“Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone – a father, a brother, a God – and asks, ‘Why am I here? What was I meant to be?’”
– Commander Spock, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
This website is a blog. People create blogs with many different purposes from humor, to espousing their views, to relating their everyday lives. The purpose of this blog is to help me better understand what I believe about the world through communicating it to others.
This blog is an attempt to express the schema of Ryan Somma’s mind. I am a human being with a mercurial belief system that causes me severe identity problems. This site provides a form of therapy for this condition, allowing me to solidify my perceptions and conclusions about the world, defining myself as a person.
Since the brain is where we store all of our life’s data, I decided to structure my ideas in this imaginary web-brain. The left hemisphere is the more logical half of the brain, the right is the more creative, and the corpus callosum sits between them, allowing the hemispheres to communicate with one another.
The Corpus Callosum
This is the main page, where the left and right hemispheres converge. Here the most recent thoughts/articles are listed chronologically. In this site’s header, you will notics an “i” and an “I” pointing to one another. This represents the Cartesian Duality, the perception that our minds are separate from our bodies.
The Left Hemisphere
On the logical side of the brain, I have broken the sections down according to the Scientific Process. That is:
Observations –> Hypotheses –> Experimentation –> Theory
These four steps I have split into two categories. Observations and Hypotheses are “introspective” aspects of the process. They occur inside our minds, therefore I have put them under a section titled “Cognitive Schema,” which is the collection of ideas in our heads.
When it comes time to bring these ideas out into public, we enter “The Memepool,” or public discourse. Through debate we force our ideas through a sort of survival of the fittest. For this reason I have replaced “Experimentation” with “Disputation.” Theories also go here, because they are conclusions I have come to about how the world should work.
The Scientific Process Within the Left Brain
This entire site is nothing but conclusions, so sampling the flavor of the articles in these various categories will give you a better idea of what I put where and why. In each of these categories I have provided “Resources” to increase your knowledge and “Disinformation” to warn you of pitfalls.
The “Concept Map” is also located in this hemisphere. This is not a concept map at all, but merely a database to help you browse all of the site’s articles. One day I would like to have a true Concept Map for this site, but from a programming standpoint, World Peace might be easier to achieve.
The Right Hemisphere
In the creative half of the brain, there is no complex logical structure. There is books “Bibliophilism,” movies “Cinephilism,” and me “Autobiography.” If you like books, check it out. If you like film, check it out. If your curious about the kind of person who would build such a site, check it out.
I will try to contribute to all sections equally. I have a monumental list of articles I want to write for this site, so there will be no end to where this can go.
Enjoy!