Introducing Corkulous and the Mind Map Project

Corkulous (as I use it) is a "Mind Mapping" tool. The idea is to visually map concepts and the connections between them with the aim of pulling some kind of coherent structure out of a pile of related ideas. In this case, I have over 400 posts that, if printed, would be over 1,000 pages. While creating each post has helped my clarify my thoughts of the moment, the result is a pile of essays that are not accessible in any practical way to interested users.

A small mind map is shown here.

A typical blog entry tends to touch on several related issues, each of which is likely to require some clarification. The index tries to do this, but it is not realistic to expect a reader to explore the index and the dozens of essays whose connection to the topic may be obscure. In any case, this results in a geometrically expanding demand on the reader. 

The Mind Map project aims to isolate a few key ideas, such as "Mind" and create a single essay or a small number of linked essays that cover the topic in a format convenient to a reader. Moreover, such a packet of essays may be suitable for publication to the wider world. 

In the map shown above, each box (and perhaps each link) can be expanded into a map of its own. More detailed maps can include HTML (web) links, links to blog entries, pictures, PDF, and links to other maps. Maps can be exported in many ways, including the ability to export to a reader who doesn't have Corkulous. This adds up to an extremely powerful set of tools that should simultaneously encourage a quantum leap in quality plus the ability to communicate the content in "bite-size" chunks.

It does not seem possible to include functional mind maps directly in this blog. It's an open question of how to share these. A more basic question would be why to share them. 

Maps can be placed in Google Drive, which provides extensive global sharing capabilities, but a "raw" board can only be viewed with someone who has Corkulous, which also means some kind of Apple device (PC not supported). That is probably too restrictive for general use. An HTML download (web page) would be widely shareable but is not there now. I vaguely remember that it once was. NOT saving the board in a standard (XML) format would seem to be a fundamental design error. Note that text items, such as links, can be exported and, with a bit of effort, appended to a blog entry that shows the board as an image. Better than nothing.

It seems that the core application of Corkulus will be to allow me to think graphically about related ideas. I have a mind quite suited to this.

M1: A Theory of Everything

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience".

This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals.

Mind Maps

One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informally model the "space" of ideas and say intelligible things about what ideas are "close to each other" in that space. This includes the ability to visualize the analogy, which, according to Hofstadter, is the underlying organizing principle of the mind.

Core Ideas

1. M1 builds on the first person experience. Everything we know comes from "unpacking" our experience, forming new associations into categories. This is articulated in Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". The first person experience is also primary in Zen, although Zen and Hofstadter arrive at quite different conclusions about what's "really going on".

1. M1 is ultimately about mind, mainly but not only human minds.
2. M1 builds on first person experience to describe (if not "explain") the emergence of personal memes such as "you" and "them".
3. M1 builds on personal memes to describe social memes and the emergence of "group minds" with "thoughts", "concepts" and "perceptions" that cannot be productively described in terms of some kind of function of individuals in the group (Dragon Theory)
4. M1 is about all possible ideas. Every idea that has ever appeared in all possible mind plus any idea that could appear in the mind, including "right" and "wrong" ideas. M1 is therefore a "Theory of Everything". Annoyingly to some, it includes all other possible "Theories of Everything". This "universe" of memes is sometimes called the "noosphere" but that word is also used in an mystical way to refer to the "mind of the universe". 
5. M1 includes the idea that M1 cannot embrace all of reality. This amounts to acceptance that there is a real world "out there" and our ideas map to that world only incompletely and approximately. Of course, since it includes all ideas, M1 also includes the opposite idea, which is that there is no actual real world out there: it's all in our heads (Strong Idealism). However, M1 concerns mainly with actual, productive and powerful human ideas. Acceptance of the existence of the external world allows M1 to embrace all of "Science".
6. M1 is not "epistemology" which is the philosophical discipline attempting to describe what "we" know and how we know it. How we "know" things is of specific interest in M1, including how and why we "know" things that are manifestly false or inconsistent with the other things we "know".
7. M1 collects imagination pumps (Dennett)
8. The focus of M1 is on "core" memes. These include the "Self", "Mind", "Reality", "Person", "Category" and of course "M1" itself and the meme of a "core meme". 
9. M1 is not reductionist. It makes no attempt to "explain" the universe in terms of a privileged "fundamental" collection of memes (such as those from neurology or quantum mechanics). If anything, the "self" is fundamental, yet, when examined, turns out to depend on other things going on that could be regarded as "more fundamental". 
10. M1 attempts to "unpack" the "self" meme to show the connection between the way cells specialize in brain tissues to produce a "brain" that is, at least in principle, capable of supporting a mind.
11. M1 is shamelessly self-referential and recursive. This is to be expected, since M1 is a product of the mind which has the remarkable ability to know itself and to know it is knowing or even doubt that it is knowing ...
12. M1 is to the universe of ideas as cartography is to the world. It's about mapping and exploring - specifically about tools we can develop to map the meme world - how we get from one meme to another, how we generalize and form analogies.