Some comments on Charles Ess's criticisms of the Global Brain idea ...
As Jack at least knows out of private conversations, I am one of those who
stick to the notion that attempt(s) towards any Global Unameit may hide
somewhere an implicit totalitarian view of the world, but OTOH strongly
believe that we need some fertile utopias to push us forward. Global Brain
is one of those ambiguous concepts, and basically Charles Ess's criticisms
seem to the point.
How to avoid the totalitarian trap? Maybe we have to think in terms of
global tools rather than Global Solution(s). For example telephone and
e-mail are global tools, like before them writing and printing. The bottom
question is how much of the culture and ideology of the
community/country/civilization/economic system inventing and spreading a
tool is embedded in it.
Now we are about knowledge technologies, and as their name indicate, those
technologies have already and will have more and more built-in knowledge
(ontologies, vocabularies, categories, basic structures of language). If we
do not want to feed the totalitarian and colonialist soil, the tools we are
now thinking about and develop have to preserve and sustain what I like to
call *ontodiversity*. But we have learnt from nature that biodiversity is
grounded on a single strong and versatile information code. That is the most
amazing discovery of the past century. DNA is without contest the better
information standard so far, allowing very subtle information interchanges
between very different organisms. So what we have to invent is something
like DNA for knowledge technologies. Some minimal common standard toolkit,
able to support and help develop a large scope of views of the world and
knowledge communities, allowing them to live independently but to share
whatever they want anytime they want, and not forcing them to share
everything all the time (we have to admit there is over 90% of human
knowledge that you and I really don't care to share)
For example "Topic Maps + OHS" seems a good candidate to be a toolkit of the
sort. As far as I can see in my "immediate universe", it's the best
available. But so far, everyone must admit here that developers and users of
those technologies are mainly originating from the dominant western
civilization. I'm looking forward to seeing Asiatic, Arabic, African ...
people step into the community and tell how they feel about those tools,
their "universality" and "neutrality", and their capacity to be used to
carry and share their knowledge and views of the world. I had recently a
conversation with a philosophy searcher whose study field is non-verbal
communication, from autistic people expression to exchange between
civilizations. She had a very acute vision that what we consider as basic
notions like "subject" "object" "category" "statement" are not as universal
as our "upper ontologists" like to think. So I wonder for example ... are
"topic" "association" "role" bound to be really human universals, or
conceptual fruits of our centuries-long culture?
Cheers
Bernard
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bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com
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