What People Ask Google When No One is Looking

As many of you know, Google has the ability to make suggestions for search phrases as you type.  These suggestions are based on what other people are most commonly searching for with the same combinations of words.  So, by starting a question, you can see how many others have finished it.  And, this can give interesting insights into what’s on people’s minds.

I based my question beginnings on different ways to group people, such as race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.  Why?  Because I believe people want to understand themselves and each other, but are afraid to ask certain questions to other humans.  So, they not ask Google instead.  After all, Google won’t judge. 

You’ll see a lot of questionos about stereotypes.  Perhaps I am a glass half full kind of guy, but I would like to think that people explore stereotypes to understand them and to eventually see past them.

Below are the results of my research.  Let me know what you think?

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Reflection and Meaning on the Web

Most people have heard of the conscious and subconscious mind.  Your conscious mind is the part of your mind you have conscious access to.  Your sub-conscious mind is the part of your mind that you don’t.  Below, I show you how this is mirrored in the web.

The web’s subconscious mind concerns the intelligence that is mined from what people do, without them necessarily knowing it.  This is often done through taking large amounts of search data, and finding interesting patterns in it.  Also, if it’s a site you buy from, then places like Amazon put you into various groups based on your choices and recommend what other people in your groups have chosen.

A lot of times things are done both consciously and subconsciously.  What unites consciousness and subconsciousness?  Two things:  Reflection and Meaning.  We consciously reflect on on what we are doing unconsciously, and we finding meaning with it.

Web 2.0 (the interactive and collaborative web) becomes Web 3.0 (the semantic web or the web of meaning) when it begins to reflect on itself and gives meaning to itself.  And, this is what we are doing when we mark up what we  create with semantic meta-data…such as tagging.

Web 2.0 will become Web 3.0 more and more when meaningful reflection (and the resulting meta-data) becomes a first class citizen of our content.  Meaning allows information to be leveraged in creative new ways.  So, there are some very exiting developments to come, and I definitely want to be part of that.

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A Slightly New Direction…

So far in my blog posts, I have either given you a tedious amount of background on me or went into relatively heavy theoretical stuff that I state as fact and don’t site references for (see The Components of Thought, The Origin of Thought, and Thought and the Environment as examples).

I think, moving forward I’m going to try to write more concrete posts that are more relevant to more people.  I’m not saying I won’t dabble in the theoretical.  I’ll just do less of it, and will better tie it to concrete applications.

My interest in computers is based primarly on interactions, such as the following:

• People interacting with themselves.
• People interacting with other people.
• People interacting in communities.
• People interacting with software.
• Software interacting with other software.
• And, lastly, people interacting with other people through software.

I think I got them all.  Anyway, the point is that there are lots of applications, particularly in the Web 2.0 community that are all about the above interactions.  Also, there are a lot of interesting ideas in both the design world and the software development world as well.  So, from now on I will try to hit these.

Eventually, I would also like to contribute software.  As I explore the landscape, I’ll better be able to formulate my ideas.

I think my next post will be about Twitter, as I’ve become a bit of an addict as of late.  My twitter id is @purecognition.  Give me a follow, if you like.

If you have been reading my blog, I thank you for your patience as I find my voice.  If you have an ideas for things I should look into, based on my previous posts, please feel free to comment.

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Thought and the Environment

This is the first post I’m doing through an add-on to FireFox called ScribeFire.  Let’s hope it works as planned.  Again, I apologize for the last of blog activity.  I am going to try hard to play a larger part in Web 2.0 starting right…now!

So, in my last post (ages ago) I talked about how a child’s interaction with their environment actually helps them formulate the symbol system that they use for throught.

Interestingly, interaction with the environment not only helps us to develop the ability to think, but it continues to support thought.  This often leads to an aspect of memory known as context specificity.  This means that you recall things easier in the environment in which you learned them.  For instance, people can remember recipes easier in their kitchen, where you use them.  There is a good chance that when you cook you probably take out everything you need and arrange it in such a fashion that it supports you in both reminding you how to cook the food and helping you keep track of where you are in the process and what you need to do next.  Atleast I hope that’s what happens.  I can make about 4 things, so this probably isn’t an ideal example for me to use.

The most interesting experience with this for me was when I started taking more advanced mathematics.  This was after spending a lot of time studying the above phenomena.  Mathematics is a complex truth-preserving symbol system that can be visually represented on paper.  So, when you look at a math problem being worked on, you are looking at thought.  Mathematics is basically a formalized discipline of thought with a standardized symbol system.  I can look at how someone reasoned about a math problem simply by looking at how they worked it out on paper, as long as I know the symbol system they are using.

So, this system system helps someone think through a problem, by supporting them in keeping track of where they are and where they can go with it.  It helps them to make sure that the steps they are taking are valid.  And, allows them to communicate their thought process with others, provided they share a common understanding of the system.

That’s the power of a truth-preserving symbol system and the means by which to represent it visually.  We can think through and communicate more complex problems.  This is a major step.  What kind of ways can and do computer assist as with this?

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The Origin of Thought

In my previous post, I explained how people have mental models of the world around them.  These models have “moving parts” that can be manipulated such that rules are followed and truth is preserved.  This manipulation can be called reasoning.  Where do these models and their symbol-systems come from?

Simply put, they come from experience.  In developmental psychology there is something called the naive sciences.  Young children have not been formally introduced to science, but that doesn’t stop them from being scientists.  Indeed, a toddler has an understanding of physics and mathematics even though they have not been formally taught these.  Children’s experiences in the world consist of tiny informal experiments.  They learn the laws of gravity, friction, and momentum simply by living in a world where these things act upon both them and the objects that they come into contact with.  Naive science is the science that we learn from experience before we are formally taught it.  This is where our mental models and symbol systems begin to form.  We internalize the things we externally experience.  We then use this to act in a way that achieves desired outcomes that our mental models predict.

This is the beginning of abstract thought and reasoning.  Next I’ll discuss how we offset thought onto our environment in order to assist with constraints put on our working memory.  Trust me, I’m going somewhere. 

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