Our thoughts are fleeting and immaterial, this mysterious stuff that’s locked away in our heads. Painstakingly, we collect our thoughts and transform them into words and documents. This transformation from thought into action is time-consuming and expensive. Thinking is a decidedly “offline” and manual process.
What would happen if you could instead make your thoughts tangible and concrete? What if you could collect your thoughts as readily as you can search online? What if your thoughts could self-organize around your tasks while you’re off doing other things? Thought networking is the idea that’s driving our efforts at Primal Fusion to explore these big questions.
What is Thought Networking?
Thought networks provide a concrete semantic representation of our thoughts, ideas and interests. Encoded as data, our thoughts are accessible to the power of computing. Semantic synthesis provides the means to expand and connect these thoughts in entirely new ways. Equally important, as structured data, thought networks may be used as inputs to software “agents” to automate much of the drudgery of our online experience.
Semantic representation. Semantic technologies are ideally suited to the task of thought networking. To borrow a phrase from Steven Pinker, semantic representations are the “language of thought”. Technically, a thought network is a type of semantic network. It represents thoughts as interconnected concepts. This lattice-like structure is how thoughts are represented as data and made concrete. Ideally, people will remain blissfully unaware of this deep structure as they interact with their thought networks.
Semantic synthesis. Semantic representation is only one aspect of a thought network. We don’t merely form our thoughts, we connect them. The word “thought” signifies a very elemental cognitive unit. We manipulate and compound these primitive structures to form ideas, arguments, and perspectives. Primal Fusion uses a semantic synthesis technology to fuse primitive concepts into these higher order constructs. Synthesis places thoughts in meaningful, task-oriented contexts.
Automation and tasking. This is where thought turns to action. With our thoughts collected and organized, we can put them to work: our thoughts may be collated with content and expressed as documents; they might traverse the Web to find related information; they might interface with social networks to connect like-minded individuals. Organized within semantic networks, thoughts have the power to direct computers on our behalf.
Benefits of Thought Networking
Ultimately, thought networking is intended to provide two main benefits. First, it will enhance our cognition. Our ability to store and recall information is extremely limited. Thought networks can help by expanding the number of thoughts at our disposal and organizing them effectively. This isn’t a comment on our cognitive abilities, any more than a calculator is a comment on our math skills. It’s merely illustrative of the way computing complements thinking.
Secondly, thought networks will save time and effort. Consider how much time you spend collecting and organizing your thoughts. Whether you’re writing a paper for school, planning a trip, or researching a medical condition, thoughts are the necessary precursor to action. If we can migrate some of that arduous process online, we can put computers to the task of simplifying your online experience.
Perhaps the best way to summarize these benefits is by way of an analogy to social networks. In social networks, we put our identity online. Our digital identities live and interact in social networks even when our attention is elsewhere. Other people interact with us virtually while we’re off doing other things. And similarly, we can keep tabs on the people we care about, regardless of barriers of time or geography.
Such are the benefits of thought networking. Once we digitize our thoughts and put them online, our thoughts may interact with the world even when we’re not attending to them. They become both an independent embodiment of our thinking as well as a powerful knowledge asset. Thought networks won’t displace thinking any more than social networks displace our socializing. But they will augment our ability to think and get stuff done.
Does this notion of thought networks seem fanciful? I expect for some it will. But think back five years: how many expected we’d push our socializing onto the network? Wasn’t Wikipedia an outrageous idea, as a collective representation of our knowledge? So while semantic technology provides for better search, better content management, and better data integration, it also provides an opportunity to make our thoughts tangible. In this, thought networking is simply another facet of ourselves – in our digital world.
Thanks to the team at Primal Fusion for their contributions to this post.
[...] the big skinny on Primal Fusion, you have to consult “An Introduction to Thought Networking“, today’s blog post by Peter Sweeney, Founder and [...]
Peter,
Nice post. We should talk and see how we can help Primal Fusion adavance the concept and practice of thought networking
Mills Davis
Hi, Mr.Davis
I am also very interested in this direction. Please
keep me informed. Thanks.
James Yue Gee
great stuff, registered for the beta and waiting…
Peter, the very concept of ‘thought networking’ (re: “What would happen if you could … make your thoughts tangible and concrete?”) is a very powerful ontological claim. Well, really, setting up a company to help people manage their cognitive processes is certainly based on a deep strong vision of the world of ideas that allows to invest one’s time and money into the project.
What a bold step from the ’shadows in the cave’ notion to actually making it tangible for The Consumer!
To me is sounds as if you are saying: OK, this is what our world is made of; let us move inside and deal with that stuff, learn the subtle works of the world of ideas.
At this point those who design the software to make it happen have to make the next step and visualize the mechanics of the semantics in more detail; like
1) what is the minimal cell of meaning?
2) how do those cells connect? (the configuration of the connecting structure)
3) how do they (semantics) relate to the ‘real world objects’ as we usually know them?
I would love to interview the programmers who do that so that to get a feeling of the turning the shadowy stuff into something quite tangible.
There’s much to be enthusiastic about as you “boldly step from the shadows” and launch our sturdy little ontologies onto the existential sea of meaning.
Surely, there are marvellous new worlds to discover, and perhaps you will find some caches of the rarest RDF that will fetch a fortune back in the marketplaces of the consumer’s [made-to-order] web experience.
My note of caution…an old man standing on the solid shores of history and gazing with some envy as you brave adventurers sail forth…is that most of this has been done before.
The search for meaning and its most efficient encoding/transport mechanism is something so fundamental to our peculiar species’ journey as to be a foundational attribute. For the past few million years, we have been doing *little else of note* other than figuring out how to encode and transport our thoughts.
So what’s new about this moment in history?
To my mind, the difference between the semantic web and the cave painting is that we are teetering on the edge of giving birth to an emergent *but non-human* intelligence.
Consider the way we speak of thoughts (memes) as pure objects with rich attributes that allow them to be stored, recalled, linked, and transformed through incredibly long chains of abstractions.
We have built tools that build tools that allow our (?) thought networks to establish meaning in themselves quite apart from the contextualised framework that gave them original life…ie, people. Freed from the messy constraints of carnality, this new intelligence breeds vigorously in the crisp chipset worlds it prefers.
That’s an interesting, and possibly inevitable, evolutionary preoccupation, but make no mistake…these thought networks will be increasingly NON HUMAN.
I am concerned that the semantic web that will be built to run on machines will not serve the ambitions I have as a human. And considering the speed at which we are giving machine systems proxy to our daily experience, that’s not a comforting thought.
Whatever you do, promise that you will consider the inescapable truth of “embodied intelligence”. The marvellous constellations and archipelagos of our thought networks are simply the maps of our intelligences’ meaty encasing.
Creating a thought map in the shape of a motherboard is inviting a transhuman future.
So, dear semantic sailors, please pack a few bags of hardtack humility and be certain of the masters you serve.
John, that was a very poetic piece, I enjoyed the language part of it. I loved it aesthetically probably because most of the undergirding ideas in your post are close to my vision.
To account for what I read:
1. “most of this has been done before”:
I see your point, yet we cannot step twice into the same waters; this new try into ontology of meaning is performed with the idea of using that ‘new world vision’ in a very materialistic way – with a purpose to create a software to automate finding (sorting through) meanings, and may be bear new ones. It looks like you think the same, because you ask:
2. “what’s new about this moment in history?”
your answer is: “we are teetering on the edge of giving birth to an emergent *but non-human* intelligence”, to which I agree.
From that you make the next step and warn us: “the semantic web that will be built to run on machines will not serve the ambitions I have as a human”.
Which sounds similar to the messages sent by Isaac Asimov and the “Matrix” authors.
3. John, your concern is widely shared. Pondering on the problem for awhile yielded in this train of thought:
– our civilization has taken the “techno” route for its development, which involves a new type of dividing the society into castes (strata); a politician, a bureaucrat, an engineer, a manager, a technician, a salesperson, a banker need so much specific knowledges and training, work related skills that it is impossible to be encyclopaedically knowledgeable nowadays.
– what is worse, our current culture assures us that it is not so; more than that: we are sure that the age of the Internet and IT technologies allows more freedom to learn and know more than ever before.
– the new emerging tool – IT related stuff – cannot do nothing wrong; it is rather that humanity does not understand the ways we operate and tend to blame the pen for the text we are writing.
I hope that this project by Primal Fusion – and similar endeavours – of trying to understand how we think will help us find a better way.
The good news is that there is a technology of cracking newly emerging problems, something that involves many high-end experts of diverse fields of knowledge. It will need some funding and will power to go there.
Anyway, my answer to your concern is: let us focus on discovering how our meanings etc emerge within society; it is me (humans) at fault, not the tool I use.
You write very well.
I applaud your answer to Michael. We share the tragic view of how our efforts tend. I am you came back with the fundamental notion that the tragedy does not arise from the tool, but out of our human decay. I would go even further and say that we should assume a transhumanist frame for considering our human definition. Those discussion are taking place and the computational application needs to relate in a substantive way.
I only have a passing knowledge of such organizations.
Since six people got motivated to dialogue here, let me introduce the next step:
– take advantage of the fact that humans are in full control of the means to resolve the problem.
Yes, let us step forward from the fundamental – aka purely theoretical — assertion that “the marvellous constellations and archipelagos of our thought networks are simply the maps of our intelligences’ meaty encasing” to actually come together and do it – it, whatever-the-progarmmers-want-to-accomplish-with-the-web.
Here is the tradegy (or is it the irony?) of the situation:
– at least two people have to work as a team:
1) an expert in filosofy (metafizics, ontology, logics, thinkng tools, history of science), organizational development (facilitation and KM), semantics, human psychology and fiziology, and
2) an expert in IT (Maths of all kinds, all types of software architecture).
3) well, probably we will need a rep from the customer per se: a guy/gal who will actually be the ultimate user of the end product.
Anyway, here is the blueprint:
Guy # 1 brings in a certain set of tools to do the following:
1) organize the mental efforts of the team, guide them into the needed direction;
2) bring to the table all the human related knowledge including the model of the human Mind (knowledge sharing and creating, expertise borrowing, mutual understanding, etc);
3) supply all the necessary thinking tools to guys #2 and #3.
Person # 2 will create whatever s/he will see it necessary to create.
Person # 3 will test the result.
The knowledge and expertise in need is so specific that one person cannot do all the three things.
If you do not agree, you can try to teach me your IT wits in this blog:)
Similarly, I cannot explain to you the works of that mind sharing trick without a series of lectures and seminars.
I am not sure whether the folks who got their diploma in Math will take the words of a linguist seriously. C.P. Snow was damn right in his “The Two Cultures”…
…what a wise book…
In my view-point, this i si somehow related to the area of
“Personal Information Management”, especially “Decentralized Personal Information Management”. How do you guys think about it?
James, please, clarify:
– do you mean that Semantic Web is related to Personal Information Management
or
– Personal Information Management is a technology to solve fuzzy problems to organize team work of experts in non-related fields?
I think Personal Information Management is a very good application of Semantic Web. And Personal Information Management, especially its extension, Group Information Management, can be used to organize team work of experts in related or non-related fields. Thus more communications with Personal Information Management would be helpful.
James, I googled up Personal Information Management (PIM) and find that PIM is rather an ergonomics related technique, while Semantic Web (SW) is about using different languages, markers for the texts that we store on-line.
The difference between the two is, like,
– PIM is about what shall one do about sifting through data and suggests different types of storing for different data (keep your calendars separate from your poems), and iti is for one person only;
– SW is about coding (programming) our texts differently so that anyone might be able to discern calendars from songs.
Did I get it right?
The technique to solve fuzzy problems that I refer to is based on 30 years of research by a huge group of linguists, psychologists, educators, logicians, filosofers, and engineers that ensures that the best solution is found to problems like:
– shutting down a faulty nuclear power station;
– designing the strategy and all the nuances for starting a new city;
– ecological problems (like saving the Baikal lake);
– developing a market strategy/policy for new commodities.
I have a feeling that PIM is similar to SW in a very generic sense, but eventually they address different problems. Does this seem correct to you?
Michael, I agree with you. As I said, PIM is a very good application of SW. I think SW is dealing with more general problems, while PIM is dealing with more specific problems. Furthermore, PIM is a very good base to build up thought networks for individuals and groups. Along with the technological development, PIM can also deal with text, not just data. So its application scope will be much more broad.
Michael, may I have your email address? So I can email you more info about PIM. Thanks.
James Yue Gee
Sure, James: it is mchumakin@list.ru.
Very often it makes more sense to talk eye-to-eye.
I spent many years working on various mind theories and conducting research on how actually our mind — or consciousness — or pure reason works.
After that everything related to mind is seen in a bit different perspective.
Amazingly, IT folks invaded this mind related topics without knowledge of what has been done there before.
If we were able to feed them those previous knowledges it might save tons of time and effort.
Thank you so much. I will contact with you.
James