Sensemaking of Complex Systems

Sensemaking seems very much related to to pattern recognition - which obviously assumes you are congnizant of having seen that pattern before. Note that this is not saying, "I have seen this exact phenomonon before." For example, one might have seen collective swarming behavior in fish, in birds, in ants, even in people - there is a pattern to which we have given the name "swarm" characterized by some combination of synchrony, orientation (direction), attraction, bifurcation, (n-furcation) and dispersion.

How people go about the business of sensemaking is often quite different that the way artificial intelligence goes about sensemaking. By this I mean, humans often have much more sensual and contextual information upon which they make classifications. This is different than raw information, such as that stored in computer memory, in that human contextual information is encoded in highly coupled networks - the real neural network. Computer memory is discrete, rank and file - the substrate being independently and identically distributed (iid).

How would an artificial neural network go about sensemaking regarding the swarming behavioral pattern? The "sense" would have to be made in some of many other contextual patterns. One such contextual pattern is the "shape" of a connective, Compositional Pattern Producing Network, as found in HyperNEAT. However, that is just one context, and we need a network of contexts for sensemaking. Moreover, these contexts exist at various timescales, from nearly instantaneous to universally constant.

Some equate thought with computation. I'm not sure I agree. There is a composition between networked computation and linear computation (serial and/or parallel) that seems necessary for categorical sensemaking. And, of course, because something makes sense doesn't mean it is true or the right thing to do. That takes some interstitial experimentation - or meta-computing - with comparison to some real-world data.

So, I will go back to my Chinese Room and continue working on that categorical composition.