There was a point when I was living in Seattle where I was doing some of my real “depth exploration” of the self and the root directory of reality™ where I was working with a lot of what appeared to most everybody else as nonsensical jargon. Admittedly, a lot of it turned out to be that. But the basic concepts which I uncovered - simply by observing the depths of my own core as a human - have stuck with me. A year and a half later, give or take, I’m trying once again to go back and integrate bits of what I learned during that alchemical process and figure out how to dress them in compatible language of other thinkers across a diversity of fields. That, to me, is the only viable way forward for the human race: people working together collaboratively across disciplines to actively find the best possible solutions.

Which is why I’m into the idea of semantic interoperability. As usual, I’ll let Wikipedia do a little of the heavy lifting while I have a proverbial smoke…

Semantic Interoperability (also referred to as Computable Semantic Interoperability) is the ability of two or more computer systems to exchange information and have the meaning of that information automatically interpreted by the receiving system accurately enough to produce useful results, as defined by the end users of both systems.

This connects with the term, “definition of the situation“, which is part of something called “symbolic interactionism” in sociology. DOTS is essentially, making clear statements about a given moment, about what is happening and what all involved parties ought to expect.

It is a kind of collective agreement between people on the characteristics of a situation, and from there, how to appropriately react and fit into it.

Establishing a definition of the situation requires that the participants agree on both the frame of the interaction (its social context and expectations), and on their identities (the person they will treat each other as being for a given situation).

These terms, to my knowledge, were not conceived of by men who were thinking about mixed-realm or augmented reality spaces where a human being becomes a shimmering auric cloud of data floating tendrils off from a very real living and breathing human body. But they seem, to me, to fit that realm of imaginative speculation quite well.

I have no idea where the threshold lies, but I have a firm belief that increasing complexity of information eventually creates spontaneous ordered systems, the property of emergence. As humans emotionally interact with greater and greater sets of data, those sets of data may learn to emotionally interact with humans. Somewhere along the way, sentience or self-reflexive consciousness of some kind is very likely to evolve.

So what we’ll be left with are clouds of meaning with orbital data satellites centered around human beings, some of the agency of which are autonomous. So you have two humans interacting as a higher order complexity: two humans sitting and chatting while their attached files, data reference points and associated digital agents do battle and enact trades and exchanges in the background, learning from each other, playing with each other: sound effects, games. Humans are complex without the technology. We do this stuff anyway: which is what interests me so much about thinking through augmented reality and really advanced software technology: it’s no different from how things are now…