Theory: History Markup Language, for ethics
Jorn Barger
narrow followups appropriately. Sorry if multiple copies re-appear.]
To review:
I've proposed, first of all, an Internet Timelines Project [1], in which
all HTML documents describing events _at some specifiable date_ (or
range of dates) could be tagged with simple 'pseudo-XML' stating those
dates in a natural format, eg: "2002.02.17". Search engines could then
add support for queries on specific dates (or ranges).
Next we add basic biographical markup: birthplace, parentage,
residences, jobs, creative works, etc. (This will require a central
registry to define a canonical 'name' for each historical personage.)
Then we generalise these biographical relationships to whole peoples
(ie, groups): migrations, economics, and especially cultural toolkits.
I imagined an add-on module for "The Sims" that I called "The
Sim-Stones" [2] that would include substitute toolkits for every culture
in history-- what did they eat, how did they cook, what did they wear,
how did they fight, what did they build, etc. (Interestingly, a few
weeks after I posted that proposal a Sims-shop did release a popular
SimStones module based on the cartoon. Coincidence, or opportunism?)
I've also done some posts about the idea of a software 'philosophy lab'
[3] that would offer a subtle-enough simulation of human motivations to
allow philosophical questions to be explored 'experimentally'.
And now I'm starting to think about adding 'ethical markup' to the ITP,
in order to trace the historical evolution of, eg, the Golden Rule, or
the institutionalised condemnation of lying/slavery/etc...
For the earliest records, there'd need to be a layer of attribution:
"ACCORDING TO WITNESS X, Zoroaster valued dogs as highly as humans."
The challenge is to find a finite _limited vocabulary_ that can express
a wide range of ethical nuances. Eg, "value" might be a useful primitive
term, so that a racist culture could be said to value (eg) blacks less
than whites, etc. (Hammurabi spent lots of words on the relative values
of slaves, freed men, and freeborn.)
[1] ITP: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/biography.html
[2] Sim-Stones: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=sim-stones
[3] PhiLab: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&q=philosophy.lab+jorn
--
Robot Wisdom Weblog: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ "If you worry that
reading the news online will rob you of the serendipity factor you get
with the newspaper, Jorn Barger solves the problem." --Dan Gillmor