The Feeling of Water

A cognitive system that gets its definitions from a dictionary can be criticised as: 

“It is only words, defined by other words – it knows nothing”. 

Dictionaries also suffer from circularity – “mend” is defined in terms of “fix”, which is defined using “repair”, which comes around to “mend”. If you don’t know what any of the words mean, the circle is useless. But words can be linked to the real world, or abstract worlds.


Helen Keller was born in 1880, and lost her sight and hearing when she was 19 months old.

While she could recognise the letters being signed on her hand, she had no idea what they, or combinations of them, meant.

One day her carer put her hand under a running tap and signed W-A-T-E-R.



She finally understood that things outside herself had names, and went on to write several books, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

There was both sensation and memory in her experience of the feeling of water - if the water had been very hot and she had snatched her hand away, there would have been no sensation of what water felt like as she changed the contour of her hand and the water changed its flow.

If we continue with the analogy of water, and submarines (the topic du jour):

We can link the propeller and its dive planes, their settings and the forces on them, and a bit of physics, so the submarine can feel the rush of water over it as it drives on – the experience of it - the words are  grounded in reality, and from them other words – its position in the world, affected by the propeller, the rudder, its position in the water column, the Coriolis acceleration during a fast turn, and then all the fault-finding that goes with it, so it can reach behind the display screens, and “know itself”. That may be taking it a bit far, but we can, using active semantic structures, make it much more than a dumb machine by giving it sensation and memory.


With this level of self-awareness, it can do things for itself that would otherwise need crew members.

The advantage here is we are using an English language interface, so everything we tell the machine we tell it in English, not a highly restrictive computer language. 

We can tell it technical stuff, procedures, tactics, strategy. We can talk about safety, trustworthiness, loyalty. Yes, those things need a lot of explaining, but what other approach would work?


Active Structure©


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