The grass labels the oval. The Information Science brick redefined.
Did you wander off the street into the trendy shop, and decide to buy the concept of Data Science. Did you ignore the user guide and just jump straight in. Did you just buy into the salesperson pitch? So I guess you don’t know that Data Science is a sub stream of Information Science, and not a standalone, and that lack of understanding is costing you time, money, and limiting your ability to get any real use of your data.
If you’re interested in the early thinkers and writers, then I suggest you look up these people; Belkin,N. Bergman, O. Debons, A.?Dervin, B. Krikelas, J. Nilan, M.?Saracevic, T. Solomon, P. Talja, S. Wilson, T.D.
Back in the 1970’s, the concept of Brick Theory was introduced into Information Science. There was the view that the brick was the basic building block of everything, and it was defined.
For almost 2,500 years the human race has been trying to get to the bottom of things, they have been searching for the base units which when constructed together make up everything else in the type. Plato of Athens in 400 BC wrote about the basis of knowledge. The ancient Greek word for word is Logos. However, there mean includes the past, present, future, usage of the word also. Saul of Tarsus in 40 AD wrote that a person (system) is a combination of different parts (sub-systems) of head, hands, feet, etc. That all of these parts are interdependent on each other to function as a whole, to achieve any outcome. In the last 100 years, Einstein and Hawkins developed theories about a common energy particle which was the basis of everything.?BERNARD K. FORSCHER in 1963 published a letter about bricks of knowledge, which was later refined into data/information bricks.?https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.142.3590.339.a (see end note)
Over the last 50 years, information science has evolved to have a number of sub areas and partners in the pursuit of the understanding of how everything fits together to solve a problem, and by problem?I mean the outcome of a decision, investigation, solution, or reinforcement of the concept.
In my previous writing’s, I always used to describe every single?thought?process as a problem. To me the ending to any cognitive sequence was an answer. But that was before I started to consider that those decision processes were not limited to humans. Indeed as we are using science to create / enhance other entities?such as bots?to make decisions, and we expand our explanations to include other cultures. I find that all of our traditional definitions in most part, take an?arrogant?stance, that humans at the be all and end all of any decision making processes. So my new definition of any process now includes where there is a usage / transformation of an energy pattern. But I want this to define the process at the lowest level, where it covers the usage / transformation at the lowest / smallest level, by any natural / artificial / animate / inanimate entity. By the true meaning of the word – entity – which describes anything and everything. So my process is not defined as experience encounter-process-outcome.?I now use the term xenologic?which means (different / foreign / strange) logic (reasoning / relationship / rationale).
Why I think new definitions and explanations?are?important, is that the world of information science is exploding into new areas of usage and transformations. As we race towards non-human usage of what is traditionally called data & information, a whole world opens up of possibilities and things that have been overlooked.?This is?because we either ignored or were not looking in?this direction. In Cindy Masons work titled -?the logical road to AI leads to a dead end?– which can be found at???https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220706202_The_Logical_Road_to_Human_Level_AI_Leads_to_a_Dead_End?she?eloquently points out that human-level AI requires compassion, metacognition, and cultural knowledge, to truly interoperate how a piece of data/information was generated, processed, and incorporated into the cognitive process on hand.
Data
There has been a lot of effort made within Data Science to better understand data, how it is used, how it is stored, how its quality is determined, how it is valued, how to deal with different time periods that data was collected and how to manage sparse data and missing data. It is suggested that one failing with current thinking is that data is seen as the base unit of explanation and that other concepts such as information, knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom are derived from data. The view here is that the energy brick rather than data is the base unit. This too is explained more fully with an example shortly. This mis-conceptualization about data means that the true value of data is lost, because of the lack of understanding of what data is. It is suggested that data is one of the basic explanations of what an energy brick is when it comes to specific examples.
Cognition is Not Limited to Human Beings
The concept of reality includes a lot more than what can be directly and indirectly observed. It includes issues to do with patterns and what scale they are discerned (e.g. at the microscopic level such as inside the atom versus the macroscopic level such as the universe) and cause and effect. There is also the realisation that the understanding of reality is mediated by those living organisms that have a nervous system. This enables them to engage in cognition. This includes decision making, sense making and information processing as examples.
Users and Transformers of Energy
Human beings are one of many users and transformers of energy. Examples of other users and transformers include a plant that follows the Sun, or the seasons based on light and heat, a tree that communicates perhaps by use of scents or aromas with other trees, an insect that navigates by use of light in its environment, and a rock that takes in energy from the sun and transforms that energy into colour and heat.
Reality
There is also the observed and the unobserved reality and there is a mental or subjective reality conceived by each living organism and there is an objective one that exists separate from living organisms. Cognition includes both understanding both the internal or subjective reality and the external or objective reality.
Definitions
An energy brick is defined here as a pattern of energy. It can be a single pattern or a combination of patterns. As stated above the energy brick is the basic unit of existence. The Energy Brick is not defined solely by its pattern, but its definition is as symbiotic relationship of its existence and its usage.
In an objective environment it stands alone, with or without meaning. In a subjective environment where sense making is applied, it can still stand alone, be a construct, or be used in combination or sequence.
A pattern of energy is observed and can be transformed by any other patterns of energy. Transformation is defined as any of the possible activities as reshaping, construction, deconstruction, generation, and destruction, of patterns regardless of time and space.
An energy brick is also defined by how it is used and for what purposes. For example, if a prescription tablet for a heart condition is considered, the following characteristics can be discerned:
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Signal:?There is a small hard object having a certain shape
Data: A small hard pill that is made of the following chemicals……
Meta Data:?A compound that was manufactured on 5 Jun 2020 and a has a shelf life of five years
Information:?A tablet used to treat various medical conditions including …….
Knowledge: A tablet that is ideal to use to treat …. and which is best applied once in the morning, and once at night
Intelligence: A tablet which has been found to treat effectively patients aged 50 years or older who suffer from the following medical conditions …….
Wisdom:?An effective medication if used with diet and exercise can help prevent a range of heart conditions including ……
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Here the energy brick is a tablet used to treat disease. It has signal, data, metadata, information, knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom components that explain what each type of tablet is and how and why it is employed.
This illustrates how energy bricks come in all shapes, sizes, and contents; have multiple explanations and have multiple uses. Other energy bricks such as treating physicians, hospitals, other patient medical conditions and the desires and expectations of love one’s influence when, where and how tablets are used to treat a specific patient’s diseases.?
Conclusions
Current views of data are seen to suffer from the flaw that they are built on the assumption that everything else is built on data and it is the basic building block of explaining what is either observed or conceptualized. An alternative view is that data is not the building block, but just another facet of an energy brick.
It has also been emphasized that most energy brick users and transformers are not always human beings but can be a plethora of other users and transformers ranging from inanimate objects, such as rocks, to other microscopic, plant and other animal forms.
The focus should be on everything and adapted from there using this concept of an energy brick and then be explained using various levels of description, such as data, information and knowledge; to give each instance, that is observed and conceptualized, context and meaning.
End Note:
These are some extra material for people interested in Information Bricks.