Interview with Jonny: The Grow Hypothesis

The following is a brief interview with Jonny about his work, why he feels it's important, and the motivation behind it.

So what is it you are up to?

I can use technology to map the ontological landscape of the human mind.

What is that exactly?

I can reconstruct the objects and the relationships between them that a person holds and understands.

How will you gain access to that?

Through a person's use of language.

What does the language say?

People are actors, so the language is not always a direct reflection of a person's mind, but maybe a refined look at a person’s understanding of the world.

How will you do it?

Through very careful listening.

Why would this be important? If this is done, it should be possible to increase the learning rate for any individual. The "awakening" (or individuation) process, I think, can almost be meticulously guided, like with a gardener’s care. How people come to their points in understanding can be documented, shared, and refined, so that new generations of people can come to understand quicker.

What tools are needed to do this?

An instrument to collect language (like a messaging tool, or even the Twitter API), Natural Language Processing (Machine Learning), Category Theory

What makes you think it is possible?

I guess it’s a thing I know to be true. This ontological representation seems to exist within all our heads, and some people tend to it to increase its number of relationships and unknot ill-defined ones, and some people seem to pay no mind to it at all. There exist lots of things like talk therapy, or domains like positive psychology or cognitive architectures, or educational theories like Montessori, or lore like visualizing success, that all seem to talk around the same thing, some attempt to manipulate and steer the mind toward an ideal outcome—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is another one—but none of the disciplines seems to address what is occurring head on, face it eye-to-eye. No tool goes to collect and depict it, nor does a tool go to allow interactions with it.

Can you elaborate?

The ontological maps in each person’s mind differ greatly, and they change constantly throughout a person’s life. People arrange them according to what works for them, and what they’ve experienced in life. Their conversations with others are often used to express their ontological structures, test the relationships they understand, and either strengthen that truth or evolve it into something more true. People self-organize towards communities often exhibiting similar ontological structures like it’s that community’s membership card. All this is a very subconscious behavior, an invisible part of our activity that is so evident that it might as well be surfaced, created, and manipulated. Like the discovery of gravity. If this ontological structure can be mapped with precision, I think it will greatly impact our understanding of each other, and improve the relationships between people. The general nature of education, economics, and social governance can be designed, built from more precise definitions of people, rather than general lore that is passed about.

The timing to put this tooling together is good. There is an underlying layer of a people’s belief system that weaves together entities and defines the relationships between them. Fortunately, not long ago, a math came about to represent this. Category Theory. Now, since this observation of beliefs is not new and industries and practices are around to understand them, and we have an internet, computers (data collection tools and ways to share it) and a math to represent it, why not go ahead and make the lore, and story-telling element of people’s journeys through life far more precise? Why not really get accurate images of these ontological representations people have, expose them, and reveal them to the individual themself? Why not allow that information to be shared with a teacher or a coach who might be able to pinpoint the little knot of belief that’s preventing the person’s leap to understand the next concept? That is just one demonstration. If these things can be mapped, and the data exposed—I think there is a lot of good that can do.

The clearest way to piece together a person’s ontological map is through language. Language is the most information-rich display of a person’s mental ontology. A medium like painting could do it, but fewer people are practiced in painting. Everyone talks. It’s cheap. The rate at which representations are created is enormous, and the diverse amount of relationships that are placed on display is enormous. They come far faster and more varied than any other medium can communicate it.

Generational knowledge, adopting new ideas during a person’s life without having to die for new ideas to be allowed

Just a side note: Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is written as if it is a deliberate decomposition of the ontology a person holds. Reading it is an exercise in tearing apart one’s orientation, and no, it doesn’t put it back together again, but when a reader steps away from the reading, and sees the world again, they are re-exposed to familiar objects and an ontology can take its shape again; it re-emerges. The deliberate learning, and tearing apart of the ontology, and relearning can be a self-induced reinforcement learning process for any person. I think it’s a good way to learn. Truth will be true regardless of the path to get there. Walking 100 different paths to reach the same conclusion is beneficial, and Joyce’s book helps reset a person to a bare, untrodden path.

Also, have you read Sylvia Plath? She was criticized for being too plain speaking. It’s a critique that her ontological landscape is too perfect. That kind of critique from people, demonstrates, to me, that she has mastered the current popular ontology free of tangled relationships. That critique comes because those critics are confronting an ontological landscape that is new and free from the errors their own possesses. It’s like all the fuzziness has been taken away, and, because of that, to them it seems too plain, but I think each new generation starts there. What is actually being observed is the tension between an existing ontology being confronted with youth coming to know it, and able to characterize it in its totality, free from the confusion of a history of trials and errors. Youth, new generations, people like Sylvia Path, are able to recreate the existing ontological structures, and craft it simply without taking in the confusion. What they get when growing up, is a distilled version of a variety of ontologies, that represent only the bare bones of what is necessary without the confusion. They feast on the basics as they start to come to know the world. For youth coming into the world, they are at the advantage of getting to learn how to make the light bulb without the confusion of also knowing the 100 ways it doesn’t work. They start fresh by knowing the one way it does work, and then they get to take it from there. In their aging process, they will get to find 100 poor uses of a light bulb that, then, the next generation of users can jump in, characterize it, then leap ahead from there.

Downloading new ideas, matrix-style, with Neuralink won’t work

The neuralink process can probably fix biological things in the brain. It might be able to speed up the processing of information of the brain, but the ontological constructs of the world, that by which we communicate with the world, functions by a totally different system. We must learn it through a different means, and cannot download concepts like Matrix, purely through stimulating certain brain neurons.

This distinction is important and will define the experience a person has in life. It also creates a point where we must necessarily define what it means to know something. Neuralink might be able to train someone to run a helicopter through a manipulation of their motor skills, but that person’s experience of flying the chopper won’t be one of understanding a helicopter, it will be one of “Holy shit! I’m flying a helicopter. My limbs know what to do, my eyes know where to look. Somehow, I know exactly what to do.” It’ll be a mindless act.

Think of Jason Bourne’s amnesia where he wakes up inside a body that has all the strange reaction times and pre-conditioning of a trained assassin. Neuralink, in my best estimates, if used in a Matrix-style way to install new concepts like flying a helicopter, will give people a Jason Bourne-like experience of watching themselves react to things without really understanding why. The moral side of that, how this experience of life is good or bad, will depend on how that relationship to the self is defined.

Here’s the difference between what neuralink can offer and what I think I can offer: I think, given the technology I create, if neuralink can activate the motor-skills to fly a helicopter, then my software could quickly make the experience of flying a mindful act. It would do this by helping a person formulate the concepts and relationships between them, the world they are manipulating. I think something like Neuralink could benefit from being balanced with something like what I create in order for people to not experience the world like marionettes.

I have to ask this for self-promotion purposes. How can we find out more?

If you want to save a lot of the leg work from filtering what I have filtered, you can hear my songs. You can read my first book, This is a Dialogue, which acts as both demonstration and research. I will have a technology application you can play with soon. If you want a seed for the fields of study, check out Object Oriented Ontology (philosophy), Category Theory (math), and Cognitive Architectures (applications of the above and more).