ONT Re: Any PORT In A Storm
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| Hence, thou suborned informer! A true soul
| When most impeached stands least in thy control.
|
| William Shakespeare, Sonnet 125
In enumerating this "motley of recalcitrant intellectual obstacles" (MORIO),
I wish to remain focussed on long-term cultural factors that act as blocks
in the way of inquiry and that constantly threaten to render it moribund.
No such problem (literally, "something thrown forward") arises from the
technology of choice -- these automatic impedimenta were built into our
attitudes, bureaucracies, cultures long before we prefixed an "e" to
any of these devices. I do not know what course others have taken,
but I picked up the sabot of AI in order to stop the machine made
of people already in motion from its long-contining course of
grinding our humanity to dust, to stop people from becoming
more robotic than they already are. Relax, it's metaphor.
But I am momentarily weary of these gloomy pronouncements,
so let me reprise this more enthusiastic vision of what
we might be doing to make the web a better place:
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Subj: Three-Headed Dogmas & Native Hands Indivisible
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 01:01:20 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Topic Map Mail <topicmapmail@infoloom.com>,
Standardize Unto Others <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
Let me make a try at tele-graphing where I think I'm going with this stuff.
There are two or three things that I have on my mind, as far as I am aware.
One is a picture of the Web as tangle or a textile that is woven of signs,
a lot of them ostensible pointers, and a picture of "machines and people"
that chase these links, and now and then content themselves with some of
of the seamingly terminal signs, or the partially addressed objects to
which they lead. So it's all Just A Big Graph to me, and since I know
that some species of graphs have the capacity and the connectivity to
animate a reflective attitude in minds and to embody the expressions
of a logical perspective on objective worlds, my question about the
evolution of the Web is just how live and just how smart it can be,
taken as an extension of our "humane intelligence" (HI). I have
now forgotten the other questions. Maybe they will come back
to me another time. I am sure that they will.
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But that was yesterday -- will it ever be tomorrow?
Jon Awbrey
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