Ausblick

Wir bleiben vorerst online

Die Corona-Pandemie hat, dank der mittlerweile verfügbaren Impfstoffe, ihren Gipfel überschritten. In der Zeit, der Online-Veranstaltungen hat sich aber unser Teilnehmerkreis erheblich erweitert. Das Online-Format macht es möglich, dass Menschen aus ganz Deutschland, und teilweise darüber hinaus, problemlos und ohne lange Reisezeiten, an unseren Kolloquien teilnehmen können. Diesen Vorteil haben wir zu schätzen gelernt und werden deshalb das Online-Format bis auf weiteres beibehalten.

Da persönliche Treffen aber auch wichtig sind, gibt es in unregelmäßigen Abständen gelegentliche mehrtägige Treffen in einem Tagungshotel.

Ioachim Drugus, Ph.D.

Towards a Calculus of Ideas

In his paper[1], John Locke developed what is now called the “theory of ideas” - a theory about the objects of the conscious mind that represent the objects of the external world.

John Locke wrote that in addition to “simple ideas”, which in modern terms might be called “atomic ideas”, there are also “complex ideas”, which are built up from simple ideas by several “mental operations”.

In terms of modern algebra, John Locke's ideas appear to be elements of a free universal algebra generated by “atomic ideas”. An idea represents many objects, a set, a class, a multitude (here referred to as the “extension” of the idea), and this suggests that the signature of such a universal algebra can be found starting from set-theoretic considerations.

After this “translation” into modern terms, a contemporary researcher would be tempted to determine the signature of the universal algebra of ideas, to formulate a calculus using the terms of this signature, and to show how ideas can be automatically generated in this calculus.

In this sense, the present author has proposed a virtual machine for generating ideas within the free algebra of ideas [2], and an algebraic set theory for describing the extensions of ideas.

• [1]. John Locke. Works. Vol. 1. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1689-90.
• [2]. Ioachim Drugus. A Wholebrain approach to the Web. 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology – Workshops, Silicon Valley, CA, USA, pp. 68-71, (2007).