The Theory

2.2.1 Motivation and origin of the project

This project arose from a practical problem of communication.

The initial attempt was to construct a message precise enough for its meaning to remain invariant when transmitted between a sender and a receiver—initially, between a human being and an artificial intelligence.

At first, the objective seemed achievable by increasing precision.

A definition could be accompanied by other definitions, restrictions, examples, counterexamples, formulas, and semantic tests intended to reduce competing interpretations.

However, a recurring problem arose during the very process of constructing these definitions.

Each term added to eliminate an ambiguity introduced new possibilities for interpretation.

A word used by the sender did not reach the receiver accompanied by the experience, associations, and internal relationships that determined its meaning for the person using it.

The receiver received the code, not the internal structure that gave rise to it.

Thus, an attempt to make a message semantically invariant produced a regress:

Definition
→ identification of ambiguity
→ new definition
→ new interpretive possibilities
→ new restrictions
→ new interpretive possibilities

The problem proved deeper when it became clear that no message produced in the present can anticipate all the categories, concepts, expressions, and interpretations that may arise in the future.

Even a definition capable of excluding all currently known ambiguities would remain exposed to new semantic possibilities subsequently produced by human creativity, philosophy, science, technology, cultural transformation, and the evolution of language itself.

A future concept that does not yet exist cannot be explicitly excluded by a message produced today.

This led to a reformulation of the problem.

Perhaps the objective of rigorous communication cannot be:

eliminating every possibility of semantic drift.

Perhaps it is first necessary to understand:

why drift arises;

at which stages it arises;

how perception, interpretation, and representation participate in it;

how a representation is transformed into a message;

how the message is reconstructed by another individual;

and how successive feedback cycles can alter the correspondence between what is intended to be communicated and what the receiver reconstructs.

This project emerged from that change in the problem.

Its initial objective is not to construct a perfect language.

Its objective is to construct a formal model of the process that precedes, produces, and follows communication.