I suppose this is a bit of an apology for, or brief explanation of what I'm tentatively calling The Open Mind Project. http://bit.ly/OpenMindProject
My research interests are relatively interdisciplinary and eclectic. Yeah, brains are complicated; and their embedded, emergent operational abstractions, aka minds, are insanely intricate. However, both are completely comprehensible, over time.
Which brings me to the comprehensibility, or perhaps seeming lack thereof, of this experimental personal firehose. The experiment is simply to bundle up a publicly parsable aggregation of the mishmash of interests that I express, document, and interact with all across the internet. The majority of items in this stream are either published by me, across a number of blogs and bookmarking sites that I maintain, or archive snapshots of my frame of reference in video discussion communities, forums, and so-called microblogging collective cognition sessions. Where external items are referenced -- notably, Google Reader -- they are presented with comment indicating my interpretation or context. The CSS of these items needs specific work, as does the entire stream, to improve the semantic utility of the raw data.
Granted, it's an astronomically "lossy" approach that is perhaps equivalent to gathering one grain of sand from every beach in the world with the goal of recreating or accurately simulating each of those shorelines; even worthy of making some good fun:
On the other hand, if I provide one grain of sand, and you provide one grain of sand, over time, we might aggregate a large enough sampling to accomplish something interesting.
If gathering grains of sand is tedious, by brain analogy, creating a complete map of the human brain is painstaking and complex beyond any of our previous efforts; yet that fact does not negate the importance of creating that map. Quite the contrary.
All this complexity is comprehensible; even the 1GB per mm^2 massively parallel mushdrive inside our own heads. It's my contention that any and all expansion of our collective human understanding -- even of the most complex phenomenon we are capable of exploring -- is a function of our focused intention and sustained curiosity.
In some venues, I've been tagged as a bit of as a futurist. With deep gratitude for that compliment, I prefer to not wear that particular lapel pin. In dabbling with the forward peering scenarios that I explore, I prefer the idea of futuretechtecture: the process of researching, exploring, debating, defining, and designing desirable outcomes and applications made possible by the dynamic, evolving affordances of current leading and bleeding edge scientific and technological developments. To borrow a meme from James Hughes, I share the belief that achieving a sexy, high tech, radically democratic future is not so much a matter of speculation or prognostication; as it is an essential objective worth articulating and co-creating, as the real-time aggregation of our collective choices, at the boundary between our everyday endeavors and the aspiration of our fittest natures.
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Mind: A Comprehensible Mishmash Mushdrive
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