Cibernética 3.0

The Informational Foundation of the Human Act

Dr. Fernando Flores Morador & Dr. Luis de-Marcos Ortega & Dr. Carmen Flores Bjurström

The research project “Human Acts Informatics”, has its home at the Department of Computational Science. University of Alcalá (Madrid), Spain.

1 §.   Introduction: what the machines have as human

The 20th Century is the starting point for the most ambitious attempt to extrapolate human life into artificial systems. From Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics to Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, from  John von Neumann’s Cellular Automata and Universal Constructor to the Turing Test, from Artificial Intelligence to Maturana and Varela’s Autopoietic Organization, the goal has been that understand in what sense man is a machine. This scientific and technological movement embraced everything, and all the disciplines without exception have contributed to the task. Not only mathematics and physics, but also biology, sociology, psychology, economics, and many others. New terms such as “information”, were developed with an enormous impact, but also, concepts such as “organization”, “entropy”, “communication”, “encryption”, “computation”, “and algorithmics”, among many others. Our work follows this historical track but reverses the order of the priorities. We want to know what the machine has as a human. To answer this question, we extrapolate algorithmic methodologies into everyday life to expand the benefits of informational theory. 

2 §.   Understanding the human act

We started with a study of the differences between algorithmized acting and human acting [1]. To manage this comparison, we classified “series of human acts” according to the dependence of each act on its prede­cessor [2]. As a result, we divide the human acts into three catego­ries: 1) the “vital acts”, consisting of absolutely free elements (∞-free) respect to their prede­cessors; 2) the “ludic acts”, which are n-free; and 3) the “mechanical acts”, that are unfree (0-free). We noticed that the more order of the series, the less freedom of their acts. In other words, we say that the organizational value (OV) of a chain of acts, will increase inversely proportional to its freedom. Casual relationships are 0-free and have the highest OV. We con­clude, that human acts are mainly ludic, with an OV in between 0-free and ∞-free, but because we had not a measurement instrument that allowed us to measure human acting, we could not differentiate kinds of ludic acts. We needed then, to develop a measurement theory that was able to quantify human acting. We believe that the new measurement unit for OV should be compatible with the “bit” as the basic unit of information in computing and digital communications.

3 §.   The essential difference between the ludic act and the mechanical act

We identify today, as “artificial reasoning” or “computation” the algorithmization of a human series of “mental acts”. The human acts that can be algorithmized, are those that can be organized in “diagrams of flux”. In these diagrams, human acting is extrapolated as imperatives, e.g. “read” and “write”. These imperatives extrapolate de acts of reading and writing, as independent acts, “polarized to the future” of a task to be done by the machine. However in real life, the act of writing is polarized to the future of the reading, and the reading, is polarized to the past of the writing; that means, that they are complementary acts and cannot exist independently. Consequently, in our research, our first step has been to understand which difference was made to introduce the concept of “polarization” of acting in an artificial system. We believe that a machine acts autonomously, while human beings act interactively, generating rhythm patterns with its specific administration of time.

4 §.   Development of a measurement theory

Measuring is a human act because developing a measurement theory implies that we have a theory of human acting in general [3]. When studying the act of writing, we notice that it is the cause of the written text, but it is not the cause of the reading of this text. The written text in their turn, is not the cause of the reading either. The relationship between the act of writing and the act of reading is not causal; so it cannot be mechanical. Further, it cannot be vital, because otherwise, we could not distinguish any pattern in a text. It must then be ludic, but that means that there is in it some order with some freedom.  The relations between acts in a chain must be in some way “actionally” connected. We denoted this specific “freedom-in-control relationship” as “polarization” and described it as the temporal structure of human acting. We say that while “writing” is polarized to the future, “reading” is polarized to the past. We call complementary this kind of act. We noticed that in a chain of complementary acts, the rules of polarization follow the rules of signs of multiplication. This particularity opens for an algorithmization of polarization. We then could say that every written text is polarized towards a future reading, and every reading of a text is polarized towards a written act of the past. Therefore, it is impossible to keep secrets. If a written text has not yet been read, the reading act will find it, similarly as a magnet, polarizing towards its past. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish the concept of polarization from the concept of causality; polarization is not present in today’s algorithms, because they are based on 0-free acts and cannot extrapolate n-free acts.

5 §.   Two basic ludic acts: complementarity and parallelism

Complementary acts that are polarized to the past and the future have no present. However, that contradicts experience in which we find many examples of presentiality. Acts that are polarized to the present will be denoted as parallel acts. They differ from complementary acts by not sharing the same referent object. Each parallel act presents its object. For instance, [John brings Mary a bouquet] and [Mary is grateful and sends a book to John] are two parallel acts. We observe that the first act is polarized toward the future, while the second act is polarized toward the past. However, these polarizations approach the present because John and Mary need to meet each other in some time-space coordinates to exchange presents. We say that they negotiate the meeting by excess or by default until they reach the present. If the act polarized to the past prevails, we have an approximation to the present by default. Instead, if the polariza­tion to the future prevails, we have an approximation to the present by excess.  In parallel acts, the objects must be operationally compatible with each other. For example, we cannot empty a lake with a cube because the lake and the cube are not operationally compatible. Going back to the first example, the flowers and the book are operationally compatible objects and therefore, the polarization towards the present is possible. When the objects are operationally compatible, we say that the acts become polarized towards the present in an absolute way (symbolized as zero “0”). Parallel acts can also be algorithmized because they follow the rules of the signs of addition and subtraction and in a complex chain of acts, the polarization follows the rules of parenthesis in algebra.

6 §.   Defining the general act of measurement

We conclude that the act of measurement falls under the category of parallel acts, and should be under­stood as a minute comparison of the same variable present in two different items or sub­stances. For example, comparing the temperature of the mercury inside the thermom­eter with the temperature of the air surrounding it; or comparing the length of a ruler, with the length of an object. Furthermore, the measurement process should not be confused with the act of experimenting. An experiment is a comparison of two states of the same item or substance and falls under the category of complementary acts. For example, in a medical experiment, the effect of a drug is studied by comparing the effect of the drug in patients to a control group. It is important to remember also, that the results of an experiment, are never a measurement. However, in our context, the measurement meth­odology must start with a classification made upon the polarization of acting. The measurement of complementary acts cannot be done because of the lack of polarization to the present. Therefore, if we want to measure complementary acts they must be converted into parallel acting.

7 §.   Strong and weak embodiment: “shouts” and “whispers” 

We will distinguish two levels of embodiment, the “strong embodiment”, which involves the complete human body and implies the capability of “touching” the things in the world, and the “weak” embodiment or “embodiment of the eye” and “embodiment of the mind”, which is the world as we see and think it. We say that the strong embodiment provides the observer with a space-time system of reference, which is the base of the parallel acts. We have already said above that measuring is a parallel act, adding now that parallel acts are characterized by a space-time coordinate system. Concerning the “weak embodiment,” we say that it is based on complementary acts. Weak embodiments include the “acts of seeing” and the “acts of the mind”, therefore we need to delimit the frontiers between “seeing” and “mentalizing”. “To see” is an act of the senses (directly related to the human body) while “to mentalize” is not. This delimitation can be done pragmatically by associating weak embodiment with the mediation of an instrument that enhances vision and mentalization. For instance, instruments allow us to see and mentalize tiny or far objects, and in general, items that are incongruent with the size of the human body. We can assume that a mentalized presentation is conceptual rather than visual, and if it is visual, the vis­ualization is not about an everyday object but about an artificial object. The graphic curve of a mathematical expression also, cannot be understood as visual because it is not an ob­ject of the senses. To be able “to understand” a mathematical curve, it is necessary to dis­connect the senses and connect mentalized acting. For practical reasons, we have denoted the human acts that are embodied in a strong sense as “shouts” and the human acts that are embodied in a weak sense as “whispers”. That means that shouts are parallel acts while whispers are complementary acts.

8 §.   Measurement of organizational value (OV)

Undertaking the task of developing a method of measurement, we needed different measuring units for the shouts and the whispers. For the measurement of shouts, we defined the “package-bit” (in short, p-bit). Because we are here dealing with acts that are proportional to the human body, we arbi­trarily attribute a real number to the part of the body involved in the act. We said that when the act engages the whole human body, it will generate 16 package bits corresponding to 1 horsepower (hp). To measure the organizational values of whispers, the situation is more complex because whispers are complementary acts and cannot be ordered. However, we assume that they can be matched with the set of complex numbers because these cannot be ordered either. Then following the praxis of the calculation of the modulus of a complex number, we used an Argand diagram to make the conversion of complementary acts into parallel acts. In that manner, we “create the act of measurement”, by iden­tifying the modulus of a complex number with the unit of OV. We denoted this unit as the “hermeneutical-bit” (in short psi-bit which is an irrational number). Then we con­structed an “artificial hermeneutical circle” based on a table of 1000 whispers, divided into 16 “niches”, to which we associate 16 OV-values expressed as psi-bits.  This database is operated by simple arithmetic operations and for each spin of the “hermeneutical wheel”, we got a “measurement” which will give a constant value for the same sample of whis­pers [4]. We consider the traditional informational unit “bit”, as the unit for the measurement of “media shouts”. In this group, we include “texts”, “pictures” and “sounds”. Because the bit is always an integer, and the p-bit is always a real number, we say that the bit is convertible to a p-bit and vice versa by sacrificing/gaining the rest of the OV value. As a rule, we convert p-bits into ѱ-bits multiplying the p-bits by 0, 25, and conversely, ѱ-bits into p-bits mul­tiplying the ѱ-bits by 4.

[1] About this our book Flores Morador & de Marcos Ortega. “The Informational Foundation of the Human Act” (2018). https://www.amazon.com/informational-foundation-Fernando-Marcos-Morador/dp/8416978611

[2] This was inspired by von Misses and Karl Popper´s probability theory. Popper, Karl R. The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson; London, 1980; p. 159.

[3] Published “Hermeneutics of measurement” in SSRN:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350021970_Hermeneutics_of_measurement

[4] Fernando Flores Morador & Luis de Marcos Ortega. Whispers and Shouts. The Informational Measurement of the Human Act. (2021).