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Are Internet discussion forums the answer?

When asked about the origin of consciousness it appears to be conventional wisdom to respond, “Language did it”.

“I believe it is legitimate to take the phrase “I know” and deduce from it the presence of a nonverbal image of knowing centered on the self that precedes and motivates that verbal phrase…The idea that self and consciousness would emerge after language, and would be a direct construction of language, is not likely to be correct.”

Our sluggish ability to adapt quickly to changes in our environment severely endangers the longevity of the human species: it takes generations for new human science theories to migrate into mass common sense comprehension.

Internet discussion forums are the answer.

What is the question?

How can we dramatically enhance the speed of the social osmosis of new human science theories?

Quotes from The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

"Internet discussion forums are the answer."

I have to say that I find, by and large, that internet forums are a waste of time, apart from some very useful hobby related forums. The fact that I return time and again to SAGG says more about my perception of some of the users present than the value of the ideas and information that I gain or contribute. By that, I don't mean to put anyone down - the obstacle is the medium itself.

So, enhanced social osmosis? I don't believe so. What we have here on SAGG, for example, is - from the entire world - a tiny active group who indulge in an exchange of view points on a limited range of issues which we tend to recycled perpetually. I find it no substitute, and no match, for live face-to-face chatter, as in coffee break at the work place. Conversing directly and efficiently with people who are more than vague ideas on forum pages, who can communicate in real time, non-verbally too, is worth infinitely on the social osmosis scale.

I am suggesting that the discussion forum is a vehicle that can be very useful if we were to use it in a more sophisticated manner than it is now used. The forum does not have to be confined to idle chit chat. If we were to begin to use it in a sophisticated manner we could attract sophisticated individuals or individuals who wished to grow into sophisticated thinkers. It could grow to be a very important means for intellectual discourse.

rede-- So true!!

coberst- Would not consciousness in fact precede language -- rather than the other way around?

There is no subsitute to face to face discussion. Some of our most valuable cues are non-verbal. New-born babies study faces and can recognise familiar ones soon after birth. Even video inhibits the interaction that occurs between people in a conversation.

It's a slow process for us individually and for society as a whole. Why do you want to speed it up coberst? Discussion and review may be slow, but perhaps they ensure the 'new' is good enough to survive.

Look up the meaning of sophistry-- the original source of the word sophistication which you use three times!

The Reverend has an idea about dialogue being a certain way, so I would imagine you both have something in common by projecting an ideal of personal value.
There's a passage in the Bible: Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine...
I would imagine you could find a willing and deserving audience in which to share your valued ideas, lest they whom you cast your words at random, trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you.

Then there's this other piece of Scripture: Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, looked down from the peaceful celestial realms upon the suffering and confusion in the worlds of illusion. He was filled with such intense compassion that his thoughts, desiring the liberation of all beings, expanded his head into a thousand heads. From his body sprang a thousand helping hands. In each palm an eye appeared.

This allegory represents that compassion is not a blind emotion, but love combined with wisdom. The wisdom of compassion is knowing the inner oneness of all life. This leads to the capacity to recognize the suffering of the world and of others without losing internal stability. Once one has developed this ability, the energy of love can move to heal the suffering.
Compassion does not mean suffering with another; true compassion means recognizing the suffering of others without being affected by it. Only from this platform of stability does the ability to heal manifest.

Ellis

I think that you misread my post.

When asked about the origin of consciousness it appears to be conventional wisdom to respond, “Language did it”.

“I believe it is legitimate to take the phrase “I know” and deduce from it the presence of a nonverbal image of knowing centered on the self that precedes and motivates that verbal phrase…The idea that self and consciousness would emerge after language, and would be a direct construction of language, is not likely to be correct.”

Darwin informs us that the species that cannot adapt to the changing environment will quickly become toast. We presently cannot keep pace with our technology driven environment.

Sorry coberst- I must read things more carefully in future.

The development of language both historically and in each individual is something that interests me, and its study was in fact a large part of my life before retirement.

Can anything else be more fascinating than the different ways we have devised to communicate and express our ideas?

Internet forums, properly organized, are a powerful tool with many uses.

The Ubuntu forums offer hints about the possibilities. The brainstorming forum is a feedback loop. As of this date, users have generated 15,540 ideas for developers to improve the product. They vote on the merit of the ideas offered.

We are likely to see more example of forums used in this way. The open source concept motivates people to share ideas, whereas the profit motive discourages it.

Once well-organized, with advanced software tools, I expect Internet forums to drive advances in education and technology.

I agree, but I expect it will take a fair amount of work. The Internet tools available today are staggeringly impressive compared to those we used in its infancy, before it was marketed to the masses; however, the more advances we make, the more we find out that we need to know.

Also we have to think not about forums, but about the entirety of the web. These are very simple bulletin boards, but there are numerous very different fora that need to be unified. We're still not where we need to be.
Most people just come to the net and learn what they learn and think, well this is the way it should be done!

Can you open a can with a hunting knife? Certainly you can! Done it many times! Vast improvement over using a rock or a screw driver! Imagine you've never seen a can opener. A hunting knife seems like the ultimate tool for opening cans, until someone shows you a P-38.
( http://www.georgia-outfitters.com/page52.shtml )

There are many axes of interest, many ways to communicate, many ways of addressing those types of communication. Success along one axis does not necessarily translate to success along another. Example: Youtube. Brilliant idea, successfully marketed. But it's actually a basic tool. Ideally, one should not see YT. It should be hidden away behind some other interface. I don't know what that interface looks like, but I know it needs to be different. It needs a tool to fit over the top of it. YT is probably not inclined to build this; outsiders may have some legal issues in building on top of YT.

YT, Bulletin boards (what the OP calls internet discussion forums), wikis, twits, blogs, vlogs, rss feeds, chats - right now it's a random mess with very weak linkages. (That's actually kind of good for now, because it allows each feature to evolve rapidly independently.)

Currently, the vast majority of YT videos are a waste of bandwidth. (That's not quite true. They're a waste for most viewers, not for all viewers.) Same for blogs, and so forth. Even if you're looking in a very narrow domain, searching for the good stuff is irritating. Example: Until recently, if you tried to look up thermodynamics and evolution and you would have had to wade through an interminable amount of utter stupidity to get to anybody who actually knew what they heck they were talking about. (That's not true any more - I just checked and the top sites are from people who actually know the stuff. Don't know what happened there, but you get the idea.)

YT is a basic level tool that COULD in principle BE built upon - and probably eventually will. If not, there will be some competitor that will replace it - eventually. So I'm not really talking about YT, but the function that YT serves - sharing and discussing videos.

I'm not saying YT or discussion fora or anything else is bad. I'm saying they're in their toddlerhood. Kinda like the internet chat programs of 25 or 30 years ago - very primitive stuff, but they were the precursors of what we have today.

Challenges:
Improved methods of actually communicating instead of just talking back and forth
Finding relevant information in a pile of crap (I'm not opposed to having the net full of crap, I just want a way of not wasting my own time on it).
Locating authoritative sources other than self-proclaimed experts. Any time you have an open discussion forum, obscurantists are going to set up a soap box and megaphone, because, you know, like, everything they have to say is, like, you know, all wise and stuff.
Methods of cross-checking or otherwise verifying information
Improved pedagogical delivery and environments
Instrumentation (i.e. measuring stuff, real data means we don't have to accept the obvious revealed "truths" proffered by the philosophical pontificators)
Better HCI (human-computer interfaces)

It's not clear to me that we need to look at these as missions, per se. The kinds of activities that these things support are things that people have always tried to do, but it was always more difficult. The technology is just enabling stuff that we have always wanted to do.

A noble thought if one can rise above their own prejudice when communicating to actually listen and be open to the idea. Often, those that propose the ideal have in mind their own agenda that may not be as universal as the plan idealizes.

One mans garbage is another mans treasure. In this, if one has no tolerance for the other idea, he closes himself off from possibility and sequesters himself behind self made walls of personal idealism.
Often the listener has proclaimed the speaker as a self proclaimed expert and has himself proclaimed his expertise in making the determination in who is qualified and what an expert looks like.
Any time opinion and belief exists in an egoic dialogue someone is going to disagree. If one decides to spend their time highlighting everything they disagree with then one ceases to be productive.

Sometimes experience and answers aren't found via google or Wikipedia, and so if one is frustrated by their inability to verify the content of dialogue by sitting in an armchair staring at an electronic screen, they might actually have to do something other than banter opinion and cast dispersions of personal belief in disgust of another's contribution regardless of what they think .
This is a clear statement.Such as express theyself without fear of condemnation, and the need to attach ones self to everything that is either of interest or disinterest and to become objective rather than subjective and close minded.

Internet tools today probably compare to the automobiles of 1920. They were advanced enough to see clearly that they were the future in transportation, simple under the hood, but unreliable and difficult to drive.

It was probably impossible then to imagine what cars would look like in 2009, but they evolved with far more complexity under the hood, but more reliable and easier to operate. I think we will see the same with the Internet.

Being objective requires more than speaking in third person.
Making a contribution requires more than sputtering evocative language devoid of content. Obscurantists are not without agendas. Progress - even living - requires filters. Humans are not capable of receiving, let alone analyzing, all data. Every kook thinks his own ideas are just as good or even better than as Einstein's and Newton's and Galileo's and no matter how many times you look at them and determine its utterly vacuous they don't want to accept that answer. Their logic circuits are broken and they have no filters on their data. Of course they demand proof that their logic circuits are broken. Sadly, when one's logic circuitry is broken and one doesn't filter data, the concept of proof is meaningless. When evidence is ignored and logic is misapplied, any conclusions are possible.

However, back to the point of the OP. If every single thing that is posted on the internet is useful to someone it does not mean that it's useful to everyone - and finding the nuggets one needs is a difficult procedure. I'm not talking about the case of obscurantists who don't actually have to produce anything useful and wouldn't recognize it anyway. I'm talking about the people who do produce to whose methods, reasoning, etc. the other sort are happily and smugly oblivious.

A fair analogy. The basic idea is there, but we have a lot to fill in: seat belts, shatterproof windshields, air bags, disc brakes, anti-lock brakes, computer control, etc., as well perhaps as rules of the road.

Obviously since need is often personal rather than absolute.

New theories in the natural sciences are quickly integrated into our society because these theories often lead to new business practices that put money into our pockets. Such is not the case with new discoveries in the human sciences.

New theories in the human sciences often take generations to trickle down to Tom and Jane because Tom and Jane pick up these new ideas normally through a process of social osmosis. Such new theories are not generally taught in our schools.

Our educational system prepares us to become good producers and consumers. However, in the name of efficiency, our educational system leaves us ignorant of many domains of knowledge that are vital to our comprehension of matters that seriously affect the political health of our culture and of the world. Cognitive science is just one example of such a domain.

Popularizer is a word I heard historian William Norton Smith use when discussing American Presidents on C-Span. He did not elaborate significantly but it was apparent to me that he used the word to describe individuals who make popular the theories of authors who write about significant concepts that are seldom disseminated throughout the public educational system.

Mr. Smith and I agree that it is essential that someone carry to the people these vital concepts that I mention. I think of myself as being a popularizer. I try to introduce to my readers new and important ideas recently introduced to the world by the human sciences.

Do you have any desire to be a popularizer?

Isn’t the Internet discussion forum an ideal medium for popularizers to perform their function?

That's probably true, but not the main point. Need is domain specific. We are attempting to solve some problem, learn some fact, understand some issue. We investigate. How do we investigate? We can use traditional methods and we can use modern tools like the internet. The internet supplies us with vastly more raw data than we can possibly make sense of. The data are corrupted, disjointed, incomplete, incompatible, irrelevant, and in some cases nonsensical. Though it may have political undertones, this is not a political statement. Though it may have profound philosophical implications, it's not a philosophical point. It's a FACT - and obvious FACT - recognized by anyone who has actually done, for example, mathematical data analysis.

As individuals we are constrained by our humanity. We have lives - the purpose of life is not to analyze data (or have debates or build things). None of us has an infinite amount of time. We would like to assimilate or make sense of something in some amount of real time, hopefully somewhat less than a human lifespan. To do this, we need tools. Now we COULD do without tools or we COULD do with primitive tools (as we are now), but it makes the effort of solving those problems incredibly difficult.

Some problems actually have a freshness date on them. If you don't put a time limit on their solution, they can transmogrify into problems of an entirely different nature.

There is an immense amount that technology has yet to offer up. But it's not just a matter of connecting a bunch of junk together. Someone has to think through the connections. On the good side, there are people who are doing this. On the bad side, most of them are trying to sell us something in the process.

I really hope you like this new challenge! Best of luck, everyone!

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Some think and are lost in the ideas of what should be an answer, missing the obvious within the conflict of definitions. Life is this but it isn't that. This is real and that is illusion by such and such a reason, and reason having a freshness date can transmogrify into something other being that reason is projected from theories (thinking) rather than things that do not transmogrify or change and evolve with human awareness.

The internet is yet one more reflection of human thinking. It is diverse and it will continue to evolve as a reflection of mans need to find meaning in life.

The internet is a means of entertainment.

I think that life only has the meaning which each of us give it