Thread by @KesterRatcliff

where might be worth trying to ask about sharing and developing a design for a radically new kind of digital communications system, even tho I'm not technically fluent in programming yet (&probably never will be among the best starting this late in life)? @mozilla @civictechguide

seems to me, we already have a big split between the people with the most technical expertise and the people with most influence or power on 'vision' or directions of dev, and most of the leaders in AI direction of development are frankly terrible people - Musk, Altman, Thiel.

so wouldn't it be better to a) narrow that gap, b) allow people who aren't necessarily excellent in technical implementation skills yet but also aren't terrible people and maybe have interesting design ideas to get listened to, even if/ especially if, their ideas are unfamiliar?

tldr: my idea is for radically new kind of digital comms system (with potential for many different systems within it/based on it) based in biosemiotics theory, and I think it potentially solves the Barrier of Meaning, Syntax-biased media, and Platonist-Cartesian split problems.

may be overambitious, but I think the Barrier of Meaning and Syntax-bias (Innis, 2008) problems aren't really that hard if you defocus on human social conventions and pay more attention to biological analogies, which are plentiful, and compare other species' cognitive ecologies.

Tldr: biosemiotics theory is about how meaning emerges and evolves biologically, from the beginning of life, or even before with polymers we would call biochemicals after the first cell wall, long before the human kinds of propositional meaning and semantics inferred from syntax.

The most important theoretical idea, which isn't new or mine, but I converged on it by imagination: meaning emerged first from the environment ~ years before humans' sense of meaning inferrable from syntax, which is a very complicatedly derived layer of it.3.7.bn

'Meaning', in the biosemiotic broader sense, is a co-regulation process between external constraint-based signals of viability ranges for specific metabolic processes, which life recursively models inside itself to make coregulation efficient enough to be thermodynamically stable

That's quite mainstream established theoretical biology, but the challenge is to model all the complicated links between that and humans' most complicated usages of language, prioritising bottom-up meaning & making it inherently robust enough to resist all sorts of manipulations.

I first came up with this mainly by imagination, 3-4 months before I knew read or knew the name of biosemiotics theory. I discovered TerrenceDeacon's interviews on Mind-Body Solution pod and gradually realized almost none of my theoretical ideas are new,open.spotify.com/episode/2EF0Wd…

but sticking them together practically, bodging a workable transition system out of existing imperfect precedents, some implementation ideas how to connect all the layers, are new, afaik. Basically, my design agrees with many theoretical biologists' perspective/s on these things.

I think imagining a radically new tech system doesn't necessarily require the skills to be able to build it, or even being innately predisposed to be capable of that sort of technical excellence, but more like exceptionally complex contextual awareness & sensitivity to analogies.

I've partly written an explanation for the general public entirely in biological metaphors, main one being ants' cognitive ecology, how their social networks' topology and collective level rationality emerge depending on micro-geographical prior structures in their environment.

I still haven't drawn it out (adhd🐒), but it has four major layers, some implementation ideas within each layer, almost clarified what the key functional challenge for each layer is, and collected many precedent parts which might be helpful to build it or prototype some layer/s.

I don't see any way it could be monetizable or useful for extracting value from the public or environmental commons, and that's a purposeful feature. It might save us so much wasted energy & conflicts that indirectly it enables more economic flourishing, but not in divisible way.

If I'm right, it would require much more time and initial shared investment in developing such a complete mapping of meaning all the way down to biophysics, like a human childhood's exceptionally long cooperatively protected early sensitive, exploratory learning phase, but then

it would then be inherently more efficient, like bio intelligence, getting more efficient over time and robust at mapping meaning all the way down, 'like turtles all the way down', unlike current AI systems which require more energy over time, as in Capitalist myths about scaling

Maybe even my practical implementation ideas aren't as new as I think, because I'm not that connected with the scene, so my ask is please could you connect me with people? I don't have excellent coding skills yet but imagining wildly new things and complex context sensitivity yes

initial shared investment doesn't necessarily mean just money - my idea is to make people's work by communicating in the medium, or type of media, more purposeful, not emphemeral, not lost over time or just accumulating value for others, so it'd be more worthwhile to contribute.

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