Addendum to the paper The Role of Knowledge in the Cyber World presented at Cyberg 2005.

The Role of Knowledge in the Cyber World -Addendum

Philip Duchastel, Ph.D.

Information Design Atelier

Access to the main paper

Note: This addendum introduces and discusses a number of more philosophical issues related to knowledge in the cyber world which were not able to fit into the main paper.

Introduction

The Cyberg 2005 conference paper The Role of Knowledge in the Cyber World deals with how the role of knowledge will be changing in the future as yet more intelligent information technologies are developed. Because of this, it is necessarily speculative, although remaining cautious in considering the plausibility of such a future scenario.

A great deal of the challenge in speculating about the future lies in overcoming the assumptions of the current zeitgeist, that collection of memes which frame our collective thinking. Many of these are philosophical assumptions arising from our intellectual history which need to be examined head-on. Not through historical analysis, but through active philosophical inquiry. That is what is done here.

Philosophical knowledge issues

While the role of knowledge in the cyber world centers on the practical processing of knowledge and how that can be facilitated through technology, that being the central focus of cognitive ergonomics, a number of issues of debate of longstanding concern impinge on how we define knowledge and thus on how we view it in its currently evolving context. Philosophy has generally been the field that has dealt with these issues, which are by no means closed. One must be cautious, however, for the field most closely associated with knowledge, namely epistemology, deals not so much with the nature of knowledge as such, but rather with the validity of that knowledge [whether our knowledge of the world is true or not] - a rather different issue altogether, and not of interest directly in the cyber world.

Information philosophy partakes more importantly of the philosophy of mind, which tackles such issues as cognition and consciousness. Evolutionary psychology is also of interest, for it considers the broad strokes of cognitive evolution, which refines our understanding of evolving trends in this area.

Of direct concern are the ontological aspects of knowledge - how we define knowledge and how we categorize its different aspects. Some of these have already been broached in discussing agents and activity theory. Embodiment appears to be at the root of many of these discussions and we examine it here in considering the nature of a self, the selfhood of agents, and of the world as a super-organism. This leads us back, however, to the process of personal knowledge construction, and hence to the original issue of epistemology, inescapable as we discuss knowledge processes.

Knowledge and the person (self)

One aspect of knowledge is its meaningfulness, that is how it fits into an overall teleological structure. It has meaning inasmuch as it is seen as pertinent [either now or at a later time] to some ongoing goal. The most general and common case of this is one's own life, however that may be characterized [as survival, personal advancement, specific goals, etc.]. Thus, the relation of knowledge to the person is of prime importance in understanding its role in life and in this world.

We come to ask that perennial philosophical question of What am I? - What constitutes my Self? Despite its anchorage in spiritual terms over the millennia, the self can be defined in modern terms that are all secular, namely body, mind, and context.

The body is the most straightforward of these components when we consider but the individual person. Later on, we will consider the issue of social knowledge and disembodied world knowledge. For now, we agree that knowledge is typically held in brains [in bodies], that it is acquired by a person, and that it disappears when the body perishes. It is a bodily function, despite the belief by many religious persons that it somehow transfers to the soul upon death or migrates through reincarnation.

The second commonly accepted component of self is the mind, the ideational aspect of the person. Mind can be thought of as comprising two kinds of ideas: beliefs and memories. Beliefs are current ideas that a person holds as true, i.e. as a defining characteristic of reality. Beliefs are largely made up of memes, those social beliefs that are acquired through intellectual interchange, including all of education. Memories are simply available patterns from storage in the brain, either intellectual facts or acquired habits. Memories come from experience and particularly from learning. Despite philosophical questions about the body-mind relationship, including the immaterial nature of mind, it is generally accepted that a personal identity is defined by both body and mind.

A third component, arising from a more inclusive systems view of self can be called personal context, which includes both physical and intellectual contexts. A classic example of physical context is air: without it, a person cannot function, and thus it can be seen as a defining characteristic of the self [a sine qua non feature of human being]. The fact that I live in the 21^st century also defines my self, just as some very distant ancestor was defined intellectually by that person's context in some previous century - our individual collection of memes are very different, as characterized by our respective zeitgeists. While this expanded view of self which includes context as a defining component is less common than the usual more restricted view limited to body and mind, it is a view which will gain currency as we continue to unfocus knowledge from its locus in human persons. This is part and parcel of the human decentering that is taking place over time [and which I will have introduced earlier somewhere in the paper].

Social [world] knowledge

It is commonly believed that knowledge is a matter of the self, that it resides in individuals who must acquire it through often difficult learning and through reflection. An associated view is that external representations of knowledge [the contents of a textbook for instance] are not knowledge as such, merely inert information which can however become knowledge in a person when that person processes and internalizes that information. This common human-centric view of knowledge emphasizes meaningfulness as the defining characteristic of knowledge: it has to fit in with the larger picture that a person has of the field or of the world, it has to be integrated into an individual's knowledge structure. Thus, it has to be embodied, and embodied in an active organism, not in inactive things such as books.

A number of issues arise in this context: how we choose to define knowledge, in particular meaningfulness versus structure; how we view the personhood of agents, or more generally their identity; and how we view transpersonal knowledge of a social character.

The knowledge-in-books issue is a long-standing one. If we stick to the human-centered traditional view of knowledge emphasizing meaning, we must treat the contents of a book as mere information and not as knowledge per se. If however, we de-emphasize meaning and focus instead on the structural characteristic of knowledge, then we can decide to accept the contents of a book as being knowledge. We then define knowledge as related information of potential value, even if its meaningfulness is not appreciated at the time. This is an a-temporal, non-teleological view of knowledge. It is perhaps best represented by the example of the Rosetta Stone: do we call the information on the stone knowledge, even before it was decoded and made meaningful? The knowledge was meaningful to the persons who encoded it on the stone and it became meaningful to those who eventually decoded it through analysis. In the intervening centuries, it was in transit, so to speak; in storage, etched in the stone. The same applies on an everyday basis to information that appears in books. Such information has structure, but no inherent meaning. Its only meaning emerges when interpreted by an individual, and then only in that individual's mind.

The question, then, becomes how we want to define knowledge. Just as structure only, disenfranchised from meaningfulness? Or as structure and meaningfulness combined. The first is a passive view of knowledge, knowledge as thing, whereas the second is an active view of knowledge, knowledge as supporting some process or even as part of that process. This is yet another aspect of the philosophical discussion of viewing the world as material structure evolving over time or as the unfolding of a process through temporary physical embodiments. One can adopt either view of the world, and either view of knowledge - whether one is preferable to the other is open to debate.

The knowledge-in-books issue deals with knowledge embodied in inert things. It does not apply to knowledge that is embodied in agents. Despite their inorganic character - they are information artifacts -, agents are nevertheless active and teleological. As such, they can in principle deal with information in a meaningful way, that is, assess how a body of information might help in attaining some goal.

The classic image of a future agent is the friendly and accommodating robot, which shows both knowledge and intelligence. The philosophical question then, is whether this robot constitutes a self or not, i.e. an autonomous person-like agent or merely an information-processing software program? The answer of course lies in accepting the dimensionality of the issue: low-level, simple agents with constrained scope of decision-making and action possibilities should be viewed merely as fancy software. At the other end of the complexity dimension, very autonomous complex agents with a good store of world knowledge and sophisticated planning routines, both of which grow with experience, can and should be considered as selves with their own individual personalities.

The issue of motivation, within the larger issue of emotion, arises in this context. Personality traits can certainly be given to agents by whoever creates them and they can perhaps be molded as well through interaction with the world, just as human ones are. Or they may be created emotionless, just pragmatic cognitive agents whose work is purely rational, following the logic that is programmed into them, as is the case for software programs today.

The sophisticated agents we are talking about may not be embodied in a robot body in the classic fashion of robotics, but they are nevertheless embodied at any given time in some computer, in some somewhat permanent electrical structure. They thus have the three components of selfhood: body, mind and context, as defined earlier.

But are they really selves? While endowed with agency, they nevertheless have no motivation for action, no needs to fill as living organisms do [unless these are artificially programmed into them, of course]. So, as selves, what would motivate them? Why would they do anything at all? The answer is simple, for we need not invoke human motivation to see them in action. Agents will do whatever they do not to fill some inner need, but simply because they are programmed to do so. Any program will run until it meets a condition that will end it; and if none is ever met, it will run on and on.

In effect, motivation and emotions are human attributes deriving from the particular way humans are constituted. We generally associate selfhood with agency, the power to act autonomously, and in turn associate that with motivation in the fulfillment of needs, for that is what makes us act. We are biological organisms enmeshed in given processes within a particular structure. Non-biological structures do not share these processes, whether they be rocks or information agents. They do not need them for they have not been built that way. They simply react to the context forces, however simple or complex, that impinge on them: if you give a rock a push, it will tumble; if you give an information agent a new piece of information, it will deal with it. There is nothing mysterious involved in that.

In sum, agents can thus not only deal with knowledge in the pursuit of their goals, but also accumulate and develop their knowledge in the same manner that humans do. Agents thus constitute, after humans, a second important class of knowledge users in all senses of the term: they use knowledge, they store knowledge and they invent knowledge. This, they may do currently only in rudimentary ways, but in principle and over time, they are apt to do as well as humans and surpass them in the long run.

A time can be imagined when the bulk of knowledge will be dealt with mostly by agents and less by humans. The moral and destiny-oriented implications of this trajectory are not considered here, as the focus is on the cognitive nature and function of knowledge, not on its social implications.

And yet, the social aspect of knowledge, its networking feature, is leading to the emergence of collective or social intelligences that are transpersonal, that emerge from the collective relatedness of the implicit networks operating beyond the capacities of the individuals partaking in the network. Just as a company creates value out of the coordinated efforts of many workers, value that goes beyond and surpasses that of any one individual in the organization, so too a knowledge network can possess and create knowledge beyond that of the individuals comprising it. And as a company, a network can have some permanence and possess some personality that confers it some level of selfhood. A number of futurists foresee the eventual emergence of a Global Brain using the potential of these networks to deal in knowledge. It is not useful to be distracted in this discussion by the science fiction scenarios of the big bad computer taking over the world - once again, the focus is on analyzing the emergence of a new knowledge cyber world and not on morality of destiny issues.

The classic example of super-organism potential is the insect colony, where individual insects engage in very limited and specialized activities, but where together, these coordinated activities lead to colony success as a whole. Most living organisms operate in like fashion, including the human body, each component playing its specialized part for the sake of the whole. The human brain itself is organized in the same way, individual neurons interconnecting in ways that lead to the emergence of memories, knowledge, intelligence and the mind as a whole.

Knowledge progression

That the ever-more sophisticated knowledge processors in the world [humans and agents] will lead to an eventual fully integrated network of intellect is a hypothesis that seems ever more feasible. If the current growth of knowledge and the rate of such growth continue on as currently occurs, some form of advanced intelligence can certainly be foreseen, as is easily predicted by the futurists.

More adventurous yet is the Leibnizian hypothesis of a fully integrated knowledge base of the world from which any issue can be analyzed and resolved in pure intellectual terms. Leibniz banked heavily on the rational and surmised, correctly I believe, that any issue can ultimately be reasoned through using a logical calculus. What is missing, of course, is knowledge, for reasoning is to a very-large extent knowledge-based, as discovered by the founders of artificial intelligence some time ago. Reason hits a dead-end when it encounters an unanswerable question.

As knowledge cumulates, it leads to further questions and when these are tackled both theoretically and empirically as needed, certain answers become easier to derive [for instance, certain medical diagnoses become easier to provide].

Knowledge accumulations feeds upon knowledge accumulation [thus is defined the progress of science today], leading to an acceleration in the derivation and accumulation of knowledge. Eventually, this would lead to full knowledge of the world's workings, or at least to avenues leading to such full knowledge. This implies an integrated representation of the fully interrelated universe, not easily achieved but again, accessible in the long-run, in principle.

Even though this view rests on the basic philosophical assumption that the world is knowable as it truly is, it is a realistic view, for the alternative of a relativistic view of knowledge leads to roughly the same conclusion. While full knowledge of everything may be a constantly-renewed ambition and never achievable, a pragmatic knowledge of the world may be fully obtainable. To illustrate, what originated the universe may never be answered, but the inner workings of the universe in all the ways they affect us [the pragmatic viewpoint] may well be knowable. That is, we are dealing here with knowability to the extent that it matters.

A further interesting aspect of this knowledge progression is how it relates to the unfolding of the universe through the realms of being. Hegel introduced philosophy to a historical perspective that saw the universe in a progression towards a particular end [the self-realization of Spirit] and many philosophers since have developed their own teleological perspective along similar lines [for instance, social justice for Marx, life in the case of Bergson, spiritual integration for Teilhard de Chardin].

Teleology, however, is needed to account for an evolving unfolding of the universe only in philosophical systems that include free will of man as an assumption. This assumption is widely shared among mankind today, but it does remain an assumption. How the universe evolved before mankind can be explained in fully deterministic terms and there is no reason, other than an anthropic one, to not continue explaining it thus after the arrival of mankind. It is likely that free will will gradually disappear from philosophical discourse as the determinants of human action are more fully derived through scientific research.

Without a teleological explanation, what is it then that is driving forth a progression in knowledge in the universe. For the time being, we all agree that it is human curiosity and the pragmatic benefits of knowledge for humans that are driving back the frontiers of knowledge. But those are unlikely to be the case when knowledge is more the affair of agents than of humans.

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