What's In A Name?

The name of the Mediaspace game is SpinThink. SynThink can be given several different spins:

Syn-Think--a center for synthetic thought, in a time marked by polemical debates over the boundaries around intellectual fields;

Synth-Ink--a place where serious ink is spilled connecting dots on the disciplinary map, and blotting out sore spots in and between the human, social and natural sciences.

Syn-Think@--a "rhetorical software" (a coinage of Richard Doyle), a virtual word processing practice (i.e., way of talking and thinking) which runs on the hardware stored in human neural wetware (i.e., it exists in people's minds) in various humanoid participants in the Institute's doings.  To download your free copy of Syn-Think@, attend any of our events--you will be infected with it immediately.

Synth-Inc.--Even intellectual/spiritual work must be funded to survive in the ideas marketplace.  This spin refers to the incorporatization of an organized center for reflection at an institution renowned for its orientation towards the incorporate--that is, the incorporeal, or spiritual domain.  We welcome all sponsors, regardless of religious or institutional affiliation...we just like them to be nice people.

Sin-Think--We encourage thinking which sins against the Thought Police, those people who protect the closed boundaries of fields of thought and who despise free ranging speculation.  The seven Cardinal SinThinks include ideas that begin, "Consider this"; "Imagine that...."

Why Meta/Physics?

SynThink slashes "metaphysics" but does not burn it.  Metaphysics studies Being from the privileged viewpoint of a human subject, as if Being were a stable field the I/eye can survey.  Meta/physics studies Becoming from the mobile viewpoint of humans constantly adapting to shaky grounds, because our streams of thought are stirred by subterranean currents, and we inevitably remain poised on the abyss.

Similarly, physics concerns itself with the material universe, and carefully frames questions in such a way that they already bracket the universe into a limited, computable slice of reality, whereas meta/physics establishes a foothold at the threshold of the physical-knowable, taking steps to probe further the murky spaces at the horizon of perception and ideas