Saturday, November 15, 2003

One more similarity to add to this post on why Winds of Change moves between the number one and number two spots on the related site section of my Alexa toolbar. We both spend a fair amount of time talking about Iraq, although from different perspectives.

Besides many sites which just seem common to many bloggers, The Agonist, another liberal political blog, is Alexa's choice for people who read this blog. In some ways they are very different from me, a frequently updated blog with news quotes, links, and summaries rather than blogger editorial.

I've been thinking recently about the fact that there are no connectivity or neurology or global brain blogs in there. In one sense I haven't been writing about that much recently. In another sense I'm doing so all the time. Just as a human may think about philosophy and religion and what it means to be human, but will think even more about survival and day to day living. In my efforts to help integrate collective human consciousness I try to do the same, and I believe some of the things I write about are dangers to humanity as a whole.

The perspective I write from is part of the same effort. While Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind and articles such as this suggest different parts of our brains may sometimes compete with each other, in healthy non-schizophrenic individuals they don't usually seem to divide up into armed camps which never work with each other. Even though I'm somewhat left of center, I try to think seriously about conservative ideas and go the extra mile to be fair when they have a point. I suspect polarization is one of the reasons we don't seem to function successfully as a Global Brain when dealing with certain classes of problems.

No comments: