JIAB

JIAB stands for [|"Jack In A Box"] which is a lame joke about a very serious idea. The idea is discussed a little on my college Focus Project page. Basically it derives from a television interview I saw of Ray Bradbury. The topic turned to the perfect school and Bradbury talked about a garden where when you went there you encountered simulacrums (androids or robots) who duplicated the great men and women of the past. Of course, those men and women are dead and unless we are merely engaging in a kind of Hollywood or Disney imagineering we can only have access to them through their writings and the writings of those who were influenced by them.

A television program called "[|Meeting of the Minds]" hosted by Steve Allen had somewhat the same motivation as JIAB, to be able to discourse with the great men and women of the past as if they were still with us. To do that one needs to be able to build a representation of their thoughts and motivations and way of thinking and discoursing. The only sources we have, at least before the 20th and 21st centuries, is the texts of their writings. So JIAB is a project to develop ways of "inverting" texts to build a cognitive model of the person who generated the materials. It is a complex project and so we need a prototype. My feeling is that C.S. (Jack) Lewis and G. K. (Gilbert) Chesterton are two great illustrative cases. This Wiki is focused on beginning a process that may one day give us a simulacrum of Jack Lewis and other great men and women to populate Ray Bradbury's garden and create a deeper possibility for Meetings of Minds.