Status

The Moral Matrix has been a project in the making for a couple of years now. It is a solo project and that makes it more difficult. The off-line version of the web site contains about 200 pages, but they are still a long ways away from the vision for the site.

The vision for the core of the site is of a highly interlinked grouping of relatively small pages on moral concepts. Using this core, worldly issues can be addressed on issue pages with direct links to the underlying concept pages as necessary. The sidelines pages will contain external supporting references, links to other sites of interest, multimedia presentations, etc. The multimedia presentations are envisioned as small Flash/DHTML like animations used to tell different fictional stories; primarily of the parable genre.

The development of the concepts core was recently given significant amounts of time. Primarily this involved significant pondering of theological and philosophical ideas. Also a large amount of time was dedicated to the organizational planning of the concepts and their storage and representation on the develop system and on the web site. Much of this involved basic ideas about ideas and their interactions. At some future point AI techniques may be useable with the Moral Matrix core perhaps resulting in an expert system on morality of sorts. It is easy to get wrapped around the axle in this area of endeavor and so practicality dictates a staged approach. Therefore, the core will next be subjected to a manual reduction and interlinking session. At some point of completeness it will be posted to the site.

The issues area is conceptually to be based upon the concept core of the Moral Matrix, but practical concerns will make that difficult at first. Therefore, some issue pages will be developed in parallel with the core work.

Sidelines are obviously not the emphasis of the Moral Matrix web site, but in many regards could be the most interesting area for visitors. Several concepts have been developed to varying degrees even to the level of a script (theatrical, not computer) in one case. All of these presentations are intended to be relatively short, of a few minutes in length, with one or two exceptions.  Some work will proceed on this material, but it will most likely be the slowest (if anything can be any slower) to arrive.