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