The Road to Novelty

Abstract

What characterises a new insight, what distinguishes ideas, when may we speak of inspiration, what induces the formation of new (general) concepts, and how do such concepts assume their contentual meaning? How does such novelty (hence the title, The Road to Novelty) come into the world and what constitutes its essence? How are the phenomena of meaning, insight and idea connected to information? And, as a limitation: What conditions must the nature of recognition and any approach to it meet so that our cognitive capacity is able to answer the preceding questions, i.e. so that it may recognise itself? This set of questions points towards the core topic of epistemology or, more generally, of cognitive science. The cycle The Road to Novelty offers a new and integrative scientific solution to these questions. The key to answering them is provided by a new category of information content, which we call CoIn. This new category derives from generalised symmetry considerations and complements the familiar Bits & Bytes. As our guiding idea, the CoIn provide the pivotal point of all reflections and results along The Road to Novelty. Using typical problems and providing their solutions, as well as on the basis of theoretical deliberations, we show that the phenomena of meaning, insight and ideas can be integratively traced back to this common informational root CoIn. The concurrence of insight, a new category of information content, idea and meaning thus also explains the interdisciplinary nature of The Road to Novelty. Knowing about this common informational root in turn enables a new foundation of epistemology, from which far-reaching conclusions may be drawn regarding questions that are central to a number of disciplines within cognitive science, including philosophy, linguistics and the logic of language, information theory together with artificial intelligence (AI), and up to the limits of formal approaches. Finally, the nature of the emergence of insights or ideas – how does such novelty come into the world? – also becomes addressable as what we call symmetry synthesis: The tree of knowledge is rooted in symmetry syntheses. As a consequence, both the meanings of general language concepts and scientific results such as (physical) laws or models manifest themselves in the form of generalised symmetries (CoIn). Bits & Bytes can likewise be interpreted in the symmetry context, namely as symmetry breaking. They serve the realm of decisions (symmetry breaking), which is complementary to recognition (to symmetry syntheses or to CoIn). As a result, both categories of information content are rooted in the notion of symmetry, yet they in a sense root at opposite ends of the concept. Together, symmetry syntheses and symmetry breaks as it were jointly provide the DNA building blocks for the informational perspective on the world. The fact that the two symmetry perspectives refer to incommensurable aspects of the world means that strong AI (creativity, cognitive faculty) cannot be realised solely by means of Turing machines. The reason is that Turing’s concept of a computer possesses only the competence of symmetry breaking. A proof of this is proposed in Section 7.2 of Part III. To facilitate the discipline-specific access to the material, as well as the analysis of the results, in Parts III, IV and V of The Road to Novelty, we relate the CoIn approach to the history of ideas of the discussions concerning recognition in philosophy and language theory, as well as in computer science / AI, and finally in logic / mathematics. In addition to the propositions already mentioned, the approach opens up many more in-depth insights into each of the sub-disciplines of cognitive science, extending to new aspects with respect to neuroscience and psychology. Last but not least, although economics is not commonly considered a part of cognitive science, this discipline assumes a special role in the argument. The model notions developed in economics enable the identification of a specific type of rationality as an essential characteristic of cognitive processes and the assignment of this rationality to an information-related economic principle.