Category: Uncategorized

Mentioned earlier I’d started reading Dennet. Finished Eco’s Kant and the Platypus – need to review. Also re-started Pinker’s Blank Slate – excellent rail against all or nothing political correctness – just because nurture / culture are big drivers of actual motivations and behaviour why discount innate propensities and capabilities of the human mind (human nature) as setting natural patterns of behaviour, beliefs, preferences, and their evolution. Why does this have to be binary / mutually exclusive argument ? Great stuff on common misunderstandings about proximate and ultimate mechanisms in Darwinian evolution. Reinforcing my view that the apparent ghost in the machine is explainable as a many layered emergent effect of the complex physical brain. Also that competing drivers mean evolutionary progress is a dynamical balance of contractictory effects – found myself extending this same dynamic (and ever changing) balance between “types” in the Jungian / Myers-Briggs sense too. Got me thinking again. [So much so that I’ve barely been able to put the book down – already 200 pages into it – See the next post above.]

Creativity and Cognition via [brainjuice] and [rivets]. Some interesting material and people – no link to Clive Holtham ?

Dawning on DVD via [consumptive] via [gimbo]. Have both 2001 and 2010 on DVD. Have to agree that the dawn of man sequence is so important – Planet of the Apes ? Do me a favour !

WebLogs in Meatspace via [curry]. Dave Winer’s plan for a face to face conference of bloggers. No apparent decision on location, but the comments out there in blogland suggest there can be no ideal place. Wait and see. The intent is to model it on Davos.

The Zen of Programming. Jim Waldo via the Bright Eyed Mr Zen. [Quote] …. all require that the programmer change …. we need to give up a measure of control and accept that we cannot have full knowledge of the systems we are building …. we will know is a minimum set of behaviors …. over time the system will change in ways we could not have foreseen. Just as Socrates found that he was the wisest of men because he knew that he didn’t know anything (as opposed to others, who thought they knew something but were wrong), programmers must come to the realization that their knowledge of systems will be more and more Socratic. Rather than knowing everything, we will know what it is that we do not know …. the result will be more reliable, more flexible and more dynamic than the systems ….[Unquote]

Started reading Daniel Dennet – The Intentional Stance last night. A collection of his essays old and new, as a prelude to his forthcoming book on mind and consciousness. Good read so far and looking like a good introduction to this important writer that I’ve not read so far. Instant reinforcement of motivation or purpose being the prime axis of any model of real knowledge – the main thread I guess. Quote of a quote that caught my eye (in view of the string theory reference below) along the lines of “the dreams that stuff is made of”. Very much from the many a true word camp of ironic aphorisms.

Lifecycle of a Big Idea. Sally Bean via Knowledge Board. Can’t quite get my head round the concept of “Open Space” events in the originating article – sounds just like TQM Brainstroming to me – but this is at least amusing.

Intersting article also from KB – “Generations of Knowledge Management” tries to counteract the “bandwagon” effect of constant re-invention of new generations KM. Good content sources – but the article knocks too much and synthesises too little for me. Anyway at least no-one argues that human interaction is not the key component of knowledge.

We Didn’t Start the Fire. Thanks to Rivets for this one. (Turn your sound on) A bit literal but pretty neat all the same.

The Beach at Scheveningen. Thanks to Adam Curry for this BBC link. A bit of a tortuous one, but the beach at Scheveningen is a place I’ve spent many a knowledge modelling moment in recent years, meeting generic information modellers in Den Haag / The Hague.

Jorn’s Fractal Thicket. Originating in 1993. Made several references to this as an intersting alternative to simple hierarchies, and was led back to it from Jorn’s Knowledge Representation Timeline. Reification, complexity, fractality, physical fundamentals at incredibly fine-grained scale, whilst realities of everyday life very broad brush. Still avoids “chaos” ? Evocative of Seth’s idea of fundamental identity vs real expressivity as conjugate variables in the quantum sense. Jorn’s motivations may be too subversively political for most people, but his core ideas about knowledge are right on the mark [Quote – depoliticised] The weak point [of established thinking in western organisations] is their need to rationalise their acts by sophistries. The radical proposal is to [create a knowledge model] that can unflinchingly put the lie to their rationalisations. [Unquote]. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to agree – the conspiracy is a natural outcome of the rationalisation, not a motive in itself.