Wiki+Motivation

This Message on SpareOom #25234 was the motivating message that led to this Wiki
I'm rereading Miracles since it has been recently the grist of two book clubs I belong to. It's also a reasonably good candidate for my little personal project, Jack In A Box (JIAB) see the link [|http://www.bridgewater.edu/~rschneid/FocusProjects/JIAB.htm]

In a way JIAB would be an inverted index of all of Lewis's writing that is threaded together as a cognitive map and a viewer would allow the reader to explore C.S. Lewis's thought almost in a discursive dialogue form, since ideal the viewer would include an English-lite interface which would allow questions like: What did Lewis think about miracles? The index would back thread all references in C.S. Lewis's writings to "miracles" and provide things like: 1) definitions that he used of miracles, 2) definitive statements that he made about miracles (i.e. conclusions) and 3) offer threads to related ideas like "Natural" and "Supernatural" and "God."

This would be a kind of non-linear reading since the database would be Lewis's works but the interface would be to the cognitive map. The idea actually comes from an interview with Ray Bradbury which I heard on television once where he talked about the perfect school and described it rather like a garden where Socratic dialogues took place with similicrums of the great philosophers and thinkers. To create such similicrums, something like JIAB would be a logical step that is relatively within the existing technology to implement.

from SpareOom message #25266 But the point of the Wiki is different. The point and motivation of the Wiki is to illustrate the thoughts in Jack's mind using concepts extracted from his works. The best illustrations would be those where he repeats arguments for an idea from different points of view so that in bringing together the extracts one gets a more rounded or fully insightful view of his thought.
 * The point of the Wiki** (see also WikiForm) where this quote is repeated.

The Wiki is distinctly NOT a forum for fighting attribution wars or having petty arguments. If there is evidence against the authenticity of "The Dark Tower" then fine. But it has to be evidence not mere conjecture.

On the whole it is important to make the atmosphere friendly to scholarship. So I have no problem at all with controversial ideas, only with personal attacks that amount to ad hominem. An idea is not a bad idea because a bad person advances it and an idea is not a good idea because a good person advances it. So let's leave personalities out of all discussion of ideas shall we!