Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
The account of SPaDE in this repository is a work in progress, and is very incomplete. This guide to the areas which are currently being addressed is also a work in progress.
It has always been the case that the project is predicated on the expectation that AI will be able to contribute to the project in a significant way. So far the amount of leverage I have realised from AI has been very small, I have a lot to learn about how to use AI effectively, and I have a lot of work to do in order to make the project more accessible to AI contributions. But the impression I have from those with more experience in using AI is that the potential for contribution is very large, and the pace of advancement in the capabilities continues to accelerate.
The top priority for the documentation will always be to getting an account which enables AI to progress the detailed design and coding as rapidly as possible. So far it has fallen well short of that, and the only coding has been done from my detailed designs.
To elevate the level of contribution of AI, the philosophical underpinnings, architecture and rationale must be articulated at the highest level (including the most difficult elements, which concern what little I can say about how the evolutionary conditions which favour the continuing evolution of benign self-proliferating intelligent systems might be promoted).
In the first instance the higher level materials should then be progressed by addressing the knowledge repository architecture so that work on the logical foundations can be established in the first SPaDE repositories. That initial development of the respositories will target metatheory rather than the usual more mathematically oriented (e.g. heading into real analysis) approach common in foundational logical systems.
The more philosophical aspects will continue to evolve indefinitely. In order to make progress on the more practical aspects of the project, it is necessary to focus on those aspects of the project which are critical to the implementation of the SPaDE MCP server, but the contribution of AI to all aspects of the project is crucial, and can only be undertaken effectively if the philosophical and architectural rationale for SPaDE is well articulated and intelligible to the AI systems contributing to the project.
There is no part of the documentation which could not be improved, and there are many parts which are very incomplete, but focus is essential, and this document is a guide to those parts of SPaDE which are currently being progressed, and, to the extent that AI is able to contribute idependently to SPaDE, provides some guidance on where a contribution might be most valuable.
I have begun this account of work-in-progress by simply enumerating the documents which I have recently created or revised. Ideally as soon as possible this should be restructured to expose the way in which these documents contribute to the rationale for the project and its architecture, and how that higher level structure can be progressed into more detailed design and code.
That strategy translates into focus on:
This is to provide a space for discussion with LLMs either via github copilot or using the web interface to Grok (which I can use for free rather than pay-per-use via the API in copilot.) The web interface to Grok has folders which provide a degree of persistence.
The documents will generally be placed in their intended destination, but not linked other than in this drafts folder.
Initially the work under discussion is an attempt at a compact but comprehensive rationale for SPaDE feeding down to architectural and detailed design of the system and its main subsystems. I’m looking to factor this into a philosophical presentation and an architectural presentation, each of which leans upon a statement of background representing the belief structures in the context of which the purpose of SPaDe can be understood and the features of SPaDE can be seen as a rational approach to realising that purpose.
The philosophical part is currently in:
The architectural part is to be found in:
and some “miscellanea” intended to provide background which might be helpfule in understanding the purpose of SPaDE and the proposed architecture: