When I was a teenager I was obsessed with the relationship between logic and emotion. I don't think this kind of obsession is that unusual among teenagers (I've seen it many times in others although school knocks it out of them!), - it is a sign of the sensitivities of adolescence and how our fiery brains tackle the mysteries of consciousness and rapidly shifting hormones. I haven't quite left this stage of my life behind though... Which is something I recommend to my students - keep hold of "young ideas"!
I've recently been making some unusual software which relates verbal communication to musical communication (if music can communicate... I would tend to say it coordinates emotions). It uses the same Shannon entropy techniques that I learnt from Leydesdorff and applied them to the interplay of concepts communicated verbally. It visualises these interactions nicely and it gives me a lot to think about.
Most people think we coordinate our understanding through the exchange of words which are the index of coordination. There's a whole field of applied linguistics which focuses on the use of words to establish rapport, etc. I don't think this is quite right (and in fact the extent to which it is wrong underpins a lot of pathology in organisations). To start with, it's not words, it is concepts... but it is not so much our articulation of concepts as the ways in which we reveal our ability to manipulate concepts. Which is pretty much what I've done on this blog for nearly 20 years. What we tune into is each others agility in moving across a conceptual field.
My new software is able to measure this. Which is cool and fascinating. It makes me think that we are barking up the wrong tree with large language models, although they are useful for moving towards a much more powerful coordination technology.
The key question about agility is not to determine the agility of conceptual shift, but to understand the fundamental springs which govern the dynamics of the shift in the first place. I'm pretty convinced that such springs exist, and that our ability to ignore them is the root of so many problems. It is the difference between Keir Starmer's communication skills and Andy Burnham. Burnham is "natural" because he is more tuned-in to these dynamics.
We need more people to be able to do this, and it may take a technology to help them. This would be a truly useful "artificial intelligence"!
