7 ms·

Noosphere, a Protocol for Thought

140 points by dgudkov 4y ago

morsch 4y ago
Man's achievement is to have created a world of rhyme, in the intimate imagination which is as real in its way as any country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it "The Third World" or "World 3". The first world is the objective world of things. The second world is my inner subjective world; but, says Popper, there's a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts. Teilhard de Chardin calls this third world the "Noosphere", that is, the world of the mind.
- lisper 4y ago
  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
  - morsch 4y ago
    Sure. It's lyrics from a song, though. ;) https://genius.com/The-orb-oobe-lyrics https://genius.com/The-orb-oobe-lyrics I was curious if anybody would pick up on it, but I guess it's a pretty obscure song. Not sure where the sample is from originally, actually.
    - lisper 4y ago
      > it's a pretty obscure song Gee, ya think?
      - morsch 4y ago
        It's not like it's my cousin's band, it's The Orb. They were even in the charts that one time. But I'll be sure to include a Willie Nelson reference for you at some point in the future.
        lisper 4y ago
        Just because it's a well-known band doesn't mean that you can reasonably expect people to be familiar with that particular passage, especially since it doesn't look like a song lyric, it looks like prose, and you posted it without attribution, or even a hint that it was anything other than what it appears on the surface to be: prose. And it's not just prose, it's prose of the sort that one might expect to find here on HN. So you should not be surprised when someone's Bayesian prior on that passage leans heavily towards original prose. (The real irony here is that it actually is a deepity, it just happens to be sourced from a context where deepities are normal.)
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Let's give credit where credit is due - The Platonists from Plato to Plotinus. The "noosphere" isn't a new concept, it's hundreds upon hundreds of years old and has a rich history in the construction and blossoming of ontology itself id est the noetic world. It's important to understand the history, context, and dialogues of noetics otherwise one might be taken advantage of. The noosphere is none other than an ecological adaptation of noetics confirmed to fit modernism ie: the inexorable march of progress narrative. Roughly mid-20th century, noetics we're reframed as a process of externalizing/alienating internal social ontologies as if they were real things. Again, it's important to understand this so as not to commit the previous historical sins. The reason I bring this up is because people inadvertently (or purposely) externalize their personal ontologies as fact nearly all the time. There's great constructive power in "is" and anyone interacting with the "Noosphere" should be actively aware as such.
turnsout 4y ago
This looks like really cool technology, but what is the use case for "normal" users? The Subconscious site [1] which leverages this library lists the key value propositions as "Own Your Data," "Decentralized," and "Open Source," which are three things average users demonstrably don't care about. I'm also concerned about the immutability of information stored in this way. [2] There are a number of reasons why immutability (in this case a fully public version history) is an anti-feature, with significant real-world risks. I would push the protocol authors to fully consider the ramifications of doxxing, harassment, accidental self-disclosure, etc—especially in authoritarian nations. If they don't have a story for how they'll handle this, it's not an appropriate foundation for the internet of ideas. [1]: https://subconscious.network https://subconscious.network [2]: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/design/explainer.md#immutable-data https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/d...
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  >but what is the use case for "normal" users? >three things average users demonstrably don't care about I always ask this question myself (and have an interest in all things no-code). But this is about the underlying Internet layers. For decades, from the ARPANET to the IETF, a small clique were unchallenged and unhurried in presenting their solutions methodically in RFC after RFC. They did a great job. Now The upper OSI model is breaking up. Everybody has a vision and a voice. Every day brings new projects like this one here in HN. There is not even large consensus around that leading Web3 banner [0]. So, IMO this natural selection process will take us at least a decade (or two?) to coagulate into standards that support mainstream "normal users" use cases [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33469978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33469978
- mattdesl 4y ago
  A lot of users do care about this when push comes to shove. An example is happening on Twitter: a lot of users want to escape Twitter onto another platform, but they are 'locked' to the walled garden because they don't own their data in a way that allows for an exit. IPFS isn't perfect but does give you the ability to migrate to other (competing) hosting platforms without having to change your URLs. I'd argue that a similar thing happens with end-to-end encryption. A lot of users don't care or even think about whether their Twitter or Mastodon direct messages are encrypted, until a malicious actor reads these messages or a data breach has them released online.
lioeters 4y ago
> The name? Noosphere means planetary consciousness, a hypothetical new evolutionary phenomena arising from the biosphere. It’s a lighthearted joke, but also an aspiration. Originally, the term "noosphere" appeared in the work of the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, first published in 1926. The word "biosphere" was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911. > In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky Another thinker who developed the concept of the "noosphere" is a French Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, written in the 1930s, he: > set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity. > The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin This "Omega point" is a precursor to the concept of the technological "Singularity" - but with a more explicit religious/spiritual connotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point#Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point#Technological_sing...
- bodge5000 4y ago
  Had no idea Noosphere was a "real" thing, I just assumed it was a reference to 40k
  - WJW 4y ago
    40k takes a lot of inspiration from older scifi works, generally making it more grimdark and turning it up to 11. Especially older 40k lore has this a lot, when budgets were a lot smaller and the lore was a lot less developed. Generally, if it was cool and/or grimdark it could get a place somewhere in the vast 40k galaxy. Space marines have been a staple of the genre since forever, titans come straight out of anime, starch cubes are quite literally soylent green (it's even given a wink in Necromunda, being called "Soylent Viridian") and of course the God Emperor was there first in the Dune series.
nathias 4y ago
this would be useful if the app had automatic/semiautomatic linking, and maybe something like code completion
louison11 4y ago
Author seems very smart, and has probably done some good consciousness work to show up with these ideas... but this is completely ungrounded & disconnected from any real use case & understanding of market dynamics... much like the rest of Web3.
- cle 4y ago
  What changes could the author make to keep this grounded and connected?
  - olah_1 4y ago
    Explain it in terms of what people already know, like Wikipedia for example. Help the reader to imagine what kind of world this tech enables.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- the-printer 4y ago
  This is essentially what I gathered. I myself am on the borders of becoming a hardcore sneakernet enthusiast.
- cbreynoldson 4y ago
  I think the post is a bit misleading (e.g. "for everybody" makes it sound like "everybody" can do something about this right now), but I think this comment misses the point of the protocol. This is (I think) supposed to be a shared language between note-taking apps (and eventually others that include "thoughts" I presume). The hopes are that it does "affect everybody," but it is not something that can "affect everybody" without "apps" speaking in this shared language. If you are not somebody who works on these kinds of things, then yea, probably useless to you for now. I think the author wants interoperability at the "thought" level between apps that support users inputting their ideas.
- fudged71 4y ago
  Explain? Have you missed all of the enthusiasm around "Tools For Thought" and the lack of interoperability between those tools?
daveguy 4y ago
https://archive.ph/O2adZ https://archive.ph/O2adZ
ChrisClark 4y ago
What does CID mean? I can't find it explained, Content ID? Is this a normal TLA I should already know? Edit: It's in one of the images. Content ID.
- cdata 4y ago
  Sorry for the confusion! It's a borrowed concept from the domain of IPFS (https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/). There is a short introduction to the concept here: https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/cid/ https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/cid/
  - ChrisClark 4y ago
    Thanks, this all looks really neat. Just getting my head around it though. I've been interested in IPFS for a long time, but still haven't dug into it.
Kiboneu 4y ago
I think cross-references are akin to dictionary words. They describe in their own right a novel and potentially useful relationship. In order to define and communicate these relationships well there ought to be a system of organization that treats cross-references as first-class citizens. Perhaps we could use something to assist the flow of information between researchers within syntopic fields. So to see a generic system like the Memo / Spheres system makes me pretty happy.
Pabloski80 4y ago
Could it be possible to build a kind of wikipedia around it?
- cdata 4y ago
  Yes, it should be possible. Wikipedia is one of the great treasure troves of knowledge on the hypertext web. We want it to be very easy for Wikipedia-like things to emerge from Noosphere.
lijogdfljk 4y ago
Is there a more defined set of memo types? I first expected a "protocol for thought" to have more thought oriented types and relationships. This just seems like Notes on IPFS. Am i missing something?
- cdata 4y ago
  You're not missing something. It's a little reductive, but the protocol did start with the use case of "notes on IPFS." One of the essential benefits of this protocol above and beyond content stored on IPFS is: you get human-readable names for your content and your peers, and you can use those names to form links that refer to other data. Memos give us a way to deliver free-form headers up-front that are also decoupled from the raw data of the content, which is very nice to have when resolving links to content you don't know much about. Other protocols in this domain start with the premise: in order to organize thought, we should crystalize the data structures to represent thought. In our approach we seek to develop a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form (or even that there should be only one representation).
  - CrypticShift 4y ago
    > a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form Are there Math theorems that "proves" this sort of "highly abstract" level of designs? Are there Academics working on this? or is this uncharted territory?
    - cdata 4y ago
      Gordon is the better founder to ask this question of. Alas, he does not dwell on Hacker News. I'm just the resident code monkey, but I'll offer you some of Gordon's topical blog posts for consideration: - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with-alphabets https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with... - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-living-complexity https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-livi... - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds Gordon and I both try to be available to talk as often as possible in our Discord, though.
olah_1 4y ago
This sounds eerily similar to https://anytype.io https://anytype.io
- cdata 4y ago
  Anytype seems to be playing in the same general space that we are. But, all I know about it is what I can glean from their website, so I can't say for sure how similar it is in concrete terms. To offer one distinction: while both projects are at an early stage and undergoing development, Noosphere has been open source from the beginning. You can scrutinize our work and kick the cans on it today (warning: very alpha / do not use in production). We invite active participation from all who are interested, and welcome contributions to our Github projects. https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
  - olah_1 4y ago
    I would love to try it out, but what is the current user experience exactly? All the code is in Rust, so is it command line only for now? Is there a text editing app with a social element where you follow other people?
    - cdata 4y ago
      Currently we have a CLI that demonstrates multi-device synchronization in principle. You can install it using `cargo install noosphere-cli` (it installs a binary called "orb"). We also have pre-built binaries of orb for x86_64 Linux that you can find on our releases on Github (e.g., https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/releases/tag/noosphere-cli-v0.3.0 https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/releases/ta...). We'll be expanding our pre-built binaries to include other platforms soon. Also, we have recently released a Swift package that gives a path to easily install our project as a dependency in XCode. We're turning the corner on offering the same FFI backing implementation as a TypeScript + WASM package, too. But, as I mentioned it's early days for us, so set your expectations accordingly. The best way to stay up to date with new things you can do is join our Discord. I make regular announcements there about our technical progress.
voidhorse 4y ago
I'm curious to see how some of these "multiplayer" knowledge graph ideas play out and if/how they wind up being different from the current web (I'm guessing they will mostly produce a bunch of 'smol' webs that are little siblings of the web we already have sans singular info brokers/filters like popular search engines). Personally, I've tried maintaining a personal knowledge graph and it's...not for me. I find having to process everything digitally and dealing with the sheer amount of information presented to be too overwhelming. I much prefer notebooks, where I only ever see "one thing at a time" even though there's a sea of information in there. The only substantial benefit digital tools provide over notebooks, to me, are hyperlinks, and that's even marginal if you mostly reference only either your own notes or complete books (vs. websites, at which point it becomes substantially more useful). Notebooks are still way faster for information capture, have no restrictions in terms of formatting, don't waste time with matters of using separate commands/ui/concepts for organization: tagging, folder structure, etc. Sure no hyperlinks but it takes 5 seconds to flip through pages to find things if you use some personal approach to indexing. I don't think any digital counterpart has really surpassed pen and paper when it comes to private notes--sharing notes, on the other hand, does seem like a good fit for digital tooling and I'm curious to see if the noosphere will beat out tools for this already built on http
- cdata 4y ago
  Hey, thanks for the anecdote. It resonates with what I have come to realize about note taking: it is a personalized activity, and whatever keeps me in the habit of taking notes may or may not work for anyone else. Inevitably, Subconscious (our companion notebook app) will manifest some opinions that not everyone will love. But, it has some qualities that you may find appealing (given your stated preferences): - Almost no formatting in the default note syntax: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext - De-emphasis on hierarchy (flat namespace for notes; no semantically meaningful nesting in note content) - The core of the Noosphere protocol is designed to enable ergonomic linking Noosphere will also bring end-to-end encryption for securing private notes or sharing with specific groups of others.
ssivark 4y ago
While I grok how graphs could be useful for personal information management, I don’t quite get the use case for a shared graph database of this kind, beyond replicating Wikipedia (but would that substantially improve on the current capabilities of Wikipedia?). Are there any envisioned use cases highlighting the value proposition?
- olah_1 4y ago
  > but would that substantially improve on the current capabilities of Wikipedia? Absolutely it would. Just as a quick example, there was an author whose name was red on Wikipedia, which I think means that someone intended to make a page for them at one point. I created this page and it got blocked by a 17 year old because there wasn't enough citations. This was an author of 20 books, but Wikipedia won't allow his page because there wasn't... newspaper articles written about him?? Why should this information be lost to the world because Wikipedia is run by bored megalomaniacs? I think that Larry Sanger's vision is to create a federated network of multiple encyclopedia's that can each specialize in their specific area. But Noosphere seems to want to be the P2P version of that. Cut out the middle man, I suppose.
  - ssivark 4y ago
    I’m sympathetic to that failure mode of Wikipedia, but in this utopic vision, if there is no mechanism regulate which content gets to claim priority for stubs, what stops spam/ads from flooding the network?
    - olah_1 4y ago
      I believe that the best “spheres” (i think that is the noosphere term for encyclopedias) will just be referenced the most times. I would assume that there will also be indexes that curate and collect the best spheres for people to search as well.
xavivives 4y ago
This is fascinating... I've been working on an extremely similar protocol Interplanetary mind-map [0] for about 5 years. I'm surprise I've never seen Noosphere before. It has the exact same topology, on top of IPFS and IPLD, and its also motivated as a tool for thought and aiming to enable transclusion among many other things. The main difference I see is that I'm aiming for a full adaptive system of information, including computation, not only note-taking (I bet you guys have more thoughts).Trying to figure this out has let me to quite deep rabbit-hole around language and semantics [1]. I've actually have a proof of concept running as my website [2], you can navigate about 500 of my "thoughts". Everything in there are transclusions, and the user-interface are notes/memos themselves. I think we should talk :) [0] https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs/ https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TudZ_fC3o/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TudZ_fC3o/ [2] https://xavivives.com/ https://xavivives.com/
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> Spheres also power a petname linking system, a kind of hyperlocal distributed DNS. > @gordon/composability This is where (one of) the problem lies, in my view. @gordon is essentially an equivalent of a DNS system. The difference, however, is that you are trying to identify a file. There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability. "composability" should be simply the unique ID for a specific file. > The plot twist is that spheres don’t point to a particular server! Instead, spheres are data structures that live on IPFS. Oh, but it seems that you agree with me!! Except, you don't. I'm just very confused. People should try to ELI5 things, instead of trying to sound too smart but failing at serving a clear explanation.
- cdata 4y ago
  > There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability. Thanks for this interesting provocation! In Noosphere and Subconscious, we are trying to relax the tension between "I can write to any name in the space" and "I don't want what I write to be clobbered by other people writing to the same name in the space." So, you have a personal scope where only you have write access. We call it a sphere. Within the sphere, you save files to a flat namespace. Other users can write to the same flat namespace in their spheres. And, when you follow another user, Subconscious will collide the namespaces in the UI. So, the content in @gordon/composability and @simon/composability will appear next to each other.

140 points by dgudkov 4y ago

Man's achievement is to have created a world of rhyme, in the intimate imagination which is as real in its way as any country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it "The Third World" or "World 3". The first world is the objective world of things. The second world is my inner subjective world; but, says Popper, there's a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts. Teilhard de Chardin calls this third world the "Noosphere", that is, the world of the mind.

lisper 4y ago
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
- morsch 4y ago
  Sure. It's lyrics from a song, though. ;) https://genius.com/The-orb-oobe-lyrics https://genius.com/The-orb-oobe-lyrics I was curious if anybody would pick up on it, but I guess it's a pretty obscure song. Not sure where the sample is from originally, actually.
  - lisper 4y ago
    > it's a pretty obscure song Gee, ya think?
    - morsch 4y ago
      It's not like it's my cousin's band, it's The Orb. They were even in the charts that one time. But I'll be sure to include a Willie Nelson reference for you at some point in the future.
      - lisper 4y ago
        Just because it's a well-known band doesn't mean that you can reasonably expect people to be familiar with that particular passage, especially since it doesn't look like a song lyric, it looks like prose, and you posted it without attribution, or even a hint that it was anything other than what it appears on the surface to be: prose. And it's not just prose, it's prose of the sort that one might expect to find here on HN. So you should not be surprised when someone's Bayesian prior on that passage leans heavily towards original prose. (The real irony here is that it actually is a deepity, it just happens to be sourced from a context where deepities are normal.)
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Let's give credit where credit is due - The Platonists from Plato to Plotinus. The "noosphere" isn't a new concept, it's hundreds upon hundreds of years old and has a rich history in the construction and blossoming of ontology itself id est the noetic world. It's important to understand the history, context, and dialogues of noetics otherwise one might be taken advantage of. The noosphere is none other than an ecological adaptation of noetics confirmed to fit modernism ie: the inexorable march of progress narrative. Roughly mid-20th century, noetics we're reframed as a process of externalizing/alienating internal social ontologies as if they were real things. Again, it's important to understand this so as not to commit the previous historical sins. The reason I bring this up is because people inadvertently (or purposely) externalize their personal ontologies as fact nearly all the time. There's great constructive power in "is" and anyone interacting with the "Noosphere" should be actively aware as such.

turnsout 4y ago

This looks like really cool technology, but what is the use case for "normal" users? The Subconscious site [1] which leverages this library lists the key value propositions as "Own Your Data," "Decentralized," and "Open Source," which are three things average users demonstrably don't care about. I'm also concerned about the immutability of information stored in this way. [2] There are a number of reasons why immutability (in this case a fully public version history) is an anti-feature, with significant real-world risks. I would push the protocol authors to fully consider the ramifications of doxxing, harassment, accidental self-disclosure, etc—especially in authoritarian nations. If they don't have a story for how they'll handle this, it's not an appropriate foundation for the internet of ideas. [1]: https://subconscious.network https://subconscious.network [2]: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/design/explainer.md#immutable-data https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/d...

CrypticShift 4y ago
>but what is the use case for "normal" users? >three things average users demonstrably don't care about I always ask this question myself (and have an interest in all things no-code). But this is about the underlying Internet layers. For decades, from the ARPANET to the IETF, a small clique were unchallenged and unhurried in presenting their solutions methodically in RFC after RFC. They did a great job. Now The upper OSI model is breaking up. Everybody has a vision and a voice. Every day brings new projects like this one here in HN. There is not even large consensus around that leading Web3 banner [0]. So, IMO this natural selection process will take us at least a decade (or two?) to coagulate into standards that support mainstream "normal users" use cases [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33469978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33469978
mattdesl 4y ago
A lot of users do care about this when push comes to shove. An example is happening on Twitter: a lot of users want to escape Twitter onto another platform, but they are 'locked' to the walled garden because they don't own their data in a way that allows for an exit. IPFS isn't perfect but does give you the ability to migrate to other (competing) hosting platforms without having to change your URLs. I'd argue that a similar thing happens with end-to-end encryption. A lot of users don't care or even think about whether their Twitter or Mastodon direct messages are encrypted, until a malicious actor reads these messages or a data breach has them released online.

lioeters 4y ago

> The name? Noosphere means planetary consciousness, a hypothetical new evolutionary phenomena arising from the biosphere. It’s a lighthearted joke, but also an aspiration. Originally, the term "noosphere" appeared in the work of the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, first published in 1926. The word "biosphere" was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911. > In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky Another thinker who developed the concept of the "noosphere" is a French Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, written in the 1930s, he: > set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity. > The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin This "Omega point" is a precursor to the concept of the technological "Singularity" - but with a more explicit religious/spiritual connotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point#Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point#Technological_sing...

bodge5000 4y ago
Had no idea Noosphere was a "real" thing, I just assumed it was a reference to 40k
- WJW 4y ago
  40k takes a lot of inspiration from older scifi works, generally making it more grimdark and turning it up to 11. Especially older 40k lore has this a lot, when budgets were a lot smaller and the lore was a lot less developed. Generally, if it was cool and/or grimdark it could get a place somewhere in the vast 40k galaxy. Space marines have been a staple of the genre since forever, titans come straight out of anime, starch cubes are quite literally soylent green (it's even given a wink in Necromunda, being called "Soylent Viridian") and of course the God Emperor was there first in the Dune series.

nathias 4y ago

this would be useful if the app had automatic/semiautomatic linking, and maybe something like code completion

louison11 4y ago

Author seems very smart, and has probably done some good consciousness work to show up with these ideas... but this is completely ungrounded & disconnected from any real use case & understanding of market dynamics... much like the rest of Web3.

cle 4y ago
What changes could the author make to keep this grounded and connected?
- olah_1 4y ago
  Explain it in terms of what people already know, like Wikipedia for example. Help the reader to imagine what kind of world this tech enables.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
the-printer 4y ago
This is essentially what I gathered. I myself am on the borders of becoming a hardcore sneakernet enthusiast.
cbreynoldson 4y ago
I think the post is a bit misleading (e.g. "for everybody" makes it sound like "everybody" can do something about this right now), but I think this comment misses the point of the protocol. This is (I think) supposed to be a shared language between note-taking apps (and eventually others that include "thoughts" I presume). The hopes are that it does "affect everybody," but it is not something that can "affect everybody" without "apps" speaking in this shared language. If you are not somebody who works on these kinds of things, then yea, probably useless to you for now. I think the author wants interoperability at the "thought" level between apps that support users inputting their ideas.
fudged71 4y ago
Explain? Have you missed all of the enthusiasm around "Tools For Thought" and the lack of interoperability between those tools?

daveguy 4y ago

https://archive.ph/O2adZ https://archive.ph/O2adZ

ChrisClark 4y ago

What does CID mean? I can't find it explained, Content ID? Is this a normal TLA I should already know? Edit: It's in one of the images. Content ID.

cdata 4y ago
Sorry for the confusion! It's a borrowed concept from the domain of IPFS (https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/). There is a short introduction to the concept here: https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/cid/ https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/cid/
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  Thanks, this all looks really neat. Just getting my head around it though. I've been interested in IPFS for a long time, but still haven't dug into it.

Kiboneu 4y ago

I think cross-references are akin to dictionary words. They describe in their own right a novel and potentially useful relationship. In order to define and communicate these relationships well there ought to be a system of organization that treats cross-references as first-class citizens. Perhaps we could use something to assist the flow of information between researchers within syntopic fields. So to see a generic system like the Memo / Spheres system makes me pretty happy.

Pabloski80 4y ago

Could it be possible to build a kind of wikipedia around it?

cdata 4y ago
Yes, it should be possible. Wikipedia is one of the great treasure troves of knowledge on the hypertext web. We want it to be very easy for Wikipedia-like things to emerge from Noosphere.

lijogdfljk 4y ago

Is there a more defined set of memo types? I first expected a "protocol for thought" to have more thought oriented types and relationships. This just seems like Notes on IPFS. Am i missing something?

cdata 4y ago
You're not missing something. It's a little reductive, but the protocol did start with the use case of "notes on IPFS." One of the essential benefits of this protocol above and beyond content stored on IPFS is: you get human-readable names for your content and your peers, and you can use those names to form links that refer to other data. Memos give us a way to deliver free-form headers up-front that are also decoupled from the raw data of the content, which is very nice to have when resolving links to content you don't know much about. Other protocols in this domain start with the premise: in order to organize thought, we should crystalize the data structures to represent thought. In our approach we seek to develop a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form (or even that there should be only one representation).
- CrypticShift 4y ago
  > a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form Are there Math theorems that "proves" this sort of "highly abstract" level of designs? Are there Academics working on this? or is this uncharted territory?
  - cdata 4y ago
    Gordon is the better founder to ask this question of. Alas, he does not dwell on Hacker News. I'm just the resident code monkey, but I'll offer you some of Gordon's topical blog posts for consideration: - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with-alphabets https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with... - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-living-complexity https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-livi... - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds Gordon and I both try to be available to talk as often as possible in our Discord, though.

olah_1 4y ago

This sounds eerily similar to https://anytype.io https://anytype.io

cdata 4y ago
Anytype seems to be playing in the same general space that we are. But, all I know about it is what I can glean from their website, so I can't say for sure how similar it is in concrete terms. To offer one distinction: while both projects are at an early stage and undergoing development, Noosphere has been open source from the beginning. You can scrutinize our work and kick the cans on it today (warning: very alpha / do not use in production). We invite active participation from all who are interested, and welcome contributions to our Github projects. https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
- olah_1 4y ago
  I would love to try it out, but what is the current user experience exactly? All the code is in Rust, so is it command line only for now? Is there a text editing app with a social element where you follow other people?
  - cdata 4y ago
    Currently we have a CLI that demonstrates multi-device synchronization in principle. You can install it using `cargo install noosphere-cli` (it installs a binary called "orb"). We also have pre-built binaries of orb for x86_64 Linux that you can find on our releases on Github (e.g., https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/releases/tag/noosphere-cli-v0.3.0 https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/releases/ta...). We'll be expanding our pre-built binaries to include other platforms soon. Also, we have recently released a Swift package that gives a path to easily install our project as a dependency in XCode. We're turning the corner on offering the same FFI backing implementation as a TypeScript + WASM package, too. But, as I mentioned it's early days for us, so set your expectations accordingly. The best way to stay up to date with new things you can do is join our Discord. I make regular announcements there about our technical progress.

voidhorse 4y ago

I'm curious to see how some of these "multiplayer" knowledge graph ideas play out and if/how they wind up being different from the current web (I'm guessing they will mostly produce a bunch of 'smol' webs that are little siblings of the web we already have sans singular info brokers/filters like popular search engines). Personally, I've tried maintaining a personal knowledge graph and it's...not for me. I find having to process everything digitally and dealing with the sheer amount of information presented to be too overwhelming. I much prefer notebooks, where I only ever see "one thing at a time" even though there's a sea of information in there. The only substantial benefit digital tools provide over notebooks, to me, are hyperlinks, and that's even marginal if you mostly reference only either your own notes or complete books (vs. websites, at which point it becomes substantially more useful). Notebooks are still way faster for information capture, have no restrictions in terms of formatting, don't waste time with matters of using separate commands/ui/concepts for organization: tagging, folder structure, etc. Sure no hyperlinks but it takes 5 seconds to flip through pages to find things if you use some personal approach to indexing. I don't think any digital counterpart has really surpassed pen and paper when it comes to private notes--sharing notes, on the other hand, does seem like a good fit for digital tooling and I'm curious to see if the noosphere will beat out tools for this already built on http

cdata 4y ago
Hey, thanks for the anecdote. It resonates with what I have come to realize about note taking: it is a personalized activity, and whatever keeps me in the habit of taking notes may or may not work for anyone else. Inevitably, Subconscious (our companion notebook app) will manifest some opinions that not everyone will love. But, it has some qualities that you may find appealing (given your stated preferences): - Almost no formatting in the default note syntax: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext - De-emphasis on hierarchy (flat namespace for notes; no semantically meaningful nesting in note content) - The core of the Noosphere protocol is designed to enable ergonomic linking Noosphere will also bring end-to-end encryption for securing private notes or sharing with specific groups of others.

ssivark 4y ago

While I grok how graphs could be useful for personal information management, I don’t quite get the use case for a shared graph database of this kind, beyond replicating Wikipedia (but would that substantially improve on the current capabilities of Wikipedia?). Are there any envisioned use cases highlighting the value proposition?

olah_1 4y ago
> but would that substantially improve on the current capabilities of Wikipedia? Absolutely it would. Just as a quick example, there was an author whose name was red on Wikipedia, which I think means that someone intended to make a page for them at one point. I created this page and it got blocked by a 17 year old because there wasn't enough citations. This was an author of 20 books, but Wikipedia won't allow his page because there wasn't... newspaper articles written about him?? Why should this information be lost to the world because Wikipedia is run by bored megalomaniacs? I think that Larry Sanger's vision is to create a federated network of multiple encyclopedia's that can each specialize in their specific area. But Noosphere seems to want to be the P2P version of that. Cut out the middle man, I suppose.
- ssivark 4y ago
  I’m sympathetic to that failure mode of Wikipedia, but in this utopic vision, if there is no mechanism regulate which content gets to claim priority for stubs, what stops spam/ads from flooding the network?
  - olah_1 4y ago
    I believe that the best “spheres” (i think that is the noosphere term for encyclopedias) will just be referenced the most times. I would assume that there will also be indexes that curate and collect the best spheres for people to search as well.

xavivives 4y ago

This is fascinating... I've been working on an extremely similar protocol Interplanetary mind-map [0] for about 5 years. I'm surprise I've never seen Noosphere before. It has the exact same topology, on top of IPFS and IPLD, and its also motivated as a tool for thought and aiming to enable transclusion among many other things. The main difference I see is that I'm aiming for a full adaptive system of information, including computation, not only note-taking (I bet you guys have more thoughts).Trying to figure this out has let me to quite deep rabbit-hole around language and semantics [1]. I've actually have a proof of concept running as my website [2], you can navigate about 500 of my "thoughts". Everything in there are transclusions, and the user-interface are notes/memos themselves. I think we should talk :) [0] https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs/ https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TudZ_fC3o/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TudZ_fC3o/ [2] https://xavivives.com/ https://xavivives.com/

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

> Spheres also power a petname linking system, a kind of hyperlocal distributed DNS. > @gordon/composability This is where (one of) the problem lies, in my view. @gordon is essentially an equivalent of a DNS system. The difference, however, is that you are trying to identify a file. There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability. "composability" should be simply the unique ID for a specific file. > The plot twist is that spheres don’t point to a particular server! Instead, spheres are data structures that live on IPFS. Oh, but it seems that you agree with me!! Except, you don't. I'm just very confused. People should try to ELI5 things, instead of trying to sound too smart but failing at serving a clear explanation.

cdata 4y ago
> There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability. Thanks for this interesting provocation! In Noosphere and Subconscious, we are trying to relax the tension between "I can write to any name in the space" and "I don't want what I write to be clobbered by other people writing to the same name in the space." So, you have a personal scope where only you have write access. We call it a sphere. Within the sphere, you save files to a flat namespace. Other users can write to the same flat namespace in their spheres. And, when you follow another user, Subconscious will collide the namespaces in the UI. So, the content in @gordon/composability and @simon/composability will appear next to each other.