Access knowledge by aspects

How does knowledge's need for consciousness affect your productivity?

In order to carry out purposeful tasks you need knowledge.

At any given time, knowledge is in one of the two latter stages of the four stages of competence. It is either

• conscious knowledge (e.g. when you learn how to drive a car) or
• unconscious knowledge (e.g. when you have become an experienced driver).
• The larger the extent to which knowledge can be sourced from your unconscious, the more productive you get at carrying out a task - not only in terms of efficiency but also in terms of learning new knowledge.

Linked concepts and the limits of your conscious mind

Knowledge itself can be understood as a collection of linked concepts. So learning can be understood as incorporating such linked concepts by having ideas. Our minds link ideas by concepts, i.e. implementation, or name, which is in fact a public access method of the mind's Thought API for that implementation.

New knowledge passes two fundamental stages while being learnt:

• craft a set of linked concepts into conscious knowledge (turning yourself into an amateur), and then
• push down that knowledge into the unconscious (turning yourself into a professional) — freeing your mind for crafting further sets of linked concepts into further conscious knowledge.

Miller's law states that the number of concepts an average person can hold in working memory is about seven. This phenomenon poses a limit to the power of your mind for mastering complex tasks. (A complex task is a task that requires several linked concepts.) If most of those linked concepts are not used regularly, then they won't make it to the unconscious level and thus occupy valuable positions in your working memory.

How can dataspects leverage your mind?

When asked to perform a task, you have to tie in — for the right reasons — many skills and concepts:

• some of which you know by heart,
• some of which you know sketchily and
• some of which you don't know, but may know how (not where!) to look them up and learn to use them the right way for the right reason.

So in order to serve as an efficient processing (rather than just a storage) extension to your mind, dataspects must be able to present to you an aspect containing no more than about 7 concepts.

It is your task to learn and practice as much in a domain so that most, if not all of those 7 concepts are unconscious knowledge.

In his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Daniel Kahneman writes in chapter 6 "Norms, Surprises and Causes", page 71:

This observation corresponds directly to the concepts of dataspects' Knowledge Management Framework (DSKMF).

As Alfred North Whitehead put it:

Quality Assurance (QUALAS)

The purpose of a corporate semantic web is to let searchers find what authors have written. In both roles, i.e. as a searcher and as an author, people tend to express their knowledge and questions in

• inconsistent ways
• using inherently variable natural language.

Moreover and realistically, neither the searchers' nor the authors' language can be normed, which means that one needs to be semantically mapped to the other. This mapping requires background knowledge, because the meaning of something is not contained in its representation. For example, there is nothing big in the sequence of b-i-g, nor is there anything small in the sequence of s-m-a-l-l.

An internet search engine like Google can learn this background knowledge, a.k.a. "term semantics", using statistical methods. This approach is not feasible in the realm of corporate semantic webs, because

• there are far fewer documents with far fewer linkages,
• documents originate from many more diverse sources and
• there are far fewer users (and these users behave as mentioned above).

This is why — for the time being — term semantics should be declared manually in a corporate thesaurus by pragmatic/dynamic/periodic corporate terminology management which is characterized by

• pragmatically accepting preliminary gaps, simplifications and inexactitudes,
• avoiding irrelevant modelings and
• correcting thesaurus items dynamically on the occasion of periodic thesaurus reviews.

Mission

dataspects minimizes the mental overhead wasted when using knowledge. If people need to

• study a subject,
• learn a skill or
• master an activity,

they need to reach usefully prepared knowledge as easily and quickly as possible.

The way they do this is by traveling through a web of aspects starting with an intuitive and spontaneous statement.

Will computers crowd humans out of existence at the point of singularity? Are efforts to make and use them in smarter ways inappropriate, futile or dangerous?

Maybe — probably (not) — we don't know.

Maybe human existence and its intelligence is ruled by universal, and currently indiscernible, laws that absolutely prohibit reaching singularity — similar to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle identifying the fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be known.

• Maybe we'll vanish leaving nothing else than our obituary as enabling crusaders towards singularity.
• Maybe computers will honour us eternally for having brought them up, hosting us in retirement homes (or planets) just like we do for our esteemed elders.
• Maybe nature's axis of evolution is on a higher dimension out of reach of our native perception (but not of our mathematical perception capabilities) and organic life is a prestage of a mechanic-digital species — making the homo sapiens sapiens act as the parent generation giving birth to an evolution step in a fifth rather than the familiar fourth (time) dimension. And just as a parent generation vanishes over time ceding its 3-dimensional existence space to its children along the fourth dimension, humans could be meant to cede their 4-dimensional existence space to their "children" along a fifth dimension.
• Or we coexist, based on the possibility that the human type of existence cannot be reduced to chemicals in organic matter, but bears a Godly breath unattainable by wires and silicon — and computers valuing us for that reason, as we value them for their speed and storage space regarding pattern recognition and integration and of course resolving logics.
• When confronted with the question about the purpose of the human existence, I base everything on a pragmatic dogma that the creator enjoys "art for art's sake", i.e. anything that reduces entropy. Mankind's characteristic curiosity and quest for innovation is a concrete manifest of this dogma.

In the course of this strive, the human brain has learnt to surmount its limitations by developing tools, which, in case of computers, increase the processing and storage power at its service.

So, in view of the fact that our best option is probably to aspire coexistence with superintelligence, the concepts promoted here are merely development steps towards some yet unknown "optimal" model of that coexistence.

A human brain's BIOS (basic input/output system) is currently confined to our senses — with maybe looming or promising advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCI, see Nick Bostrom's thoughts on this below).

The interesting part in this is not so much the question whether we can consciously operate machines using our thoughts, but whether we could "use" e.g. Wikipedia unconsciously. That is, connect our brain to Wikipedia and use its knowledge by means of ontological linked open data (LOD) that integrates with our unconscious mind. Such functionality could for example enable anyone to honor, heed and practice fine-grained Swiss societal customs and habits in a convincing manner without having ever learnt, considered or practiced any aspect about those Swiss customs in a conscious way previously.

That's why I consider dataspects' principal intent — making optimal use of computers to minimize mental overhead when learning and working — not only worthwhile but imperative.

Philosophical Background