Connections

Like the Internet, it's all just memes and links

Neural networks like the brain work by creating connections between concepts called associations.

Human networks like society work by creating connections between people called relationships.

"In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe." -Alan Moore

The Connections Are the Argument

The biggest persuasive argument for the perspective being presented by this wiki is how it relates all of the important concepts in psychology, sociology, spirituality, and science to universal themes of evolution, emergence, and happiness.

Seeing this applied to a few concepts is not nearly as powerful as seeing it applied to hundreds. The hyperlinks help you visualize the connections between these ideas.

There is also the interdependency of many ideas, where understanding one is a necessary prerequisite for understanding many others. There are circular dependencies, too, which are hard to explain in a linear format. You have to know what language is to understand allegory, and understanding allegory gives you a more nuanced understanding of language. There are many such examples, and the wiki format encourages you to explore an idea, and then explore it again in a new light later after learning something related.

The holistic vision of a self-organizing fractal universe will emerge in the brain once it has made enough of these connections. You simply need to explore and let your interests take you wherever they lead until the links turn from blue to purple and your mind turns from Euclidean to fractal.

Visualizing the Connections

Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach mind map

Much of the inspiration for this came from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, particularly the mind map image depicted near its conclusion.

"It’s in a sense a real mind-bender. You read about 20 minutes and then your brain is fried." -Sylvester Stallone on GEB

What if we demonstrated the same pattern of connections between a much larger complex of ideas, covering all of the key topics in philosophy, psychology, science, and spirituality that relate to building a worldview? Just the most important ones that contribute to the metanarrative to avoid information overload, since the function is akin to scripture not encyclopedia.

Having an interactive 3D version of such a mind map that covers all of the topics in this wiki would be an amazing way to see and explore these connections.

WikiGalaxy is a similar project using Wikipedia, but it is an older one-off and doesn't provide a way to recreate it with other websites.

The Wikipedia Graph project seems like it could be adapted to this purpose.

If there are off-the-shelf tools to create something like this, they aren't making themselves known to Google searches.

James Burke's Connections

This page a perfect opportunity to introduce one of the all-time greatest docuseries on connections. This playlist contains series 1 and 2 and some other classic Burke BBC specials.

James Burke's Connections (Full Series)

Musical Connections

Every concept has a song about it, and many of us have very musical internal monologues. Songs associated with ideas, emotions, memories, people, places, etc. play in our minds whenever they are triggered by these things.

OneRepublic - Connection

Funkadelic - Connections and Disconnections