Metascience of content-based cognitive ergonomics

Abstract

In the ongoing technological revolution from 4.0 to 5.0 life, a critical issue is cognitive ergonomics for intelligent information processing. Joint Cognitive Systems (JCS) is a helpful concept to understand the strengths and limitations of human and machine information processing and reasoning. To operate in the real world, the JCS must represent the relevant actions, agents, goals, and context. However, machine representations such as Turing machines or formal automata represent the world in terms of meaningless symbols. Such formal machines must be interpreted, i.e., their representational elements and operations that generatively manipulate representations must be given meanings, which is often called symbol grounding or interpretation. The representational elements must be given meanings, otherwise they cannot function in a meaningful way in the real world. It seems that information content and its relevance are a consequence of human information processing and thinking. An interpreted Turing machine has a set of domain-specific rules or operations that manipulate symbolic states from one to another. Information content makes it possible to ask and answer new kinds of questions, for example about truth and validity. Information content and its relevance thus form the human part of intelligent JCS. The problem of information content, its relevance and truth form the standpoint of a new kind of ergonomic thinking. It focuses on the content of relevant information. This field of ergonomics can be called content-based, because the topic of its analysis as well as its arguments are based on the content of information processes in human-machine interaction.

Keywords: Cognitive Ergonomics, Joint Cognitive Systems, Human-Technology Interaction, Information Contents

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008085