Philosophical Foundations
The journey begins not in a computer lab but in a “Great Books” seminar. Bryant Cruse, who would one day found New Sapience, was an undergraduate at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where the curriculum is an intensive study of acknowledged great minds of Western Culture. The questions, “What is truth?”, “What is the relationship between ideas and reality?”, and “What is reality itself?”, were asked again and again. Bryant formed his own thesis, a radical departure from traditional epistemologies, which focused on debate about truth, belief, and the justification of individual assertions.
Reality for human beings, he conjectured, is the intersection of human cognitive and sensory apparatus and whatever it is they interact with. This approach leads to the conclusion that the most certain and reliable knowledge we have about reality is models, intellectual constructs having internal consistency while conveying some practical utility. In other words, theories. But we do not say of theories that they are true or false, only that they are better or worse at explaining things.
“How could they be so wrong?”, we smugly ask today. But their mathematics was elegant. More important, their model enabled them to do many useful things like know when to plant their crops and, with simple instruments like the sextant pictured above, how to navigate a ship on the oceans.
Newton’s model, with the sun at the center and replacing the ancient preference for regular circular motion with forces at a distance, explains far more phenomena – from the position of the moon to the trajectory of a falling apple – making it a superior model.
After St. John’s College, Cruse served as a Naval Aviator and used a thoroughly Newtonian inertial navigation system (INS), pictured below, while flying long-range aircraft over the ocean. The INS was an elegant invention, but very complex and none too reliable. When it failed, the air crew fell back to an aviation version of the humble sextant and tables of celestial observations (essentially the same as those compiled by Claudius Ptolemy in ancient Alexandria) to find their position.
These experiences and considerations had a profound impact on what Cruse understands knowledge to be, and have proven fundamental to the development of sapiens technology.
Practical Rocket Science
Cognitive Chemistry
If all the expert knowledge needed to understand spacecraft telemetry could be practically encoded for a computer, might it be possible to use similar methodologies to create a general model of the commonsense world?
The average adult is thought to be conversant with tens of thousands of individual concepts. The scope of the problem, of assembling these ideas into the coherent world model that people have, appeared daunting.
Cruse returned to his philosophical roots. Democritus conjectured that if you keep breaking material objects into smaller and smaller parts, eventually you get to parts that are indivisible, which he called atoms. Could this be true of ideas? If so could “atoms of thought” be classified in accordance with unique connection properties to create in effect a “Cognitive Chemistry?” The answer turned out to be Yes!
Experience building practical spacecraft models underscored the same lesson learned through the advent of object-oriented programming languages, that there is an inverse relationship with respect to sophistication in algorithms and the data-structures they process. You can solve problems using unstructured data if you have very sophisticated algorithms, or you can solve problems using simple algorithms if you have sophisticated data structures.
Synthetic Knowledge can be seen as the antithesis of machine learning, because machine learning features highly sophisticated algorithms and vast amounts of simple unstructured data, and requires vast computing resources.
Applied Epistemology