I have written about the fact that I don’t believe in believing. In that article I distinguished between assuming and believing. I’d like to say more about the role that assuming plays in my view of reality and in my life.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

I realize that I am using my own, perhaps narrow, definition of some words. I’m trying to convey some ideas and these are the best labels I can find. I hope the ideas get through to the reader even if the words don’t quite fit.

“Assuming” can mean several different things. In one sense it means “my best guess”. I guess that a particular thing is most likely to be so. I “assume” it’s so. For example, the paper says the high to day is going to be 69 degrees fahrenheit. I “assume” that it will be warm enough that I wont need a coat. A sweater will do.

In another sense it is a point of view that I take for some purpose, whether I think it likely to be so or not. For example, I am going to temporarily assume that there is a God, an omniscient being with whom I can interact and ask for favors. I “posit” the existence of such a being even though my best guess is that it’s existence is extremely unlikely. Given that assumption I can ask the question “What should I do with the rest of my life?” I can then speculate on what my assumed God would answer.

I have a toy platypus named Phred. I have conversations with Phred. I don’t really think that an inanimate toy has a mind and can communicate with me. However, I mentally ask Phred questions and then I look to see what pops up in my mind. I try not to influence what comes up, not to choose it, just to let it emerge. Of course I recognize that in some sense I am making up the answer. However, to the extent that I am able, I let the words emerge from my sub-conscious. I began this interaction when a friend asked me if my platypus had a name. I said “I don’t know. I’ve never asked him.” In my mind I said “Do you have a name?”. Immediately into my mind popped the name “Phred”,

So I’ve defined two meanings for “assume”. One is “my best guess” and the other is “ a point of view I choose to hold.”. Often these two are the same. I choose to hold a point of view that is my best guess as to what is so, even if I have very little information about what is really so.

Though I may be belaboring this, I want it to be very clear. I may assume a point of view even when I have very little idea as to whether it is true or not. I may assume a point of view that I think unlikely to be true. For example, if I want to better understand someone who disagrees with me, I may attempt to assume their point of view.

Now I’d like to make one more jump with this idea. I have a way of viewing choices about how I live my life that uses the word assumption in a slightly different way. In this process I come up with a guideline, or an idea, that I think may be a useful approach even though I don’t really know whether or not it will. I then choose to live my life as if this was so.

Similarly, I may be faced with a choice and I may think something like “I am going to make this choice as if a particular perspective were correct.” For example, let’s say I am with a church group that seems to be operating with a particular set of very rigid moral codes. While I am with them I may choose to live my life as if there really was a God who enforced (rewarded and punished behavior) these codes.

The one area in my life where I use this most explicitly is in my attempt to never lie to anyone about anything It’s more than that, the underlying goal is to never intentionally mislead anyone about anything. This view does not mean I have to tell people what I think is so. I can remain silent. However, if remaining silent strongly implies that I know things to be one way when in fact I know them to be different, then I have a difficult choice. I can avoid actually “lying”, but I would still be misleading.

Why, I hope you are wondering, do I choose to do this. I was at a talk by Buckminster Fuller when he was in his 80’s. He said it was a choice he had made and that it seemed to work for him. He suggested that anyone who thought it might work for them should try it. He was very clear that there was no underlying absolute principal that drove this choice. It was, he said, just a point of view you could assume to see if it would help your life.

He went on to make it very clear that he was not suggesting that we be honest when dealing with important issues, but that he really meant “all the time”. The example he gave, in response to a question, was that it was just as important to answer truthfully about whether you had brushed your teeth as it was about whether you had been unfaithful to your wife. He said it was a way of viewing reality, not a technique to use to feel that you were a good person. He also suggested that in the process some people might find that they became more able to see what was so, more able to be honest with themselves.

My understanding of what Buckminster Fuller suggested means that, if one is trying to follow the path he suggested, little white lies are just as damaging to the process, just as undesireable, as major lies about important things.

I chose that path. I chose to live my life based on the assumption that always telling the truth would make my life more meaningful and satisfying.

I don’t “believe” that is so for me, rather I choose to assume it is true. So far the evidence is that it seems to work well for me almost always… I also don’t assume that others should assume this point of view. Rather I suggest, as Bucky did, that it might be useful to some people.

Note: This “truth path” is a different subject from “assumptions”, but it’s an important part of my life and this gives me a chance to state it as clearly as I can. Here are a couple of other things I want to say about my experience with this path.

I came up with a couple of guidelines that help me with this path. One is, for me, the answer to the question “When is it most important to tell the truth” is “about having lied”.

A second is, if my telling the truth makes me feel somehow better, morally superior, to others who don’t choose to follow this path, then that is undesirable. The choice to tell the truth should not be used as a way of feeling superior to others and when it is, that is damaging to the spiritual goal of the path. This is not about being better than, it’s about doing something that works for me. I do have considerable difficulty with this area. I do resent people who lie… and I recognize that this can get in the way with my getting the most from my own choice to be honest.

So much for assumptions… for today.

I usually use the word “belief” to mean something that I don’t believe in. I don’t believe in “believing”. I distinguish between “believing” and “assuming”. When a person assumes something it’s usually their best guess as to what is so. In some cases it’s not even that, it’s just a guess they would like to live by for some reason. For example: “I’m going to assume that this man I just met and I are going to be good friends. I’ll approach our relationship like that, and see what happens.”

We assume things because we think that living with that point of view may be useful. We remain open to changing the assumption if our experience implies that it would be useful to do so.

Beliefs, as I see them, are not assumptions. They are fixed points of view that have somehow become part of how we define ourselves. When a person’s beliefs are challenged or threatened, they become defensive, or offensive. They will often fight, or even die, to defend their beliefs. In my view we have relatively little immediate control over what we believe. We kind of end up believing things. In my view we don’t get to choose what we believe.

I think it’s often hard to identify our beliefs. They are part of our mental paradigm. They are like a lens through which we experience reality. It’s hard to see the lens we are looiking through. Though we cannot immediately change our beliefs, we are able to make some choices about them.

(1) We can seek to identify them
(2) We can take steps to weaken, and maybe remove them.

It is my intention to identify those things I “believe” (using my interpretation above) and to change them to assumptions. Some assumptions have a very high probability of being right. For example, I assume that if I drop something, it will fall down. I don’t want to “believe” this, but I assume that it is extremely likely.

I feel somewhat the same way about faith and hope. Faith, as I understand it, is to continue to believe that something is so, or will happen, even when experience does not confirm it. I’ll be kind. Let’s take “belief” out of that sentence. Faith is to continue to assume something is so, or will happen, when experience does not confirm it, or even seems to contradict it.

If experience confirmed it you would not need faith. You could just assume it was so based on experience. I consider faith an error in judgment. A mistake. It implies the ability to base your actions on something you wish were so, rather than your experience and knowledge.

If the word faith is used to mean “to live as if something were so, even though we don’t believe it, or doubt it,” then I can see that faith could be useful. I think there are often opportunities to make assumption that might be useful to live by for an individual.

I have one of those. I choose to live my life in a certain way. I don’t think it’s what others should be doing. It’s what I choose to do. Here it is:

I choose to do all I can to never lie to anyone about anything, except in humor. I don’t have “faith” that this will make my life better. I choose to “assume” that it will make my life better. If I got strong evidence that it was not working, I would stop. So far, I think it has been useful to me.

Hope, on the other hand… seems like a good thing. Hope is where you are able to see what you want to be, or want to become so. I like that.

Having hope that something will work out can be a good thing. Having “faith” that it will work out seems foolish to me, unless it means..”I will choose to live my life as if it will work out, even though the odds of that happening are unknown, or low.”

One difference is that if you faith in something and it does not work out, you can feel betrayed, or somehow diminished. If you chose to live it as if it would work out and it doesn’t, you just made a bad choice. Unfortunate, but not a betrayal.

Ok, so I don’t want to believe anything. Given that, how do I relate to the beliefs that seem to be an important part of most major religions : God, hell, heaven, sin, celestial policemen, life after death etc.

First off, I don’t want to belief any of that stuff. I also don’t want to have faith in any of that stuff. However, I may sometimes choose to live my life as if some traditional “beliefs” are correct.

Operationaly I am an aetheist. Technically I guess I am an agnostic. I don’t “believe” that there is no omniscient being who is aware of my every act and rewards me for some and punishes me for others. Rather I think it is extremely unlikely that such a being exists and acts in that way. I choose to live my life based on the assumption that no such being exists.

This means, for me, there is no one to pray to in hope that they will respond. Prayer can still be good. It’s a wonderful focusing experience. Positing a being who could help can be useful in praying, in focusing on what you want to be so. But I don’t “believe” in such a being.

My problem with the word atheist is that it sounds like it is opposed to something. It’s a negative sounding title. Like being the “anti-christ” or the “anti-god”. I’m not in active opposition to the believers of my world. I think they are very likely to believe a pack of lies, but so what. Those beliefs do not seem to make them less able to lead fulfilling lives, or be successful. I only have a problem when those beliefs result in bad things happening to others who don’t hold the same beliefs. I have some concern that the believers of this planet are going to have a major role in destroying it.

Just because a relgions belief structure is based on a pack of lies does not mean that their morals, values, and goals are all wrong. It just means that some of them could be wrong, but they would be unable to judge them fairly.

I have not had a positive sounding label that I can use that would imply that (a) I think most of the belief structure of traditional religions is a pack of lies and that (b) I still think there are some wonderfully “spiritual” aspects of life and consciousness. By spiritual I mean to imply things like awesome, transcendent, deeply satisfying, bonding to universe, expanded awareness, and all that stuff.

Based on recent reading, it looks like the label “Humanist” is the best I will find for now. So I guess I am a humanist.

Before I reveal this burst of inspiration I want to mention one aspect of my reach. My genius is that I can discover great things, more or less on my own, figuring them out from scratch. Good stuff, big thrill. However, unfortunately the blazing light of this genius is somewhat dimmed, perhaps “overshadowed”? better mixes the metaphor, by the fact that the things I discover have usually (ok, maybe always) been discovered by others years earlier. So it goes! I still get a thrill out of thinking I discovered them. It may be that my forgettery is of great value here as I probably read about these things, forgot them, and then, glory halleluiah, discovered them on my own. So here is the latest addition to the list:

Digital Community Engineer
Digital Community Designer

Hey! How about that! I’ve never heard of these job titles. They define a unique niche in the field. At this time about 90% of the relevant work falls under the “Web Development”? area. My job title is “Instructional Technologist”?, and my work is also part of “Digital Community Engineering”?.

The idea is that these newly named professions design, create and support on-line communities. The social networking sites and their cousins (FaceBook, YouTube, E-harmony, etc. ) use these professions.

How about that! Now… for the dénouement, I have not yet Googled these terms. I am going to do so now and report the result here. I fully expect to get 5000 hits on each term in quotes. Here’s what I get:

“Digital Community Engineer”? – WOW! No hits! “Digital Community Designer”? 1 HIT Tim Putnam – Digital Community Designer. Tim is a design and marketing widget of sorts. His background in Music Business helps focus our websites to be highly effective tools for our Entertainment clients. He keeps our member communities growing by implementing and monitoring electronic marketing campaigns. He also contributes his graphic design talent to the design of websites and merchandiseHowever, Google suggested that I might want to try “Digital Community Design”? and that gave 12 hits.

Still, I think I’m fairly early in the game to come up with these terms. I may also check using “on-line”? and “software”? in place of digital, but I think “digital”? is the high ground here.

An acquaintance of mine, Marc Prensky, has a certain degree of fame in web/Instructional technology world for coining the phrase “Digital Natives”?. We older people, he says, are “digital immigrants”? (though the country moved in around us rather than us moving into it) and the younger people are “digital natives”?, who grew up in this new world.

So where is my fame for coining “Digital Community Engineer”?. Last week I had not even thought of the term, and now, praise be, I are one!. And, I think, so are most of the people to whom I’m sending this as e-mail.

Harry (AKA genius wannabe) Baya
December 2^nd, 2006

http://harry.baya.net/emergence/ant_path_1.htm

Here is my first draft of a description of the program to be written in Logo to simulate ant learning:

http://boppers.net/emergence/ant_plan_1.htm

I have put my thoughts about this program in a web page. http://boppers.net/emergence/hb_tracker2.htm

If you have any comment on this you can post them here… or e-mail them to me.

This triggered a thought today that perhaps “death” may be as important to the evolution of these kinds of consiousnesses as it was to the evolution of life on earth. I’m going to work my way up to that thought below. First I will lay out the context in which that thought is especially interesting to me.

In the opening chapters the Emergence book discusses how some kinds of complex systems can evolve to have adaptive behavior. The kind of complex system they discuss have multiple independent agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways with rules, such as the laws of physics, determining the outcome of each interaction. These systems can evolve, or progress, or whatever word you want, to behave somewhat like living beings. Among the examples they give are ant colonies, cities, and slime mold. The author says that we humans tend to look for some sort top down direction, a pace maker, or a ruling group, but that in fact these systems tend to behave more or less indepently of any such control. Rather they are the product of the interaction and the results of each interaction. This is referred to as “bottom up” intelligence.

This fascinates me and also expands on my own view that complex systems, such as hundreds of birds chattering in a tree, or a nation, or a city, can be usefully viewed as life forms with intelligence, memory, purpose, and the ability to learn and adapt. They can exhibit attributes of life and intelligence even though the individual components do not have significant intelligence as with ants and slime mold. Similarly the human body, I have read, is actually a community of cells that work together to form a complex system, though each of the cells is, relativly speaking, dumb. The human brain is another example of this. In other cases, such as a city or nation, the individual units, the humans, have some intelligence, but each one is only a tiny part of the greater creature and the “consciousness” of the greater creature, such as a city is not based on their consciousness.

This is somewhat old ground for me and one I have been thinking about, just for fun, for years. However, today I came up with a new wrinkle on this and I want to write it down while it is fresh in my mind.

Let me start by restating my perspective, my guess, about some of the fundamental aspects of our reality. It seems to me that life and conscioussness are “emergent” qualities of our universe. When certain kinds of complex systems ( multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways) are allowed to persist for long periods of time (it may take billions of years) they tend to (a) get more complex and (b) eventually become homes for forms of life (hard to define, but definitly a persistent dynamic organization [ a dynamic pattern or sequence of patterns ] of physical matter over time ). We see this in what we know of the history of our universe. Initally, we now think, it was amost pure energy (whatever that is) but over time simple elements, like hydrogen, came into being. Over more time more complex elements, like carbon, came into being. Eventualy something we would call life “emerged” from these elements. And eventually something we would call conscioussness emerged in the evolution of some of the life forms. The key elements here are
(a) certain kinds of complex systems,
(b) something like “evolution” where the complex systems eventually find ways to become more complex,
(c) the emergence of something we would call life and
(d) finally, the emergence of something we would call consciousness.

I want to comment at this point that, from our perspective, consciousness seems to be the highest level of this evolutionary chain. This seems to be the most complex and interesting thing to emerge from energy, time, and simple matter, but, it seems likely that there are stages beyond this which either have yet to emerge, or which we cannot percieve. I find it fascinating to speculate on what these future (or unseen) stages of this process might be.

Now for today’s “insight”:

I recall reading years ago, probably in a book by Carl Sagan, that the early forms of “life” on our planet did not evolve.. they just persisted. They were able to somehow absorb things from outside and use them as a source of energy, and perhaps to replace detriorating components, but they just kept existing as long as they could with no real possibility of change.

Then, somewhere along the way, some of these life forms, through trial and error, which we now call evolution, changed so that they did not live forever. Rather they created clones/offsprings and then died. Death entered into the evolutionary chain. This, so it said in the book I read, was a major improvement in the nature of evolution. The other, perhaps equally important change, was procreation from sex. Both allowed for more or less random changes, mutations, to occur between generations. This opened the door to threads of evolutions, evolutionary paths. In some cases the life form evolved to favor one kind of mutation over another. In some cases this gave evolutionary advantages to particular life forms. The stage was set for the process of which we are the product.

Prior to the emergence of death in the process, change was far less likely, and far less able to form preferences and trends (get bigger, survive out of the sea for longer periods etc. ) because there was far less replacements of one system with another. Death, said my unknown author, was probably one of the most important things to come into being in the evolution of life. After organisms started to die and be replaced by their offspring, the evolutionary process took off and evolution occurred at a much much faster clip than before.

So, how about the emergent consciousness of ant colonies, of slime mold, of cities, of nations. Look ma, no death! Cities don’t die very often. They just persist. Interesting. What if cities had to be destroyed every two hundred years. I don’t know that the residents would have to die. They could be redistributed to work those from other cities to build knew ones. Would this be a good thing?

But wait… though cities don’t “die”, they do seem to evolve. They can’t move, as a rule, but they can change. They can add new technology, new infrastructure, new ways of moving goods and people, new laws, changed laws, new guidelines, changed guidelines, new ways of enforcing laws and guidelines (rewards and penalties), new services and new ways of delivering services, new kinds of entertainment, education, communication and on and on.

This is different. The early life forms before death could not do these things. They did not have the abilty to change and adapt that a city does.

Still… I wonder if something like “death” would be benficial. E.g. every 100 years all laws must be abolished and a new constitution adopted. Each new law must be approved individually… no blanket adoption of groups of old laws. The same for education. The same for everything that could abolished and recreated, maybe even buildings, roads, parks, pipes, wires … every physical part of the city and and every rule or convention that could be changed. The same for nations, for clubs,…. for churchs (now there’s something I could get enthusiastic about)

Phase 2 of this line of thought: Early life forms were not mobile. They were stuck in one place, like plants, or they were completely at the mercy of the medium they were in, like the ocean. They had no choice as to where they would be tomorrow. For many of them they would live in only one location. Trees, flowers etc. are like this. Their offspring might end up far away (birds carrying seeds), but often their offspring would very close. Then life forms came into being that could move about, that were not anchored. Mobile life forms, animals, came into being and evolved. These tended to be more complex than plants (at least it seems that way to me) and more able to evolve into creatures that could survive and reproduce in a wide variety of climates. I read recently that man’s evolutionary advantage was in his/her lack of specialization to one climate. We survived because we were generalists. We did not have a shaggy fur coat as part of our body because that would be a disadvantage in hot climates. Rather we had vulnerable skin that could not survive at all in cold climates, and often had to be protected in hot climates… but, we developed the abilty to adapt by making and wearing appropriate clothing.

So… how do these concepts apply to “bottom up” intellgence. Ant colonies can move…a little.. and they do. So can slim molds.. but I don’t think they are truly mobile beings, like individual animals. I would like to hear from the experts about “mobility” in bottom up intelligence.

So, trying to end this rambling, where does this lead? For me it leads to questions about the nature of bottom up intelligences and how that nature compares to more traditional life forms and consciousnesses like animals and humans. I would love to hear, or read, the reflections of experts related to this issue.

Finally, it occurs to me that though cities cannot die, move and adapt the way an animal, especially the human animal, can, there can be other “bottom up” entities that can. These could be virtual entities that exist in cyberspace…and we could attempt to build an environment in which these could evolve, in which something like “death” could be a useful attribute. I find this a big stretch of mind… and perhaps I will be able to say something about it once I have had time to think about it. Right at the moment I feel like my mental reach has significantly exceeded my mental grasp.

Is this line of thought of interest to any one? Did you read all the way to here? Do you have any related thought you would like to share?

Harry Baya Sept 2, 2006

The new world order into which we are entering, the new social fabric that is emerging, seems to me to be most different, most new, in the opportunities it gives to individuals. Before now, it seems to me, only very rare individuals could have a big impact. These were leaders or geniuses or very lucky individuals. The big changes were implemented by the masses, but they were lead by a tiny percentage of the population, the movers and shakers of their generation. I think that’s changing. I think the new world will allow individuals to act in such a way that they can contribute to significant changes through their collective actions rather than through the actions of their leaders. I will try to give a few examples.

What’s new is that the individuals now have a more direct influence on what happens next. Take Amazon.com for example. It might seem that the power of this institution is in its product and its ability to allow people to find what they want and get it efficiently. Of course that’s important, and it’s new in some ways.. but the aspect of what they are doing that seems to me to be part of my new social fabric is the way in which Amazon.com is paying attention to what people buy in such a way that they can tell me that I might like a particular product because others who bought things I bought seem to like something that I had not heard of. It’s a sharing of prefences. It means that instead of waiting for my local store to notice that a product is starting to sell and, if we are lucky, exposing others to it, I am informed quickly of new things of interest. The energy that excites me is not from Amazon.com. Rather Amazon.com has found a way to tap into the energy that it’s customers bring to it.

Blogs can be the same. On the one hand it may seem that what’s exciting about blogs is the software and the distribution opportunities that the internet provides. Yes, that’s true, but it can be viewed differently. Blogs are another opportunity for individuals, not just leaders, but many many individuals, to share with others in a way that did not exist before. A really good insight, or perspective, or idea, or anything that could be put in a blog, can become global within days. The blog architecture is important because it allows the energy and knowledge of individuals to be have a much broader reach.

In the new social context individuals are able to collaborate with, and compete with, others appropriately selected from a far greater population than in the past. An individual might have found it difficult to collaborate on a project with anyone outside his or her town, or outside of, say, half a days’ driving distance. Now, there are many projects in which the collaborators could easily be on different continents.

Here’s another one coming down the pike. At this point it is somewhat difficult for two or more individuals to collaborate if they do not speak a common language. My best guess is that we will one-day have translation software that will effectively remove language barriers for many kinds of work. That is yet another step toward opening the way for individuals to collaborate with, and compete with, others drawn from a much larger ocean.

This is a kind of extreme democracy – in which a far greater number of decisions are made by a mass vote. There will be far fewer intermediaries in the decision making process. Bureaucracies will spend far more of their resources enabling and supporting communications between individuals, and within groups of peers, and far less on weeding things out and pushing them up the hierarchical power structure to be handled. Human organizations will become far more like peer to peer networks, and far less like hierarchically controlled and centralized networks.

I have a strong sense that I am on to something here, that I am seeing something important emerge, yet I am frustrated that I can’t seem to verbalize it adequately, that I can’t communicate what I sense… because I don’t really understand it… I just feel it.

As long as this gong keeps going off in my mind telling me that something important is happening and that I need to pay attention, I will keep trying to capture the message in words.

Years ago I read an article that said that when something, such as the amount of horsepower available to a culture, or the speed in which a message can be delivered, changes by an order of magnitude of seven or more, then the thing changes in nature, not just in kind. The choice of ‘seven”? was kind of arbitrary, but the idea was that when something doubles, it can still be seen as just more of the same, a change, but not a change in kind. However, when something changes by an order of ten, or 20, then something entirely new comes into being. It’s a powerful thought and I have enjoyed thinking about it. Examples abound in technology from steam engines, to telescopes, to computers. My sense is that the changes I am trying to describe in these “flat world”? essays are of that nature. They are difficult to see because those in the middle of them will see them as just more, not different. What they can’t see is that in many cases there is enough “more”? to be different in kind.

A second part of this perspective, which I have not seen described as clearly as the “order of seven/different kind”? model above has to do with synergy, with two or more changes interacting in a way that brings something new into being. A good example of that is the internet. Computers were speeding up and networks were growing. At some point there was a fairly robust network connecting quite a few computers all over the U.S. The synergy was there. Onto that synergistic platform stepped Mosaic, and it’s heirs, the World Wide Web. I think that the growing computer speeds, communications speeds, number of nodes on the world communication network, and growing data storage capacity are a platform supporting a huge range of innovative software applications and approaches to using computing power and communication power. In many cases two apparently unrelated software innovations hit some kind of synergistic space warp that connects them and brings something entirely new into being. Google, Ebay, Amazon.com, Blogs, …and on and on.

Google is another great example of what intrigues me. On the one hand, what is exciting about Google is the power and efficiency of its search engines. It searches billions of sources, and searches smartly in many situations. The power is growing daily. It is indeed very impressive. However, the side of this picture that is so exciting to me is the field in which it is searching. Where did all that information come from? How did their get to be so much searchable stuff on-line so fast? How can that information base grow so quickly? It seems to me that much of this is the work of individuals, people who chose to put things on the web, for profit, for fun, for whatever reason. Millions of small institutions, local libraries, colleges, clubs, families, alumni groups, special interest groups and on and on have put their data on the web. The most exciting part of Google is not the search engine, it’s the ocean of data that’s available to search. As these search tools evolve they will rely more and more heavily on the choices made by individuals. A billion caring people trying to find something interesting are going to be, as I see it, a search tool that no computer can duplicate. The computer can harness that power, it can enable it to do exciting things, but the real power and energy is coming form individuals making informed choices.

Information is to a search engine what steam was to early locomotives. The more organized and useful the information is, the more energy it contains. Think of raw data as being like oil in the ground, and usefully structured information as being like gasoline at the pump.

I’d like to think that everything I am trying to say in these two absurdly lengthy Blog posts will someday be sayable in a paragraph or two, using well understood concepts and metaphors that don’t even exist now. What I am trying to do now is roughly equivlant to Alan Turing, who died in 1954, trying to envision and describe the World Wide Web. He might have sensed the possibility, but the vocabulary to describe it had not been invented yet. Even the word “software”? was apparently not used in the way we use it now till 1960. (here’s a web page on that).

The gong is still ringing in my mind. I’ll probably give this another shot one of these days. Of course, once I read beyond the first chapter of “The World is Flat”? I may not be able to say much without feeling that my thoughts are derivative. For now, I feel they are original. Harry Baya Nov 7, 2005