Psyberspace

I came to the net in 1993 when online zines were the equivalent of weblogs. Slower, less native to the web, morphed from fan-zines on paper. Here is a swag of them. e-zine-list: John Labovitz’s e-zine-list There was a Psybernet one, came out twice. Here is the second one, mostly all my snippets. John has discontinued maintaining the list, replaced by blogdex?

This will be the last time I say stumbleupon found this for me. But it did. This is not after hundreds of results. I have listed all my results here bar one or two, hiking and another on Stevie Wonder. They were OK for me but not this weblog. I love this one from Marvin Minsky Because it is from 1982, because it is part of the history of psyberspace, because it is in text and because it is a little self-reflective right now. Here, after the title stuff is the final paragraph of the essay.

WHY PEOPLE THINK COMPUTERS CAN'T

Marvin Minsky, MIT

First published in AI Magazine, vol. 3 no. 4, Fall 1982. Reprinted in
Technology Review, Nov/Dec 1983, and in The Computer Culture,
(Donnelly, Ed.) Associated Univ. Presses, Cranbury NJ, 1985

Just as Evolution changed man's view of Life, Al will change mind's view
of Mind. As we find more ways to make machines behave more sensibly,
we'll also learn more about our mental processes. In its course, we will
find new ways to think about "thinking" and about "feeling". Our view of
them will change from opaque mysteries to complex yet still
comprehensible webs of ways to represent and use ideas. Then those
ideas, in turn, will lead to new machines, and those, in turn, will give us
new ideas. No one can tell where that will lead and only one thing's sure
right now: there's something wrong with any claim to know, today, of
any basic differences between the minds of men and those of possible
machines.

More from stumbleupon – The William P. Gottlieb Collection, comprising over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists. Burrow down to hi-res photos.

Before I have even rated pages in stumbleupon the third link they returned was this one. The whole of Clamor Magazine is interesting.

“While the Enron scandal currently unfolds, another Bush family business scandal lurks beneath the shadows of history that may dwarf it.”

But while President Bush publicly embraced the community of holocaust survivors in Washington last spring, he and his family have been keeping a secret from them for over 50 years about Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.

English words are connected by just three degrees of separation. Writes Phillip Ball, on the Nature site. 2 July 2002

The researchers traced the links between 30,000 English words in an online thesaurus. For example, the word ‘actor’ can be connected to ‘universe’ through two intermediaries. The thesaurus lists ‘character’ as a synonym for ‘actor’; ‘character’ is also equated with ‘nature’; and ‘nature’ with ‘universe’.

Moving from ‘actor’ to ‘universe’ in the network of words therefore takes three steps. To the surprise of Motter and colleagues, they found that the same was true of just about any randomly chosen pair of words in the thesaurus. The English language, in other words, enjoys just three degrees of separation.

Word Association has long been standard fare in psychotherapy, not just as formal tests but as a way of seeing into dreams or noticing themes and archetypes. Given this new research some might think that anyone can link anything, making nonsense of the lot. My hunch is no, making links is not nonsense. The art of seeing these links is profound. Also consider this: if linking like this is so prevalent then there must be a choice of conduit words (my word for the linking theme word) and thus highlighting one over another will have some impact. I doubt a computer could do that, though a computer could be a great aid here. I bet that there are some words that are stronger, more prevalent than others as conduits – eye. ear, head, arm, etc. earth, air, fire, and water? At last there might be a clearer reason why Tarot, astrology and alchemy can be so profound; they channel the immediate through “star” words that make archetypal sense of experience.

Thanks Josh for the link! Love to see a visual map of this!

It looks good, about to investigate this! It could be I Like This! The project Dan I did not quite do in about 1995?

Update: Hmmm, I filled it all in. It works technically. I got some OK recommendations. Is it “feature” based or “collaborative filtering”?

The name is wrong IMO, as is the choice of rating: Bad, Good, Great. This sounds like a popularity quest which is what we DON’T need more of. Bad good great… Match for me. would be better or even better ”I Like This”.

Still it is delivering OK! For example I got this in the first go: Biblioteca Arcana That is quite me.

The paper by Vicente Rafael, Professor, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego states ”This is a work in progress; please do not quote from this draft or cite without the author’s permission. I welcome feedback; please feel free to e-mail me at vrafael@weber.ucsd.edu.” I have emailed and asked permission to link and quote – will remove if not granted. I link this because I have the question on my mind about the class nature of info tech generally, about its impact as part of the forces of production, but also about the use of communications, does it impact what actually happens in a qualitative way. Does a better linked crowd become more revolutionary or just more potent? How does the flatness of the net impact on leadership? Does the group have a life of its own and can we trust it? Vicente L Cell Phone and the Crowd

From the perspective of Generation Txt, a certain kind of crowd comes about in response to texting. It is one that bears, in both senses of that word, the hegemony of middle class intentions. Texting in its apolitical mode, sought to evade the crowd. But in its reformist mode, it is credited with converting the crowd into the concerted movement of an aggrieved people. In the latter case, the middle class invests the crowd with a power analogous to their cell phones: that of transmitting their wish for a moral community, whereby the act of transmission itself amounts to the realization of such a community. Such a notion assumes the possibility of endowing the crowd with an identity continuous with that of middle class texters. However, this assumption had another aspect. Not only did it lead to the fantasy of ordering of the masses under bourgeois direction. As I demonstrate below, the middle class interest in ordering the crowd also tended to give way to a different development. At certain moments, we also see the materialization of another kind of desire this time for the dissolution of class hierarchy altogether. How so?

Classic Wired from 1995. I recall reading this at the time and feeling annoyed with myself that I had not written it, as I thought along these lines in 1992. Now I don’t really mind 🙂 writing is hard. There are about a hundred links in Google to Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg and they all reference this one article!

An obscure Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago.
By Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg

Here is my message to linuxodyssey on Yahoo, where I have chronicled my free software adventures.

New Phase, lets call it phase 3. The first was my go at Debian way back in July 1999. Then Mandrake 8.1 on the Dell, which ended with severe problems. Now Red Hat 7.3

xrefer Came up with this item on dialectical materialism. Just a standard encyclopeadia item really, but what a great little search engine for when you want a classic encyclopaedia entry!

… the basic aims and principles of dialectical materialism remain very much in harmony with the fundamental spirit of progressive, rational scientific thought, which continues to perceive a fundamental opposition between scientific theories and religious myths, to address the scientific challenges posed by the failure of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic programme, and to seek a scientific metaphysics as the basis for an enlightened view of the world.