Marx Synthor

This is a Synthor made from Karl Marx’s books, “The Communist Manifesto” (written with Engels) and “Das Kapital”, two of the most influential books of all time. Marx’s critical theories about society, economics, and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class conflict. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. His work in economics laid the basis for some current theories about labour and its relation to capital. Most people have heard of him but few have actually read his books.

A Synthor can present ideas or ‘thoughts’ of an author in response to statements, questions or comments from persons interacting with it. We will call such a system a “Synthetic Thought Generator”, abbreviated to SYNTHOR.

A book is a collection of sentences that need to be read in sequence. This, indeed, is the main reason why people who are short of time, or with a deficit of attention, cannot read books, even if they want to. As discussed above, the company of a person who has read a book can partially compensate for someone who has not read the book. Reading a few lines at random from a book cannot be a replacement for the company of someone who has read the entire book. Similarly, looking up keywords from the index of a book will not provide a similar replacement. What then is the difference between the company of a person who has read a book as against other mechanical means of finding a relevant portion of a book?

The answer to this question lies in the stochastic nature of human thinking. The response of a human being to a statement, question or comment is constructed out of a ‘cloud’ of possible responses, the construction being dependent on prior knowledge, memory, recall andmood, among many other psychological or physical factors. As a result, the response to the same verbal stimulus may be different at different times. This variety is what attracts people to each other instead of to a mechanical algorithm that always produces the same response to a particular stimulus. If conversation with a Synthor is to have even a semblance of the usefulness of a conversation with a person, its design must incorporate uncertainty.

Here, we define a mind as a collection of thoughts, each thought being represented as one or more sentences. This definition is a purely functional one for the purpose of creating a Synthor and does not, necessarily, have any connection with what an actual mind is –if there is something called an ‘actual mind’. Each sentence in the cloud of sentences that constitute a Synthor’s mind has an equal probability of becoming a response to a stimulus such as a statement, a comment or a question. However, context, keywords, and appropriateness (mood) determine the sentence, or sentences, that will be actually selected for response. In other words the probability of sentences appearing as a response are adjusted until a sentence or set of sentences ‘collapse’ into an actual response.

This Synthor consists of methods for determining the probable context for a conversation, extracting keywords that represent this context, then adjusting the probability of selection using a ‘mood’ that will represent the appropriateness of a response, and, finally, presenting the most probable response from a final list of high probability responses. In addition, each step in this selection process can be altered by the probability of forgetting to adjust a value. A Synthor with a mind consisting of the contents of just one book would respond as a whimsical but knowledgeable reader of that book.

This Synthor contains two of Marx’s most well known books, with the maths and tables edited out for convenience of display and understanding.

It can be moody, forgetful and disjoined - it all depends on you…