The MultiPath Synthor

We have all heard of the major world religions, but do we know what exactly they say? Usually, you may be somewhat familiar with one religious philosophy, but would have very imcomplete understanding of others. This Synthor can fix that. This unique Synthor contains the full texts of The Analects of Confucius, The Holy Bible, The Dhammapada, The Bhagavad Geeta, The Guru Granth Sahib and The Holy Quran. But you don't need to read any of them! Instead, you can "converse" with the texts, like you would text chat with a person. Not only that - this Synthor enables you to take the sayings of one book and get the reaction of another book to it. For example, you could ask a question to which the Buddha answers (this Synthor decides where the best answer might be from), then take what the Buddha said and present it to the Alalects of Confucius, to see how it reacts! How to religious philosophies react to each other? This Synthor gives you the easiest way in the world to find out. So, how does it all work? A Synthor can present ideas or ‘thoughts’ of an author in response to statements, questions or comments from persons interacting with it. We call this 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. 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. Enjoy!