Ideas propagation: vertical and horizontal

[Egeides]

There are many ways information can pass from one point to another.

Horizontal ideas sharing- Passing information to the greatest number of persons and thus necessarily make it user-friendly is one way (and potentially watered down). This is vulgarisation. Very simple and direct.

Vertical ideas sharing- Throw information to very few persons seriously interested into the topic adn well-organized to pass it back is another way, since they will pass this to the next ones, whom will pass it to others ... and so on until it gets to most people (in political/else acts, if not in debates). In fact, the vast majority didn't ever hear about the guy who threw the thing from the top of an academic ivory tower, and it is pretty elitist. It also means that people truely having influence nowadays and writing real solid stuff are not necessarily well known and on TV. People are TV/papers/parliament are (knowingly or not) often front.

The guy is not popular at all, and maybe not even credited for his achievements (he may or may not just end up in footnotes, or not at all since not close enough to the discussed subjects. You don't put a footnote to a philosophical guy if wrote a scientific paper). The one going on TV and speaking alot (but creating nothing) can often take the credit (like some politicians, or people with more influent friends), or even a nation having less power to express may see its ideas exported (NASA...). Very often, the ones writing in a more vulgarized way (or having more political or well-known people support) take a part or whole of their ideas from others take the credit, which is more easily done if they have a tag showing them as professional in this area. One can also look at influence of influence of influence...

How many persons know the influence of Plato and Aristotle, coming from 300BC, on a whole bunch of occidental thinkers (Kant, Nietzsche... whoever), which got influence on... ? Make the test: go to someone and ask him what's the influence of Plato in his life? ;D Even among academics that are, let's say, in social sciences, and so on. All the methodology, science and so on is influenced from influenced from... If you ask someone what Pythagore did, you'll be answered trigonometry (or no answer). He influenced Plato, among others.

So actually, if you want to do something on the longer term, you can make it by being read by very few people... (or do the opposit) And if you want to read good stuff, having an ideaological map may be useful (anyone knows if there is such a book on this?). The extension of this idea to nations and culture is also interesting.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." -- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929 (Wikipedia.org - Plato article)

So, who are your personal true teachers?... Where do you believe the real (complete, unwatered down) stuff to be found? How many lives are authors from thousands of years ago are saved/wasted because of them now?

This has to do with this article I presented here a long while ago but had no time to write, about Fukuyama (which ideas have daily influence on millions of persons, yet I less than 1% people know his name. Who influenced him? How many people know these influences of his has influence on them through Fukuyuama?):

http://www.opendemocracy.org/debates/article-3-117-2190.jsp

[Caid Ivik]

This reminds me of the recent boom of memetics. To make a node-map of person's mind it's not that hard, altough sometimes you may not resemble whether the idea was created by the person itself, or if it came from another. Or simply if you trying to do so, you may not understand his "level": a perfect idea could come from analysis of a "horizontally" acquired meme. That's how we interpret for example Nietzsche or many later hegelians (I didn't mean actually Fukuyama, but he would be close  ;D ) and of course, most neomarxists. I had personal experience with feministic philosophy, where are some very trivial questions analysed with scholastic detail. These were influenced by a part of thinking, the part, which was enough shinely presented. This I would call horizontal recurrence.

[Egeides]

I actually forgot to mention one aspect: How it is surprising that a schism at the unknown top can lead to a complete scission of the whole network from top to down. How moves there get so much of an impact elsewhere. Still, each element in the network acts individually, but within a structure and thus when the network branch on which he is moves, he moves with it. It is newtonian: your branch moves -5, you move +3 = total -2 move. Of course, it is not that simple and direct, but you get the idea: the games at the top of the influence network have an influence of all the others' intellectual environment (books...).

This is politics, but it is also everything ideological. An "intellectual battlefield", yet this term seems fundamentally chaotic instead of seeing harmony in the moves. Anyway... it makes a tactical map more puzzling for one that tries to see how to get out of influence and cycles/trends to think perfectly :P

[Caid Ivik]

I would say a thinking without any influence cannot be perfect. We should be only aware of it, but why erase it? You cannot talk about colors if you are blind, you know  ;)

[Egeides]

I partly agree but...

- We often already have basic data on which others' studies were based, and so we are not necessarily blind. I guess this is why even a child can understand something from his environment without his parents telling him.

- Also, a child can express the whole range of emotions with pain on a sheet, except that he generally will get interference from around.

My opinion, and the use of a map:

I tend to believe that it is possibly like this young child which has the whole range of emotions to paint. It may be useful to evolve by oneself on a given field, and waiting only after to look at those who went onto the subject. I did the experience with success in the past. This is why a universal map of the ideaological network could be useful on a technical side (for "strategic orienting").

I have an hypothesis (based on different aspects, stuff above included) that the brain is operating independently from "me" and so it will furnish "me" different rendering (data/results/computation) depending on the orientation/strength of the will I push on it and depending also on how affected I am by the empirical background it gave me until then (thus will orientation). Thus the point is to get a certain control upon this (control not being defined as going to a pre-defined result but as a possibility to orient it). By having a universal map of ideas (and society's influence on with its different forces situated on this map), it is a potential technical tool to start with (to neutralize your environment by peeking at the opposite to the same level for example).

Still, of course, I understand this "a blind cannot see colors", as a I also added (recently) as "one cannot lurn all about cooking all by himself except with the infinity before himself". To me, this mapping seems like a quest for a better methodology and of course better results. Just look to which extent the scientific method changed history; well I believe that some parts of methodology are still left widely untouched nowadays (multi-disciplinarity, use of a disciplin within another, evaluation of the margin of error, detection of sophisms...), should it be to attain a better precision, neutralize potential bias, miss lesser elements... But this is a wide and very interesting subject (to me).

One could have course make many links to Herbert's thinking.

Let's just start by inventing a easy-to-use and precise scholastic-detector. Some academics/journalists wont pass ;D

[Anathema]

I haven't read the article you linked to, I don't have the time right now :-

You got me thinking though. If all that we think and know has its fundaments in a select few persons in ancient time, those guys kind of gave us a "frame" in wich we think and expand our knowledge. So did the same people who thought of such things hundreds or even thousends year back, outline our field of thinking, and at the same time its boundaries?

[Caid Ivik]

Well, then how would you define "self" if not your own thinking? According to Leibnitz, I would say that nothing else is in our soul than the mind itself, it's a (transcendental?) software for our (material?) hardware. Mind works with memory. There is some kind of "bios", which works as an "interface" between soul and brain (ie perception of time), however how much can you make with a computer if you have nothing installed? There are many "installed" things in us, at first your biological needs (or expressions; that are those emotions), then language, customs and other social stuff. And this is the limit, you have no universally objective language, for example. Yes, one guy said me that sanskrit is a language given by gods, but here I would wait...

Language itself is extremely influented by various aspects, which you can find, but not describe. Maybe it is already controlled. Orwell's "newspeak" is nothing else. Something like when wives of politicians found their power and united into Bene Gesserit, or when human found out how to make fire if you understand. What I try to say is, that scale of society's organization is rising last years (centuries), so perhaps our language is so far from its pure form, that I fear our generation won't be able to analyze how strong this memetical cancer is.

[Anathema]

Newspeak is a deliberate attempt of the party to decrease the rate of thought of the people, that's not what I meant.

What I mean is that even things we never think about thoroughly were sometime thought of by someone, and because we never think about them we can't think outside the "box". For example, the number 0, wich essentially equals nothing, yet is of mathematical significance.. We've been spoonfed that along with basic numbers so that they're burned into our mind, and it's basic for us. But when something is taken as basic, it also means you're unable to think as if it's not there, preventing you from reenacting the discovery or coming up with alternatives.

[Caid Ivik]

Well, I was replying more to Egeides. But I think you are true, there is a structural pattern in our knowledge. To make an alternative, it could be possible trough analysis of these roots, tough I don't know if here we need metaphysics or just Platon's generation  ;D