From Plato’s World of Ideas and Forms to Human and Machine Intelligence

Recently the big scientific congress – the Summit of the International Society for Study of Information (IS4SI) took place. It consisted of several conferences and workshops. One of them was the conference “Theoretical and Foundational Problems in Information Studies.” Its participants came from 33 countries representing all 6 inhabited continents. At this conference, presentations of important discoveries and their applications to information technology were made. Here is a synopsis of few presentations that are highly relevant to how we evolve our current information technologies to become highly efficient, resilient and intelligent just as "life processes" evolved from single celled organisms to human societies that developed such evolved concepts as good, evil, religion, Justice, trade, arts, science, technology, and culture. You can read some of the papers in the "Proceedings" which will be published soon.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (420s-340s BCE) introduced the Theory of Forms. In simple terms, Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world. The physical world is the material stuff we see and interact with on a daily basis; this physical world is always changing and imperfect. The world of Ideas and Forms, however, exists beyond the physical world and exists in the form of ideal structures as illustrated in this picture.

The general theory of information (GTI) tells us that information per se belongs to the ideal world of structures, which is the scientific realization of the world of Plato - Ideas or Forms. However, it comes to and functions, in the physical world of living beings by acquiring physical representations and physical carriers. Living beings and the machines invented by them, both work with these carriers and physical representations to access, process, use and store information. On the other hand, the physical universe is made up of structures which interact with each other using the laws of transformation dealing with matter and energy. These interactions result in more complex physical structures. All physical structures contain information, which has the capacity to change the states of these structures (the concept of from being to becoming).?

However, life forms have evolved to use physical structures in the form of genes and neurons to create mental models of physical structures as abstract structures. Unlike physical structures, mental structures only exist in the abstract models created by living organisms using their own physical structures. The mental energy required to create mental structures is derived from their physical structures. For example as shown in this video link, when birds crack a nut open using different methods for the seed or when a physicist unravels the mystery of sunspots with a theory, they are creating abstract structures as cognitive models using the information from various physical structures and their dynamics.

General theory of information, so clearly articulated in many books and articles, provides means for the abstract mental model representations using ideal structures that exist in the ideal world. Abstract structures deal with information and knowledge and Knowledge to Information is as Matter is to Energy. It provides the tools to transform information into knowledge and follow the dynamics of these mental structures. These are the tools in the form of fundamental triads, named sets, knowledge structures, cognizing oracles and the structural machines. These tools and their use are also discussed in various books and publications.

Genes and neurons play a pivotal role as distinct structures in carrying information and representing it as knowledge using symbolic and sub-symbolic computational processes. These structures enable information acquisition, processing, and storage along with its use in exploiting the transformation laws of matter and energy.?

All living organisms are cognitive and autopoietic. Autopoiesis refers to a system with well-defined identity and is capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. Cognition, on the other hand,?is the ability to process information, apply knowledge, and change the circumstance A living organism is a unique autonomous system made up of components and relationships changing over time without changing the unity of the system. The genome contains the knowledge that is required to build the components using physical and chemical processes and physical resources. Information processing structures in the form of genes and neurons provide the means to build, operate and manage the stability of the system while interacting with the external world where the interactions are often, non-deterministic in nature and are subject to large fluctuations.

Our understanding of how these information processing structures operate comes from the analysis of the genome, experiments in neuroscience and the studies of cognitive behaviors in living organisms. The genome in the physical world is knowledge coded in executable form in deoxy-ribonucleic (DNA) and executed by ribonucleic acid (RNA). DNA and RNA use the knowledge of the physical and chemical processes to discover the resources in the environment using the cognitive apparatuses in the form of genes and neurons. They build and evolve the hardware utilizing various embedded, embodied, enacted, elevated and extended (5E) cognitive (sentient, resilient, intelligent and efficient) processes to manage both the self and the environment.

The Burgin-Mikkilineni Thesis uses this information to provide a structural machine model with knowledge structures to infuse the autopoietic and cognitive behaviors encoded in the genome. “A genome in the language of General Theory of Information (GTI) encapsulates “knowledge structures” coded in the form of DNA and executed using the “structural machines” in the form of genes and neurons which use physical and chemical processes (dealing with conversion of matter and energy). The information accumulated through biological evolution is encoded into knowledge to create the genome which contains the knowledge network defining the function, structure and the autopoietic and cognitive processes to build and evolve the system while managing both deterministic and non-deterministic fluctuations in the interactions among the internal components or their interactions with the environment.”

We can use the BM thesis to design a new class of machines which are infused with autopoietic and cognitive behaviors that mimic living organisms. The ontological BM thesis states that the autopoietic and cognitive behavior of artificial systems must function on three levels of information processing systems and be based on triadic automata. The axiological BM thesis states that the efficient autopoietic and cognitive behavior has to employ structural machines. In the next section we discuss the digital genome and the autopoietic and cognitive behaviors in digital automata.

This video talks about infusing autopoietic and cognitive behaviors into current information technologies. It turns out that John von Neumann's stored program implementation of the Turing machine acts as an information processing structure with symbolic computing and the deep learning neural networks act as the sub-symbolic information processing structure.

However, in order to infuse autopoietic and cognitive behaviors we need to go beyond the current symbolic and sub-symbolic computing structures as siloes and integrate the knowledge obtained from symbolic and sub-symbolic structures with super-symbolic computing. This has to do with a foundational issue discussed in the book “Computation and its Limits”. “The key property of general-purpose computer is that they are general purpose. We can use them to deterministically model any physical system, of which they are not themselves a part, to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. Their logical limits arise when we try to get them to model a part of the world that includes themselves.” For a more detailed discussion, see a preprint of a paper presented in the summit, "Digital Consciousness: The Business of Sensing, Modeling, Analyzing, Predicting, And Taking Action"

The theory points a clear way to implement the digital genome with super-symbolic computing to integrate symbolic and sub-symbolic information processing structures. The transition from Turing machines to Structural Machines using the general theory of information allows us to design and implement autopoietic and cognitive machines without disrupting current symbolic and sub-symbolic information structures already in use just as the mammalian brain evolved by reusing the reptilian brain. The breakthrough here, is a common knowledge representation that goes from data structures to knowledge structures and information processing structures that use current Turing Machine based computations to create a Structural Machine.?This can be done as an overlay on top of current IaaS and PaaS and AI algorithms. This will be similar to how the mammalian brain repurposed existing reptilian brain with an overlay architecture and a common knowledge representation that includes the "self" and its interactions with the environment.

The possibilities with this breakthrough result discussed in this summit are only limited by the imagination of next generation computer scientists and IT professionals with open mind and curiosity. Example use cases are:

• Self-managing application workloads utilizing IaaS and PaaS services from many vendors with the knowledge about how to replicate themselves, protect themselves, and manage fluctuations in the demand for and the availability of the resources to maintain their stability just like living organisms do.
• Provide composable services in the form of knowledge networks where the service nodes wired together fire together to exhibit both autopoietic and cognitive behaviors.
• Move from deep learning to deep reasoning with neocortical-like reasoning using common knowledge representation of information gathered from multiple sources.
• Build intelligent robots that mimic living organisms using digital genome specification and its execution with structural machine-based knowledge network. This enables 5E cognition in these machines.
• Etc., etc., only limited by human imagination.

In conclusion, it is important to point out that autopoiesis and cognition allow shared knowledge to optimize global behavior while paying attention to local constraints and local autonomy of participants. These behaviors allow developing the concepts of good and evil, justice, etc. This addresses the problem of self-referential circularity not moored to external reality that plagues various independent logical systems. Autopoiesis and cognition allow the development of a higher level "self" while maintaining global optimization and local autonomy with democratic consensus. It is also important to note that all human organizations are autopoietic and cognitive with collective "self", consciousness and culture.