The Semantic Sphere 1

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence.

Acknowledgements xv Chapter 1. General Introduction 1 1.1. The vision: to enhance cognitive processes 2 1.2. A transdisciplinary intellectual adventure 5 1.3. The result: toward hypercortical cognition 27 1.4. General plan of this book 35 PART 1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION 37 Chapter 2. The Nature of Information 41 2.1. Orientation 41 2.2. The information paradigm 45 2.3. Layers of encoding 56 2.4. Evolution in information nature 66 2.5. The unity of nature 69 Chapter 3. Symbolic Cognition 75 3.1. Delimitation of the field of symbolic cognition76 3.2. The secondary reflexivity of symbolic cognition 78 3.3. Symbolic power and its manifestations 80 3.4. The reciprocal enveloping of the phenomenal world and semantic world 82 3.5. The open intelligence of culture 84 3.6. Differences between animal and human collective intelligence 85 Chapter 4. Creative Conversation 89 4.1. Beyond “collective stupidity” 89 4.2. Reflexive explication and sharing of knowledge 92 4.3. The symbolic medium of creative conversation 103 Chapter 5. Toward an Epistemological Transformation of the Human Sciences 113 5.1. The stakes of human development 113 5.2. Critique of the human sciences 120 5.3. The threefold renewal of the human sciences 125 5.4. The Ouroboros 133 Chapter 6. The Information Economy 135 6.1. The symbiosis of knowledge capital and cognitive labor 136 6.2. Toward scientific self-management of collective intelligence 140 6.3. Flows of symbolic energy 144 6.4. Ecosystems of ideas and the semantic information economy 148 6.5. The semantic information economy in the digital medium 154 PART 2. MODELING COGNITION 159 Chapter 7. Introduction to the Scientific Knowledge of the Mind 161 7.1. Research program 161 7.2. The mind in nature 165 7.3. The three symbolic functions of the cortex 171 7.4. The IEML model of symbolic cognition. 176 7.5. The architecture of the Hypercortex 184 7.6. Overview: toward a reflexive collective intelligence 187 Chapter 8. The Computer Science Perspective: Toward a Reflexive Intelligence 189 8.1. Augmented collective intelligence 189 8.2. The purpose of automatic manipulation of symbols: cognitive modeling and self-knowledge 194 8.3. The means of automatic manipulation of symbols: beyond probabilities and logic 202 Chapter 9. General Presentation of the IEML Semantic Sphere 207 9.1. Ideas 208 9.2. Concepts 213 9.3. Unity and calculability 217 9.4. Symmetry 220 9.5. Internal coherence 225 9.6. Inexhaustible complexity 230 Chapter 10. The IEML Metalanguage 235 10.1. The problem of encoding concepts 235 10.2. Text units 238 10.3. Circuits of meaning 241 10.4. Between text and circuits 244 Chapter 11. The IEML Semantic Machine 253 11.1. Overview of the functions involved in symbolic cognition 253 11.2. Requirements for the construction of the IEML semantic machine 258 11.3. The IEML textual machine (S) 261 11.4. The STAR (Semantic Tool for Augmented Reasoning) linguistic engine (B) 264 11.5. The conceptual machine (T) 267 11.6. Conclusion 270 Chapter 12. The Hypercortex 275 12.1. The role of media and symbolic systems in cognition 275 12.2. The digital medium 277 12.3. The evolution of the layers of addressing in the digital medium 284 12.4. Between the Cortex and the Hypercortex 289 12.5. Toward an observatory of collective intelligence 291 12.6. Conclusion: the computability and interoperability of semantic and hermeneutic functions 296 Chapter 13. Hermeneutic Memory 299 13.1. Toward a semantic organization of memory 299 13.2. The layers of complexity of memory 302 13.3. Radical hermeneutics 304 13.4. The hermeneutics of information 308 13.5. The hermeneutics of knowledge 312 13.6. Wisdom 317 13.7. Collective interpretation games 318 Chapter 14. The Perspective of the Humanities: Toward Explicit Knowledge 323 14.1. Context 323 14.2. Methodology: the digital humanities 327 14.3. Epistemology: explicating symbolic cognition 331 Chapter 15. Observing Collective Intelligence 341 15.1. The semantic sphere as a mirror of concepts 341 15.2. The structure of the cognitive image 346 15.3. The two eyes of reflexive observation 350 Bibliography 353 Index 377