The Challenge of Finding Meaning
Our inner lives, our mental lives are built on a foundation of “meaning.” Everything we do has meaning. Everything we see or hear has meaning; everything we think is based on meaning. Our lives are so deeply bound up with meaning that we cannot have any kind of existence that is independent of meaning.
While meaning is clearly the fabric of our lives and has been the object of study and fascination for millennia, it is not well understood. At Cognitive Science & Solutions, meaning is of paramount importance. We are in the business of encoding knowledge so as to generalize on it’s meaning, forcing us to directly confront the question of meaning and render the results in 1’s and 0’s – not an easy challenge.
Can one determine meaning simply by consulting a dictionary? No. Look up “energy” in a dictionary and the definitions will include the term “power.” Look up “power” in a dictionary and you will see the term “energy.” Dictionaries are useful in defining one word in terms of other words, assuming you already know the meaning of those other words! Dictionaries have a strong tendency to be circular; one word refers you to other words, which refer you to still more words until you end up back where you started. One cannot use a dictionary to bootstrap your way up from no knowledge of words to a deep understanding of words!
Meaning Emerges from our Biology!
So where does meaning come from? How do we avoid the problem of creating a web of definitions which are ultimately circular in nature? How does one inject real meaning into the representation of words (and other forms of knowledge)? Where does meaning ultimately come from? What is its source?
The source of meaning, it’s true wellspring, turns out to be our biology! Meaning is injected into our webs of knowledge from our senses. A great example is the word or concept of “color.” Look up “color” in the dictionary and you will not find an objective explanation of color. “Color” is introduced to our brains via our visual senses. If you’ve never had color vision, then no explanation will ever suffice to help you really understand what color is. Color is an experience, a sensation, a sensory input. Color cannot possibly be understood, except by possessing a color sensory system. In fact, even today, scientists are not certain that people all experience color in the very same way. It is possible that we each have a somewhat unique perception and understanding of color.
This conclusion, that the meaning of color stems from our visual processing system and only from the visual senses, and cannot be “defined”, probably comes as no shock to the reader. But let us expand on this conclusion in stages.
External Senses, Internal Senses and Emotional States
It’s very obvious that many words have their meaning injected into our minds via the 5 external senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Each of these external senses is clearly a rich source of meaning that cannot be fully duplicated by any other means.
But the external senses are not the only senses we possess. We also possess internal senses such as hunger, thirst, nausea, balance, the passing of time and many more. These provide meaning exactly analogous to the way the external senses provide meaning.
Continuing on, we have emotional states, such as happy, sad, hopeful, lonely, angry, jealous and many, many more. These too, function to inject meaning into our webs of knowledge in a way that no dictionary could begin to accomplish.
So, we see that our biology is the source of meaning through the external senses, the internal senses and our emotions. Our biology clearly provides a myriad of sources of meaning, none of which can be conveyed through a simple, objective mechanism such as a dictionary. But we can expand upon this even further, in the next paragraph.
Consider the scope of words whose meaning ultimately stems from the visual processing system. Examples include big and small, short and tall, slow and fast, steady and blinking, hovering and falling, light and dark, focused and blurry, up and down- the list could go on and on. The auditory sense provides it’s own trove of words such as loud and quiet, whisper and shout, noise and music, clanging, banging, murmur and echo. The tactile system provides concrete meaning to words such as heavy and light, hard and soft, sharp and smooth, still and vibrating. We could similarly assign meanings to words that are associated with the olfactory and taste.
When viewed this way, the 5 external senses, plus the internal senses and our vast repertoire of emotions provide a rich source of meaning injected into our minds, and form meaningful anchors to our extensive webs of knowledge.
A further point before we wrap up is the subject of synesthesia. Perhaps the most interesting person with synesthesia is the mnemonist S. V. Shereshevskii, as described by the famous psychologist A. R. Luria in his 1968 book The Mind of a Mnemonist. (This is an outstanding book and I encourage everyone to read it.) Not only did S.V. Shereshevskii possess a phenomenal memory but he also experienced synesthesia very deeply, where each word not only had a sound, but a shape, a color, a smell and a taste. One cannot help but surmise that the synesthesia must have greatly enriched the meaning and experience of all that he was asked to memorize, and this, in turn, enormously aided his ability to recall information.
Conclusion
So, what’s the point? None of the discussion above tells us exactly how to encode knowledge. But the discussion above does give strong hints about what to encode, if not how to encode. Cognitive Science & Solutions has spent years developing the machinery to encode knowledge in a way that promotes the kind of generalization required for Artificial General Intelligence; knowing what to encode begins to fill in some of the gaps.
Lastly, let’s talk for just a minute about an innate limitation of encoding knowledge. For example, how does one encode knowledge to convey the experience of seeing the color red or feeling the joy of happiness? Well, we can encode the word red as visual input corresponding to a wavelength of about 700 nanometers. And that’s true, but incomplete. How does one encode the experience of seeing red? The experience or sensation associated with some sensory input is known as its “qualia”. How does one encode qualia? No one knows. No one even has a clue. Most likely, this is not even possible.
At Cognitive Science & Solutions we think of the sensory input to the brain as being composed of two unique, but intertwined flows. First, there is the flow of information from the sense organ to the brain, and that we can encode. But the information flow is accompanied by, and somehow intertwined with qualia, and no one knows to how to address that. So, we settle for the first and accept the limitation of the second as a blessing in disguise. More on that at another time.
