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That doesn't surprise me. I'm something of a
student of Tao, though hardly a good practitioner. However, there is and always
has been this curious belief that we live in the best of times, and are so far
advanced beyond the people of the last generation, the last century, the last
millennium. Yet this is also an age where people devalue introspection, even as
we attempt to understand the way that we think. I suspect that the frameworks
have changed, the language for describing our perceptions have changed, but when
you get right down to it, but that we just keep rediscovering truths that
people who listened to a far slower rhythm than our MTV paced life already knew.
The Tao is relevant now, the truths of Buddha and Jesu and Mohammad are,
stripped of their religious baggage, still very much relevant to the insights of
our own perceptions. For us to forget this is human, of course .. the paths that
we each walk to enlightenment must perforce be our own ... but at the same time
for us to assume that we are the only ones who have contemplated our own
awareness is arrogant folly.
-- Kurt
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 4:43
PM
Subject: Fw: Nothing GNU Under the
Sun
I'll tell you what's even
spookier...
I've spent many of my years in college fascinated
by all the recent progress in cognitive models of the brain. "Wow, we
are learning a lot about how the mind works! This is going to
be a new world order, with all these critical discoveries now being
made. Society will change, now that we are starting to discover _how_ we
really think!!!"
However, a couple of years ago, I started
studying meditation, and realized the field of mind and matter has _already_
been understood, and documented, at a far deeper level of intuition,
sophistication, and consistency than present day cognitive psychology...this,
over 2500 years ago! http://www.buddhanet.net/abhidh05.htm
My point is, thorough knowledge and all the
answers already exists around us or within us...everything we all do in life
is basically trying to sift and sort preexisting, primordial knowledge in
different ways, hoping to 'click' with current structures in such a way to
best be known to society, and to benefit society. Whether it will be us
who gets the right combo, or another effort down the line, we don't know...but
trying out combinations, as we're doing, will ultimately benefit society
in the end.
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 5:51
PM
Subject: Re: Nothing GNU Under the
Sun
Whoa, that's spooky. It's almost as if the
whole of XML development and KM has been anticipated in that little blurb.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 1:33
PM
Subject: Nothing GNU Under the
Sun
I was just looking at a folder of papers on my desk that
included:
"New Elements of a Strategy for Knowlege Sharing and
Reuse
o Standardize a canonical form (knowledge interchange
format)
o Define common ontologies (vocabularies of representational
terms with agreed-upon definitions in human and machine
readable forms)
o Build libraries of ontologies and task-specific reasoning
tools
o Separate knowledge from programs by using a declarative
knowledge representation language
o Identify general classes and relations underlying
application
specific facets
o Generalize reasoning and problem solving
methods"
Source? Semantic web? Nope. Berners-Lee?
Nope.
The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort. Thomas Gruber.
October 1991. The membership list is a whos who of
AI today.
Some things take a long time to mature and when they
do, often other people's names are associated with
the success, but not the long long haul to get the
concepts ready for that success.
len
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