[HN Gopher] Noosphere, a Protocol for Thought
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Noosphere, a Protocol for Thought
Author : dgudkov
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-11-25 12:21 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (subconscious.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (subconscious.substack.com)
| olah_1 wrote:
| This sounds eerily similar to https://anytype.io
| cdata wrote:
| 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
| lioeters wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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
|
| 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_sing...
| CrypticShift wrote:
| Every time de Chardin name pops up, I always remember this
| filmed discussion with Richard Dawkins :
|
| https://youtu.be/_J_WtktTzEI?t=3386 As a
| student, I was very persuaded by that old French theologian,
| teilhard de chardin, who wrote a book called the phenomenon of
| man, which is...Pretentious gibberish,, but it fooled me when I
| was a student.
|
| Not that I agree with him. It just makes me smile.
| frozencell wrote:
| Dawkins. A typical English rodomontade?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| My understanding is that Catholic theologians generally don't
| hold old Teilhard in high esteem either, to put it nicely.
| Not that Dawkins is some grand intellect himself, especially
| when he weighs in on theological and philosophical matters.
| Painful, painful high school caliber ignorance.
| googlryas wrote:
| Are you religious/believe in God or god's?
| andrepd wrote:
| CrypticShift wrote:
| As one of the progenitors of "New Age" currents [0], you
| bet Catholic theologians don't like him. [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardi
| n#Inf...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age#Christian_perspec
| tives
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Chardin took the concept directly from Vernadsky, I think he
| meet him in a french conference. See also Olaf Stapledon "Star
| Maker" for a fictional treatment. Is also interesting his
| influence on Bogdanov.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Had no idea Noosphere was a "real" thing, I just assumed it was
| a reference to 40k
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| turnsout wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]:
| https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/d...
| mattdesl wrote:
| 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.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| >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
| cdata wrote:
| Hi there, I work with Gordon (OP) on Subconscious and
| Noosphere.
|
| This is a topic that we take seriously and think about a lot
| together. We've had some good discussions in our Discord, and
| some of our motivating goals have manifested as issues on
| Github:
| https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/issues?q=is...
|
| Our work is open source, and we are building it in the open
| hand-in-hand with our community. I personally respond to as
| many issues and stray comments on Discord as I can. If this is
| a topic that you care about, your feedback, comments and ideas
| would be very welcome.
|
| > 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.
|
| My personal opinion is that we need more than a story. Our
| users need tools that empower them to be in control of their
| data, and that includes being able to keep private data
| private, fix mistakes and execute countermeasures when they are
| threatened with abuse.
|
| And it's true: immutable data is a double-edged sword. The
| primary benefit we seek from it is content addressing, which
| enables us to look up some data in a way that makes data
| providers fungible. This has an advantage when it comes to
| censorship: if censored network A can't give you your data, you
| may be able to find it on uncensored network B as long as your
| know the content address. It also presents a challenge:
| sometimes a user may rightly wish for data to be removed from
| the network; content addressing creates the possibility that an
| abuser may have access to data in a way that further dis-
| empowers users who are already vulnerable today.
|
| Here is a strong opinion (weakly held) that I have about
| mutability: the "mutability" of the hypertext web has not
| spared us from the kinds of danger described above. We have
| leaned on mutability as a privacy crutch, and in turn we have
| excused ourselves from providing capabilities and interfaces
| that enable real privacy and agency for users under threat. For
| example, a user may think a Snap message is extra private -
| from their perspective, the message is ephemeral - but others
| will still find ways to make copies and propagate the data
| across the network, and Snap the company certainly has access
| to the data (perhaps in perpetuity). What recourse does that
| user have once their data escapes the mutable sandbox?
|
| It's possible that immutable data will enable us to build
| better tools for taking pro-active action against abuse. For
| example: today on the hypertext web, the recourse for most
| users to head off the propagation of harmful data is to reach
| out to service providers individually, file abuse claims and
| hope that the content is eventually removed. Victims are
| burdened with both identifying that the data is stored with a
| provider, and also the clerical task of reporting the abuse
| over and over again. In a world with content addressing, anti-
| abuse filters full of content addresses may propagate fluidly
| from provider to provider, which suggests a far less burdensome
| process for the abuse victim - they don't need to know that the
| content has surfaced on some provider in the distance, because
| the provider is already aware of the abuse claim and can pro-
| actively refuse to propagate the data.
|
| In the end, I think the best solutions to the problems of this
| kind of abuse will be social/legal ones, supported by a
| technical foundation that can enable pro-active
| countermeasures.
|
| All that said, I'm not an expert on this topic, I just like to
| spend a lot of time thinking about it. If you or someone else
| reading this is an expert, and you have some time to spare,
| please come hang out in our Discord or on Github and teach us
| what you know!
| deafpolygon wrote:
| How does "decentralized" and "own your own data" fit together?
| Presumably, decentralized means your data is on everyone else's
| server, rather than on one provider (the 'cloud') or your own
| ('self-hosted')?
| cdata wrote:
| When we say "decentralized," we don't mean that your data is
| deliberately scattered around the network; we mean that the
| underlying infrastructure providers are fungible.
|
| In other words, you own your data because you can change
| infrastructure providers as it suits you, and other users who
| interact with you on the network generally won't notice or
| otherwise care that you did that.
| voidhorse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| - 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.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion! It's a borrowed concept from the
| domain of IPFS (https://ipfs.io/). There is a short
| introduction to the concept here:
| https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/cid/
| ChrisClark wrote:
| 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.
| louison11 wrote:
| 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.
| the-printer wrote:
| This is essentially what I gathered. I myself am on the borders
| of becoming a hardcore sneakernet enthusiast.
| cle wrote:
| What changes could the author make to keep this grounded and
| connected?
| olah_1 wrote:
| 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]
| cbreynoldson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Explain? Have you missed all of the enthusiasm around "Tools
| For Thought" and the lack of interoperability between those
| tools?
| daveguy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/O2adZ
| Pabloski80 wrote:
| Could it be possible to build a kind of wikipedia around it?
| cdata wrote:
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
| morsch wrote:
| Sure. It's lyrics from a song, though. ;)
|
| 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 wrote:
| > it's a pretty obscure song
|
| Gee, ya think?
| morsch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| nathias wrote:
| this would be useful if the app had automatic/semiautomatic
| linking, and maybe something like code completion
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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/provoking-emergence-
| with...
|
| - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-
| livi...
|
| - https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds
|
| Gordon and I are both always available to talk in real-time
| on our Discord, though.
| Kiboneu wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-11-25 23:01 UTC)