Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
To advance the SPaDE deductive intelligence capability as rapidly as possible it is intended to continuously exploit that capability in its own advancement. The concept of “singularity” has been used to refer to the point at which an AI system becomes capable of improving, re-inventing or re-constructing itself, leading to a positive feedback loop of self improvement and hyper-exponential growth in capability.
This is usually considered as a single seismic event, but the application of a capability to improve itself can be expected to occur at multiple levels. In relation to the philosophical context in which SPaDE has been conceived, the possibility of such a phenomenon appears at the lowest level as the primitive deductive system becomes capable of reasoning about deduction and devising more capable and efficient algorithms for deduction. At the upper extreme, as intelligent systems spread across the universe, we anticipate that each generation of self-proliferating intelligent systems will be capable of designing and constructing the next generation, exhibiting extreme capabilities in relation to logic, mathematics, engineering, and system design guided by normative systems.
The singularities in such a progression are not fully susceptible to focal methods, but will in general have focal cores in which formal models of the relevant capabilities are represented, can be elaborated deductively, and thereby contribute to progressing the singular capability in question.
The progression from purely deductive logical foundations, through to the most advanced self-proliferating intelligent systems, may therefore be seen as a progressive collaboration between focal AI operating withing formal models of the target environments for proliferation and the available of projected technologies for implementing proliferation, and broader intelligent capabilities surveying the whole, constructing and evaluating relevant formal models.
For the SPaDE project, this long term cosmic perspective provides motivation and context for an effort primarily addressing the logical foundations, where there are singularities which are completely focal, since they depend only on the structure of the logical systems and support no perception of physical reality, nor any direct effect upon it. The upper levels will be addressed in SPaDE only through philosophy.
At each level in this progression, we describe as a “singular focus” the particular capability which we are seeking to apply to its own advancement, and we can talk of a “focal tower” as the progression through multiple levels of singular focus.
In this document I aim to put some more detail into the characterisation of this focal tower, so that available resources can most effectively be applied to its progression.
It falls into two parts, the first is a very crude sketch of some different levels in the tower, and the second is a more detailed account of the first singular focus.
The project is foundational, which is to say, that it begins with a core upon which all else is progressively built.
The core is a formal deductive system
When we start from a blank slate, there is a bootstrap problem which we have to solve as quickly as possible to reach a capability which can in principle be applied to its own advancement, once sufficiently developed.
To that end, I identify an ultimate purpose, and a fundamental technology, and show how focal methods can be used to ascend a tower which leads us as efficiently as possible from the fundamentals to the ultimate ends.
The tower progresses through of a number of singular foci, each delivering self advancement of a particular capability, leading on to the next singular focus. That these are focal indicates that the knowledge and capabilities are represented in formally represented declarative theories, and therefore constitute perfect information spaces which can be advanced by focal methods. That these foci are singular indicates that they are designed to facilitate reflexive self improvement, and ultimately to optimise trans-cosmic proliferation.
Though this is spoken of as a single tower, there are many upward routes through singular foci to related ends, that many of these will be progressed, and that the knowledge thus gained will be shared through SPaDE-like diasporan repositories.
There are three coarse levels in these towers which correspond to the layers in the epistemological stack. These three epistemological layers distinguished primarily semantically. At all these levels, the knowledge is first given as abstract models. At the level of purely logical or mathematical knowledge this is the whole story. Empirical knowledge is given by presenting an abstract model of some physical system, and then interpreting certain of the objects in the model are representing physical quantities, enabling deductive reasoning about the abstract model to be interpreted as reasoning about the physical system. Normative propositions are something else.
From the bottom up:
1.1 Logic and Software Engineering In this the broad capability is in logical reasoning in a logical system suitable for all deductive reasoning about declarative knowledge. The context in which that capability is exercised is contemporary accelerated computing. The focus, which is a singular focus, is on reasoning about programs, since the embraces the capability to completely re-engineer this kind of reasoning capability.
Empirical Knowledge 2.1 Engineering Design The next layer takes us out of the purely logical into the physical work, from engineering software to engineering physical artifacts. The context for such engineering is the world as we find it, with existing physical system to support design and manufacturing, and the focus is on the advancement of the physical infrastructure supporting design and manufacture.
Normative Knowledge
The previous layer a capability in the context of what we now have on planet Earth. What happens as we try to establish such a capability on some other planet? Then we have to move to the design of a completely new system which will function in a context which is devoid of most everything we have here on planet earth.