What Philotica is

Philotica did not come from nothing, in keeping with the principle ex nihilo nihil fit, later subsumed under the first law of thermodynamics: the energy of an isolated system is constant; it is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes from one form into another. To put it differently: something comes from something, and not from nothing. Philotica was born in the fire of existential questions many years ago. First, in conversations with a friend, long since gone. One of our favourites was the question of the meaning of a single human being's life. Not the human as a species. Back then we could not answer it to our satisfaction, and we argued about it fiercely. Did I write “argued”? I meant, of course, “discussions”. Today the creator of this portal, who is also its author [see the Authors tab], is able to answer it, though it is most likely a question to which each person must find their own answer.

A great deal happened afterwards along the way, but the first decisive moment came with the creation of the HiveEve project, whose main channel of activity and publication became LinkedIn. The turning point followed a few moments later, with the publication of the Triptych. It was there that the foundations of Philotica finally took shape.

Why Philotica? It is a curious case. In keeping with the same principle ex nihilo nihil fit, the term first appeared in science fiction /.../. So it appeared, and then refused to disappear, knocking about somewhere in my head and surfacing now and then, unexpectedly. Its last serious eruption came during the work on the Triptych, when two studies fell into my hands: The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model: A Model of Bidirectional Effects in Developmental Studies (Cook W.L. & Kenny D.A., 2005) and Dyadic Data Analysis (Kenny D.A., Kashy D.A. & Cook W.L., 2006). Suddenly the dots began to join, and so the Triptych section “Philotic studies” was born, its title derived as follows:

Philotic studies [NEO] – an authorial neologism; derived from Greek φίλος (phílos, “friendly, beloved”) / φιλία (philía, “friendship”). It denotes the study of the ethical and epistemic quality of bonds between entities /.../ and an analysis of whether and how complex relations generate a new, shared identity (the core). The operator ∩² is used for “double/bi-intersection” /.../. The label “philotic studies” is therefore a “working tag”, while at the same time it anchors in existing frameworks: the analysis of interdependence in dyads (APIM) and the modelling of multilayer/temporal networks (multiplex) /.../.

And so, in consequence, Philotica was finally born as the name of both the portal and the framework, having had its episodes along the way in Addendum I and in Gods as hyper-consciousness in a relational network /.../ – but those are other chapters of the same story.

So I probably need not write any more about the origin of the word Philotheca, the library for the Philotica project.

That is the past. Today Philotica is a working platform: a place where the research corpus – the three core projects gathered in Philotheca – continues to grow. The ambition reaches further than HiveEve ever did. Philotica is meant to be built with others (see Rules if you are interested in the terms of collaboration): through open discussions on GitHub, but also through actual work on the projects themselves. If someone wanted, say, to take on the Human Source Code and begin building a model of the human from available medical data – this is exactly the kind of collaboration this platform exists for.