PatternSmithing Alliance Blogs

This is an old debate that a good friend and former colleague @galtenberg agreed we needed to have and the topic has been on my mind the last few days. At the time we were working together, we were weaving together a theory and applications concerning a mechanism of the human mind called resonance, which has not been incorporated  into mainstream theories of cognition even now (see for example the disambiguation page on wikipedia below) but I have zero doubt will be in my lifetime as more discoveries are made about it.  In general, resonance concerns the interaction of a particular individual’s consciousness with elements of the physical, virtual, or cognitive domains that brings it into an amplified state (which my work seeks to leverage) in a repeatable manner.  Note this is specific and tuned to the individual and has other specific criteria which I don’t wish to fully enumerate here save one:

Note there is a deceptive system effect of consciousness which @galtenberg called fascination.  I call it deceptive because it cannot be fully depended on save for a data point of an affect.  Quite simply, it is when something repeatedly (at least for a period of time) grabs your attention in such a way that it can appear as resonance.  Quoting @galtenberg, he expressed two things quite well about its mechanisms:

Fascination can lead to resonance [but not always].

and

Fascination wears off…

In other words, the first quote refers to the fact that fascination can be an early indication or precursor of resonance but it does not imply the latter; hence, why I like to call it a bit deceptive.  In fact, we used to call it false resonance at times – it would give a false indication of resonance.  Other times, it was an excellent earlier indicator of resonance.

The second quote deals with a quite simple test : If it is in fact merely fascination and not resonance, the brain will give a definitive clue – the sort of magical fascination will begin to fade (unless other mechanisms like an addiction are at play, at which case it will return in a cyclic loop over time) and the fascination will wear off.

This contrast between these two leads to an important question: If one is following what fascinates the brain, will it lead to evolution of consciousness (which Csikszentmihalyi talks at length about) or to depravity?  I have asked that lately again because for better or worse I have heard about some quite depraved individuals in the last few months, both in the news as well as personally.  One thing is in common in all these cases – they are quite driven by something that fascinates them deeply (my usage of the term here could spark some debate because I am dragging it through the mud perhaps but bear with me) but leads to ultimate depravity and destruction in their life and the lives of others.

It could be easy to label the fascination in all of these cases I am talking about by saying it is driven by some basic human drives – sexual gratification, fear, grief, horror, or morbid curiosity in the specific cases I am thinking of but that is too easy.  For instance, during the grieving of my father passing away last year, I had what I would call fascination with one disturbing aspect of his passing but this led me toward discussion with others and ultimate resolution and passing through the grief; however, there was a sort of binary choice – I could have gotten caught in a repeating cycle of going over the same ground over and over without any resolution whatsoever or I could the extra attention to actively work through the challenge I was faced with.  I would say that the former approach would have led to depravity.  Nonetheless, the fact stands that this fascination was nothing related to resonance – this period is now gone (thank goodness) and did not lead to the phenomena we call resonance.

I don’t have answers at this point (even though we debated it years ago) – that is not the point of this post.  I am merely chewing on the question again and offering it up as food for thought for others who may be interested.  If you feel like discussing, feel free to comment on this post here on the blog, or on my friendfeed profile when it echoes over there or reply to @joelkotarski at twitter when it echoes over there.

(below is wikipedia disambiguation page embedded for quick reference without leaving the blog post)

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This is my ‘entropic flow’ blog – the other  blogs I have all center around certain projects or endeavours I am working on, whilst this one will be about day to day life or thoughts that don’t fit underneath any of these projects.  I remember when a friend who was about to start a blog talked to me about the paths one could take in blogging – I said generally you could do the project-focused blog (the ‘it’ or ‘us’ blog), the personal blog (anything about yourself and what is on your mind – the ‘I’ blog), or a general blend of the two.  I chose the first but I feel this medium should be as much about inspirations and struggles as about reporting major breakthroughs and goals.  The first route loses a sort of human touch.

I chose the name Entropic Flow as sort of a contradiction in terms – Flow is the state of mind described my Csikszentmihalyi and can be attributed to ordered consciousness, while Entropy can be described as  lack of or moving away from order.  I believe that order can emerge from disorder.  Dee Hock coined a term ‘Chaordic’ to describe processes that make a combination of Chaos and Order.  Anyway, because life and thoughts don’t always fit inside the line of projects and endeavours, I want the overflow to go here, hence though the thoughts will spill into all kinds of categories and hence appear disorganized, I believe they will emerge into other things.

Actually, this blog was started a long time ago but never syndicated into the PatternSmithing Alliance blogs – it was actually intended to be private, but I have since decided to open it up and start publishing from it as of today.  The topics will be quite broad and cross all of my diverse interest areas.  As noted, at times the topics may appear entropic but the intention is that these will flow into larger themes (either within the same post or over time as themes develop).  Of course, there may be zero audience for these thoughts, in which case the blog becomes a killer diary.

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Those in the private beta will see a few changes in the next few weeks.  Both of these have been inspired by hand drawn work.  Some of the best concepts I have worked on individually and in groups have been when I/we have sketched on a whiteboard or on a notepad.  Suddenly in the last two decades, with computer technology we have the power to rapidly create lots of content but often the tools get in the way.  So we have this amazing powerhouse ready to help us persist out and create thoughts and turn them into things; however, there is an impedance mismatch between the creative process (at times) and the ability to just create.  At times, this is based on lack of knowledge – once the requisite knowledge is obtained the tools available on the computer or web site become very tuned to the process – at other times the tools themselves create a sort of unknown friction.

Many of the best creations occur when people go back to simpler tools that allow for expression.  I gave examples of a white board and notepad but here is a more vivid one – the target might be a piece of music, and of course the artifact of music paper might give the power to virtualize the music and have an orchestra (or several orchestras) play the music – however, it is very difficult for someone to simply sit down at a computer with software for placing notes on scales and simply compose the music.  Often the composer will step away and grab one or more of the instruments or even hum parts of the emerging piece to themselves – testing the emerging song for resonance.  Now, the designer of the computer software could add lots of features to make this feedback loop tighter – that enhance the medium of placing musical notes on the scales inside the software (like having the notes/chords play on the computer as they are placed, or to highlight a portion of music and loop it over and over until it is right).

In the same way, these next advancements of the user interface seek to simultaneously enhance the experience of conceptualizing, enhancing, and creating thingks but also more closely mimicking the very effective simpler virtualizing artifacts we’ve been using for years.

• Flourish is based on quickly weaving together the conceptual fabric of the think portion as well as the relationships that define it and although it is available as a low-level language, it ultimately works with human interactions/gestures with the user interface to accomplish this.
• The new user interface design builds off of Flourish but uses a look and feel that looks, well, hand-drawn, if there is a high degree of flourishes going on.  Flourishing is a concept within the system and measures the rate of development of a Thingk and is based on the similar concept in positive psychology which can be reviewed here.  A Thingk that is not yet ‘done’ but its creator is neglecting will in fact be languishing and the fact that it is is either a reflection on the mental state of the individual (are they languishing?), a reflection of their relationship to the Thingk (is it time to pass it on to someone else?), or if we haven’t done our job right, a negative reaction to the user interface that is causing the impedance mismatch we are trying to solve (the relationship of the user to our offering is languishing).  Either way, it must be noted in all three cases that they are no longer using flourishes to advance their Thingk.  So flourishing in the Thingk.com offering is a measure of  the number of flourishes that are happening on a Thingk-in-formation.  This concept will also be extended later to the interaction of the community with the Thingk-in-formation or Thingk-at-completion-state.  The flourish portion of the user interface for building Thingks will also be used to be inspired by and weave together Thingks others (or even you yourself) have created, and this also will eventually be factored into the concept of flourishing.  Either way, the look and feel of the user interface will reflect this in ways I cannot yet reveal but I am pretty confident I think you’ll enjoy.

More to come later!

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FluxPoints fits into a larger set of projects and the plan has been to add its technology in after some of the other layers have been built in.  This was always due to its complexity, and to avoid any tight-coupling to the fluxpoints framework; however, some recent work on static pattern engineering and the Thingk framework have prompted the need to inject the underlying concepts in FluxPoints into all of the projects.  The developments are quite exciting and I expect tremendous momentum on all projects over the next few months, so there will be plenty of opportunity for those who would like to contribute.

I can’t talk about detailed specifics on two core components of the FluxPoints framework; however, after working with their consequences, I believe they can bring about a transformation of how we use the web.  Both are geared around the goal of bringing flux to endpoints that wrap around static patterns or Thingks (that is, fluxpoints).  There will be several mechanisms for bringing flux to these endpoints, but these two additions, it is hoped, will change the nature of how people respond to information on the web.

The first, and oldest, mechanism is the NeoReQuest framework, and changes the way we look at the standard web request and the way we frame a sequence of interactions with the web.  The notions of context, intention, and most importantly, autotelic behavior surround this longer running transaction we frame as a new form of web request.  Eventually, NeoReQuest will be a standalone site as the value this way of walking the web will bring will far outgrow the fluxpoints project; however, the fluxpoints framework will frame the activities on partner sites (thingk.com, dreamspawn.net) as NeoReQuests.  This serves a two-fold purpose: to bring flux from the partner sites to these activated endpoints and to evolve the neorequest framework so that it can be effortlessly incorporated into future partner sites when it is time to go public.

The second project focuses on one of the best forms of analog flux that carries meaning that we have encountered and has been completely overlooked on the web.  Armed with the technological platform we are arranging and some basic concepts, this form of flux provides us some of the best measurements and provisioning of flux from the human mind than we could ever hope to achieve without it.  To be honest, since this idea came to me I have not been able to tuck it away for future work.  This is probably the most active Thingk in my mind at the moment and the energy of it will drive all of the other initiatives forward (except it will probably slow work on the book I am writing).  Of course, I’m being purposely vague, but those who work with the beta testing of Thingk.com will be able to experience early stages of this technology.

Finally, the PatternSmithing Alliance is the “centralized organizing and guiding body for the core activities, knowledge, and applications of static pattern engineering technologies”, and these are three such technologies (that is, fluxpoints, neorequests, and voxpoints).  All three are semantic web technologies at root (that is, they both expose and consume data using the semantic web framework) and the Alliance will maintain the specifications for the ontologies and schemas used for all three.  This is also an invitation – I am interested in collaborating with individuals who are interested in any of these technologies.

As a last note, I want to pay homage to Dr Stephen Thaler, whose series of Thingks and experiments he performed with Imagination Engines, and his generous sharing of information to the web community all along and my subsequent exposure to them, gave the initial inspiration for the FluxPoints project.  Although I am not using any of Dr Thaler’s technology in this site, the spirit of his ideas and the results he obtained live inside this project – I have no doubt exposure to his ideas directly transformed my own conceptions of SPE technology back in early 2001.  This sort of attribution (the “inspiredBy” attribute in the Thingk-related ontologies) is essential to track.  Thank you, Dr Thaler.

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The Thingk.com private beta will open up in May 2010.  Here are some details surrounding the private beta:

• This will be an invitation only beta, which means:
  • Some colleagues and friends will be asked directly to join – please feel no obligation but your feedback will be greatly appreciated if you can assist.
  • Throughout the last few years, I have been looking at interesting individuals who may be interested in patternsmithing and Thingk persistence – you will be receiving a hand-crafted email as a personal invitation – once again, no obligation please – only do this if it brings you value but if you do your feedback is greatly appreciated.
  • As expressed on this blog, if interested feel free to contact me at the contact form http://xri.net/=joel.kotarski and I will be able to accomodate you.  Also if you think you know someone who would be interested from the category above, please contact me here as well.
  • We’ll probably have limited invitations to spread around among private beta users – these will probably only be on a request-only basis, however, to control capacity initially.
• For those in town, we will most likely host an in-person meeting where we will go over some details about the site and what is being accomplished – for out-of-towners we may also host a teleconference as a separate event.
• Since we will be testing privacy and security (with potential bugs to be found), I ask that you put the kind of ideas you may spontaneously work on but not your actual work and certainly not anything you would consider intellectual property at this point.  Much of the data from the private beta will be wiped clean on launch so that we can fully test; however, I am planning to make an easy mechanism to tag content you wish to transition over to the full system – also, I will be soliciting feedback on making this process as painless as possible for those generally interested in getting value from the work they do in beta testing.
• As always, being asked to participate should not imply obligation to participate, and participating should not imply obligation to give detailed feedback.  Anything you do is greatly appreciated and will be rewarded in some manner.

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