1. KnowledgeInformation Postext ISI Torino Sorin Solomon That Which We Know

2. KnowledgeInformation Postext ISI Torino Sorin Solomon What We Can Name

3. KnowledgeInformation Postext ISI Torino Sorin Solomon Postext A Mind for Society

4. Communication Life Organelles Cells Organs Individuals Chemical signals cytokins Hormones Odors Complex self- organized phenomena emerge through the interaction between their components. Communication is the generic term for this interaction.

5. Communication Life Individuals Odors As life evolved, different means of communication emerged, taking advantage of certain properties of the medium Visual Signals Touch Sound Group Swarm Population

6. Communication Life Human Tribe Humans adopted the evolutionary niche of cooperative hunting, which required advanced techniques of cooperation through sound. Sounds Individual Evolution Niche Cooperative Hunting Techniques Cooperation

7. Communication Life Human Tribe The fact that the tribe as an entity has much longer lifespan allowed cooperation techniques to aggregate and evolve, and the co-evolution between the communication skills and the tribe gave a boost to the advance of communication techniques. This amounted to the emergence of Knowledge. Sounds Individual Cooperative Hunting Longevity Techniques Cooperation Evolution Co-Evolution Knowledge

8. Communication Human Tribe Improved communication had fitness benefits to the tribe, and so did the preservation of knowledge. This created an evolutionary pressure that eventually resulted in the emergence of the well known human traits: language, capacity for symbol manipulation and abstractization. Sounds Individual Techniques Knowledge Evolution Language Symbols

9. Communication Human Tribe The moment of the emergence of the first symbol is equivalent to the moment of the emergence of the first DNA macromolecule: the non-living code that can generate life is equivalent to the non- knowledgeable symbol that can generate knowledge. Individual Techniques Evolution Language Symbols Life DNAProteins Semiotics InformationKnowledge

10. Like DNA that needs the right kind of cell in the right ambiance, information will yield knowledge only when it is presented in the right context. The knowledge in one’s mind is essential for the reconstruction of knowledge from a piece of information, like the the protein machinery used for generating proteins out of genes. Life DNAProteins Semiotics InformationKnowledge Context

11. Communication Human Tribe In the beginning, the knowledge needed to interpret the (information coded in) symbols was provided by the challenges of survival. As symbols and communication acts evolved into language, much of the contextual framework became embedded into the language itself. However, note how pre-lingual knowledge is essential for the acquiring of language, as we see in the case of natural language processing. Individual Techniques Language Symbols Semiotics InformationKnowledge Context NLP

12. Communication Human Tribe No one doubts that DNA is not life. In the same way, it should be clear that information is not knowledge. Information is made of symbols, bits and letters; knowledge is made of thoughts, actions, and context. Life “happens” only among proteins, and in the same way, knowledge “happens” in the mind. The purpose of communication is to transfer knowledge, but in most cases it can only be done by coding it into information. Individual Hunting Techniques Language Symbols Information Knowledge Mind

13. Communication Language is essentially linear. Text, the physical representation of language, inherited this linearity. The mind is not restricted by dimensionality, and so thoughts are multi-dimensional in nature. This distinction Language Information Knowledge Mind Text Linearity Multi-Dimensional Thoughts