Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
This project is seeks to contribute to the proliferation of benign intelligence across the cosmos, from small beginnings here on earth, complementing and merging with similar progressions from other points of origin.
It involves both a kind of philosophy, dubbed “synthetic philosophy”, and a kind of engineering, “deductive engineering”.
Deductive Engineering (an aspect of a broader deductive paradigm, subsuming mere computation) is directed toward:
Synthetic Philosophy provides philosophical foundations for the representation of knowledge and the application of deductive methods to its exploitation in the proliferation of intelligence, as well as addressing the what it means and what it takes for such proliferation to be benign. The earliest and highest levels of strategic thinking for SPaDE belong here, and are informed by evolutionary thinking, projecting from the evolution of intelligence in the past to its future proliferation, and considering how higher aesthetic and moral purpose survive evolutionary imperatives.
The engineering begins with the development of prototypes of softwaresupport for knowledge representation and deduction in an architecture consisting of four subsystems, each occupying a subdirectory of the project repository.
In addition to those four subsystems, there is a fifth subdirectory, docs, which covers those aspects of the project which are not specific to any one component, primarily concerning philosophy, architecture, and administrative matters. It is here that Synthetic Philosophy, is developed and articulated. This philosophy not only guides the architecture of SPaDE, but is intended to be a significant part of the project in its own right. It is the part of the project which discusses the role of metrics, standards, and norms at all levels. In that way synthetic philosophy addresses what it might be for self-proliferating intelligent systems to be benign, and how that might be achieved.
Further elaboration may be sought in the following five directories, each with its own README (one for the top level, and one for each of the four subsystems):
docs - rationale, philosophy, architecture, and administrative matters. with all documentation not specific to the four main subsystems of SPaDE.
The Knowledge Repository (kr directory) containing those parts of the project contributing to the architecture of the distributed repository of declarative knowledge.
Deductive Intelligence (di directory) Containing the support for deductive intelligence which makes feasible the application of deduction and the transition to a deductive rather than a computation paradigm for information processing. This wraps the deductive kernel with layers of focal intelligence making use of multilayered neural nets closely coupled with the hierarchy of logical contexts found in the SPaDE distributed knowledge repository.