User:JWSchmidt

Possible new wiki: Science of the Soul
I am interested in the idea of starting a wiki that would be concerned with scientific investigation of the universal human cultural feature of belief in a soul. There are many websites (for example) and published books dealing with the idea that there can be a science of the soul. These various approaches to a science of the soul range from that of Francis Crick (very materialistic) to many New Age speculations about how non-material spirit links through a soul to our material bodies.

One effort towards a science of the soul based on a multidisciplinary approach has its roots in the Wingmakers and Lyricus materials. Currently, the Wingmakers community is served by a discussion forum that can be accessed at the Wingmakers website. That discussion forum has about 55,000 posts. In addition, there are additional websites that have been developed by members of the Wingmakers community that are concerned with speculation about the meaning of the material at the official Wimgmakers and Lyricus websites. This large and distributed mass of internet documents concerning Wingmakers is daunting for new members of the Wingmakers community.

I think it would be constructive to establish a Science of the Soul wiki that could provide a system by which members of the Wingmakers community can collaborate to make easily accessible
 * 1) links to Wingmakers-related websites
 * 2) summaries of the most important material at the Wingmakers discussion forum
 * 3) Wingmakers-inspired speculation/interpretation/commentary by members of the greater Wimgmakers community.
 * 4) Links to websites that have useful information on branches of sciences that are relevant to a scientific study of the soul.

This Science of the Soul Wiki would be fundamentally multidisciplinary and it would be desirable to invite others from outside of the Wingmakers community to join in and share their perspectives. Since science as a human enterprise and investigation of the soul have often diverged, it will be important restrict material at this proposed wiki to efforts that have a real connection to science. Much of the material in this proposed wiki is expected to be speculative, but the wiki's rules for article style should force participants to try to frame all discussion in the language of science. Speculations about the nature of the soul will need to be expressed in terms of hypotheses and the goal of finding objective methods to test those hypotheses.

As an example of a topic that would require speculation, the Lyricus website mentions "neo-sciences". It is expected that there will be additional information about the nature of "neo-sciences" in the future at the Lyricus website, but for now the Wingmakers community must speculate.

A portion of the wiki should provide an historical perspective from Aristotle to Blavatsky and on in to the 20th century approaches towards a science of the soul that have been suggested by workers in specialized fields such as physics, computer science, and neurobiology.

Other Wiki projects
My Wikipedia user page.

Wikicity Places

 * I want to bring Asimov's time travel novel into the Asimov wiki project
 * Macintosh wiki
 * An interesting "alternate history" and my Robotics Althist
 * LOGO

A city is a complex organism with centers of entertainment and governement. A wiki has an evolutionary growth pattern like that of a city.