In a few thousand years of humans developing their civilizations, there always has been a big question and that is how human mind actually works? This is not a new question and we can agree on that as a matter of fact. Ancient Greek philosophers had this question. To be honest, this question is somehow a philosophical question and not a specific psychological or neurological question. Because we know those forms of science just study the human mind in another way.
But this question is the founding question of new forms of science (such as psychology, which we saw earlier in the article) and we have to dive a little bit deeper to find out what happened after asking this question. First, philosophers just discussed about the human mind and how it works. This is what we call Philosophy of Mind. This form of philosophy, lead the human race to a new path, and that is the path of cognitive science.
A little bit of history on Cognitive Science
Before going deeper to this article, I’m about to say most of what I wrote here are not history lesson and they’re just more like a story about cognitive science. Please keep that in mind that this article is not going to be a blog post about the history of cognitive science.
So what happened after philosophers questioned the human mind? For a long time, most of scientists and other philosophers tried to answer this question. For example, they just have started researching the languages and their differences and even how the language we speak can change our way of thinking or perception. This was a big step towards new discoveries, but linguists weren’t the only ones interested in this world.
In the other hand, physicians and biologists started diving into the world of human bodies to understand how mind can work in the body. They raised new concerns and questions and understood the neural system of the human body and the most complex neural network of all time, the human brain.
And after that some of those physicians just understood the world of human mind can be a lot more than just the physical body. So this is how psychology is born (probably). Let’s have a review on what we’ve got here. We’ve got Philosophy, Linguistics, Neurology and Psychology. Fine, we have a nice and big collection of science and philosophy but it can’t be completed without mathematics. So mathematicians and computer scientists started to work on a new concept.
This new concept is basically called Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. Nowadays, everyone talks about how AI can change their job or their life. So now we can understand how a simple question of How human mind actually works? lead us to image generators, text generators or even self-driving cars.
What’s Cognitive Web then?
This is an important and good question. Cognitive Web or Web 4.0, is basically the web which is created using AI, but by the people and for the people and it’s of the people. In Web 4.0, we try to utilize AI tools to get better results for our researches, for our entertainment and in general for everything we’re doing in the current Web 2.0. For now we consider these as parts of the Web 4.0:
Cognitive Search
Recently, we saw how ChatGPT took over the whole internet. Everyone was talking about it. A little bit later Perplexity AI came with their state-of-the-art cognitive type of search engine. So you can consider we already are in web 4.0, and Open Cognitives is just an organization to help you utilize and use these tools.
Now imagine all search engines have these ability. This is what Cognitive Web or Web 4.0 is. You search about a term and the engine will return a ton of unorganized information? No! It tries to give you a summary about the whole thing.
Cognitive Wiki
For sure, all of us used Wikipedia at least for once. We have another problem with wikipedia though. There is a huge amount of good information on wikipedia, but we can’t have all of them at once. The idea of Cognitive Wiki is to help people have those information in a better way.
Now let’s understand how it may work. You open the cognitive wiki and type United Kingdom for example. Then it summarizes the whole content about the United Kingdom in one page for you. This is how we’re utilizing the existing tools to get information from existing sources of knowledge.
Cognitive Art
This part is for education, creativity and entertainment. We already made our tool Mann-E to bring your artistic ideas to life by just typing what you have in your mind! You can use Mann-E to create art right now and bring what you have in your mind just by a few clicks. Even the image featuring in this article is generated by Mann-E.
Cognitive Art can be a tool for concept artists, designers and all people who need to enhance their creativity to get better results in their lives and even create new trends in art or design!
And more
Of course we are not only thinking about generative side of AI, but also we try to work on other sides as well. We still need systems to detect fake news, systems to detect political orientation of a certain news agency and we also need to get feedback from people who are exploring the web 4.0 through sentiment analysis methods. In general, we just need more AI!
Conclusion
What we’ve learned is that a simple question about the human mind, can actually revolutionize the life of billions of people who are living on this planet. The cognitive science and tools we currently have can be considered our priceless assets.
But the problem was that we never tried to utilize them to actually enhance our lives. Cognitive Web or Web 4.0 is there to just help people utilize these tools and enhance their lives for real. In general we just try to make the world a better place for real.
Sincerely,