This post consists of a table that David Hays and I drew up in August 1981, nine years before we pubished our basic article on ranks theory: The Evolution of Cognition. That is to say, when we made this, we hadn’t really thought things through. Notice, first of all, that each table has five columns, one for each rank. We were thinking in terms of five ranks. When it came time to publish we couldn’t conceptualize a fifth rank in a way that satisfied us, so we dropped it from our accounts. Through interacting with chatbots I’ve come up with a way of thinking about Rank 5, but I want to set that aside for now.
While I have thought about updating this table with my current thoughts, that would take a lot of work now that I’m working with a much more sophisticated theory. The point of posting this table is siimply to show what a quick sketch looks like. It’s the form of the individual tables that is important, not the specific labels we placed in the cells back in 1981.
Summary by Rank
This table summarizes some, but not all, of the individual tables below. The ranks are columns, from left to right. The entries in the cells indicate what is new at that rank. Those entries are taken from the diagonals in the following tables. Some of the cells contain abbreviations, some of which are obscure. I could expand some, but not all of those abbreviations. 1981 was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.
I’ve colored the rows for material that either or both of us, Hays and me, have more or less covered in one of our publications. The first row became the central argument in our cognitive evolution paper. “PlaceNo” is place notion, for the arithmetic we argued was central to Rank 3. “Code” is computer code, for the computation that is central to Rank 4. By “Network” we probably meant cognitive or semantic networks, which was the notation we used for knowledge representation, as it was known back then. These days it could almost, but not quite, be artificial neural network (ANN).
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