Today's Topics:
Theocratic Networking
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Date: Tue, 11 Dec 90 01:11:46 -0500
From: Michael Travers <mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
Subject: Theocratic Networking
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
O R I G I N
Out of Many, One
ORIGIN is an idealistic, transcendental, and "utopian" design
for national and international computer networking.
Within the framework of a single design concept, ORIGIN
research projects are intended to simultaneously involve concepts
from religion and theology, Cognitive Science and advanced
theoretical psychology, linguistics and computer science research,
and those areas of national or international politics where our
research conclusions may be pertinent.
Thus, the ORIGIN concept is highly inclusive, and is based on
our "vision of the network", which supposes that the rapidly
expanding growth of international telecommunications, and the
continuing evolution of Information Science, is creating a highly
ideal potential for broad human welfare, which must be recognized
and actualized if these potential benefits are to be fully
realized.
The ORIGIN networking and research design is intended to
develop along an advancing front involving numerous simultaneous
and related aspects or sub-projects, which are organized "in
parallel". The integrity of the design flows from our higher-
level research into Cognitive Science and language design, and
thus we are concerned with a variety of related projects in the
mathematics of language and cognition. We are researching the
topic of dimensionality, particularly as it relates to the general
form of information structure and cognitive organization, and from
there, we explore how this abstract general form realizes actual
form and existence in the particular languages and data structures
of today's international political and economic environment.
In a traditional sense, the ORIGIN design might be described
as "theocratic", because it is intended to accomplish objectives
very similar to those pursued by traditional religious idealists
or "utopianists", who have endeavored to introduce classical
religious or spiritual idealism into the political affairs of a
broadly inclusive social group.
Much of the scientific work developed within the framework of
the ORIGIN design is intended to ovecome the debilitating
epistemological weaknesses of traditional religion, which have
forced classical theocratic idealism to remain little more than
speculative and impractical arm-chair philosophy.
Traditionally, religious ideals have necessarily been
grounded or authenticated in the personal and private spiritual
experiences and philosophies of inspired and charismatic religious
leaders, whose ideas have been codifed and institutionalized
within the social context of a specific culture or historical
epoch. Within the traditional context of this implicit "social
fabric", it has throughout history occasionally been possible to
ground the speciics of an entire social order in spiritual
idealism, by maintaining an adequate and intuitively grounded
"spirit of interpretation" of the original and founding spiritual
doctrines of a culture, -- an interpretation and "mediation" which
has always inevitably been required in order to translate the
somewhat vague and weakly defined elements of religious philosophy
into the precise empirical specifics of political reality.
But in today's cosmopolitan world, with its "melting pot"
atmosphere, and its advancing respect for the rights of
individuals and minorities, it is no longer possible to ground the
spiritual philosophy and ethics of a culture in an implicit
"spirit of interpretation", as mediated by an elite priesthood,
and based on the ethical philosophy or metaphysical idealism of
some one particular charismatic and inspired spiritual leader.
With due respect for individual rights in our highly diversified
contemporary social environment, we have been in many cases forced
to remove from our public affairs any solid grounding in a body of
"ideological" principles, regardless of how generic or universal.
Thus, the argument against "prayer in school", for example,
requires us to sacrifice in our public schools any hope of
grounding the education of our children in some higher concept of
spiritual truth, because we are unable to agree on just exactly
what this might mean in detail, and we recognize the dangers
implicit in requiring all of us to acknowledge any one particular
body of traditional beliefs over any other.
Yet there is associated with the "freedom to choose" thus
protected an unfortunate but inevitable lack of public moral and
ethical wisdom or authority, since any such authority must be
fundamentally grounded in a "non-scientific" belief system of some
particular and somewhat arbitrary cultural characteristics. In the
United States of America, rather than pick one such belief system
over any other, we have been forced to retreat to the broadest and
least constrained sort of traditional idealism, which almost entirely
removes from our schools and from at our culture at large the parochial
and "narrowing" guidance of any implicit ethical philosophy which
extends beyond the range defined by civil and criminal laws.
In its present formulation, the design for ORIGIN is not yet
concerned with making specific political judgments, or taking
formally-grounded positions on moral or ethical issues. As we
seek to define and expand the linked dimensionality of our various
research programs, however, we remain motivated by our deeper
concern for broad social welfare, and the need to establish in
noncontroversial and genuinely authoritative terms some decisive
and effective means to assemble and correlate and disseminate the
collective insight and wisdom of the broader human family.
As a preliminary phase of this ambition, we are attempting to
formally define or synthesize from various network resources a
highly refined syncretic composite of ethical and moral
principles, which could be founded on scientific method and on
pertinent "state of the art" information from a highly diversified
range of sources, -- rather than on epistemologically flawed and
ambiguous cultural traditions, ancient scriptures, and "the spirit
of interpretation". Surveying the wide range of spiritually
inspired and unquestionably authentic cultural and philosophic
traditions found in the melting pot atmosphere of today's
religious environment, the ORIGIN design is an attempt to formally
synthesize from this broad diversity an "essential common core of
eternal truths".
In our continuing attempt to formulate a general theory of
mind and spiritual metaphysics, our research into cognitive
epistemology and theological hermeneutics leads us to believe that
it should eventually be possible to build a formal interpretive
system that systematizes the traditional elements of religious
diversity, correlates these in various ways, and seeks to redefine
a common central core of tested and "time invariant" insights upon
which most classical and recognized philosophies might reach
formal agreement.
From the myriad and highly diversified sources of spiritual
wisdom and insight which meet in comptetitive confluence in
today's spiritual environment, the ORIGIN design is thus an
attempt to formally synthesize a common body of central core
invariants, which all classical traditions hold in common, and
which can form the genuine foundation for an illuminated New Age
of genuine planetary enlightenment. In the spirit of "E Pluribus
Unum", ORIGIN stands as a formal and programmatic means to
synthesize through contemporary technology a means that in
harmonious confluence, the varied traditions of world religion can
overcome their competitive Babel, and join in contributing to the
common enlightenment which would seem to be our highest and most
desirable destiny.
ORIGIN RESEARCH, PO Box 23346, Santa Barbara, CA 93121, 11/11/88
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End of Subgenius Digest
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