On October 27, 2000, Andrius Kulikauskas submitted a draft of MindSet, version 0.1 for discussion. We invite you to read our correspondence. Would you like to participate? Write to Andrius Kulikauskas, ms@ms.lt, leader of our working group, for information on how to join us.
Our members include: Jeffry Archambeault, KK Aw, Zigmas Bigelis, Jenson Crawford, Stephen Danic, Ben Darnell, Hans Donner, Nick Duffill, Flemming Funch, Joseph A. Goguen, Anna Herbert, John Harland, Dr. Rodney King, Yasuaki Kudo, Andrius Kulikauskas, Kernan Manion, Saulius Maskeliunas, Cass McNutt, MindJET, LLC, Mark Oeltjenbruns, Roy Roebuck, Andrew Taylor, TheBrain Technologies, Carol H. Tucker, Raimundas Vaitkevicius, Caspar van Beek, William Wagner, Kenneth Yu of nwis.net.
We Share Our Mental Workspace
Why We Think Openly
How ...
What ...
Whether ...
R e s p o n s e : We bring to life a culture that fosters thinking about our own thoughts. Our culture helps us to invest ourselves in our thoughts, challenges us to take up new perspectives on our thoughts, and invites us to share the joy of our thoughts.
I n s p i r a t i o n : Our minds are gifts, especially our ability to express our hearts. We must apply our gifts on behalf of all, so that we share a joy that goes beyond our gifts. We must aim, not to be comfortable, but to be open to each other, linked heart-to-heart. This is what all would want us to do.
V i s i o n : Let every mind reflect every heart.
Our minds work particularly, they are optimized differently: they may or may not offer sight or hearing, they run at different speeds, they apply different languages, they contain different experiences. Yet what truly matters are the general concepts that the mind can play with and reflect the heart. These are the same for every heart.
We wish to rely on general concepts rather than particular minds.
By thinking about our own thoughts, we make our thoughts general. We step beyond the special nature and particular experience of our minds. We think unhindered thoughts, like children or fools, that can express every heart.
Having the wisdom of experience, it takes an act of will to abandon it. We wish to support every will, both by diminishing the unnecessary difficulties, and encouraging the necessary resolve.
We encourage ourselves to look at our thoughts from new perspectives, that we might have new feelings, see new connections. We eliminate our expectations, the meanings derived of our unique experiences. We brush aside patterns that they may rise anew, independent of any perspective, for our thoughts can encompass more than our minds, and the patterns that persist are profound.
We make it simpler to hold our thoughts, that we may walk around them, and separate the general content from the particular presentation. We extend our mental workspace for our thoughts, putting to memory, writing on paper, recording with computer, and most importantly, granting to society our thoughts that they may thrive. We rejoice that we may build tools with software, but we look to every aspect of everyday life throughout the entire world as a workspace that we all may think about our own thoughts.
We develop tools that are truly useful, by which we may shape our minds, working with one perspective, but regularly switching to another, fostering the difficult habit of embracing that perspective which may best further shape us.
We think openly so that our wills may always remove every particular experience from our minds, that we may think through the general concepts that persist. We wish to reflect the depths of any heart.
We must start by thinking of ourselves as creators of tools for thinking. We arrange our thoughts, both inside and outside of our minds. We use and design our own minds. Designers must think as users, and users must think as designers. Only then are we able to think together.
We each devote tremendous personal energy and artistic integrity that the tools we create may offer genuine support for a particular mental perspective. We accept that each of us must choose our own styles, licenses and languages.
We must each start by working independently. Only as individuals can we conclude that the requirements which truly matter for thinking are given by the limits of our minds. We must always return to our individual values that we may know what is true. We can organize ourselves only by means of shared values that we each take from living reality, not unexamined authority.
We must all end by working together. Otherwise, we lead ourselves and other fools to the brink of fallacy - that our tool will solve all problems, that our tool will last forever, that our tool can be valuable by itself.
Instead, we intend our tools to work together, and so we concentrate on specific uses. We wish our tools to be kind, and prefer to serve the preferences and requirements of particular minds, rather than all minds. We require our tools to support import/export standards and modeling languages that assure our thoughts do not get trapped in any tool. We expect our tools to yield genuine benefits, and so we foster a culture of usage, that we may understand how they shape our minds over the long term, in conjunction with other tools.
We need to motivate ourselves to work together, but no compensation can encourage us to compromise our particular visions of what is useful. We can be motivated to work together only by the joy that we share with all who find our tools useful.
Users of our tools will have the greatest joy when the thoughts they express can thrive within a network of tool making users, and take on a life of their own. We wish to bring to life this network that it may bring down every limit between our minds and our society.
The specification that we refer to, as individual creators of tools for thinking, should be the conceptual space available to the human mind. Through our network, we continuously educate ourselves about this space, and also evaluate the usefulness of our modeling languages with regard to expressing this space.
A network that only serves itself will run out of energy and be worthless. As soon as we can, we reach out and benefit others. We help independent thinkers, who are too often isolated, so that their ideas may move through society. We also work with enterprises that value independent thinking, that we may best integrate our network with the infrastructure of our society.
The elegance of our network depends on its conceptual validity. We challenge our understanding by continuously expanding the relevance to a wider audience with simpler mental resources and purer mental interests.
The growth of our network depends on rapid and profound feedback. We wish there to be numerous small but important projects. Our network must offer many ways for people with few economic resources to justify their participation. Otherwise, our network loses avenues for responsive feedback. We envisage that these services will open up our network to every individual of our society that they may contribute what and how they are thinking.
Public Domain 2000