Thinking about thinking

In isolation, these three conceptual models are pretty valueless. Their value can only be realised when they are mixed together with a number of other concepts to form a strategy. To be effective, the concepts must complement each other , forming a multitude of different criteria to base decisions upon.

Marvin Minsky, in his book "The Society of Mind" writes about the quality of genius. He expresses the opinion that genius can largely be accounted for by what he describes as: "unconscious administrative skills that knit the things we know together". This can be applied to the idea of selecting conceptual components for a suitable strategy to cope with the Internet.

He reasons that geniuses don't crop up very often because society wouldn't be efficient if everyone mixed what they know around in their heads to come up with individually different novel solutions. Minky says that involuntary factors are at work to curb this tendency because a co-operating group is far more efficient if everyone is working along the same lines of thought.

This natural tendency for a group to think in unison is fine when the group is coping with known and familiar environments, but, as soon as it encounters an environment where the group strategy isn't working, the group is then open to new ideas. It'll be more receptive to group members re-mixing what they know around in their heads. This is the process that is at work now as the Industrial Age changes into the Information Age. It is probably why the reader is reading this book.

Marvin Minsky describes adaptive thinking as a network of circular activities in the mind. A kind of coming together of a host of mini-minds all working independently but in unison to come up with a solution. He says it is foolishness to ask if any of the individual components of this thinking processes are applicable because each in its own way contribute towards a final resolution. It makes no sense to look at any part in particular because their effect on a system's overall performance is too dependent upon the other parts. Like those original Apple Macintosh manuals: no part can be understood without knowing how all the other parts work.

This thinking process of mixing up many concepts, or mini minds, Marvin Minsky refers to as "multiply-connected knowledge-nets" . He suggests that the process involved is not so much dependent upon coming up with lots of novel solutions, but, using ingenuity and clever tricks to weed out all the nonsense: leaving only the realistic possibilities.

Bearing this in mind, the three conceptual models above are simply mini minds that have to be put to work. They cannot work by themselves, they'll have to be joined with many others. The trick though, is to make an appropriate selection of other conceptual models to minimise the number of absurdities that might arise.

As we saw with the Macintosh programmers and the young children learning a language, this process cannot be arranged by just throwing hundreds of things together. It has to be built from the bottom up, starting with a few components at a time and building on to that base to expand upwards and outwards. This is the basis of bottom up, object orient design that we shall be dealing with later in the book

Here, we've made a random start with a few concepts that relate to communicating. We know this will be as good as any other place to start because the Internet is about communication. We shall now go on to add a few more concepts into this mix and see what evolves. And, please bear in mind that it is unlikely that the concepts we'll be dealing with in this book will give everyone the same conclusions. If that were to be the case, we could have started with the kind of bullet list the Industrial Age academic was calling for.