"To refuse this challenge of providing something entirely new in the world would be to fall somewhat short of our full humanity."
[ASIDE: Several months ago I googled Gerald Feinberg to see if he had ever written a follow-up piece to The Prometheus Project: Mankind's Search for Long-Range Goals (1969). Sadly, I learned that he had passed away in 1992, and I was unable to locate any follow-up to this optimistic vision of man's potential to shape his future.]
But on to business... that being, the ongoing search/struggle for a formula/mathematical model.
Let me just say that strange thoughts about matrix manipulations have now returned to plague me at odd moments. My search for a workable model of 5-dimensional navigation devolved some years ago into a struggle to master and manipulate matrix mechanics. But I never succeeded in creating a model of anything more than a single aspect of what I felt needed to be represented. I don't remember how I decided to use matrices and matrix operations for these representations, save that I was not familiar enough with anything else (say, set topology) to be able to use it for what I needed.
Anyway, as this progressed, I got further and further into the intricacies of matrix mechanices, and farther and farther from the big picture I was trying to capture. And I was never really sure a matrix representation would work at all. There were too many things I still didn't know how to represent using matrix mechanics... How could I model degree of correspondence between representations? How could I model forward flow of information, and feedback, and priming? Was it possible to model emotion or conviction or attention as operators with differing effects on the mental representation's position in determining the final outcome? Can you use matrices as members of a zero-sum set? (And so it went.)
Eventually I decided to table the model-creating until after I had achieved some brilliant insight that would enable it to go much faster. (Translation: This isn't working.)
Staring in the mirror this morning, I came to the moderately depressing realization that I was probably not going to be the recipient of such a gift of sudden insight. If I want to create a working model, I am probably going to have to model (independently) all the various aspects of 5-dimensional navigation as I believe I understand them, and then hope a more global model can somehow be synthesized from the results. (Oy.)
Which brings me back to the thought - "This would be so much easier if someone else were here in Smearland with me!"
"The Prometheus Project cannot be an effort of one man, or a small number of men, since no small group can encompass the total wisdom or feelings of mankind. I am writing in the hope of stimulating enough interest in these questions so that eventually a sizable fraction of the human race will take part in the discussion..."
