IPFS IPFS Camp 2022, 2 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Trancending natural language - Xavi Vives

Description

This talk was given at IPFS Camp 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal.

A

Yeah, my name is tabi, and this is actually a talk about interplanting, my mapa protocol to upgrade natural language.

A

So there is something that concerns me a lot, which is that as humans, we we are not understanding each other and I know. This is not a new problem for Humanity. We've been having it for for a very long time, but I think we're getting more started, and we have amazing technology that it's helping us to progress at exponential rates, but things like better communication, better sense, making better meaning making and better understanding at getting worse and I.

A

Believe it's because, when you combine this lack of understanding with this exponential Tech you're, getting where, where we are now, which is this age of exponential misunderstanding.

A

So in this talk, I want to discuss three things: um one will be Y is what is the cause of that and how I can believe, I believe with the digital protocol on top of apfs? We can fix some of these issues and how this is not only about language for communication but language to extend or cognitive capacities.

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So why are we not understanding each other I? Think the best way to summarize that is what I call the fallacy of share, meaning, which is we behave like we give the same meaning to things and I Define, meaning in a particular way. Meaning is all the information that we use to relate to an object so that Sensations emotions, knowledge, uh memories.

A

The sum of all these experiences around an object is what the meaning we give to that object so take, for example, climate change. What does it mean to your climate change? What's climate change to you, um You, probably even exposed to over the years to conversations to papers? You have knowledge about it. You experience it yourself. Maybe you've seen changes in weather patterns. All these compounding information is what the meaning that you give to climate change, which means it's fundamentally subjective for each of us.

A

Each of us had the complete experience or a different example like how does a kid learn? What are trees it's exposed over the years in its childhood, um it Associates the world with this 3D object and the sound and the smell, so the fallacy of share meaning is basically confusing the word with its meaning.

A

It's confusing something objective is something completely subjective: the tree with a complex idea that we have in our heads that where the tree is so, if you want to change any of that, if we want to improve in regardless of how we communicate and how we think at the very least, we need to make meaning explicit.

A

So interplanetary map the protocol, it's aiming to make many or subjective meaning, explicit and in a way that cannot be separated from the information that we're trying to represent now, meaning it's like this huge cloud of uh in our heads like it's a universe. It's something fuzzy and complex and ambiguous, and if you want to make it um concrete to make a protocol, we have to make it a little more tangible. So this is my topology of meaning.

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So first, it's it's objective which all give different, meaning it's also around an object. um It's the meaning of something I call this the meaning of something at the moment in time by a particular individual, a meaning unit.

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So and these meaning units are not stand alone, they are very complex objects like a tree and just make up ideas like bark green photosynthesis, my memories of a tree, the smell of a tree. All these things can be themselves conceived as meaning units, and we can interconnect them and the sum of all them is what makes a tree also tree evolves. Like sorry, a mini unit evolved like just because now I'm talking about the tree, I'm changing the meaning of it, maybe like very slightly not in a meaningful way, but nevertheless, it's changing.

A

Also trees has pointers if I say tree. Each of you will recall an idea of a tree a different one, but there is a pointer to this idea. So the fallacy of chair, meaning, is confusing the word the pointer to what it's pointing at and not only words can be used as pointers. If I see a tree, an image also a recall a tree or if I smell something right and we can conceive everything as a meaning unit.

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Any physical object like tree, but also constructs or like digital stuff, like text a paragraph, a word, a character, anything that we can conceive, we can transform it as a meaning unit.

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There is a lot more properties and there's a lot more complexity in here, but my aim was just to Showcase that, while fuzzy we can get quite close to it and we'll never be able to represent meaning fully, but we can do much better than what we have right now.

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So if the best data structure that I know of to represent something of this complexity, um it's it's a graph. It's ipld! It's where each meaning unit can be represented as an ipld object, that's made of other interconnected, IPL the objects and, at the same time they can live in multiple meaning units. At the same time, and because everything is subjective and our minds are behind the subjectivity, we can basically Define it as a peer-to-peer Network where our minds are represented as nodes and we can just exchange meaning as messages.

A

So you may be wondering okay, but that's a lot of data. How do you get all that in? How do you make it actually work and like do you expect just to plug in like a Nero link or just to you know, input lab dictionary for the rest of your life, and the answer is quite more simple than that. You just need to make meaning when you need it to be explicit when you have conflict, when someone asks you, what do you mean?

A

It's basically saying hey: there is something in your world that I'm not quite getting it. Can you make it more explicit, that's a good time to make it explicit um or when you're trying to figure out something by yourself when something is not clear enough when something an object of a study or you're dealing with a lot of complexity.

A

That's a time where you can add more concreteness. You can make it more explicit, I'm used to maybe thinking. Okay, that's still a lot of things. That's a lot of work, but actually the project aims for maybe a platonic idea, I'm, not so sure how platonic it is.

A

But you should never write the same thing twice it's this idea of transclusion, which is you write something once and then you reuse it everywhere, which is not something easy to you and there's a lot of complexity here, because you need to treat language in a specific way, but nevertheless, it's possible so and as opposed to just expressing the same thing over and over again like in in different ways, but a slightly different context.

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What we do is we just would express it once and when we need to change it because it doesn't fit the context. You add resolution so you're, meaning making you're adding Clarity to your meaning.

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Now, I didn't start really this for um for communication, um there was a main another motivation for me. We just I want to improve my sense, making and I felt limited by the tools that I was using it I'm using all these digital tools, but they don't work. How I think they're, not uh they don't. Allow me to structure information and to transform it in a way that fits my mind and that's exactly the reason I'm using a computer.

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It's to assist my limited cognitive capacities, so what I want it's something that trade information in the same way, I, think that is organized and I, can trans structure and transform it and visualize it in something that suits my needs.

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So when you organize information around meaning units and you connect them using language, what you end up is basically a digital representation of your mind, and it's quite amazing, because now every single piece of information has its place, which is how you structure. In your mind, you don't need to think where you put stuff, you don't need to force a categorization like file system or a tagging, because instead, what you do is you write down how this is associated with other things? So now never never anything is misplaced.

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There's everything has a place, which means that I can add a lot more information, which means I, can add a lot more subtleties in more in how expressing my reality and I'm dealing with either tasks, ideas or just expressing meaning in itself, and if I lose something I just get it back in the same way, I get something from memory. I recall it using associations, I find like similar stuff and then I browse through this similar stuff until I found it.

A

Now, this beautiful Masterpiece, it's aiming to express how a word it's used, so the pink one will be the the meaning that the culture gives to a word it is. It has a large semantic field. It means this word is used in many different places in many different ways.

A

um It's also fuzzy like it's not clear right, because we use it all in a slightly different way and there is no Clarity on how to use it now. The blue thing is how I use this word. It's much. Fine like it's, it's a smaller uh semantic feel I use it in more much more explicit ways, but and I also use it sometimes in places that the culture doesn't use. It I have my particular way of using it foreign.

A

Now this is what happens when you start using something like interplanetary mind map, because you're making meaning concrete. You start realizing about the fallacies of how you're writing, like the the incoherence, sometimes you're, using a word, but this word is defined in a particular way for you, but now you're using it ah a slightly different.

A

So what you do instead, you split and you create a different meaning unit, so you're, basically adding resolution to your reasoning, you're, adding Clarity and now you can create abstractions that better capture your reality in a much more accurate way, and so it better can suit your needs.

A

So this is my website. um You can find there the references to the project and also you can actually browse part of my mind over the last year. I've been this is still a in design phase and it will be for some time, but over the last year, I've been using it to write over a thousand meaning units, and it's been a quite amazing experience.

A

Most of the words that I've written or like the I Define, meaning was some for was for things that were not clear enough for me that the way we use it in language was not Concrete in order to work, and the perfect example is the idea of meaning. At the beginning of this talk, I read a fine Munich in my own way, and what this allowed me is to use meaning to create this framework, because otherwise, the the definitions of meaning that I found were not concrete enough were fuzzy so by making it explicit.

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I now have over a different, like maybe 10 different words that include the word, meaning meaning unit projection files, future meaning share, meaning and so on. So the system is being allowing me to make my world more consistent to meaning making and not only that, but because of it, I can deal with much greater complexity. I will dare to say that at least an order of magnitude I can keep going and going and going and I have this system.

A

That is mapping how I think and my memory, so I keep forgetting things and then I go back to the system. I realize that I already reasoned, that in the past and so I can bring it back. To my my run, let's say, and while I've been focusing a lot in language, this is not about language itself. It's about meaning and many things can be expressed as meaning um we're only limited by the digital tools, but nevertheless this can be pushed off a lot and one extreme example is in in the website itself.

A

The user interface is conceived as a meaning unit, which means that I can transform how I visualize the data and how I need, which means I could create a system that not only is expressing my own meaning, but it's actually visualizing and transforming in the ways I need and because I can do this UI I'm there to say that this can probably extend to much more than just simple user interface and we probably can reach any kind of computation and any kind of application. On top of that.

A

So uh that's it. uh If any of these sounds remotely interesting to you, I would love to talk to you any ideas you may have or collaborations I'll be super happy. This is my website where you find everything the Twitter handle and the telegram handle are the same. So thank you.