wikosophy.org: Doubts and Comments

The Wikosophy project is now officially closed. Thanks for collaborating!

Before closing down the Wikosophy website, so if ever, now is your time to start thinking.

But can you “remix” thinking?

Science fiction hero Asimov deals with mobs in his “Foundation” series. “The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved.” But what about the thoughts of the many? Can they be creative and innovative?

This image suggests that you should put in “Monkey” for the ? in the title. Wikosophy hopes to show that the Internet consists of an extremely big group of thinkers.

Prepare for a joke, taken from here: “The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher. The Second Law of Philosophy: They’re both wrong.” How true, but on the other hand I still believe: A big number of Wikosophy contributors would be very, very wrong – or, in the end perhaps even perfectly right, because all their different and contradictory opinions would be edited out by each others resulting in what we aim for: a comprehensive philosophical thought which has not one but many authors.

A spectacular vision of a world wide web was created in the 1930ies. In the mind of Paul Otlet, “electric telescopes” would link all the people in the world with the opportunity to browse through documents, images and all of creation. He, according to the New York Times article, even anticipated social networking, where people “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” A singular mind has anticipated what became reality – or, even possible – only decades later. What would have happened if Otlet had put his idea up on an analouge pre-”wiki”, under scrutiny by his contemporaries? A lot of laughter, most likely, and total rejection of his ideas. Have times changed? can people nowadays accept visionaries more easily? Would the Wikosophy project know an innovative idea or just reject it?

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it. (Terry Pratchett, taken from here)

Peter A. Gloor is not doing SETI, he is doing SECI: At the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he is into the search for collective intelligence. Some of his theses are outlined in this item at DenkBloggAde. To quote Gloor: “We need collective intelligence”. So let’s create it at Wikosophy.

If you go in-depth about thinking, is it necessary to construct some hierarchy in the process? Is there some judge living inside of you, telling you: “Okay, now, this is more right than that”? There seems to be the belief that networks need hierarchies to function. Is this true for Wikipedia? If thinking is put into a non-hierarchical network – as Wikosophy is trying to do -, does it have to fail? And if so, why?