A Cosmist Blogifesto

Thanks to Michael Anissimov for the news: Dr. Ben Goertzel just published the working draft of a new book, A Cosmist Manifesto, accessible here for free as a series of blog posts.  I treat Dr. Goertzel's perspectives most seriously, and encourage everyone to check his writings and speeches.  I have yet to read this work, and will provide feedback there, as I encourage others to do.  That Dr. Goertzel, whom I hold in the highest esteem, is choosing to use this medium provides an opportunity to communicate with him constructively on his ideas. 

 
Many of us have had difficulty explaining the advantages of the blog platform to others.  I know I was quite stubborn to accept the medium, for all the usual reasons.  One of my former housemates, John Ruscher, blogged about music in Charlottesville, and I derided his work and his technology incessantly.  I was ignorant, became biased, and allowed my biases to sustain my ignorance even as John built a community for music and made a lasting impact on the culture of my city. 
 
A blog, generally, is a discrete set of data arranged ordinally, usually temporally.  While Dr. Goertzel uses the discrete nature of posts in a manner conventional in the blogosphere, he has forgone temporal ordering for his audience, instead arranging posts like chapters of a book meant to be read in a particular order.  Blogs are not books: I could link you to a particular chapter of his work, and you may assume the idea complete, without the constraining contexts intended by the author within the larger work.  Like the album goes the book, as we evolve to an ecosystem dominated by linguistic singles. 
 
Within each discrete post are typically three main datastreams: the title, the main content, and comments.  While all are typically text entries, this is not necessarily the case, and I'm hopeful we can facilitate conversation here at Teme with conversations in art and music and cinema.  Because Dr. Goertzel's book does not currently allow such expression, the principle difference between his use of a blog over book is the addition of comments, themselves discrete blog-posts tied to a particular parent in a threaded manner.    That Dr. Goertzel allows comments is a call for the internet community to blog back: His dualistic structure allows reading of his chapters as both intelligently designed and socially evolved frames. 
 
The Teme Foundation's core principle is to utilize technology to build ecosystems for our ideas to evolve.  Clearly Dr. Goertzel understands this power of technology as a platform, enabling us to respond as his own ideas optimize.  I encourage others to join me as I take him up on the opportunity.