Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
It is surely a commonplace that the solution of difficult intellectual problems requires focus. This is of course, just the opposite of what we see in LLMs, which are trained on massive datasets and are not only costly to train, but also not cheap to apply to simple problems. Problems which require deep thinking are explicitly provided for in many models by getting the LLM to think twice (or more) and reflect upon its results. Away from the generality of LLMs, AI has lately had success in narrower domains by using more focused methods. Deepmind’s alpha-zero has shown the benefits of focus upon the problem domain at hand.
Alongside the effectiveness of focus in some narrow domains, it sometimes happens that the solution of a relatively broad problem set may be facilitated by focus on certain key subproblems. A special case of this comes with the idea of “the singularity”, the point at which AI becomes capable of redesigning itself leading to progressive acceleration of the AI design cycle and hyperexponential growth in the capabilities of artificial superintelligence. Here we see that focus on the problem of AI design may be expected to advance capability in design across the board, and the potential suggests talking of this as a benefit of singular focus.
It may be that the benefits of focus, and the possibility of singular focus, can be turned into architectural models and strategic plans, and that is the purpose of this note.
There are two kinds of focal thinking which contribute to the proposed architecture. These come as a focal tower and a focal hierarchy which are discussed in turn.
The focal tower as described above correlates with the epistemological stack in the following way.
TODO explain the correlation.
In a SPaDE repository (and in any ITP like reasoning system) there is a natural hierarchy of theories, each theory building on its parents. Each theory is a perfect information space, since all answers all the information which can be used in determining theoremhood is available in the theory or its parents. The cumulative aggregate of the extensions in a theory and its ancestors is called in SPaDE a context, and each context is a perfect information space, suitable for focal reasoning by a specialist in that context. Since the theories are arranged in a hierarchy, the contexts are also arranged in a hierarchy. In SPaDE, the hierarchy is mirrored by a hierarchy of reasoning specialists which continuously learn both by undertaking reasoning tasks subcontracted to them, and by independent exploration of their context.