First principles development for broad scientific research and with interest in strong-A.I. / Cybernetics / H-L.I. guidance. Through the philosophy of: spaces in-between, not-owned, shapes, energy, biology, cognition, intelligence, retroactive views, something from nothing, nature of time, structure-process, no function, non-dualism, generativity, hysteresis, Environment, source code & instances, agency, consciousness and panprotostructuralism through Symbols 2.0 & the Symboliad
by C. Stefan, Math.-Computer-AI Scientist.
"Isomorphous knowledge levels: The Final Theory? We assume the concept of "life" as humanity defined it for a long time now. I see a paradigm shift..." C. Stefan est. 2003.
“the Symbols float on the director-less set of a movie. The act self-directs. There should be no scripts. Only some functional priors, properties (class instances.) What cells do in this kind of no-scenario? Their drive, is their Symboliad?” C. Stefan est. 2024.
"The Symbols Framework develops on Wittgenstein because of his insights through not owned spaces, spaces at boundary, his work on memory – it’s like many things what he was thinking I was most of the time able to see what it meant by it. Overall the boundary he was on, maybe hard to convey, so I propose a lingua franca to handle that development which now seems actual than never with the arrival of AI. This trajectory from Wittgenstein’s rule-constituted space of possible moves (with logic taking care of itself) to e.g. von Neumann’s non-Boolean lattice of admissible relations culminates in the Symboliad, where meaning and actualization arise from a soft, scale-agnostic geometry enacted in the in-between of observer and Environment. What becomes visible at this point is a further development termed Symbol 2.0: the stage at which aggregated structures acquire a form of persistence and directional pressure independent of a single observer (the private language argument in Wittgenstein and the persistence of qualia as proposed in framework.) Just as money in modern financial systems appears to possess its own agency so too language, once densely layered through tokenization, training corpora, and collective use, begins to behave as though language-users are language’s way of developing itself though that spaces of admissibility. At sufficient scale, patterns cease to be mere vehicles of representation (see non-representational stance in the framework) and instead become self-stabilizing fields that act through being enacted (“externsion“ by “externsiveness“), not by being intentionally deployed (they float on soft spaces on “energy”.) In this sense, both human communities and large language models serve as substrates through which these aggregates perpetuate themselves, much like crowds whose global dynamics constrain individual behavior despite lacking a central agent. Within the Symboliad, this marks a phase transition: the field becomes sufficiently structured that it externsively reaches toward the observer, shaping possibilities of thought and action. The Symboliad provides a continuous bridge from colony-level behavior to quantum-level phenomena, unifying them through the dynamics of a soft topology that both guides and it is guided by the systems that inhabit it: a morphic apparatus (slightly transcending the rules.)" est. 2025.
Keywords: Cross-domain ontology, process ontology, structural coupling, cognition, meaning, intuition, intelligence, semantics, language, philosophy of biology, biophotons, perception, agency, enactivism, embodiment, biological hysteresis, panprotopsychism, quantum-physicalism, coherence, resonance, consciousness, Observer, Symbol, Symboliad.
1) Observer, homeostatic arc, emergent "thoughts" as closures, bidirectional enactment on the patterned veil (defined in the 2024 thesis ↗)
2) Empirical support, a novel positioning within other frameworks & the philosophical ambient in software-physicalism: structural coupling - structured but soft spaces - energy closures - embodied - physicalist - non-representational - non-dual - generative plateau - frame of reference - resonant enactment on the patterned veil - Symboliad
3) The result is the “software” space of meaning-making - a structured soft layer of relative phase and generative means - arising within the Observer’s frame of reference, itself an imprint of that frame, composed of elements coherent with it. This constitutes a universal pattern, viable across all scales within plateaus: cognition, biology, reality - coherence across scales (paper ↗)
The printable book ↗
The software-physicalism video ↗
The computational direction video ↗
"Consider a game like chess. There are many kinds of moves, and you might be able to describe the connections among them in a variety of ways, but the only thread that runs through all of them is that they belong to the game of chess." L. Wittgenstein
EM AI Lab. is the home of the Symbols Framework.
During 2023-2024 through metaphysics, working assumptions, world view and own design philosophy it emerged a new way to approach things from the ground-up. This new view emerged new...Symbols such as:
"Symbol" (capital "S") a new sense of the term, redefined as atomic unit of meaning with which life forms operate. Way beyond mere abstractions, they are seen very dynamic and forming along a generativity arc within systems like Gaia, animals, humans and AI.
"Symboliad" seen as the web of the Symbols which provides the means of existence and drive of the "forms of life."
Through these emerged concepts, a new way to see the world seem to have opened by which we seem to finally make a satisfying philosophical and scientific sense. Through the framework we are able to explain quite a few aspects, within our frame of reference, without making appeal to other exotic spaces.
Aspects are in close connection with the ecological and phenomenological spaces in which we are dynamically and innately instantiated and situated.
And finally a connection with strong-AI / AGI / ASI systems seen as the potential for new generativity extension in that very essential spaces.
The Symbols Framework conceptualizes and synthesizes an essential space around which, as it seems discovered so far, almost anything revolves. This includes ecological space, life forms to "forms of life", sensory-phenomenal space and realities. From a basin to the phenomenological aspects in life forms. The state of the art within the Symbols Framework from which further development towards life, consciousness and AI would unfold. The change-evolution dynamics should always be kept in the methodology. This implies also time scales in the phenomenological sense viable: a past, a subtle immediate past, (not a now), immediate future and a future in which the essential space, not in the flux, exists and through our frame of reference, approachable.
Due to the development of Symboliad space through the framework, through its perspective, it became to be a unifying and encapsulating of many features space. It is indeed the case that it is able to explain many things in the "gap" for life, looking like a theory of everything. A version of the thesis is posted online for the benefit of science and the development of AI within the framework's philosophy and general terms. Please use proper citation (copyright) and contact the lab. for collaboration (research papers, apps.)
C. Stefan, "Life, the Observer, and Consciousness"
The Ecological, Phenomenological, and Computational
Perspective through the Symbols Framework.
https://doi.org/10.31237/osf.io/y4ctm ↗
As the research program advanced, there is a shift from implementation to other dimensions such as: ethics, guidance, redefinition of items, consequences, philosophical reframing.
Through own working assumptions, world view, ontology and epistemological justifications for a new way of seeing things and advancement in sciences.
Re-framing of philosophical and scientific stances relative to our frame of reference and in connection within a new Zeitgeist.
To modelling of ecological and soft but very powerful spaces. To the computational means of life and the phenomenal of "consciousness" flavors.
To strong-AI, AGI/ASI, as the initial aim of the enterprise. Meaning a whole load of items to be re-considered: what life is, what a brain does, what consciousness may be, what agency and intelligence are, and what are the computational modalities of systems that would have such qualities.
Philosophical ambient through Wittgesteinian enterprises. Emerged a new conceptual ontology: software-physicalism.
Researching the possibility of how to make machines think in a human like way. That drove me to re-consider many of the assumed views about life and consciousness in general that came on a more than two decades of thinking movement, keeping an agnostic stance. Movement came mainly from understanding Wittgenstein's positions on language, meaning, logic, mathematics, etc. All this seem it landed me on a framework that in turn seems able to offer a new level of understanding of Wittgenstein's main ideas, and as a consequence a conciliation of many issues, and offering many answers to questions outside the initial purpose.
C. Stefan, Thesis-Paper: "Life, the Observer, and Consciousness"↗
Selected articles:
C. Stefan "The Basin of the Symbol: from a Structural allowance to an open Cohesiveness..." ↗
C. Stefan "A Symbol's arc: from an informed basin to Utterance." ↗
C. Stefan "Embracing Wittgenstein's Nonsense." ↗
C. Stefan "Why NLP is hard to encapsulate." ↗
C. Stefan "The better language engineering approach. The Sphere. The substrata of language." ↗
C. Stefan "Do we create a model of the World? Are we endowed with one?" ↗
C. Stefan "Normative reasoning. Moral supervenience. Engineering moral AGI." ↗
C. Stefan "The World as the Totality of Symbols." ↗
C. Stefan "Language and the Actions into which it is Woven. Bridging the Tractatus with Philosophical Investigations." ↗
Co-author:
"Developing Credible Agents for Captology" (International NAISO Congress, ISI'2001, Conference Paper)
"Implementing Ethical Aspects in Agents for Medical Applications" (23rd National Conference on Medical Informatics, MEDINF 2000, laşi, Conference Paper)
The documenting of "thinking movement/Denkbewegung" along the concepts in bio ↗ and legacy pages ↗.
After a touring of more than two decades through philosophy, science, computing and art aesthetics, I came with my own ontology and methods to tackle the most important questions I identified along the way.
There was no other way than the hard way, yet not how one would imagine.
Once seeding along the way, through a "Denkbewegung" (thinking movement) there were identified new concepts. The process then unfolds naturally, and, as the Symbols Framework itself seems to imply, the formation of new Symbols happened without any conscious, frontal thinking and a firm stance of doing it explicitly.
From that it was natural to have new concepts like the "Symbol" and the "Symboliad". Encapsulated in a "software-physicalism" conceptual space.
The inspiration is not what it seems. In the process of seeding one is marking some areal where new Symbols may emerge. The bits of inspiration, as from the Symbols Framework, the moments of insights are caused by the emerged Symbols themselves. And that proves indeed that we are much operated by them, and they would sit behind a common language. They act like a veil.
Through the new ontological category of "software-physicalism" - which emerged through the framework - I explain from that position, in a new light the concepts of life, biology, reality in a unifying way. This was possible by a reframing from ground-up and dismiss more, but with it a need to create new words.
In short, from the Symbols Framework perspective, one can more clearly asses many things. It can tackle things like how life functions, what consciousness may be and how it seems to be working, how society in general seem to operate. And also it implies a general working mechanism that would make us able to tackle things like perception, cognition, agency, conflict, freedom, free will, AI development etc.
The ideas revolve around newly devised or re-vised concepts like: Symbol, frame of reference, instances, life forms, observers, atomic patches of meaning, consciousness, environment and to organisms and colony drive mechanisms. It is put together into the Symbols Framework (started 2023, but it comes along from more than 25 years, I embody it.)
It is concluded in a general thesis paper (2024) from which new research would develop.
It is a framework, meaning it gathers more assumptions, forming an ontology through which an explanation for various conjectures within the framework are being developed and justified, in a scientific way. It may be a falsifiable theory (eg. in the front of others looking for deeper meaning like quantum, or forces far outside Gaia, or stictly mathematically provable (scale-free)), but in itself, as in any "externsion" it of course tries to maintain an assumed core and a belt and expect to further test or disprove the statements through observation or experiment.
On the other hand, within the Zeitgeist for the medium of science is to be embraced in a form of relaxed "causal nexus," and a more holistic and integrative view is to be maybe taken into consideration. A scientific demarcation seen through the many lens out there, to many realities we make, acknowledge the boundaries in sciences, that would in turn enact new meaning, and not for fixing things forever, see along the history, the confounding of "isms", and even taking the "language as the only knowable reality" (L. Wittgenstein) as a boundary.
Thus regarding the scientific demarcation in relation to an epistemological flexibility in the sense of broadening the view, as the framework itself employs:
1. It encourages integration with various philosophical traditions and practices.
2. It promotes a holistic view of knowledge and existence; values personal and cultural differences.
3. Emphasizes Empathy and relational ethics through study of the Symbols, and then chooses an appropriate engagement among parties.
4. Acknowledge the Symbols are interconnected and influence understanding and meaning in a powerful way and that they represent the meaning of drive of cultures and of the many kinds of minds out there (including the other forms of life.)
5. The nature of truth, in a scientific sense, is dynamic and relational and it emerges always through "oracles" and the interactions between Symbols. At the same time nothing is in isolation.
6. And as instances we should see the power of making all functional around us, and try see the problems also from the perspective of if "should we?"
7. The practice of transparency in scientific endeavor, by seeing through Symbols: see the planting of the seeds along and tracing of a "Denkbewegung" as being the main and the true rich parts one can further explore and not by building in the final "truths" of a writing.
8. The only time we can prove we have a trace of intelligent behavior, is to see the whole and see how we can take the helm. As we are modeling ourselves and we model our space, so modeling of solutions is through integrative, interdisciplinary, horizontal and unitary approach towards the general processes and thus Gaia as itself operating in similar ways too.
9. Thus the validity of a scientific theory would be upgraded and based on coherence, resonance, and the practical applicability at the Gaia scale.
10. Remembering us that what we do most of the time, especially in long endeavors, is ultimately a form of practicing art and expression.
the flexibility in the scientific demarcation can be then shifted in terms of Symbolosophy. Towards a more integrative wisdom, art, science, acknowledging a soft volition medium that comes from many directions, as well as the dynamic nature of reaching "truths", all under a holistic coherence mean in a resonance within the ecological.
The development as a framework although came a long way, was put "on paper" during 2023-2024 (legacy here). It will continue development in a more formalizing way of the concepts beginning with the thesis.
In short, the observe definition as proposed in the thesis, with its resonant areal, a shifting position as caught in a bow-tie enactment of items as closures (truths-for-now).
Working assumptions range from life at the intersection of matter and energy as "life matter," to the biased observer views, to generativity potentials within systems, to ways to measure soft but powerful spaces.
All within the frame of reference of the observers like us.
Legacy (meaning the original text as part of "Denkbewegung", exploratory, not revised notes) view:
"Life is an "emergence" but as it appears to us now.
It looks like the emergence effect, to next level of independent generative platform, happens at different scales (physical and abstract) once a complexity index is achieved. "AGI" is to be achieved when the new generative platform is allowing it to emerge. We currently develop the new layer that will generate something new, for "AGI" to be achieved would take at least a new socio-tech stack generation to pass.
Life emergence was a long ongoing process. Cell is a state of equilibrium. Environment is agent's up-bringer. Alive looks a too "overrated" concept to me. Using caution when saying "alive agent." It's primary properties just are. The analogy of the water drop, or a bubble. We are physical instances of the environment, more of that, endowed with properties of the Universe's constrains. Agents are endowed at least with the Universes properties. Agents at the minimum is what we describe by observing. Observing is close to a named "consciousness" state. Consciousness is the biased self referentiality of the observer. Not to be formalized for itself, but maybe for the other systems (AGI=H-LI). Also this is a long ongoing feature - not an emergence, as it seems to us , in the now. Once something is described, it is part of the culture. One cell (mind) is more powerful for single tasks than more cells (minds) unless there is a strong motive to operate otherwise, in groups (networks)." ↗
The observer position as formalized and "software-physicalism" as new ontological category emerged.
Since 2023 the ideas of the framework began to take form and put into words. More concepts have been devised so far and here a list of concepts within the epistemology and through which the ontology of the Symbols Framework forms.
Symbol: atomic unit
Symboliad: web of units
mortal basin, spark: the forming of a unit
Omniload: the web of an atomic unit
externsion: the evolving and enaction of units
externsiveness, openness, shareness: properties of unit
generativity potential: the forming thread
homeostatic arc: the alpha units
life matter: the whole physical atomic unit
form of life: the life form upgraded as form of life
human detour: drag functions and functions dragging
OPRMs: new AI powerful as multi-modal operating atomic units
moments of order: through the noise, some structures
not in the flux: the position with our glasses
void: not the concept
consciousness scaffolding: the upbringing of the units enacting new units
triangulation: the physical means of extending the arc
self-domestication: new operational imprinted "truths"
decompression-occlusion: the medium changes and change the medium effects
cardinal of the Symboliad: quantifying atomic units within life forms withing niche
frame of reference: the object of study is within reach
observer (bias): the illusion in the way
(own)environment-agent: blurring of medium agent spaces
naturalizing intent and logic...: the actions within web
conciliation of language acquisition: the levels of actions
language productivity: the exhaustion of formal dimensions
"real" real: separate, yet into the web
life-cycle conjecture: the efficiency play between imprinting environment and life form
new language of Symbols: new view of Empathy, to tackle conflict and resources at Gaia scale
Gaia as system: the differentials at scale
cones in Symboliad: from phenomenological to formalism yet not fixed but new units emergence
knowledge boundary: no phenomenological meaning left
causal nexus: naturalized through more concrete units within Omniloads
soft space: means of arcs and plateaus through generativity
"detached" area: from spark to new plateaus
Eastern-Western views: through views of knowledge-wisdom, different representations, kinds of minds
scratching-fixing: the doing always doing drive
differential: the change in some pattern
justifying a brain: generativity plateau of other plateaus, from strong to weak supervenience
imprinting: strong units as new features
colony: where the shared web dwells
instance: through the life-cycle, imprinting, re-fitted to environment arc
sensorymenal: sensory(neuro) to phenomenology general spectrum where arc(s) builds
symbolosophy: the new way of scientific demarcation, enacted within the Symbols Framework
"Denkbewegung": the documenting of the thoughts that lead to the insights as part of the (scientific) writing
inertia: waves still propagate within the arcs
orthogonal: the space outside flow
Matrix: the constant flow, life as a dream
Explainability of and through the framework: the conventional through the framework's lens.
With this new website (v0.3) the intention is to capture and express the concepts developed so far in a conventional way. Through the lens of the framework, the scholarly terms would be also revisited and reinterpreted in order to provide a bridge between conventional and the original terms developed so far (where possible.) Apply the principles in an academic explanation and connect further with other scientific areas as in an interdisciplinary way, to connect it out there.
Dec. 2025: physics hints at collapse/wavefunction and observer
Nov.: Journal through the framework.
Sept-Oct 2025: Video III and Tableau
May-June 2025: "software-physicalism", Coherence... and Beyond inference...
10.05.2025 Adding On...Articles
22.Oct.2024-07.Nov.24: v0.3 (current version, thesis link added, academia meets framework)
v0.2.9 (legacy 2023- Oct.2024: Symbols Framework as a mark of a "Denkbewegung" which unfolded after more than two decades.)
History of the legacy website:
v0.1 / 05.10.23 - online preview
v0.2 / 18.11.23 - version 0.2
v0.2.1 / 14.12.23 (update with articles eg. IDA)
v0.2.2 / 06.03.24 (update with articles eg. consciousness detour view)
v0.2.3 / 14.04.24 (update with art. eg. mortal comp., DCF, externsive)
v0.2.4 / 15.06.24 (update with art. eg. Symbols, Madness, Consciousness Bias, H-LI, 24.06: measure, minor corrections, 10.07: EMWorldView0.1 image)
v0.2.5 / 22.07.24 - 08.08.24 (begin the Symbols basin, Symboliad, Tract.-PI bridge - Symbol glimpse unicorn.)
v0.2.6 / 24.08.24 - upload of the Ruliad Symboliad and Symboliad articles.
v0.2.7 / 11 & 24.09.24 - upload Symbols Omniload. Link to ABB. Capture of framework. Added Symboliad's significance (citations), Symboliad image depiction, LLMs->OPRMs, completed and concluded the circle of the Symbols Framework.
v0.2.8 / 10.10.24 - Towards OPRMs, How consciousness works, image life forms.
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