Arts and Minds

Peer-Reviewed Publication, Weblogs and Technorati Ratings of Original Thought

This posting is another in what I now realize will be a longer series on the life-cycle and utility of communication channels. The first, posted on December 14, 2003 is entitled: Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels.Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communcation Channels Now in this current paper I will consider the special case of information propagation and dissemination for original, disruptive, or counterintuitive intellectual content.

The peer-review process filters undesirable qualities from publications within scientific and academic communities. It is generally intolerant of innovations, disruptive observations, and contributors whose work is nearly entirely original (with the exception of mathematics), yet these qualities are essential to a healthy intellectual environment.

Original workers take great risks, often remain isolated from their peers, and are typically shunned and disrespected by potential employers. They are lonely thinkers that crave colleagues and dialogue.

The web-log, or blog, is now the most accessible as well as the most rapid route to publication for these original minds, and it does offer some dialogue. But the blogosphere is a generally a chaotic and unreliable marketplace for information. It is more often used for agglomerating news, publishing news and commentary or accessing news, either personal or news of interest to the greater community, than as a portal for serious intellectual publication.

Publishing original material on a blog is risky because the contribution is automatically branded unreliable because the writers become known by the company that they keep, and that company is far too often intellectually messy and unreliable.

Associative Decision-Making: A Challenging Paradox for Management

The Syncretic Process and The Value Of Associative Thinking In A World Of Linear Decision-Making

The products and services—the creative intellectual capital upon which most business are founded—were born in an associative thought process. Paradoxically, later decisions in those same organizations are frequently initiated, managed, and concluded almost entirely within a framework of linear-logical thinking. Syncretic thinking is a mental process that makes non-linear, and therefore unexpected, but nonetheless logical associative connections among seemingly divergent phenomena or data on the basis of subtle qualities they may have in common. This process, present during the conception of a new venture, should not be abandoned or overwhelmed by linearity.

By understanding and resolving this paradox between the creative syncretic process that characterizes the founding stage culture of an organization, and the conservative linear processes that characterize later stages we can generate a new mix of creative thinking that effectively includes and optimizes both elements. These two divergent modes highlight several differences between the mind-sets that typify the young and innovative start up phase of a business, and that same business when later it is more mature and settled into it’s niche. Associative and inventive thinking that generated a novel product or service and founded an organization or industry usually, at maturity, will have yielded to a more rigorous calculus and competitive strategic analysis. In this later phase of organization, rewards linear thinking frameworks that conserve capital and that advance incrementally within a defined and established niche. The creative productive early associative process is discouraged, and linearity, alone, is widely believed to support long-term survival. Neither framework by itself is likely to encourage the growth of new ideas that may form the future re-creations of the organization in a changing market and technical environment.

Must all governments fail us?

All institutions will eventually fail because institutions comprise gatherings of fallible people. Any institution can only be as successful as the combined strengths and weaknesses in each individual member as described and moderated by the set of the strengths and weakness of their belief systems, mental health, and power within the institutional process. Great institutions of government may fail more spectacularly, and with more severe consequences than small institutions because the kinds of individuals attracted to the greater power and influential positions of high office carry their personal needs for power, entitlement, mental illness and greed along with them into official positions. As an institution grows it gathers like-minded powerful cronies to it’s bosom, As it grows the probability for failure increases proportionally because if is also gathering the flaws, illnesses and weaknesses of all into the process of the institution. It follows from this that the more powerful the institution, the greater will be the probability that it will fail dangerously and do harm to all of us just when it is needed most.

Make a mental list of institutions in your city or town, your state and region and your national government. Try to think of an exception to the rule of eventual catastrophic failure, or at the minimum, nearly ruinous scandal. These are about half of the events comprising what we call history.

Now a further caution: individuals who seek or demand great power (and who are sometimes referred to as ‘an institution unto [himself/herself])’are apparently likely to display greater rates of mental illness as ‘ordinary’ people. But among the power-seekers we may reflect upon the high number of individuals even within living memory who have demonstrated tragic psychotic or psychopathic personal characteristics. It they had worked as gardeners their destructive influence would have had less catastrophic impact.

The Twain Shall Meet At Last!

It has been a guiding principle in our learning, drummed into our brains during primary school years, that one cannot compare apples and oranges because they are different (despite similarities obvious to any schoolchild), and that ‘never the twain shall meet’— that because of these differences they can never be usefully compared or combined. Soon we will all know that it has always been a lie. The twain shall be tied together by Twine.

Today, within minutes after I received my notice that Twine was being demoed At the Web 2.0 conference on Friday, October 19, ’07, I entered the search terms (Twine, radar,) into Google. What I got were eight references to today’s Radar Network’s announcement of the pioneering product Twine, along with an overwhelming number of references to all sorts of things I don’t want to bother with from nubs of string to space-aliens. Google brought me far too many irrelevant pages-full-of-pages, signifying nothing. Google regurgitated the whole hairball including some few useful threads that were not always up front, or even within the first few pages.

That problem, and others, have been addressed by the new product, ‘Twine’, developed by Nova Spivack and his team at Radar Networks. Twine will accomplish at least three grand feats.

The Daemons Are In The Details

Several effects of complexity compound human errors within networked computing and communication, increasing the disorder of human society. In time, the interlinkages among computers and people will inevitably become increasingly error laden amounting to serious proportion of the content in any channel (as an accumulating and published expression of various other dysfunctions) propagating seriously destructive impacts upon the smooth transactions within the society within which they have been placed. All this happens with the good-hearted intention of producing improvements in data integration, utility, speed, and economy. This is a predictable, inherent, and inevitable factorial dysfunction. Here are only a few of the ways chaos overwhelms us.

Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels

I remember the birth of CB radio, the early days of the internet, and way back, I knew just a few ham radio operators. I was once a kid in the cellar with a Quaker Oats carton, rolls of copper wire, coils, 'cats-whiskers', mysterious crystals, and presto!— a working crystal set! All of these, as they emerged had the 'feel' of whale songs overheard in a cavernous ocean of silence and signals. At first, the signals were few, rare, and precious, and the silence was everywhere else. Suddenly there was overwhelming Babel. Citizens Band Radio suffered from this nearly lethal later malady.

At this moment—this stage of development—any or most weblogs are odd isolated voices. Some of the most isolated and strange sounding people are ranting in blogspace. This is to be expected and predicted. Blogging is now somewhere between ineffective voices in the wilderness, as the community forms and becomes regulated, and the (spooky and inviting) calls of whales and wolves, but we are slowly spinning towards the last stage, to the tragedy of the commons. Now, right now, we need some kind of organizing principle to make the space visible, prevent overgrazing by a particular kind of user, to validate it and it's content, and to make it useful to the millions who do not yet know that it exists.

Communication channels have a life cycle and develop over time, and they mature with increasing use. The first stage of new, open but still empty communication channels is typified by signals (test patterns, logos, chimes, etc., that stand as symbols in place of the self, or in place of an organized broadcast channel that is itself a place-holder for future ‘content’.

If the world of web logs is to be successful, it must soon migrate from a predominance of identity-seeking postings, typical of stage one, to content based communication directed to what in psychology has been termed ‘object’, or non-self.

Are Emotions The First Layer of Meaning in Mind-Space?

Are emotions the primary filters or categories for meaning in experience?
Are experienced sense data recorded into long-term-memory and rendered recallable only after they are tagged with emotional meanings? Learning and remembering may require us to sort among experiences, sorting them by our associations to their emotional meanings, in order to create our knowledge and understanding of the world. I suspect that we depend upon the strength of our emotional responses to direct and mediate the assignment of experiences to memory, and for building connections among those experiences.

Feelings and emotions appear to define and determine the meaning of sensory events (or percepts). It is hard to think of any exceptions. Mathematical thinking, the realm of ‘purest’ logic, comes first to mind as a system of thought so removed from everyday life that emotion could hardly play any role in mathematical thinking. Were it true it might offer proof that this, at least, might be the exception where emotion holds no sway in meaning or memory. However, mathematicians are often moved or motivated by the beauty and elegance of great mathematical propositions. Mathematicians and musicians (music is a first cousin to mathematics) share similar aesthetics of form, order, proposition (musical theme), development, and resolution. Our aesthetic responses to music are rich with emotional overtones and impressions. To be motivated by these same aesthetic qualities in mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, or any ‘pure’ science may provoke deep emotional responses to discoveries of the order and patterns in the universe we explore: Q.E.D.; ahhh!

BOUNDARIES: A Field-Guide To The Associative Nature Of Our Own Minds.

The brain has no hard edges; neither does information. There are no gray interior walls to prevent ideas from wandering across the boundaries between and among fields. Many paths of curiosity lead to intellectual, artistic and scientific questioning, and onward to understanding. For many of us and for our children, these curious pathways are barred by signs that say: “Private Property—Do Not Enter Without Permission”). In the words of a song: “We have to be carefully taught.”

Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.