There are days when I awaken
To a feeling of the buzzing, humming
Nature that flows from
Moments of calm awareness
My senses team to show me a new
Environs with fresh fields, hills and rocks
I might have asked a question to which
My senses reponded: This!
A next challenge, another step
A new path, my current direction
Orientation can be a comforting
Embrace of love, recline into warmth
………
From a notebook entry, 30 Nov 2005
Heavily influenced by Allan Watts
That each practice, craft, art, emotion, occupation, trait, or other aspect of existence is a mental space.
That each mental space is multi-dimensional itself.
That humans encounter mental spaces by realizing and understanding them.
To describe how a human encounters a mental space:
- At first, we have no awareness, understanding of the mental space.
- Then, they realize it as uni-dimensional. Geometrically this is a point, dot in the mental space.
- This encounter creates an event horizon, behind which there are new possibilities within the event horizon that present further access to the dimensions of that mental space.
- Gradually and progressively our capacity for realization and understanding increases. That is, our capacity for experiencing more dimensions in that mental space increases.
- So, we begin to realize and understand a mental space dimension by dimension.
- Readiness, fitness, experience, will, motivation, ability, or other characteristics contribute to and define the capacity for experiencing more.
That this encounter is a mental or cognitive singularity. (As opposed to a mathematical, algebraic, technological, etc., singularity.)
- Not all cognitive singularities are devastating, say, as one might interpret a singularity Kurzweil discusses.
- Cognitive singularities vary in capacity and intensity.
- The maturity of cognitive singularities could be indexed, measured.
That the entirety of mental spaces I would call a “chromatic latticework” of mental spaces.
- The chromatic lattice’s fabric is described by the dimensionality of three kinds of mental spaces:
- Intra-mental spaces: those regarding one’s own mentality.
- Inter-mental spaces: those regarding mental spaces shared between interacting individuals.
- Extra-mental spaces: those regarding social, cultural, and that span multiple individuals. These exist beyond individuals, regardless of their awareness of them.
- The entirety of these spaces describes human knowledge.
- Are there a-, pre-, or para-cognitive spaces?
< End of Part 1 >
Pre-searching is a behavior pattern I’ve noticed as people key in potential search terms to a search box that gives suggestions.
Foraging behavior begins before the search results page, since users can check their idea of what they want to find based on what’s suggested by the engine. Much like the “QuickLook” design pattern eliminates the pogo-effect on retail sites, the suggested keyword can eliminate a pogo-effect from search results page (SRP) to a new entry.
This reminds me of the earliest ‘suggested search keywords’ I remember, which were on the SRP – either at the top or bottom of the SRP – and suggested related keywords, especially more detailed variants or subtopics.
Variations on where and how pre-searching happens
Google’s Chrome address bar is the most familiar “suggested keywords” to me. Of course, Google added this to their www.google.com search box a few years ago, if my memory serves correctly. I recall Firefox having a robust URL suggestion in version 3. Around that time, I was in frequent working sessions with a projector. I watched with amusement as people would use that suggestion as a pre-processor, if you will, for where they wanted to go or what they wanted to find.
Prospective suggestions would serve up keywords not in your history. Retrospective suggestions would serve up keywords, URLs, etc., in your history.
Some sites provied “popular terms”, which serve a similar function as suggestions, but they’re ‘canned’. It seems that most ‘popular’ keyword collections are: (a) not dynamic; (b) stuffed with marketing-oriented keywords; (c) extremely limited.
Am I coining “pre-searching”? Or, is it already documented?
Perhaps someone’s already coined this or another term for the same behavior pattern. I take the step – as my science education compels me – to formalize the idea for future reference. After all, having this in hand might help me convince a client that suggested keywords are worth the effort.
If you know of a reference to behavioral pattern matching this one, please comment so I can keep up with it. And, perhaps update this post.
Just Reading the Paper
This is to thank all of the journalists, reporters, newspaper columnists and editors who have applied critical thinking to subjects that I cannot see from my daily position in this world, but want to know about. I appreciate your contribution for how it has made me feel at ease, at home with the practice of challenging ideas.
I have a vivid memory of when I realized this: Someome on the radio said something while I was just lightly paying attention to the story. The commemt slipped an argument I would normally disagree with below my radar, and it got past my front-line defenses, it got past the the cognitive frames and constructs that define my usual positions. I started thinking about this unwelcome, uninvited argument from the speaker’s perspective. I completely bought into it. I started seeing past experiences that could’ve brought the speaker to their beliefs. I started seeing how their cognitive frames sealed and secured their worldview.
I am better off for having slogged through the battlefields where ideas, ideologies, and styles compete.
Now, I play a new game as I get to know other people. The game: A way to think through problems the way my partner in conversation would. I try to see how they got to their positions, opinions, or conclusions. Sometimes I find that the ends of those paths are familiar – a place I know of, a person I know, a character I’ve seen. After evaluating another’s perspective more thoroughly, I have a more complete understanding of their world-view. Often times, I am won-over to a perspective that is altogether new to me. Rarely do I become entrenched, because in the long run, I spend more time challenging their world-view and mine.
I enjoy the fruits of your labor every day when I listen to the radio, or when I read newspaper articles. If it harmed you that I didn’t pay for your work I consumed, I apologize. I love the idea of a reporter as one who digs to reveal. It’s romantic. But, the investigative reporter is a stronger kind of energy. A tension to open criticism to the public. A daring and bravery for being in the practice of analyzing and critiquing the politics and regularity every day.
I hope I get to see your profession bond with other parts of our lives, our markets, our economies to focus even more by grafting onto or being inside those entities. I have a dream that as newspapers – or, even the formal news outlets – deconstruct and dissolve the reporters take their trade into organizations as investigators on the inside. I dream and hope that investigative reporters develop a function akin to what user experience (UX) does: To analyze, criticize, improve upon how companies communicate within and without, how companies behave, how companies plan and develop.
Happily challenged and educated by your work,
Jay