These papers on-line from the Journal of Consciousness Studies are all ten years old, but full of good ideas. Linked by a cross-hit on Brian Josephson, whose contribution here is a review of Roger Penrose “Shadows of the Mind”, and include references to Chalmers, GEB and qualia, amongst other things. Some good reading.

(Also linked Lindsay Beyerstein’s Majikthise in my blogroll thanks to the same cross-hit.)

Not tried this new “FreeMind” mind-mapping software yet – I remember being very disappointed with Mind Manager, the net topologies you could create were far too simple – but I’m on the look out for something new.

Interesting given my Pirsig interests, and the fact I blogged way back that “Pirsig was a Blogger“, that the owner of the FreeMind site also refers to Pirsig – specifically the way he used index cards to marshall his thoughts when writing his second book Lila – not just cards with subjects and thoughts, but meta-cards with processes and relationships for handling other cards. I saw it as very blog or wiki-like the moment I read it.

Another set back to Google Books, a class action to assert copyrights. Come on, see the bigger picture, who benefits.

Mentioned this “new science” web site once before (in connection with an Owen Barfield review). The net result is one of the whackier, crankier, sets of ideas for bringing the spiritual to bear over the classical objective scientific, and I can’t find much to identify with, except an enormous “Reader’s Journal” of books and other texts that Bobby Matherne has read and reviewed.

[Linked thanks to a search cross hit on my earlier post.
Love this Hoffenstein quote – very much from
the Wordsworth school of “Murder to Dissect”.]

Little by little we subtract,
Faith and fallacy from fact,
The illusory from the true,
And starve upon the residue.
– Hoffenstein, 1933

As well as popular science, Barfield, Herrigel, anything “Zen and the Art …” (except Pirsig) there are dozens of Rudolf Steiner (of Anthroposophy fame). Lots of good sources on the right lines.

A 2002 Jorn Barger joke doing the rounds. Here quoted in full.

An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trashcan.

The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!”

The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that! We must train all the audience members to recognise XML, and then start a committee to investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement semantics!”

Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:

FIRE!

which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display,
saving the lives of everyone in the theater.

Ah yes, the analysis paralysis of committees discussing semantics, I remember it well.

Notice though the essential grain of “evolutionary” truth in there, and the meta-problem of the steps needed to arrange for “evolution” to occur, all of which is to do with the future, not the here and now.

One of my themes is the ubiquitiy of internet communications makes ideas, particularly the ones that are easy to grasp, which re-inforce “consipracy theories” or otherwise prey on human fears, spread like wildfire, like viruses, like memes in fact.

This news story is about hoax blogs spreading ideas (ironically, about the spread of biological viruses) like viruses. One of the things I’ve said many times the “information model” used to structure web information needs to be sensitive to irony, satire and other “non-truthful” intents of those posting the information. As if.

I’ve remarked before how amazing I find Google’s indexing of little old me’s blog. I thought it particularly remarkable since I shifted away from Google owned Blogger to WordPress (for categorisation capabilities, that I’ve not yet exploited !) without actually giving the Google indexing issue a second thought. As far as I can tell the full text of my whole five years blogging is indexed, even in the new page URL’s that didn’t exist before June this year, as well as the old pages that remain on-line, and cached copies (of both) too.

This is particularly interesting, because this news story claims Google is only just about to initiate indexing of non-Blogger blogs, feed summaries initially, full text later.

I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t bothered to exploit the categorisation yet, despite making the move explicitly for that purpose. I guess I still have a lingering suspicion that the best categorisation is implicit in the organisation of page links, backed up by text searches. Well I never, who’da thought it ?

Well, well; I know and like some of Peter Drucker’s management writings, but I’d never noted his earlier philosophical works or his connection with the Vienna Circle. Someone I must research more closely.

How about this for a quote ..

“I couldn’t stand the ultra-rationality of my Uncle Hans.”

Instead, the young Drucker was attracted to Othmar Spann, the “Romantic” among the economists, whom he rates today as a “great sociologist, but a rather mediocre economist”