Roots

This project has roots that go back to the late 1960's, and spans a wide range of subject areas connecting the humanities and deep intuition to technical issues in semantics and the foundations of analytic thinking.

The work began with studies in conceptual structure and the theory of categories and classification. How are word meanings constructed? Are there universal principles that govern the structure of thinking and the way categories are formed?

The doctrine of "closed loop interval ontology" is a recent idea that seems to solve the problem of establishing a common root for the vast diversity of semantic possibility.

Design

This project as it stands today (Tuesday, April 23, 2024) is a creative "mindstorm" - a flurry of semi-interconnected ideas that are held together in the context of a gradually emerging vision that spans much of human experience and motivation.

The actual structure of the project is configured on a database, with several major categories or types of written units, including

• Theme groups - collections of "themes" brought together in the project somewhat like chapters in a book. Like everything else, they are transient and ephemeral, and subject to change and reordering at any moment.
• Themes - statements about something interesting having to do with the subject introduced in the theme group
• Terms - the beginnings of a specific and perhaps formally-defined vocabulary for the project, emphasizing epistemology

Progress

This project is undergoing continuous creative evolution, across a very wide spectrum of interconnected subjects. We are following a "brain storm" approach to interconnecting subjects, as we free-associate between interesting subjects which we see as facets of a larger emerging whole. But this method makes our written presentation somewhat erratic. Some themes and subjects are fairly well-developed, and others are barely more than placeholders or notes.

So, as we continue to expand and edit this project, we are beginning to tag each theme or section with a progress level, a one-word status report on the condition of this particular unit. This is intended to help navigate the project.

Theme groups, themes and terms are now tagged with one of these terms, providing an approximate assessment of project status:

• Placeholder - a very basic and minimal starting point for something to be developed later
• Note - a few thoughts about something to be developed
• Sketch - an initial description of something
• Draft - the beginnings of an article or statement
• Polished - something we have looked at a few times, and want to feature in an attractive way

You can search the entire content of the project - all themes, theme groups and terms - from the left-hand menu.