"I link, therefore I am."--The emergence of hypertextual consciousness

Hypertextual Consciousness 1.0
http://www.altx.com/htc1.0/

 

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The way the human mind does this is through a combination of subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivty has higher entropy or more degrees of freedom while objectivity defines lower entropy or fewer degrees of freedom based on rational constraints.

Picture the situation of trying to grow a perfect crystal. What we will begin with is the high entropy or the subjective state of a molten salt composed of all the ingredients needed to make the crystal. This would be like generating a bunch of random words and phrases in the context of a theme. There does not have to be any order in that molten flux, just ingredients.

Next, we add a seed crystal, which is a small but low entropy sample of how we want the things to crystalize out. This has to be an objective standard in the sense that a given order needs to created from the random; repetition of a crystal.

Next we cool the molten flux of random words and phrases so the cnstituents of the crystal can crystalize out onto the objective seed. Cooling is lowering the entropy of the molten flux of words and phrases, reducing the level of random within our molten flux with the needed material lowering entropy even further in the context of the seed crystal.

It will not be a one step process, but will have many stages.

 

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Excellent and vivid analogy! I was trying to think what this "cooling" influence on language might be that lowers it's entropy and increases its self-interactive potential. And it appears Mcluhan has already beat me to the punch with his distinction between "hot" and "cool" media:

MCLUHAN ON HOT AND COOL MEDIA
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...l hot media cool media&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&strip=1

I would add that with words you also have this factor of weighted clustering going on where certain words link up better with other words. In the crystallization scenario this would be something like how molecules form thru their own "grammar" of atoms and electrical charges.

 

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HYPERTEXT PARADIGM

http://www.faced.ufba.br/~edc708/biblioteca/interatividade/web paradigma/Hypertext.html

 

How so?

Word salad.