There's something very valuable that few people are talking about: we could call this our civilization's DNA. Can we make it a public good? more info
To explain what I mean, there is a recent example of knowledge transfer from the West to the East, where the entirety of not just supply chains, but the manufacturing processes coded in the particular machine sets were transferred, by making them understood by people, and the knowledge re-encoded in other people's neural networks to remember how to do stuff: how to assemble and operate machines to extract natural resources and run economy from own currency to own data at all levels including communication protocols.
This is Infinity -- a community, where we live and support the realization of our personal goals for making the world a better place for all (not just our community).
The Infinity is a purposeful community: we are here to research and engineer ways for rational global economic and political cooperation, in order to help the world collectively define and pursue goals.
It is an experiment, in trying to discover the minimal set of elements that are necessary and sufficient to run a self-determined community, with its own economy and politics. We are looking for minimal database model for that.more info
To support all activities, and integrating with opertions of all relevant equipments with everyone's freedoms to share details about their operations for community credit, that works like money (making it an open source sovereign economic system software, allowing for any community of manufacturers and consumers to form self-governance and monetary system, that can seamlessly interoperate with the economy of other sovereign systems, because of common ontology for defining economic communities). You can think of this community, as a digital version of "Global Village Construction Set" (which is an initiative to provide a minimal set of open source industrial machines that are necessary and sufficient to run a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts). However, in our case, we are looking for minimal database model that is necessary and sufficient to create an independent and rational economy and politics, and we have created one based on the equation model (described in the model section).
This community has originated from the relentless minds of innovators, wanting to create positive impact for the world, through introducing new (0 ⇢ 1) and scaling already existing (1 ⇢ oo) innovations. Therefore, we have a way for projects to create shares as if they are their products, and sell them to fund their operations, in a manner that resembles how companies get funded via getting listed in stock markets.
The community has a way to register mutual contributions, what works like a central bank with our own currency and humanity's natural measure of value!
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The Model
Introduction
Please, watch the video for introduction.
The Equation Model
Please, watch the video for introduction.
First principles: F(X)=Y
The equation model F(X)=Y functional form, which describes a triplet (F, X, Y) is sufficiently abstract to define and describe the pursuit of any goals (Y), with respect to any world (F), by any process that varies (X). (Note: while equation more generally can be of parametric or differential forms, where both sides of the equation are parametrized, it can be shown that by denoting all of those parameters as a single complex X parameter, it can always be rewritten into the functional form, and thus, talking of the functional form is sufficient for our further investigation.)
However, it generally proves to be hard for people and organizations to convert everyday problems into mathematical ones, and even today, the majority of people are unable to reduce their everyday problems to mathematical ones, and apply the formulas they've learned at the elementary schools.
Therefore, we sought for a more concrete semantic decomposition of the components of the equation model into the more concrete concepts widely used by humans of all sorts of backgrounds.
We tried to create a decomposition that employs less than 8 concepts, because that is the upper limit of short-term memory for most humans. The mission of the project at that time was to eliminate the knowledge gap between us humans: "We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole." -- a problem introduced in the economist Leonard E. Read's essay "I, Pencil" in 1950s, and well-explained in Matt Ridley's TED speech "When Ideas Have Sex" in 2010 (video).
Foundational Questions
“Who?”, “Where?”, “When?” DOING “What?”, “How?”, “Why?”
Base vectors of human semantic space.
If we take a look at how do human kids understand the world, we may notice that they ask a lot of questions, and there seem to be just a couple of basic question categories, that they use to do it. These include some of the basic questions like “Why?”, “How?”, “Who?”, “When?”, etc. When humans grow up and get entrepreneurial, they try to answer the same questions using methodologies like the so-called "Lean Canvas": “Problem”, “Solution”, “Customers”, etc.
Initially, we tried to identify the technical concepts that correlate best with what equation model implies, namely, realizing that the equation F(X)=Y has two parts separated by equality sign – one part that specifies the desired condition to satisfy (=Y), and one that describes the state (F(X)) dependence on our actions (X). From that, it was quite clear, that the conditions (=Y) part has to correspond to concepts that people associate with things they seek. We named that by word “Goals” (because that is what is formal definition of a "goal" -- a set of conditions that when satisfied, the goal is said to be achieved), but later realized that humans tend to use a variety of other equivalent (or inverse) concepts to describe or imply them, such as “Problems”, “Challenges”, etc., and many other synonyms of the concept of goal, and realized that the most prominent relevant question among the ones that people ask when they speak about goals, is “Why?”.
Continuing, it was clear that what remains is a decomposition of goals into actions, as described in the first video. For example:
– A monkey wanted a banana. (Y - Goal)
→ So it had an idea to use a stick to reach it. (Arrow 1)
⇨ So it had actually taken the actual stick and performed an action. (Arrow 2)
– A human wanted to the Moon. (Y - Goal)
→ So it had an idea to use a rocket to reach it. (Arrow 1)
⇨ So it had actually made the rocket and performed an action. (Arrow 2)
So, we asked ourselves: What parts of the equation do these arrows (→ Arrow 1, ⇨ Arrow 2) represent, and what human questions answer them? We thought that these have to be the concepts of an “Idea” and “Plan” (project). There we had our model:
– Goal
→ Idea
⇨ Plan
This model is just a set of simple words known to most people, corresponding to more technical words like intent, principle and action, that we saw in examples of the behavior of living beings, and how they operate (i.e., how humans and monkeys decompose their intents into actions). This way, it is easy to see that these concepts (goal, idea, plan) correspond to questions “Why?”, “How?” and “What?” (grammatical accusative case, or a so-called “object” in subject–object–verb language model).
– Goal ("Why?")
→ Idea ("How?")
⇨ Plan ("What?")
We later identified other words (synonyms), that people use to answer those questions, such as:
– Goal: “Problem”, “Challenge”, “Question”, “Category”, “Domain”, “Concept”, “Intent”,...
→ Idea: “Solution”, “Opportunity”, “Answer”, “Transformation”, “Algorithm”, “Principle”, “Method”,...
⇨ Plan: “Organization”, “Company”, “Group”, “Delivery”, “Activity”, “Project”,...
On a side note, you can see the reflection of that in our current website, as the top titles like “Question”, “Idea”, “Project” that, communicate these categories in such a way that they feel naturally actionable to most English speakers – it’s easy to ask a question, suggest an idea, and start a project.
We call the questions or categories like these -- “semantic base vectors”, and we just explained 3 of them (we came up with 6 in total, described below).
So, when someone asks a question like “Why?” – what they are asking, is for the other party (whom they are asking) to project whatever they are doing or planning onto the axis defined by the “Why?” dimension to elucide the answer.
These three vectors were sufficient for basic understanding. However, let's take a look how do they correspond to parts of the equation model. We had:
When mathematicians speak, what they mean by writing equations, is that we write the de-facto circumstances that we have in the world on one side of equality sign (“=”), and the desired circumstances on the other side:
F(X)=Y
“What we have” ⇡ ⇡ “What we want”
That is the semantics of equation as a concept. Pragmatically, to solve an equation, one or the other side is transformed, until we have the equality not as a condition, but as an expression of fact about required X in terms of other components.
Can you notice our beautifully discovered concepts of “Idea” and “Plan” (through examples of a monkey and a human, moon and banana) in the equation model already?” If not, continue reading.
So, we observed that in context of this semantics, the obvious answers to questions “What we have?” and “What we want” would be:
– F(X): “What we have?” is:
→ We have the world. (world state 1)
– Y: “What we want” is:
→ We want the goals. (world state 2)
We already connected the “Y” with concept of “Goal”, so we leave it out and focus on the “F(X)”, – asking: What are F and X, if the F(X) is the world?
The most natural answer to this question that we’ve got, is that:
→ F is “remaining world without agent (doer, or process) itself”
→ X is “the agent (doer, or process), that is part of the world”
By looking at what human questions identify these categories, we match up:
– X : “Who?” (agent)
– F : “What?” (world)
However, in the midst of this chapter above, we observed that the concept of “Plan” answers the question “What?” (we said -- grammatical accusative case, or a so-called “object” in “subject–object–verb” language model). So, how do these concepts connect?
It is easy to see that, the so-called “subject” (of “subject–object–verb” language model) corresponds here to agent (X), and the so-called “object” of the model corresponds to world (F), so that we correctly interpret that agent acts on world: we say – “agent parametrizes the world, seeking to make it equate to goals”. That is, so that agents like humans or monkeys parametrize the world (F) with what they are (themselves as world parameters) in terms of their actions (selves as processes), to achieve their goals (the following future states of the world).
The fact that both semantic categories of “Plan” and “World” are answers the same question of “What?” do not contradict: by answering the same question (“What?”) they are both just being part of the world (as is “agent”), but “agent” has this extra category of “Who?” that is useful to people’s minds to help figure out causal social relationships, and that is probably why people have this semantic dimension or question.
In context of mathematics and optimization theory, it is widely known that what we mean by “X” in many contexts is not just a parameter, but an optimizer, or a process, that searches for parameters (just like agents do), and we identify analogies:
– X : “Who?”, (agent) – “Process”, “subject” – the Human, the Monkey,...
– F : “What?” (world), “Plan”, “object” – the Banana, the Moon,...
For clarity: in the context of language model (“subject-verb-object”) – “X” part of the equation corresponds to “subject+verb” part, while “F” part of the equation corresponds to “object” part. That is true because we consider agent (X) here as both a part of the world (“subject”), and an actor doing (“verb”).
We go back to first insights, and plug in what we have:
– Goal ("Why?") – Y – having "imaginary (desired) Banana in monkey’s mouth" is cool.
→ Idea ("How?") – ???
⇨ Plan ("What?") – part of F – "the Banana in the real world, and steps of getting Banana".
Then, and ask ourselves:
– Where do the steps of getting Banana come from?
– What does the X correspond to as “subject+verb”?
– Does X really correspond to Ideas?
With a little bit of abstraction, namely, the concept of "class and instance" (as in object-oriented-programming) (or the concept of a "random process and its realization", as in process theory), we realize that an “Idea” has to be an abstract principle (that emerges as a representation that is a result of mental processes) to be able to be an “actions generator”, or “plan steps generator” for it all to make sense. Thus we define an “Idea” as an abstract prescriptive principle “X”, that can generate actions (and then the actual actions (like plans and projects), must be the concrete realizations of its process “X̂(t)” (samples of a random variable defined by an “Idea”)).
With these abstractions in place, we can indeed say that “X” really correspond to “Idea”, and write:
– Goal ("Why?") – Y
→ Idea ("How?") – X
⇨ Plan ("What?") – part of F – X̂(t)
Now that we have elucidated the ontological anatomy of the equation model –
“What?” “How?”
⇣⇣
F(X)=Y
⇡ “Why?”
We finally have a mapping between mathematical equation model and the basic human questions asked by children.
However, we said that when human kids understand the world, they also ask the questions like “Who” and “When?”, one of which is obviously not covered in the among our three semantic base vectors. Do we need more semantic vectors?
We thought – yes. Namely, because the current “What?” in the “F” part is too broad – it can be pretty much anything, and from experience, we know that people move in the 3+1-dimensional spacetime, where there are a couple of very useful coordinate systems and reference systems, that people use to talk about things as parts of the world, like identities, space and time, that as we know are answers to questions “Who?”, “Where?”, “When?”, and therefore we include them as the remaining 3 dimensions, totalling 6.
You might notice that we arrived to the fact that both “How?” and “Who?” correspond to “X” somehow. What does it mean? Well, think about it: the “X” as a process is as much an agent as it is an algorithm. So, "algorithmness" of it is addressed by “How?” and "identityness" of it is addressed by “Who?”.
There, we arrive at our core model (here is a video on it):
“Who?”, “Where?”, “When?” DOING “What?”, “How?”, “Why?”
“What?” “How?”
⇣⇣
F(X)=Y
⇡ “Why?”
F: World, X: Processes, Y: Goals.
“Where?” “Who?”
⇣⇣
F(X)
“When?” ⇡
It's 6 questions that answer basic questions about world's processes, and closely corresponds to and meaningfully decompose common philosophical decompositions of the world, like:
subject -- verb -- object
substance -- entity -- essence
world -- operations -- dreams
(entities -- processes -- conditions)
...
etc.
Note: In a broader sense, any world is really about “What does what?” rather than “Who does what?”, because processes are more general than agents -- it is sufficient to focus on processes, and their input-output quality to understand the world and its systems, in a similar way how it is sufficient to understand sentences as pairs like (object, subject+verb) and not triples like (subject, verb, object).
Database Model
Please, watch the video for introduction.
For World Dream Operations.
Being a informative set of concepts that seem to be convenient for human cognition, making sense of the world, and converting problems from data to equations, we decided to build a database based on the equation model, connecting the essence about substance. We decided to focus on modeling world’s governance (economy and politics) using these concepts, assuming that all that humans had created is a result of economy, after all. Economy, in the very basic sense, is an input-output (supply-demand) process, made of operations, like trade.
Looking from the political perspective, we can also notice, that society does already divide itself into segments, that loosely correspond to equation model, namely:
– Goal ("Why?") – Governance – Y
→ Idea ("How?") – Academia – X
⇨ Plan ("What?") – Business – part of F, namely X̂(t)
However, as described in the video, we started off, with the last concept set (“entities”, “processes”, “conditions”) corresponding to the equation model, and identified database tables and datasets in the world that have answers to these questions, to come up with a coherent relational database model of just 15 tables. The database first 5 tables were made to reflect the answers to “Why?”, “How?”, “What?”, and “Who?”, by having tables, named:
– Intents table: to write Questions, Categories, Problems, Challenges… (answering “Why?”)
– Methods table: to write Ideas, Inventions, Answers, Opportunities… (answering “How?”)
– Projects table: to write Projects, Organizations, Companies… (answering “What?/Who?”)
– Profiles table: to write People, Individuals… (answering “Who?”)
– Tools table: to write Equipment, Devices, Operators… (answering part of “How?”)
These tables were sufficient to write down companies, their equipment, people, ideas, and goals. However. Then, to support the self-sustainability of the community, we needed the trade functionality, and so, we had implemented the trade, as a type of tool operations, by having extra 5 tables:
– Operations table: to write Operations (e.g., Transformations, Transfers)… (answering “How”, “Where?”, “When”?)
– Results table: to write Results of work, like milestones and demos… (answering parts of “Who?/How?/What?/When?”)
– Products table: to write Products for sale, that are parts of results… (answering parts of “What?”)
– Orders table: to write Orders (buy/sell/transform/etc. requests)… (answering parts of “Who?/What?/When?”)
– Trades table: to write Trades (list of matched order sets)… (answering parts of “Who?/What?/When?”)
Finally, to be specific, we introduced the following last 5 tables, to provide the locations for tools to operate on, and the needed few other tables to write and carry out structured orders.
– Locations table: to write Locations for Operations (geo/web/financial accounts)… (answering “Where?”)
– Units table: to write Units and Standards… (answering part of “How?”)
– Currencies table: to write Currencies (products used as units)… (answering parts of “What?”)
– Messages table: to write Messages (to process orders of certain type) – (answering parts of “Who?/What?”)
– Users table: to write users… (answering parts of “Who?”)
These tables, connected in the specific way, exemplified in the project the database (which you can download once you log-in), seemed to be sufficient to answer all the questions that we may want to know about each device that generates operations, contextualizing and making operations meaningful.
At this stage, we are working on testing this database model, and further refining its structure to fit for answering the foundational questions arising from the equation model, and you are welcome to participate in our research.
Treating the actionable items of other systems as “Products” allows to model and integrate functionality of other applications as their product operations. For example, to subscribe to a calendar, one may imagine calendar application’s items as products with that needed “operation” type. This way, this database model can work like a Meaningful Operations System (MOS), adding meaning to whatever any application already has and does as its operations.
It is our aspiration to perfect this model, and have all systems work with full intent awareness and contextualization of operations, so that every system can explain itself to humans in human-understandable form, and this way remains understood, and keeps our “Civilization DNA” understood.
Get involved!
Rationale of Engagement
You engage with us, if you'are interested in working towards high level shared goals, trying to derive value to yourself, the community and the world through various ways on this site -- be it through public discussions on new concepts, or sharing ideas for impact, or running open businesses for profit, or researching theoretical models of global cooperation -- consider the Infinity community -- a virtual country of individuals that share inputs in a similar way that people that subscribe to a particular country do -- but with a particular purpose:
"To support activities of our virtual citizens, assuming that every member has their own ideas for the world, that need to be discussed, understood, and supported as they make sense, and a higher objective to help the world collectively define and pursue goals."
To do that, we are currently in search for the minimal set of elements that are necessary and sufficient to run a self-determined community, with its own economy and politics, supporting all activities, and integrating with opertions of all relevant equipments with everyone's freedoms to share details about their operations for community credit, and using equation model as shared language to help world align and pursue goals together."
