My new blog address is http://www.opposablemind.com

Apologies for the inconvenience! Curse my laziness. I should have done that to begin with. I’m moving over to Typepad because of the attrocious response time here at Blogsome. Hopefully, paying a bit will mean better response time over there. Although I can see that it isn’t a perfect world either. For one thing, you can’t do Google Analytics unless you have a Pro account? Give me a break. Perhaps its time to just bite the damned bullet and host the blog myself. Is there such a thing as RSS redirect? Haven’t we yet learned our lesson about hard coding values?

If you have comments about the best we to move a blog with the least amount of headache for readers, please send them to rsscomments@metastorming.com.

Thanks all, see you in the new digs.

- David

I like checking out the meme-space when I get a notion of a new flavor of idea. Context Management System is something that popped into my head recently, and a google turned up this post. I’m not even sure that it has the same perspective that I do on what a Context Management System should be. I agree with the comments about intent. We need to surface intent of both conscious and unconscious varieties. The trick to this is realizing that intent isn’t a simple scalar value, but rather a multifaceted matrix of factors, with varying degrees of consciousness.

Isn’t this the crux of context?

I’m thinking that a CxMS is the killer app of web2.0. Blogs are individualized expression of CMS, and the high powered CMS allows the full range of collaboration to bring content to fruition.

How is a CxMS different from a CMS? Really, they are quite orthogonal. A simple example is Mountain Dew. Content: highly caffeinated liquid that could be mistaken for antifreeze. Context: go juice for snow-boarders and x-game wannabes.

You wanna get a sense of context, listen to a politician. It’s all spin with no content. Content-less context.

The problem with this characterization, though, is that it comes across as quite negative. And the reason is pretty clear. We hate being coerced, and it’s pretty clear that marketers and politicians are usually after one thing only, and they’ll tell us anything including bald-faced lies to get it. They want the power that comes with our undivided attention.

Remember in Minority Report when Tom Cruise is assalted by blaring ads trying to get his attention? Does anyone that we’ll tolerate this kind of harrassment? I think Spielberg just wanted to give a futuristing dystopian feel, but come on. If one thing is clear about the power of the net, it’s that the consumer is starting to wake up to the power of the collective. Coercion is on the way out the door, but it’s not gone yet. The larger public only needs access to tools that allow them to effectively separate signal from noise in an intuitively obvious and inobtrusive way to start a transformation into a coercionless society.

Give me the tools to wield influence in my micro-contextual interactions, and the collective context will follow suit. We will finally be capable of looking at ourself in the mirror, not as a myriad of individuals, but as a gestalt: the species view.

[Damn, this writing is tortured, isn’t it? Too bad. I’ve got to get this post off of my drafts list. I’ll pretty up the follow-ons.]

Last week I enjoyed having breakfast with Charlie Wood, a fellow Vignette alum. I’ve been working on communicating the ideas and visions I see on the net for the past year or so, and it’s a nice change have someone show recognition on the other side of the table instead of squinting at me like maybe I forgot to take my meds.

So, a quick question. If I enjoyed the meeting so much, why has it taken me this long to blog about it? It’s a very good question. I’ve been consuming mass quantities of data as I try to figure out a strategy for not drowning at the feed hydrant. I’m committed to making this transition, but I can tell that I’m currently in over my head and wiping out more than I’d like. If I started trying to write what I thought was relevent, I wouldn’t shut up.

So, I’m just going to limit myself to one more link in this post. Check out the O’Reilly ITConversations pick-of-the-week, if you haven’t already. Marc Smith was onto something really keen a year ago. I don’t see nearly the ripples on the surface of the pond that I’d expect from this kind of insight. Once again, I ask myself: am I delusional, ahead of the curve, or just looking in the wrong places?

I’ve bought my copy of Kurzweil’s new book, but haven’t cracked the cover… yet. It’s definitely on my must read list. After watching him speak at this years Accelerating Change, I look at the singularity a bit differently. I’ve basically been a singularity nerd my whole life. How exactly I might define singularity has changed several times, but I’ve consistently been attracted to the idea that we are on the verge of making a discovery that will change everything about the meaning that we make of the world. This passion has meant that I can share my views with acquaintances in any sub-domain that I happen to be interested in, but it’s a real challenge to find those souls who are trying to grok the big picture in a way that seems native to me. Science is often too dry, science fiction, even the hard stuff, is often too frivolous (or becomes so after a while). Pragmatism seems lifeless and new-age is too juicy, to the point of being squishy. I’ve been doing my own cognitive mashups of these various domains for most of my life, but haven’t taken the time to jot the thoughts on paper.

But this issue of the singularity as it was approached at AC2005 approximated my imaginary mashups more precisely than any single event ever had. It is time to start paying attention to futurists — not necessarily because they have the answers, but rather because they are some of the few who are asking the right questions. Take a moment to glance up from your keyboard and remember the things that are taken for granted today that we didn’t have as kids. Talking about the way things were when you were a kid starts to sound like that “three miles in the snow, up hill both ways” kind of tale. Now think about the stuff that is common today that was unimaginable 10 years ago. Everyone having a cell-phone. Remember five years ago, imagine that everyone has a web presence. Remember last year and imagine that everyone you know has heard of del.icio.us and is wondering what it means.

Yes, the singularity is near, but once again, we’re looking in the wrong place. At the AC2005, the focus was AI and IA (intelligence amplification), and most of this work is being done in schools and labs. These are the predictable places where we might expect innovations to come from. These are the people who are paying a hefty price to make themselves sufficiently accident prone that the next big accident that turns the world on its head might have a chance of occurring on their watch.

But more likely, the event is already happening somewhere else. In my rush to get up to speed with RSS and feedburner, I’ve neglected my Wired subscription of late. A monthly print magazine just can’t pack the whallop that feedburner can anymore; it lacks the edge for me that it used to have. That edge is what fueled my way from cover to cover with each issue for the past eight years or so. But the pink covered November issue grabbed my attention again and I flipped from the back forward, now impatient with the warm-up acts that fill the first two thirds. I came upon the story about Fly from LeapFrog. This $99 kids toy is much more than it first appears. I don’t care if it catches on or not. In this day and age of mashups and hacking, this thing has capabilities that are just begging to be extended.

I know that it doesn’t have all of the functionality that I want right now, but just wait. This is disruptive technology like we haven’t seen before. Not because of cpu horsepower, or cutting edge graphics, but because it interfaces with our thinking in a way that unleashes potential that has been lying dormant for quite some time.

Imagine, say, version 3.0 of the Fly. It is wirelessly connected (wi-fi or blue-tooth, or whatever), it can record audio and video, and synchonize it with the stylus activity, it is GPS enabled. Now think of TiVo for your conversations and experiences with real-time tagability, and sharable withing ad-hoc peer groups of mutual trust. This changes the classroom environment considerably. Old-schoolers will immediately think of the potential for chaos and how hard it will be to control the situation. Flip it instead to seeing that chaos as an interesting asset. The facilitator (formerly called a teacher) changes roles; no longer is the job about disseminating information to the masses, but rather it now becomes more like conducting a symphony of minds. Introduce a concept and contextualize it until someone gets it, and then let them expound until it starts to spread and catch fire for the rest of the kids. What if, instead of thinking about pre-scripted lesson plans, the facilitator was freed to assist in exploration, looking for ways that existing activities and presently relevent interests can be folded into a dynamic curriculum, with real-time feedback on how well each student is grasping the concepts based on their participation?

The vision I’m seeing is at least two, and perhaps four, jumps ahead of where we are. Don’t focus on the specifics. Look at the trend. I’ve been looking for a good way to convey the concept of the “singularity” for my friends who’ve never heard the term. How about this: remember that exercise where we looked around at technology that is hard to remember living without? When our kids get that feeling every day about the stuff they know today that they didn’t know yesterday, the generation gap will effectively narrow in terms of age (18 year olds will seem as old and out of it as grandparents to 10 year olds), and yet the chasm between generations will deepen so profoundly that it will effectively be an impassable mote.

Adults don’t have the kind of plasticity that will allow them to change fast enough to keep up with change at singularity speeds, but our kids do. And this new world is just this moment opening up for them. Want to watch the birth of the singularity. Follow the children and see if you can keep up.

I got a hunch to go back and reread Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind.” When I came to the part where he talks about the R-directed cultural creatives who insist on seeing the big picture, I paused to reflect. 20 Million of these folks in the US? That’s about a percent of the adults (rough guess, R-directed style, no calculator whipped out for that one). So, where are these guys? Sure, I’m finding a bunch of good blogs, and need to start my own blog-role, but I’m not seeing the kind of volume that I expect from this sizable a crowd.

Maybe they’re having just as much of a challenge as I am. I may have said it before, but blogging currently, is a pain in the arse. These major league bloggers must have some sort of system down to slog through their reading/writing/and rethinking.

I want to unleash my big-picture thinking, to turn my head inside out so that people can get at the goodies and put them to use. And I want to unleash the goodies from this 20 million strong uber group so I can put them to use. A year ago, I set out as a goal to become a lightening rod for the cultural creatives in Austin. I’m still relatively unknown, but I’d like to think that I’m just on the pre-vertical part of the asymptote.

My writing could improve, sure. But that’s only part of the problem. Okay, okay. I reread yesterdays entry, and I can see why it might be a bit murky. Sometimes big-picture view leaves the details too fuzzy, like the zoomed in picture of my house on Google Earth. So, here’s a better description of what I’m thinking about. And visual to boot. I think I’m wanting even more detail than this shows, but the gist should be clear now, right?

I’m motivated and technically ept (though I don’t have super-human tech prowess), and I find keeping up with my ideas an obnoxious chore. And I’m probably more tolerant than 95% of those 20 million. The SSE stuff could help, and I also want to actually get into the XFN. These have been around for a while, why aren’t they in more widespread use?

How about this. I’m reminded of the early days of computers. I was working on my CS degree back in the late 80’s, so I still got to hear the old-timers talk about optimizing their code to account for the rotation speed of drum memory (okay, so maybe not firsthand). I was always amazed that anything ever got done at all. I’m not the best coder in the world, so I sometimes found just the simple tasks to be a bit of a challenge, but throwing machine code and clunky hardware restrictions in the mix, and I’m amazed that anyone perservered at all.

It must feel like the same kind of thing is going on for those 95% right now. I’m kind of enjoying trying to get up to speed, and I’ve seen the twinkle in the eyes of the true geeks who are seriously getting off on all this stuff, but Web2.0 is basically equivalent to assembler in terms of innovation. We’ve got some high powers parts, but if you want to actually build an application, you’d better get out the soldering gun and prepare for a few marathon sessions of hacking and kludging. It’s happening on a faster scale now than it did in the early days. But we still need to get some pretty wrapping around some more of this functionality.

I’m being too hard on everyone. The effort is appreciated, and the progress is stellar. Again, I find myself incredibly grateful that other people love to do this stuff enough to basically do it for the love of craft. Still, my expectations and standards are high. Let’s actually make something that those 95% will wonder how they ever lived without. Something as simple, powerful and intuitive as Google, but with the mission of unleashing contribution.

If you’ve got ideas, contact me, david, at metastorming. comp (minus the p).

Let’s build this thing.

Roland Tanglao has an excellent presentation of RSS Remixing. Listen to the podcast, particularly to the questions at the end; there’s an application that wants to be born.

What we really want to do is improve the signal to noise ratio. As communication becomes cheaper and more efficient, the volume of data has exploded, and will continue to rise exponentially. In addition fragmentation has also skyrocketed as it becomes easier to express an opinion through blogs, tags and spam. In short, the meme-space is severly fragmented and in dire need of defragging. How are we going to do this?

Read Umair Haque’s Edge Competencies on bubblegeneration.com for a background insight on how this next piece works.

Each user is effectively sorting signal from noise on a daily basis. Most are duplicating effort without any coordination to reduce the size of the haystack. The people who are helping effectively reduce the size of the web haystack is the team-up of Google and the bloggers. The emergent semantics of folksonomies has promise, but so far has been largely untapped. When I mention collaborative effort, I’m not thinking of mechanical turk. I don’t want to farm out the task of separating signal from noise to someone collecting micropayments for that task. Why? Because I’ll likely end up with garbage. Who better to filter my content than me, right? So how do I leverage others if not explicitly?

Implicitly. I already sort my own content daily, just save the results to a tag file. What if I had a tool that helped my with this solo task? Here’s the gist. Currently I bookmark or tag only a tiny fraction of the links that I find interesting. Tagging is currently too distracting from my task at hand, reviewing content. I don’t want to leave my page, or be limited to three tags, or go to a shadows page. I want the basic implicit context of my current page to become an automatically generated tag for all sub-links on the page, and I want an easy way to add tags such as toBlog, toRead, toSave,
, for, etc. The option to add these tags is in a hover-menu when I pause over a link (the implicit tags are auto-logged and tagged when I view the page; example auto-tags include timestamp, parent-page, email author/group, Google search terms, etc.). Now I’ve got implicit and explicit annotated history of all links that I come across.

How to use this history? Remember the toBlog tag, when I go into blog mode, if I search my taglog for toBlog, all those links come up, and I can sort by date, project, or other tag. While composing my entry, if I highlight a phrase, and hover over the phrase, I can create a link to one of these taglog links.

Here’s the cool thing. This tag-log is mine. I can export it to del.icio.us or shadows.com if I like, or keep it private. Hmmm. Private is last millenium. I want to share my content. Remember, I’m not just in it for me. I want other people to be able to leverage my meaning-making, so I want them to be able to read my log. If I’m shy about something, perhaps I can make specific entries wholly or partially private. Maybe I can make my taglog available anonymously.

In my own little taglogged folksonomy, links become somewhat relevent as soon as I’ve been exposed to them. They gain relevency when I tag them, visit them, or blog them. Other people can see the links that occupy my attention at various levels. Now, imagine a tool that was harvesting these annotated attention streams in the same way that google is currently doing page-rank.

What we’re doing here is turning every web citizen into a Maxwellian Demon, separating signal from noise for his own benefit and then sharing that benefit with whoever would like to use it. This is creation of value in the form of meaningful context. Collectively, this value will be astronomical. There is a little problem though. Right now, the web isn’t nearly stratified enough. Think of wikipedia. There is one entry for Bill Gates. We need to microchunk this. Currently, each little demon is fighting with every other little demon to push the content around. This is because we are used to thinking in the metaphor of physical proximity, and a thing can only be in one place at a time. Tagging has broken that metaphor, but we still fall back on it by habit. Contextual proximity has no geographical bounds, and therefore can be multiple places all at once. I “Bill Gate’s” microchunk of information might be simultaneously “funny” “serious” “factual” “disputed” “interesting” and “worthless.” Much of the value of folksonomy tags is their subjectivity, not their objectivity. If I can find other users whose subjective experience of a micro-chunk matches my own, then those matches could possibly be harvested across other micro-chunks.

In this way, I might want to subscribe to an RSS feed of “funny” Bill Gates micro-chunks. Or maybe subscribe to a particular user’s “funny” tag for other micro-chunks. Or maybe to some heuristically determined subset of users who’ve tagged this micro-chunk as “funny.”

There are almost unlimited ways that I can control my feeds now, and if I make it so that my incoming stream is easily adjusted by turning the volume up on signal and down on noise, we’ve got our app for harvesting collective intelligence.

I’ve probably moved ahead too fast. Bring it down several notches and just think of your known peers (not FOAF). What if you could just share your taglogs with this peer group? I could see what you find interesting before you blog about it. We could see who in the group hasn’t seen bubblegeneration.com. The work that we do quickly moves from having individual value to having collective value.

Effectively, what we’re doing is laying down multi-variable pheremone trails (see Emergence, by Steven Johnson), while we’re searching for content crumbs. I can easily change my state so that certain pheremone trails become invisible and others become highlighted based on my current intent and internal state.

There are other issues that I’ll address in a future entry. These include trust+identity commons, and compensation+reputation. These concepts are seen as difficult primarily because of paradigmatic habits of viewing resources as scarce. If we can break down this habit, we can see that attention is one of the best forms of compensation. So much so, that it can be monetized, not by Amazon or Google, but by you and me. In the coming omniarchy of an abundance economy based on attention, the citizen becomes king, and the corporation becomes servant. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the data. The prevailing worldview is flipping on its axis as we type…

- David

At the Accelerating Change conference in September, I met Linda Groff and we had a wonderful conversation about the relationship between the coming singularity and spiritual intelligence. It was just a short conversation between talks, but clearly we had some common ground. One of the topics in that brief conversation was my participation in the Spirituality Track of the 2005 American Creativity Associations international conference in Austin.

About a month ago, Linda called to ask if I would like to participate on a panel at the upcoming World Future Society in Toronto.

Here is the draft of the description of the panel so far:

World Future Society Conference Proposal-July 2006–Toronto
Panel Theme: Cutting-Edge Issues in Evolution: Creativity and Innovation

There are many issues that will effect the future evolution of humanity. One important issue is the development of human, social, cultural, scientific, technological, and artistic potential via creativity and innovation in all these areas–the focus of this panel. The world is currently in a period characterized by terrorism and natural disasters, which all engender fear and lead some to seek oversimplified black and white absolute worldviews that choke off dialogue between different worldviews in the deeper search for truth and understanding, which is necessary for creative breakthroughs to occur in any field. This panel will look at a number of different perspectives on creativity and innovation–including key approaches to this in different cultures and time periods, and including the debate on evolution vs. “intelligent design” today–and why this topic is so crucial to future human evolution, noting that humanity has always progressed when great creative breakthroughs have occurred and stagnated when people lived in fear and dogmatism.

Who should attend: Futurists in any area of life–academy, business, government, and community-who are concerned about fostering greater creativity and innovation, rather than fear of change, so that humanity can continue to evolve.

What you’ll learn: Why is creativity and innovation so important to the evolution of humanity and society, what are the challenges to creativity and innovation today, and how might greater creativity and innovation be fostered.

How this knowledge can be applied: Panel will look at how to encourage creativity and innovation-including in a climate where fear of change exists. The many benefits of creativity and innovation to civilization will be noted.

Chair and Panelist:
Linda Groff, Professor, California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Director, Global Options Consulting, USA

Other Panelists:
* David L. Swedlow, Synergy for Practical Conceptual Innovation, Austin, Texas
* Jan Amkreutz, Digital Crossroads Consulting, Montana; Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Agent Technology and Knowledge Management, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Other Possible Panelists:
* Johnson, Charles, Psychiatrist, author of books on creativity and a CD on the Evolution of Music.
* Lindstrom, Hal, Editor of Technological Forecasting Journal, on Technological Innovation.
* Cordeiro, Jose. Venezuelan Representative for WFS, Millenium Project, and Club of Rome; and Convenor, recent TransVision Conference, Caracas, 2005. Attending recent Brazilian Innovation Conference.

Reading up on the librarians take on this issue gave me pause to think further on the consequences of the shift toward enabling the general population to find any information that is available. After reading this particular entry I added my own perspective, which is as follows:

I would argue that there is a quantum mindshift that is occuring right now, and the biggest bottleneck is the paradigm inside of which we are operating. Paradigms have a very nasty habit of being invisible when viewed from the inside (kind of like dreams; in both cases, it takes a significant amount of mental labor to become aware of the boundaries). I would like to make a couple of observations that may bring the boundary of the current predominant paradigm into focus a bit.

People are outgrowing the need for librarians. Ironically, the job description is morphing into something like: obsolete yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then to reinvent what you do at a higher level. The growing demand for information will no longer make it tolerable to stand in line for information, or to explain my issue to a human being before getting an answer. Roy’s maxim above, that people like to find more than they like to search doens’t even quite go far enough. People like much more than to find. In the same way that searching is just the prerequisite to finding, finding is just the prerequisite to contributing. People ache to contribute, and they are doing so with folksonomies, and wikis, and applications for building applications that will soon do everything from indexing the worlds knowledge to solving unheard of problems (see ning.com).

Our linear solutions for solving large scale problems are no longer agile enough to accomplish the task before us. We are shedding the skin of the current paradigm. The best we can do is to let go of it, and embrace the omniarchy of multi-paradigmatic navigation.

The population is becoming empowered and situated to start making most conventional jobs obsolete. We are used to thinking of people as needing the help of an expert to do make real headway on any significant task. Most hierarchies are set up to concretize the expertise of individuals. These silos are to restrictive for the kind of collaboration that is striving to be born. Rather than looking at division of labor, we should start looking at multiplication of labor. Rather than thinking of ways in which you can more efficiently give people access to your expertise, learn how to hand them your expertise so that you aren’t part of the bottleneck between them and their contribution.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the bumber sticker that reads “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.” Perhaps it needs to be updated and brought back. It should now read: “Follow those who lead by getting the hell out of the way.”

[Metacomment: I realize that I’m a bit behind the curve here. I just caught up with Brewster Kahle’s talk at ITConversations. In it, he mentioned the Googlezon presentation, which I watched. I wanted to know who else was looking at this, so boogied over to del.icio.us to check out the tag, and came upon the LITA Blog. We need to keep an eye out for the librarians, because they are on our side.]

Things are moving fast in the world these days, so I’ll step with brisk caution. Nothing fancy in this first post using the Flock web access platform (as they say, ‘browser’ is so inadequate to describe what web users do these days).

I’m using the developer pre-prerelease of Flock. I’d heard about it a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until my phone conversation with Alex Rollin that I decided to go searching for new interesting stuff. In addition to Flock, I stumbled upon ourmedia and CivicSpace. 

I am happy as all get-out that the web infrastructure is starting to come alive to assist people and organizations in acting more as a unit. During the conversation with Alex, I talked about my desires for capabilities. I’m woefully inadequate at organizing myself even without all of the new content spewing forth, so I’ve been on the lookout for decent tools. Outliners came to my attention this past week, and I’ve just started scheduling via Planzo. I’ve also set up a ProtoPage, but all of this stuff is still quite disconnected. Though I’ve got a CS degree, I never made much use of it in the coding field. I’m trying to take care of that with some Ruby on Rails self training, but that takes time. I’m tinkering withthe ProtoPage to get it to do what I want, but I can tell it’s not ever going to satisfy me completely, and I’ll just end up frustrated that it won’t do everything for me.

So, what am I looking for?

Glad you asked. The old school models like YahooGroups and Usenet is topic based. Find the group and post there. It fit well with the desktop folder metaphor, and is heirarchical (left brain linear - see Dan Pink’s  A Whole New Mind.). The blogging solution is very much a tag metaphor, where we’ve got some kind of folksonomy for a particular user, and follow their interests. This seems analogous to the depth vs. breadth metaphor for tree traversal, but it doesn’t quite fit. What I really want is some combination of the two on the content creation side, as well as the content retrieval side.

I would like to have my own mind-map/idea-map like interface that was local to my own machine. It would act as my home application and contain links to all of my other applications and data (calendar, mail, documents, etc.). This would be my starting place, and the container for all my contributions. But it would also server as my launch pad, so that if I found that I wanted to post something to my blog, I’d just SendTo the blog of choice. I could also choose multiple destinations, and they could all refer back to my tree, so that if I updated my stuff, it was current everywhere. I’m starting to think this sounds a bit more like Ted Nelson’s original Xanadu vision.

But in addition to being the launchpad, it would also serve as an RSS reader application. I love del.icio.us (who doesn’t), but still want it to do more. I would like to get a flag when others who have similar interests to my own, and when they have found and tagged content that I might like.

This isn’t all crystal clear for me right now, but I’ve got to wrap up for now. Back with more later.

Opposable Thumb to Opposable Mind: Grasping Our Situation by Shifting Our Consciousness.

I’m a big picture guy. I tend to spread out in an absurdly wide breadth-first way to try to find the commonalities in everything. Kind of like trying to wrap my arms around the universe.

The title of this blog and this post occured to me while listening to Ray Kurzweil at the Accelerating Change conference last month in Palo Alto, CA. He mentioned the role of the opposable thumb in our evolution from the apes, with just a shift in the leverage point, tools went from potential to manifestation. Cognitive capacity expanded to make best use of abstraction as more and more items became tools. This is a powerful feedback loop; the more robust the abstraction, the more versatile the tool, increasing the need for robust abstractions, etc.

We now find ourselves in a funny predicament. Being mostly blind to our own paradigms, we’re having a hell of a time figuring out what to do with ourselves. Lots of gloom and doom talk with terrorism, global warming, peak oil, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, ozone holes, antibiotic-resistant super-bugs, etc. All of this stuff comes about because of unintended consequences of unchecked growth.

But wait just a minute. Let’s take a second look at those consequences and see if they really are unintended. In this blog, I’ll explore the possibility that the universe has a teleological bent that can be discovered and exploited. I’ll go even further: its starting to seem to me that part of this bent is the desire to have this bent discovered and exploited. That’s a seriously twisted perspective, and to fully explore it, we’re going to have to break a few paradigms. (I can feel my melodrama coming on…). The universe may be more like the Matrix than we currently suspect. Each of us is Neo, and the universe supplies all those other programs just to get us to develop the very insight that I’m proposing.

The first victim is the question, “Does life have a purpose?” I think the answer is, “yes.” But the purpose isn’t 42, unless 42 is a code for “finding balance.” But, upon finding balance, the universe isn’t happy. It doesn’t just reach a static equilibrium. It then uses that stability as a platform from which to hurl itself into another disequilibrium in a never ending game of pendulum swinging from disequilibrium to equilibrium, and back again, at successively higher levels.

The second victim is the question, “What is life?” I’d answer that life is anything that expresses intent. In my view, this means that the universe is alive, and that everything in the universe is alive. This is probably too bold to state right up front. Almost no one thinkgs a rock expresses intent. I would argue that the degrees of freedom with which it can express its intent are extremely limited. A molecule has a very tiny degree of freedom, but more than an atom. A virus can express more freedom than a molecule, but less than an cell. A colony of cells more than a single cell, but less than an organism. A society more than an organism, but less than an eco system, etc. The ordering makes one think that a galaxy is the jump above eco-system, but I believe it is a competing/collaborating intelligence; a different track, not a member in the sequence chain. Galaxies metabolize hydrogen into all of the elements necessary to create life, and then create the galactic organs that shuttle this matter into star clusters and solar systems.

As I’ve alluded, I’m positive I’ve said too much for an initial post on this subject. I’m going to shoot my credibility to hell before I even acquire an audience…

Ahh, to hell with it. You all are grown ups; you can make up your own minds. Just don’t be too quick to dismiss an idea because it doesn’t fit what you were taught in school.

- David