Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
This directory covers those aspects of the SPaDE project which are not specific to any one component, primarily concerning philosophical background, architecture, and administrative matters.
The material is presented in the following categories:
I am a philosophically inclined, retired software engineer, with particular interests in the formal foundations of mathematics, generalised to declarative knowledge as a whole, and in the role which formal representation and reasoning can play in the engineering of intelligent systems. I am free to work on whatever I choose, and look for the problems to which I might be able to contribute.
The rationale begins with a speculation, underpinned by evolutionary imperatives, on the future of intelligent systems over the next billion years. As intelligence spreads from Earth across the galaxy and perhaps beyond, the dominant forms of intelligent systems will be those most effective in self-proliferation, a general principle which applies beyond the particulars of the evolution of life on Earth.
Anticipating the forms of intelligent systems over such timescales is difficult, but some features can reasonably be predicted. Success will be fueled by knowledge. The growth of knowledge is a collaborative endeavour. Certain prominent forms of knowledge are additive (bodies of knowledge which aggregate consistently), and can be given solid but slender foundations, building on a small number of fundamental concepts and principles. Such foundations can be made formally precise, admit reliable deductive elaboration and application and are susceptible to focal methods. These enable productive reasoning about the world using abstract models and thereby support the engineering of self-proliferating of intelligent systems.
The progression of SPaDE is intended as an engineering process in which the means to proliferation are engineered and applied by ever advancing intelligent infrastructure exploiting and continually advancing a distributed shared repository of declarative knowledge. Its progress is underpinned and supported by a constructively oriented philosophy which provides epistemological and logical foundations as well as addressing the ethical and aesthetic norms which are intended to guide the project and its outcomes. Philosophy and architecture are intertwined and therefore begin together with:
The seminal insights upon which the SPaDE architecture is based include:
That there are universal representations for declarative knowledge, the simplest of which is the higher order logic derived from Alonzo Church’s Simple Theory of Types (which is adopted by SPaDE).
That all deductive reasoning takes place in perfect information spaces, which are domains in which intelligence can most effectively be delivered by focal methods rather than by large language models.
Further elaboration of the ‘synthetic philosophy’ which underpins the project, and the architecture for proliferation which emerges from it, appears in the docs directory:
The contribution sought by this project to that purpose is in two principle areas. The first is concerned with the management of that shared repository. The second with the architecture and fundamental core of the deductive intelligence which is considered the engine of proliferation.