Concepts, Part 2
Spreading Concepts
[This article is a work in progress]
In the first part of this article, I showed how concepts centre around motivations. In this second part I’ll explain how exactly they act on the mind, how you turn them into symbols, and how you use them to reason through problems.
Interpreting Your Own Thoughts
Consider the concept of humour.
Some things you hear and see are funny to you. But is the concept of humour by itself funny? Not likely.
The concept of cute isn’t itself cute, the concept of dangerous isn’t itself dangerous. A concept is not the same as an example of that concept. It doesn’t do the same things. As you think about a concept, you take a more formal or “academic” approach to the subject. This is different from how you experience and use the concept day-to-day.
In the previous article I discussed concepts in terms of their day-to-day effects and the changes they make in your mind. This is when you apply them to actual examples, instances, moments, when you deal with experiences in real life.
In this article on the other hand, I’m talking about concepts as how you see them when you look inside your mind. Precisely because you have the ability to see your own thoughts, you can have thoughts about your thoughts. You can have thoughts about a variety of mental events such as your feelings, predictions, and experiences.
Looking back at the concept of humour, where did the concept of humour, as is what you see by looking at your own thoughts, come from in the first place?
Here’s one possible chronology. As a child you found certain sights and sounds made you laugh. You didn’t really know why, they just did. Later on in life you noticed that it felt good to laugh at certain things, and that you wanted more of it. Once you gained enough empathy for others feelings, you even tried to make them laugh. As you succeeded or failed in these attempts, you wanted to better understand what makes something funny to you, so you could do more of it. Here is where you first considered the concept of humour. You had social motives to invent the concept, i.e. you wanted to be popular by making others laugh.
What you’re starting to see is that looking into your mind, and defining and naming concepts are secondary actions that you do after you have already established your basic motivation. This is when you formalize and abstract your thoughts. All concepts you are aware of develop in this way. They are afterthoughts, and as you saw in the above example, you have a different motivation for defining a concept than the motivation that drives the concept itself.
It’s easy to confuse what is a cause and what is an effect when you try to look at your own mind. The concept humour is not a cause, it is an interpretation of your existing thoughts and actions. It is also an attempt to understand them. You are trying to understand yourself better in order to solve a new problem.
Here’s a detailed example to show this pattern at work.
“Transportation”
Growing up, you may have been a passenger in a car, in a train, perhaps on a plane, or a boat. You may have ridden a bike or a scooter. You learned how to address each of these on their own. You may perhaps have had difficulty getting into a car as an infant, or riding a bike, but you soon gained the skills for it. At no point did you need to understand the concept of transportation in order to use a car, a bike, or a train.
One day, perhaps you needed to get from one place to another, and realized you had many different options. You had a moment of indecision. This was a new problem you hadn’t faced before. You had to pick which would be the best. Within this problem context, you started to think about all the different ways you have available to you for getting from place to place.
The moment you realized the new problem, that of choosing how to get somewhere, you had generated a new concept. As a child you had taken whatever option people told you to. Now the decision was one you had to make yourself. Trains, planes, cars, etc are all possible solutions that you now have to pick from. Whereas as an infant you may have faced problems around your “bicycle” or “scooter”, you now have the problem of “transportation”.
Eventually, you attached a word to these experiences so that you could communicate about it to others, and so that they could communicate about it to you.
[Past this point this article is a Work In Progress]
Communicating Your Ideas
Why do this at all? Two reasons. First, to communicate your ideas to others. There’s a benefit and joy in sharing ideas with like minded friends, and to do this you first have to articulate them. The second reason is the same as the first, but in reverse — you’d like to relate other’s thoughts to your own experiences, and learn from them.
[WIP: We have many driving motivations that cause us to speak.]
A Machine For Creating Solutions
In a game of chess, your primary goal is to capture your opponent’s king. This desire to capture an opponent’s king in chess leads to many diverse actions. In each case you imagine a set of moves that lead to one of your pieces taking the place of your opponent’s king. The outcome you want is always the same. Anything that gets you there is a solution.
Regardless of how different they are, they are all part of the same concept. The concept is a checkmate. They all address the same underlying motivation: to win this game of chess. As you contemplate possible moves, you discard those that don’t achieve your goal, and lock in those that do. The act of going through possibilities, and accepting or rejecting them as solutions, is the machinery of a concept in motion.
During the game, you repeatedly ask yourself: “will this move lead me to capturing his king?” When you introspect and become self-aware of what you are doing, you realize you are ultimately deciding if a given move belongs to the concept checkmate.
This second level of introspection is not necessary, though in many cases it can be helpful. Often you can achieve your ends unconsciously, acting on instinct. In other cases you consciously think about your ideas, and try to find patterns that can help you do a task better. Concepts originally form in the first unconscious layer. Later, through introspection you discover patterns in your thoughts and give names to groups of experiences which you previously acted on instinctively. Why do this?
In the game of chess, you may soon find that having a few good moves in your back pocket isn’t enough. This is where introspection kicks in. Through introspection you might become aware of patterns in your thoughts. Now instead of just trying to win the game current you’re playing, you start strategizing. You invent concepts, stratagems, plays, offensives, defences. Each of these solves a smaller problem, related to the larger problem of winning the game.
What you’re starting to see is that defining and naming concepts is a secondary action that we do after we have already put the basic motivations in place. This is the act of formalizing and abstracting or thoughts. They are a result of introspection.
[Work in progress]
[formalizing concepts is an attempt to explain them to others clearly — formal logic is an attempt at social justification, convincing others, not yourself]
Are you also working on applying human creativity, human understanding, even human values to Artificial Intelligence? I’m looking to connect with others who have a similarly ambitious vision of the future of A.I., who want to tap the full creative potential of human intelligence, in software.
