A few of the background ideas driving the Thortspace ecosystem
Some of my favourite thoughts to try to think
Our world is facing crises along multiple dimensions.
We need better media in which we can think collaboratively — media which would allow us, as a community of thinkers, to achieve transformational thinking.Thortspace aggregates the thinking of crowds, in a
qualitative rather than quantitative way, to produce
wholes that redefine the meaning of their parts.Thortspace … Mind. Blowing.
Jean Piaget — Knowledge is a process, more than a state
The common postulate of various traditional epistemologies [theories of valid knowledge] is that knowledge is a fact and not a process and that if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various sciences still imperfect, that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically.
Hence the absolute position of the problems “What is knowledge?” or “How are the various types of knowledge possible?”
… Under the converging influence of a series of factors we are tending, more and more today, to regard knowledge as a process more than a state.~ Jean Piaget — Genetic Epistemology
“Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of design, so much so that the Human Centred Design principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible, but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations.”
~ From “The Design of Everyday Things”, Donald A. Norman
What is given to us primarily is the unity of an equipmental whole, a unity which constantly varies in range, expanding or contracting, and that is expressly visible to us for the most part only in excerpts. The view in which the equipmental contexture stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view and sight of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. “Unthought” means that the equipmental whole is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking; instead in circumspection we find our bearings with regard to the equipmental whole.
~ From “Basic Problems of Phenomenology”, Martin Heidegger
Japanese: We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable.
Heidegger: That is part, I believe, or every dialogue that has turned out well between thinking beings. As if of its own accord, it can take care that that undefinable something, not only does not slip away, but displays its gathering force ever more luminously in the course of the dialogue.~ From “On The Way to Language”, Martin Heidegger
“Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.”-Han-Shan, Translated by Gary Snyder
“Like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind.”
~ Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman
