it's because doing philosophy still feels important and individual philosophers are making personal progress in the sense that they are acquiring and refining their own philosophical concepts. Philosophy is a slow and difficult process and philosophers are wasting the vast majority of their time doing what I believe they themselves would agree is a waste of their time if they only had a better way to view the actual landscape of philosophy; the landscape of the content of philosophy.

Despite this heavily pessimistic view of philosophy, I am not advocating for Skeptical Metaphilosophy, the view that philosophy does not have intrinsic value. I also, of course, don't claim to be able to reliably recognize when I or anyone else is specifically wasting their time doing philosophy. What I am advocating is that we build the systems required to show whether there is, where there is, and when there is valuable philosophy to be done. After thousands of years of philosophers spinning their wheels on philosophical problems, I think it's fair to suggest that some focus needs to be put into novel methods for making discipline-wide progress. For those that are able, instead of spending time refining one's own philosophical positions and attempting to make personal philosophical progress, I advocate putting some work into progress for the discipline as a whole.

Speaking of traction, actually imagine a wheel spinning on a road. The wheel spinning is the effort of philosophers and the forward motion is the progress of philosophy. If philosophy isn't making progress because of the nature of the content of philosophy (e.g. "words on holiday" or some other confusion) then that means our wheel is slippery, the problem is intrinsic. If instead philosophy isn't making progress because of the way philosophy is done or the current environment of philosophy (e.g. pervasive repetition of ideas or high barrier to entry for publishing or unknown status of philosophical positions) then that means our road is to slippery, the problem is extrinsic. For progress we need traction, for traction we need both the wheel and the road to have grip. Skeptical Metaphilosophy is the view that our wheel can't be made grippy. Naturalism could be construed as the view that scientifically supported positions are are the only grippy parts of the wheel. Both are about the wheel, philosophy itself. Philoinformatics is an attempt to give the road grip. Set up an environment where philosophy can make all the traction it possibly can. Of course, the wheel could be incurably slippery and giving the road grip won't help, but at least now you know where the grip is missing. In other words, Philoinformatics at bare minimum can provide evidence for or against Skeptical Metaphilosophy.

Philoinformatics is an attempt to face the problems of philosophy head on by building mechanisms for helping people understanding the actual landscape of philosophy. Actually, I intend Philoinformatics to be more general than what I've been advocating. Here's the more general form:

  1) Identify Symptoms
  2) Identify underlying qualities giving rise to the symptoms
  3) Design Systems to modify that quality of philosophy
  4) Develop the Systems

As simple as these steps may sound, all four of these steps are quite difficult. You might also notice that despite what I started out saying, Philoinformatics doesn't necessarily need to radically enhance philosophy. Any enhancement will do and would count as work in philoinformatics. But I stand by the "radically" part of the goal because I think philosophy requires radical enhancement and I hope philoinformatics is an avenue for getting us there.

Philoinformatics

I've gone ahead and impulsively bought philoinformatics.com on a surge of possibly-too-much-coffee and currently just have this blog as the main and only page. I renamed the blog to match, at least for now, and intend to keep the blog rolling probably under philoinformatics.com/blog when I get a main page set up. I'm planning on doing some writing for at least the next month or so in order to put together an enticing philoinformatics manifesto/vision (edit: draft) that will hopefully inspire a small community into forming around the idea of enhancing philosophy by building new software. Stay tuned!

Conceptual Space Markup Language (CSML)

I've recently come across a great paper by Benjamin Adams and Martin Raubal called Conceptual Space Markup Language (CSML): Towards the Cognitive Semantic Web. I found their paper interesting on many levels because it lies at the nexus of many rather diverse topics that I’m interested in. CSML directly involves Computational Geometry and the Semantic Web, but indirectly involves the philosophy of meaning, mind, and color. Also, as it grows in popularity, I believe force-based organizational algorithms and neural networks will become a heavily used mechanism for generating and using CSML data. Basically, CSML takes Conceptual Spaces, which are already at an interesting intersection of multiple mind sciences and multiple strands of philosophy, and connects it with multiple threads of engineering and informatics.

Wait.
What are Conceptual Spaces?

Conceptual Spaces are multidimensional spaces made up of quality dimensions. Quality dimensions are basically just any property you can think of that has a (pseudo-) continuous range of values. Think: size, mass, brightness, beauty, craziness, unicornity or anything else that you think you can make sense of on some sort of numerical range. You can now consider points and (convex) shapes within your set of quality dimensions, which will correspond to concepts. Consider the classic-cool-colour-cone example to the lower right. That’s a representation of a conceptual space with quality dimensions of hue, value, and saturation. 

But this isn’t just a fancy mathematical model. Structures like this are in some sense actually “held” by neurons in your brain. You may have heard people talk about "levels of reality" (or "levels of description of reality") such as the physical level, biological level, psychological level, sociological level, etc. Well, the idea is that when you look into the brain, which is (of course) very complex, you can look at it "at different levels" (presumably of granularity in this case). Conceptual Spaces are one of those lesser-known but very useful levels between the neuronal level and the psychological level (and below the symbolic level if you think there is one). Other people have much more comprehensive and informative explanations that I’m not going to try to repeat here. If you’re interested in the multitude of potential philosophical implications check out Paul Chruchland’s State-Space Semantics and Meaning Holism. (He’s also got some good stuff to say about colors outside of the classic-cool-color-cone here.)

CSML describes Conceptual Spaces

CSML, the Conceptual Space Markup Language, is an XML serialization of conceptual spaces. CSML brings a whole new engineering dimension to conceptual spaces which fits into the realm of Semantic Web technologies and is actually analogous to OWL, but with radically different implications. In my previous post, which was actually written in June 2008, I dreamed of a “smooth semantic web” that didn’t always require rigid categorization. CSML looks like a better candidate to handle that kind of data. CSML is specifically designed to handle context-dependent meaning and (relative) similarity of concepts, which are both difficult to handle in OWL. (How would you represent a large squirrel and a tiny planet consistently? What about brightness, beauty, craziness, and unicorniness?) After trying to use a few units ontologies for measurement data (at iCAPTURE for Mark Wilkinson) I also have high hopes that CSML can help simplify the problems on that front.

The most exciting part for me is that conceptual spaces lend themselves to fancy techniques for being automatically generated by way of artificial neural networks and force-based organizational algorithms, which brings in a few more of the theoretical engineering topics I’ve been interested in over the years. Starting with similarity data, force-based (or tension reduction) algorithms could help identify quality dimensions. Neural networks can nicely use quality dimension coordinates as input and also learn to precisely place items into conceptual spaces. I can’t wait to see the tools that will be created to allow for generating, reasoning over, and visualizing CSML data and how they will integrate with existing semantic web technologies and machine learning techniques.

Towards a Smooth Semantic Web

This is an almost complete draft I wrote almost 2 years ago. I thought I should publish it because it is basically complete, and because my next post will be about the new language and technologies that will make the "smooth semantic web"  a reality. And for the record, 'smooth semantic web' was a provisional name to be changed before publishing.
Here it is:

The Semantic Web is slowly building up and will eventually grow to a critical mass where it will become useful. How useful is another question. Will it revolutionize the web? Web 3.0? Maybe. Maybe not. But it will definitely have a use and an effect. The current standards such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, and SKOS are good, and still have a ton of potential that is growing exponentially as we speak. But these standards are not enough. OWL and SKOS can only capture so much knowledge. They can capture crystalized categorizations of well defined concepts. But much, if not the vast majority, of knowledge is not found in strict categorization and necessary relationships. So what is missing?

People have made attempts to extend OWL in a few different ways to make it cover a wider range of statable knowledge. People have looked into adding probability, non-monotonicty (time), belief. I propose a different addition which, if adopted, would add a prior layer to OWL, just as the above attempts do.

Consider a music ontology. OWL can support certain relationships such as: Rock ISA Genre, Track isPublishedOn CD, etc. But the certain pieces of knowledge cannot be represented because they haven't been crystallized to the point of being definable, especially when you consider the categorization of instances. Imagine the daunting task of deciding whether certain border line songs count as belonging to a specific genre. But consider the task (still daunting, but not as much) of deciding whether a song is "better classified as Rock than Rap" for instance. It may be difficult to say that a song is Rock, or is Rap, but it may be clear which one it is closer to. Much more can be said.

Notice that we are not talking about probabilities here. It isn't semantically correct to say that a song is "more likely" categorized as Rock than Rap. We are saying that if we were to categorize it as either Rock or Rap, it would be better categorized as Rock than Rap.

You may be wondering what the criterion for "better" is or should be. This itself should be represented within a knowledgebase.

So how would we use this knowledge? SWRL and SPARQL can only handle deductive reasoning, so they won't help. There are two options, the way I see it. Take my smooth knowledge and use some kind of classifying step to derive a regular rigid knowledgebase. The other option is to invent smooth reasoners. I think vector space representations and abduction would be important for this step.