V. The Fire is in Our Minds Nicolas Benjamin Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 22, 2017 Δ. Realising the Enlightenment dream by changing the way people think

‘The fire is in the minds of men’ (Dostoevsky, 1871) — A candle burns differently in space, photo by NASA

Of Fires and Minds …It begins with a seed: That we wish to know; That we can in fact know. It grows to form a tree. Whose branches are without counting, laden with the fruits of our labour; to be freely plucked and shared and eaten… under the watchful gaze of a curious serpent. The fire is in the minds of men — Fyodor Dostoevsky Humanity’s search for meaning is a mind-blowing Odyssean journey: From the very first sparks of cognition in the stygian caves of the palaeolithic, to the civilisation-embracing blaze lighting our current search for answers at the edges of the known universe, the fire in our minds has driven us to question everything in order to circumscribe the bounds of our world, that we may know where we stand. Throughout this journey, we have faced adversity both in our search, and for even daring to have undertaken it. Eden’s serpent and the tree of knowledge are a testament to the taboos swirling around knowledge, and the hardships faced by those who would seek it. As we shall see, categorising what we know has helped us better disseminate ideas, which have sparked additional mind-fires and convinced more people to think for themselves. These thinkers were inclined to question their restrictive institutions, and devise new ones that rehabilitated learning as a worthy pursuit. Who were these thinkers? What thought processes can we trace back to them? And what new institutions and trees of knowledge will allow us to continue decreasing the cost of thinking? Whenever we improve the production, handling, and distribution of information we drop the price of thinking — Gregory Rawlins

‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field’ (Genesis 3:1–24, KJV)— ‘Eldersnake’, Eren Arik

Diderot and d’Alembert’s tree of knowledge — Frontispiece to the 1780 edition, illustrated by Chrétien Frederic Guillaume Roth, 1769 The Encyclopédie system of human knowledge in abstract form — University of Michigan illustration, translated by Heller

Since the philosophers’ century, numerous mass-market encyclopedias have improved on the groundbreaking endeavours of the Lumières. In recent times, the Civilization series of computer strategy games introduced the concept of a technology tree, a directed graph of interlinked scientific and technological advancements stretching from the stone age to the information age. The Internet has allowed for an even more ambitious open source project to take shape: Wikipedia, the largest web-based free encyclopedia, containing over 40 million multilingual articles at last count. Its own tree of categories serves as the great backbone for classifying all of its articles. How many novel innovations has Wikipedia enabled by virtue of its ease of access and vast scope? While traditional knowledge trees are suited for simpler hierarchies, they are inherently limited with regards to mapping complex heterogeneous systems with network structures, such as human thought, or all of human knowledge. To organise such information, a more precise descriptive model is needed. The Ontology: The Structure of Ideas Unbeknownst to you, your pixel lens, the field through which every idea in the universe is received, transformed, and projected, possesses its own knowledge models. Like the thousands of photoreceptors contained in the housefly’s iridescent compound eye, the pixel panes in your lens work together to process and filter information, and to form an image combined of manifold inputs. Far from being haphazardly strewn about the surface of your scientific lens like bubbles in a stream, your pixels are (more often than not) categorised into ordered groups of interconnected concepts. The most suitable analogy for these groups is an ontology. Wikipedia defines an ontology as a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities… for a particular domain of discourse.

Your pixel lens is like a compound eye — Compound eye of Antarctic krill

Think of the ontology as a microscopic thread tying your pixels together. Comprised of several semantic triples (subject-predicate-object), an ontology imbues its pixels with context and meaning, interweaving them with warps and wefts of causality into a rigorously mapped conceptual network of interconnected knowledge. This kind of network is capable of expressing precise information about the multitude of fantastical phenomena populating reality. Here is a brief example of an ontology: Cassini-Huygens →is an → unmanned NASA spacecraft →which spent → 13 years and 76 days → orbiting and exploring → Saturn and its system, → and flew into → the planet’s upper atmosphere → on → September 15th 2017. In truth though, your mind’s pixels are not as organised as they could be.

Cassini-Huygens, dearly departed, into the waiting arms of Saturn (1997–2017 †) — Artist’s concept of Cassini deploying Huygens over Titan

The Concept Layer: Visions of things to come The Enlightenment goal of changing people’s minds succeeded up to a certain point. In the wake of its great dawn, raiments of kings and sashes of priests were thrown onto the pyre, revolutions burned bright, and whole new disciplines were spawned within the widening sphere of human knowledge. But due to technical and biological limitations — for it is, as of yet, impossible for me to directly experience your thoughts — the dream of a universal conceptual language has only partly been realised. Yet imagine for a second that you’ve just been handed a tool capable of merging your pixel lens with mine: You would now understand not just what, but how I think — the fabric of my ontology. Let’s not stop there. Imagine now, that your tool can merge all pixel lenses, across all of humankind. Would this not engender a colossal, apotheotic broadening of the mind to span the entire scientific endeavour and beyond? A civilisation-spanning, global brain wherein the neurons are connected concepts within our very minds: A Concept Layer. What then? What future fires would we spark? What knowledge trees would we map? What miracles would we be capable of? Sapere aude. “Dare to know” — Horace