Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"
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<p>But to Engelbart's dismay, this new "collective nervous system" ended up being use to only make the <em>old</em> processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, which only <em>broadcast</em> data. </p> | <p>But to Engelbart's dismay, this new "collective nervous system" ended up being use to only make the <em>old</em> processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press, which only <em>broadcast</em> data. </p> | ||
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+ | <blockquote>The difference that makes a difference, which <em>knowledge federation</em> is positioned to contribute, is to organize us in knowledge work in such a way, that the result is the production of <em>meaning</em>.</blockquote> | ||
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+ | <p>The purpose of [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] is to | ||
<p> | <p> | ||
[[File:Giddens-OS.jpeg]] | [[File:Giddens-OS.jpeg]] | ||
</p> | </p> | ||
− | <p>The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact | + | <p>The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact that its absence, the impact of using the technology to merely broadcast information, had on culture and "human quality".</p> |
<p>Dazzled by an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.</p> | <p>Dazzled by an overload of data, in a reality whose complexity is well beyond our comprehension—we have no other recourse but "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it a competitively.</p> | ||
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</div> </div> | </div> </div> | ||
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<p> | <p> | ||
<blockquote>"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",</blockquote> | <blockquote>"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",</blockquote> | ||
− | Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. <em>Of course</em> | + | Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. <em>Of course</em> the political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking for was to 'hit the brakes'; and when our 'bus' is inspected, it becomes clear that its 'brakes' too are dysfunctional.</p> |
− | <p>So <b>who</b> will lead us through the next | + | <p>So <b>who</b> will lead us through the next and vitally important step on our evolutionary agenda—where we shall learn how to update <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>?</p> |
− | <p>Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" | + | <p>Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored—and so were Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and the others who followed. </p> |
<p>Why?</p> | <p>Why?</p> | ||
− | <p>It is tempting to conclude that the <em>academia</em> followed the general trend, and | + | <p>It is tempting to conclude that the <em>academia</em> too followed the general trend, and evolved as a <em>power structure</em>. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.</p> |
<p>As we pointed out in the opening paragraph of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. | <p>As we pointed out in the opening paragraph of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. | ||
− | Our tradition developed from classical philosophy, where the "philosophical" questions such as "How do we know that something is <em>true</em>?" and even "<em>What does it mean</em> that something is true?" led to | + | Our tradition developed from classical philosophy, where the "philosophical" questions such as "How do we know that something is <em>true</em>?" and even "<em>What does it mean</em> to say that something is true?" led to rigorous or "academic" standards for pursuing knowledge. The university's core social role, as we, academic people tend to perceive it, is to uphold those standards. By studying at a university, one becomes capable of pursuing knowledge in an academic way in <em>any</em> domain of interest.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>And as we also pointed out, by bringing up the image of Galilei in house arrest, this seemingly esoteric or "philosophical" pursuit was what largely <em>enabled</em> the last "great cultural revival", and led to all those various good things that we now enjoy. The Inquisition, censorship and prison were unable to keep in check an idea whose time had come—and the new way to pursue knowledge soon migrated from astrophysics, where it originated, and transformed all walks of life. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>We began our presentation of <em>knowledge federation</em> by asking "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?" </p> |
− | < | + | <h3>Diagnosis</h3> |
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− | < | + | <p>Here is why we felt confident in drafting an affirmative answer to this rhetorical question.</p> |
− | <p>Early in the course of modernization, we made a fundamental error whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently uncovered and reported, but it has not yet been corrected.</p> | + | <p>Early in the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently uncovered and reported, but it has not yet been corrected.</p> |
− | <p>Without thinking, from the traditional culture we've adopted a myth incomparably more disruptive of modernization that the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality". And that the | + | <p>Without thinking, from the traditional culture we've adopted a <em>myth</em> incomparably more disruptive of modernization that the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality". And that the role of information is to provide us an "objectively true reality picture", so that we may distinguish truth from falsehood by simply checking whether an idea fits in. </p> |
<blockquote>The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.</blockquote> | <blockquote>The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.</blockquote> | ||
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[[File:Einstein-Watch.jpeg]] | [[File:Einstein-Watch.jpeg]] | ||
</p> | </p> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>It has turned out that <em>there is simply no way</em> to open the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our models <em>correspond</em> to the real thing!</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>How, then, did our "reality picture" come about?</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Reality, reported scientists and philosophers, is not something we discover; it is something we <em>construct</em>. </p> |
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− | <p> | + | <p>Part of this construction is a function of our cognitive system, which turns "the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience" into something that makes sense, and helps us function. The other part is performed by our society. Long before we are able to reflect on these matters "philosophically", we are given certain concepts through which to look at the world and organize it and make sense of it. Through innumerable 'carrots and sticks', throughout our lives, we are induced to "see the reality" in a certain specific way—as our culture defines it. As everyone knows, every "normal human being" sees the reality as it truly is. Wasn't that the reason why our ancestors often considered the members of a neighboring tribes, who saw the reality differently, as not completely normal; and why they treated them as not completely human?</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Of various consequences that have resulted from this historical error, we shall here mention two. The first will explain what really happened with our culture, and our "human quality"; why the way we handle them urgently needs to change. The second will explain what holds us back—why we've been so incapable of treating our <em>systems</em> as we treat other human-made things, by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>To see our first point, we invite you to follow us in a one-minute thought experiment. To join us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral. No, this is not about religion; we shall use the cathedral as one of our <em>ideograms</em>, to put things in proportion and make a point.</p> |
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− | <p>What | + | <p>What strikes us instantly, as we enter, is awe-inspiring architecture. Then we hear the music play: Is it Bach's cantatas? Or Allegri's Miserere? We see sculptures, and frescos by masters of old on the walls. And then, of course, there's the ritual...</p> |
+ | <p>We also notice a little book on each bench. When we open it, we see that its first paragraphs explain how the world was created.</p> | ||
+ | <p>Let this difference in size—between the beginning of Genesis and all the rest we find in a cathedral—point to the fact that, owing to our error, our pursuit of knowledge has been focused on a relatively minor part, on <em>explaining</em> how the things we perceive originated, and how they work. And that what we've ignored is our culture as a complex ecosystem, which evolved through thousands of years, whose function is to <em>socialize</em> people in a certain specific way. To <em>create</em> certain "human quality". Notice that we are not making a value judgment, only pointing to a function.</p> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>The way we presently treat this ecosystem reminds of the way in which we treated the natural ones, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We have nothing equivalent to CO2 measurements and quotas, to even <em>try</em> to make this a scientific and political issue.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>So how <em>are</em> our culture, and our "human quality" evolving? To see the answer, it is enough to just look around. To an excessive degree, the <em>symbolic environment</em> we are immersed in is a product of advertising. And explicit advertising is only a tip of an iceberg, comprising various ways in which we are <em>socialized</em> to be egotistical consumers; to believe in "free competition"—not in "making things <em>whole</em>".</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>By believing that the role of information is to give us an "objective" and factual view of "reality", we have ignored and abandoned to decay core parts of our cultural heritage. <em>And</em> we have abandoned the creation of culture, and of "human quality", to <em>power structure</em>. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>To see our second point, that reality construction is a key instrument of the <em>power structure</em>, and hence of power, it may be sufficient to point to "Social Construction of Reality", where Berger and Luckmann explained how throughout history, the "universal theories" about the nature of reality have been used to <em>legitimize</em> a given social order. But this theme is central to <em>holotopia</em>, and here too we can only get a glimpse of a solution by looking at deeper dynamics and causes.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>To be able to do that we devised a <em>thread</em>—in which three short stories or <em>vignettes</em> are strung together to compose a larger insight.</p> |
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+ | <p>The first <em>vignette</em> describes a real-life event, where two Icelandic horses living outdoors—aging Odin the Horse, and New Horse who is just being introduced to the herd where Odin is the stallion and the leader—are engaged in turf strife. It will be suffice to just imagine these two horses running side by side, with their long hairs waving in the wind, Odin pushing New Horse toward the river, and away from his pack of mares.</p> | ||
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− | <p>The second story | + | <p>The second story is about sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and his "theory of practice"—where Bourdieu provided a conceptual framework to help us understand how <em>socialization</em> works; and in particular its relationship with what he called "symbolic power". Our reason for combining these two stories together is to suggest that we humans exhibit a similar turf behavior as Odin—but that this tends to remain largely unrecognized. Part of the reason is that, as Bourdieu explained, the ways in which this atavistic disposition of ours manifests itself are incomparably more diverse and subtle than the ones of horses—indeed as more diverse so as our culture is more complex than theirs. </p> |
− | <p>Bourdieu | + | <p>Bourdieu devised two keywords for the symbolic cultural 'turf'" "field" and "game", and used them interchangeably. He called it a "field", to suggest (1) a field of activity or profession, and the <em>system</em> where it is practiced; and (2) something akin to a magnetic field, in which we people are immersed as small magnets, and which subtly, without us noticing, orients our seemingly random or "free" movement. He referred to it as "game", to suggests that there are certain semi-permanent roles in it, with allowable 'moves', by which our 'turf strife' is structured in a specific way.</p> |
− | <p>To explain the | + | <p>To explain the dynamics of the game or the field, Bourdieu adapted two additional keywords, each of which has a long academic history: "habitus" and "doxa". A habitus is composed of embodied behavioral predispositions, and may be thought of as distinct 'roles' or 'avatars' in the 'game'. A king has a certain distinct habitus; and so do his pages. The habitus is routinely maintained through direct, body-to-body action (everyone bows to the king, and you do too), without conscious intention or awareness. Doxa is the belief, or embodied experience, that the given social order is <em>the</em> reality. "Orthodoxy" acknowledges that multiple "realities" coexist, of which only a single one is "right"; doxa ignores even the <em>possibility</em> of alternatives.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Hence we may understand <em>socialized reality</em> as something that 'gamifies' our social behavior, by giving everyone an 'avatar' or a role, and a set of capabilities. Doxa is the 'cement' that makes such <em>socialized reality</em> relatively permanent.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>A [[vignette|<em>vignette</em>]] involving Antonio Damasio as cognitive neuroscientist completes this <em>thread</em>, by helping us see that the "embodied predispositions" that are maintained in this way have a <em>decisive role</em>, contrary to what the 19th century science and indeed the core of our philosophical tradition made us believe. Damasio showed that our socialized <em>embodied</em> predispositions act as a cognitive filter—<em>determining</em> not only our priorities, but also the <em>options</em> we may be able to rationally consider. Our embodied, socialized predispositions are a reason, for instance, why we don't consider showing up in public naked (which in another culture might be normal). </p> |
+ | <p>This conclusion suggests itself: Changing <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>—however rational, and necessary, that may be—is for <em>similar</em> reasons inconceivable. </p> | ||
− | <blockquote> | + | <blockquote>We are incapable of changing our <em>systems</em>, because we have been <em>socialized</em> to accept them as reality.</blockquote> |
− | <p> | + | <p>We may now condense this diagnosis to a single keyword: <em>reification</em>. We are incapable of replacing 'candle headlights' because we have <em>reified</em> them as 'headlights'! "Science" has no systemic purpose. Science <em>is</em> what the scientists are doing. Just as "journalism" is the profession we've inherited from the tradition. </p> |
+ | <p> | ||
+ | [[File:Beck-frame.jpeg]] | ||
+ | </p> | ||
+ | <p>But <em>reification</em> reaches still deeper—to include the very <em>language</em> we use to organize our world. It includes the very concepts by which we frame our "issues". Ulrich Beck continued the above observation:</p> | ||
+ | <blockquote> | ||
+ | "Max Weber's 'iron cage' – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future – is for me the prison of <em>categories and basic assumptions</em> of classical social, cultural and political sciences." | ||
+ | </blockquote> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>We may now see not only our inherited physical institutions or <em>systems</em> as 'candles'—but also our inherited or socialized concepts, which determine the very <em>way</em> in which we look at the world.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p><em>Reification</em> underlies <em>both</em> problems. It is what <em>keeps us</em> in 'iron cage'.</p> |
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+ | <h3>Remedy</h3> | ||
− | < | + | <p>Notice the depth and the beauty of our challenge.</p> |
− | < | + | <p>When we write "worldviews", our word processor underlines the word in red. <em>Even grammatically</em>, there can be only one worldview—the one that <em>corresponds</em> with the world! <em>Whatever we say</em>, even when that is "we are constructing reality", <em>by default</em> we are making a statement <em>about</em> reality, we are saying how the things "really are" out there. But in this latter case, of course, the result is a paradox. </p> |
+ | <p>We <em>are</em> in a paradox; how can we ever come out?</p> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>The answer we proposed is in two steps.</p> |
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− | + | </div> </div> | |
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+ | <div class="col-md-3"></div> | ||
+ | <div class="col-md-6"> | ||
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− | <p>The <em> | + | <p>The first – pointed to by the metaphor of the mirror, and the Mirror <em>ideogram</em> – is to self-reflect. We are proposing the kind of self-reflection that Socrates championed, which was the academic tradition's very source, and point of inception. We believed that something was the case, and it turned out that it was not. Meanwhile, we built on that assumption our institutional organization, our ethos and our self-image. We built on it even a formal logic, which excludes the middle.</p> |
− | < | + | <p>The <em>mirror</em> reflects the fact that we are not <em>above</em> the world, looking at it objectively. However it might have seemed otherwise, the procedures we use were not objectively existing ways to objectively see the world, which were only <em>discovered</em> by our predecessors. We cannot forever continue being busy doing the work that is <em>defined</em> by those procedures. The evolution of <em>our</em> system must be allowed to continue. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>The <em>mirror</em> warns us that <em>we</em> are now 'keeping Galilei in house arrest'—by using only "symbolic power", of course, and without being aware of that.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Our self-reflection in front of the <em>mirror</em> is not from a power position, but in the manner of the [[dialog|<em>dialog</em>]]. Which means—in a completely different tone of voice, which reflects <em>genuine</em> intention to see what goes on, correct errors, and make improvements.</p> |
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− | <p>The | + | <p>The Mirror <em>ideogram</em> points to the nature of our contemporary academic situation, in a similar way as the Modernity <em>ideogram</em> points to our general one. The spontaneous evolution of <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> has brought us here, in front of the <em>mirror</em>. Seeing ourselves in the <em>mirror</em> means seeing ourselves in the world. It means the end of <em>reification</em>—and the beginning of <em>accountability</em>. The world we see in the <em>mirror</em> is a world in dire need—for <em>new</em> ways to be creative. The role in which we see ourselves, in that world, by looking at the <em>mirror</em> is all-important.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Imagine what it will mean to liberate the vast academic 'army', all of us who have been selected, trained and publicly sponsored to produce new ideas—from disciplinary constraints, to empower us to see ourselves as the core part of our society's 'headlights', and to self-organize and be creative accordingly!</p> |
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− | <p> | + | <p>But how shall we do that, how shall we step into that so much larger and freer yet more responsible role—without sacrificing the core element of our tradition; which is logical and methodological <em>rigor</em>?</p> |
− | <p> | + | </div> |
+ | <div class="col-md-3"> | ||
+ | <p> | ||
+ | [[File:Mirror2.jpg]]<br> | ||
+ | <small>Mirror <em>ideogram</em></small> | ||
+ | </p> | ||
+ | </div> </div> | ||
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+ | <div class="col-md-3"></div> | ||
+ | <div class="col-md-7"> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>The answer, and the second step we are proposing, is unexpected; even seemingly impossible, or magical.</p> |
− | < | + | <blockquote>We can go <em>through</em> the <em>mirror</em>—into a completely <em>new</em> academic and social reality.</blockquote> |
− | < | + | <p>Symbolically, that means liberating ourselves from the entrapment of <em>reification</em>—and liberating the people, the oppressed. We all must be liberated from reifying the way we see our world, from reifying our <em>systems</em> or institutions, and the very concepts we use to make sense of our world. We must all move to a world where what constitutes our society, and our culture, is given the kind of status that the technology has—of humanly created things; which must continue to evolve, by being adapted to their purposes. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Academically or philosophically, this crucial step, through the <em>mirror</em>, is made possible by what philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—which we adapted as one of our <em>keywords</em>.</p> |
+ | <p> | ||
+ | [[File:Quine–TbC.jpeg]] | ||
+ | </p> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:</p> |
+ | <blockquote> | ||
+ | "The less a science has advanced, the more its terminology tends to rest on an uncritical assumption of mutual understanding. With increase of rigor this basis is replaced piecemeal by the introduction of definitions. The interrelationships recruited for these definitions gain the status of analytic principles; what was once regarded as a theory about the world becomes reconstrued as a convention of language. Thus it is that some flow from the theoretical to the conventional is an adjunct of progress in the logical foundations of any science." | ||
+ | </blockquote> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>But if the switch to <em>truth by convention</em> is the way in which the sciences repair their logical foundations—then why not use it to update the logical foundations of our <em>knowledge work</em> at large?</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p><em>Truth by convention</em>, as we use this [[keyword|<em>keyword</em>]], is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let <em>x</em> be <em>y</em>. Then..." and the argument follows. Obviously, the claim that <em>x</em> "really is" <em>y</em> is unintended, and meaningless. Only a convention has been made—which is valid <em>within the given context</em>, of an article, or a theory, or a methodology.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>In our <em>prototype</em> we used [[truth by convention|<em>truth by convention</em>]] to define an <em>epistemology</em>; and a <em>methodology</em>. </p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>The <em>epistemology</em>, called <em>design epistemology</em>, turns the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information, as we described above) into a convention.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>In the "Design Epistemology" research article, where we articulated this proposal, we drafted a parallel between the modernization of knowledge work we are proposing, and the emergence of modern art. By defining an <em>epistemology</em> and a <em>methodology</em> as conventions, we academic researchers can do as the artists did, when they liberated themselves from the demand to faithfully depict the reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters—we can be creative in the very way in which we practice our profession. We made it clear that the approach we proposed was a general one, and that our <em>design epistemology</em> was only an <em>example</em> showing what might be possible when the approach is developed.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Notice that logically <em>anything</em> can be turned into a convention. The "proof of the pie" is that it works! <em>truth by convention</em>. We, however, chose to use [[truth by convention|<em>truth by convention</em>]] to codify the state-of-the-art <em>epistemological</em> insights; the ones that now serve as anomalies, challenging the epistemological and methodological status quo, and demanding change. In this way, by weaving those insights into a <em>prototype</em> <em>methodology</em>, and configuring a system that will continuously keep them up to date (we are doing that as we speak)—we use [[knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] to give information the agency to <em>modify</em> the <em>epistemology</em> and the <em>methods</em>; and to enable the latter to <em>evolve</em>.</p> |
− | </ | + | <p>A <em>vast</em> creative frontier opens up before us on the other side of the <em>mirror</em>, both academic <em>and</em> cultural. We developed the <em>holoscope</em> and the <em>holotopia</em> as <em>prototypes</em>, to show what might be possible if we pursued this <em>new course</em>. </p> |
− | < | + | <p>By using [[truth by convention|<em>truth by convention</em>]], language too can be liberated from <em>reification</em> and tradition; and so can our professional and specifically disciplinary-academic pursuits. We conclude here by only mentioning two examples, each of which illustrates <em>both</em> possibilities (both were proposed to corresponding communities of interest, where they proved welcome, and useful). </p> |
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− | <p> | + | <p>Our definition of <em>design</em>, as "the alternative to <em>tradition</em>", introduced <em>design</em> and <em>tradition</em> as two alternative ways to <em>wholeness</em>. Here <em>tradition</em> means relying on what we've inherited from the past, and relying on small changes and "the survival of the fittest"; <em>design</em> is the alternative, where we consciously and intentionally "make things <em>whole</em>". The point is that when <em>tradition</em> can no longer be relied on, <em>design</em> must be used. This pair of <em>keywords</em> allows us to understand the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>, and our situation or the "world problematique" in simple terms: We are no longer <em>traditional</em>; and yet we are not yet <em>designing</em>. We are caught up in an unstable way of evolving, where neither of the options work. Our <em>technology</em> is developed by <em>design</em>—and progressed at an accelerated rate; our culture (represented by the <em>headlights</em>) has remained <em>traditional</em>, and fallen behind.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Our definition of <em>implicit information</em> as <em>information</em> that is not making a factual statement, but is implicit in cultural artifacts, mores etc., and of <em>visual literacy</em> (a definition for the International Visual Literacy Association), as "literacy associated with <em>implicit information</em>", opens up a whole realm of possibilities to be developed. While our ethics, legislature and academic production have been focused on factual, <em>explicit information</em>, we have been culturally (and ethically and politically) dominated by the subtle <em>implicit information</em>, which we have not yet learned to decode, <em>or</em> control. The creation of <em>prototypes</em>—the core activity on the other side of the <em>mirror</em>, by which agency is restored to information—opens up a myriad possibilities for combining art and science. As we shall see, in the Holotopia project this will be our core approach.</p> |
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+ | <div class="col-md-3"><h2>[[Holotopia:Narrow frame|<em>Narrow frame</em>]]</h2></div> | ||
+ | <div class="col-md-7"><h3><em>Scope</em></h3> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>The question we'll explore here is the one posed by the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>: <b>How</b> do we need to "look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it". </p> |
+ | <p>We build part of our case for the <em>holoscope</em> and the <em>holotopia</em> by developing an analogy between the <em>last</em> "great cultural revival", where a <em>fundamental</em> change of the way we look at the world (from traditional/Biblical, to rational/scientific) effortlessly caused nearly <em>everything</em> to change. Notice that to meet <em>that</em> sort of a change, we do not need to convince the political and business leaders, we do not need to occupy Wall Street. It is the prerogative of our, academic occupation to uphold and update and give to our society this most powertful agent of change—the standard of "right" knowledge.</p> | ||
− | |||
− | < | + | <h3>Diagnosis</h3> |
− | < | + | <blockquote>So <em>how</em> should we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it? <br> |
− | + | Nobody knows! </blockquote> | |
− | |||
− | + | <p>Of course, countess books and articles have been written that could inform an answer to this most timely question. But no consensus has emerged—or even a consensus about a <em>method</em> by which that could be achieved. </p> | |
− | |||
− | <p>Of course, | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>That being the case, we'll begin this diagnostic process by simply sharing what <em>we</em>'ve been told while we were growing up. Which is roughly as follows.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>As members of the <em>homo sapiens</em> species, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to understand the world, and to make rational choices based on such understanding. Give us a correct model of the natural world, and we'll know exactly how to go about satisfying "our needs", which we of course know because we can experience them directly. But the traditions got it all wrong! Being unable to understand how the nature works, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to the ghost to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error. It <em>removed</em> the "ghost", and told us how 'the machine' <em>really</em> works. </p> |
− | < | + | <p>Of course no rational person would ever <em>write</em> this sort of a silly idea. But—and this is a key point in this diagnosis—this idea was <em>not</em> written. It has simply <em>emerged</em>—around the middle of the 19th century, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes were replaced for so many of us by Darwin and Newton. Science originated, and shaped its disciplinary divisions and procedures <em>before</em> that time, while still the tradition and the Church had the prerogative of telling people how to see the world, and what values to uphold.</p> |
− | <p>From | + | <p>From a collection of reasons why this popular idea of what constitutes the "scientific worldview" needs to be updated, we here mention only two.</p> |
<p> | <p> | ||
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</p> | </p> | ||
<blockquote>The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.</blockquote> | <blockquote>The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.</blockquote> | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>The mechanistic or "classical" worldview of 19th century's science was disproved and disowned by modern science. <em>Even the physical reality</em> cannot be understood as a mechanism, or explained in "classical" or "causal" terms. Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, expected that the largest impact of modern physics would be <em>on popular culture</em>—because the way of looking at the world that it took over from the 19th century's science, which he called the "narrow frame" (and which we adapted as a <em>keyword</em>), would be removed. </p> |
+ | |||
+ | <p>In "Physics and Philosophy" Heisenberg described how the destruction of religious and other traditions on which the continuation of culture and "human quality" depended, and the dominance of "instrumental" thinking and values (which Bauman called "adiaphorisation") followed from the assumptions that the modern physics <em>proved</em> were wrong.</p> | ||
− | <p>In " | + | <p>In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heisenberg's intellectual "heir", co-authored the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message was "We have to learn to think in a new way". The new way of thinking, conspicuously impregnated by "seeing things whole" and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, was shown to follow from the worldview of new physics, and the environmental and larger social crisis.</p> |
− | < | + | <p>The second reason is that even mechanisms, when they are complex, (or technically even <em>classical</em> nonlinear and dynamic or "complex" systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>This is yet another core insight that we the people needed to acquire from the systems sciences, and from cybernetics in particular.</p> |
<p> | <p> | ||
Line 576: | Line 583: | ||
</p> | </p> | ||
− | < | + | <p>It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There is a <em>scientific</em> reason for that: The "hell" (which you may imagine as the global issues, or as the destination toward which our 'bus' is currently taking us) consisting largely of "side effects" of our best efforts, and "solutions". |
− | |||
− | |||
<p> | <p> | ||
− | [https://youtu.be/nXQraugWbjQ?t=57 Hear Mary Catherine Bateson] say: | + | [https://youtu.be/nXQraugWbjQ?t=57 Hear Mary Catherine Bateson] (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, and the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who pioneered both fields) say: |
<blockquote> | <blockquote> | ||
"The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge <em>in general</em>. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!" | "The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge <em>in general</em>. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!" | ||
Line 586: | Line 591: | ||
</p> | </p> | ||
− | |||
− | < | + | <h3>Remedy</h3> |
+ | <p>The remedy we proposed is to spell out the rules, by defining a <em>general-purpose methodology</em> as a convention; and by turning it into a <em>prototype</em> and developing it continuously—to represent the state of the art of relevant knowledge, and technology.</p> | ||
− | < | + | <p>Our <em>prototype</em> is called Polyscopic Modeling <em>methodology</em>, and nicknamed <em>polyscopy</em>. </p> |
− | |||
− | < | ||
− | < | ||
− | <p> | + | <p>This approach allows us to <em>specify</em> what "being informed" means (by claiming it not as a "fact about reality", but as a convention, and part of a practical toolkit). In <em>polyscopy</em>, the intuitive notion, when one may be considered "informed", is made concrete by the technical keyword <em>gestalt</em>; one is informed, if one has a <em>gestalt</em> that is appropriate to one's situation. An <em>appropriate gestalt</em> interprets a situation in a way that points to right action—and you'll easily recognize now that we'll be using this idea all along, by rendering our general situation as the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>, and our academic one as the Mirror <em>ideogram</em>. Suitable techniques for communicating and 'proving' or <em>justifying</em> such claims are offered, most of which are developed by generalizing the standard toolkit of science.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>Most of the <em>design patterns</em> of this <em>methodology prototype</em> are <em>federated</em>; and we here give a single example of a source, to point in a brief and palpable way to some of the important nuances, and to give due credit.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>A situation with overtones of a crisis, closely similar to the one we now have in our handling of information at large, arose in the early days of computer programming, when the buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which nobody was able to understand and correct. [https://holoscope.info/2019/02/07/knowledge-federation-dot-org/#InformationHolon The story] is interesting, but here we only highlight the a couple of main points and lessons learned.</p> |
<p> | <p> | ||
[[File:Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg]] | [[File:Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg]] | ||
</p> | </p> | ||
+ | <p>They are drawn from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Old-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard. The first one is that—to understand a complex system—<em>abstraction</em> must be used. We must be able to <em>create</em> concepts on distinct levels of generality, representing also distinct angles of looking (which, you'll recall, we called <em>aspects</em>). But that is exactly the core point of <em>polyscopy</em>, suggested by the methodology's very name.</p> | ||
− | <p>The | + | <p>The second point we'd like to highlight is is the <em>accountability</em> for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language including the native "machine language" of the computer will allow the programmers to create <em>any</em> sort of program. The creators of the "programming methodologies", however, took it upon themselves to provide the programmers the kind of programming tools that would not only enable them, but even <em>compel</em> them to write comprehensible, reusable, well-structured code. To see how this reflects upon our theme at hand, our proposal to add systemic self-organization to the <em>academia</em>'s repertoire of capabilities, imagine that an unusually gifted young man has entered the <em>academia</em>; to make the story concrete, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. Young Bourdieu will spend a lifetime using the toolkit the <em>academia</em> has given him. Imagine if what he produces, along with countless other selected creative people, is equivalent to "spaghetti code" in computer programming! Imagine the level of improvement that this is pointing to!</p> |
− | |||
</div> </div> | </div> </div> | ||
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<div class="col-md-6"> | <div class="col-md-6"> | ||
− | |||
− | <p> | + | <p>The object oriented methodology provided a template called "object"—which "hides implementation and exports function". What this means is that an object can be "plugged into" more general objects based on the functions it produces—without inspecting the details of its code! (But those details are made available for inspection; and of course also for continuous improvement.)</p> |
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | <p>The solution for structuring information we provided in <em>polyscopy</em>, called <em>information holon</em>, is closely similar. Information, represented in the Information <em>ideogram</em> as an "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. The circle represents the point of it all (such as "the cup is whole"); the square represents the details, the side views. </p> | ||
+ | |||
+ | <p>When the <em>circle</em> is a <em>gestalt</em>, it allows this to be integrated or "exported" as a "fact" into <em>higher-level</em> insights; and it allows various and heterogeneous insights on which it is based to remain 'hidden', but available for inspection, in the <em>square</em>. When the <em>circle</em> is a <em>prototype</em> it allows the multiplicity of insights that comprise the <em>square</em> to have a direct <em>systemic</em> impact, or agency.</p> | ||
</div> | </div> | ||
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<div class="col-md-7"> | <div class="col-md-7"> | ||
− | |||
− | <p> | + | <p>The <em>prototype</em> <em>polyscopic</em> book manuscript titled "<em>Information</em> Must Be <em>Designed</em>" book manuscript is structured as an <em>information holon</em>. Here the claim made in the title (which is the same we made in the opening of this presentation by talking about the bus with candle headlights) is <em>justified</em> in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it.</p> |
− | <p> | + | <p>It is customary in computer methodology design to propose a programming language that implements the methodology—and to <em>bootstrap</em> the approach by creating a compiler for that language in the language itself. In this book we did something similar. The book's four chapters present four angles of looking at the general issue of information, identify anomalies and propose remedies—which are the <em>design patterns</em> of the proposed <em>methodology</em>. The book then uses the <em>methodology</em> to justify the claim that motivates it—that makes a case for the proposed <em>paradigm</em>, by using the <em>paradigm</em>. |
</div> </div> | </div> </div> | ||
+ | |||
+ | <!-- XXX | ||
Revision as of 09:38, 11 August 2020
Holotopia
Imagine...
You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?
Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it?
Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.
The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.
Scope
The question we'll explore here is the one posed by the Modernity ideogram: How do we need to "look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it".
We build part of our case for the holoscope and the holotopia by developing an analogy between the last "great cultural revival", where a fundamental change of the way we look at the world (from traditional/Biblical, to rational/scientific) effortlessly caused nearly everything to change. Notice that to meet that sort of a change, we do not need to convince the political and business leaders, we do not need to occupy Wall Street. It is the prerogative of our, academic occupation to uphold and update and give to our society this most powertful agent of change—the standard of "right" knowledge.
Diagnosis
So how should we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it?
Nobody knows!
Of course, countess books and articles have been written that could inform an answer to this most timely question. But no consensus has emerged—or even a consensus about a method by which that could be achieved.
That being the case, we'll begin this diagnostic process by simply sharing what we've been told while we were growing up. Which is roughly as follows.
As members of the homo sapiens species, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to understand the world, and to make rational choices based on such understanding. Give us a correct model of the natural world, and we'll know exactly how to go about satisfying "our needs", which we of course know because we can experience them directly. But the traditions got it all wrong! Being unable to understand how the nature works, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to the ghost to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error. It removed the "ghost", and told us how 'the machine' really works.
Of course no rational person would ever write this sort of a silly idea. But—and this is a key point in this diagnosis—this idea was not written. It has simply emerged—around the middle of the 19th century, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes were replaced for so many of us by Darwin and Newton. Science originated, and shaped its disciplinary divisions and procedures before that time, while still the tradition and the Church had the prerogative of telling people how to see the world, and what values to uphold.
From a collection of reasons why this popular idea of what constitutes the "scientific worldview" needs to be updated, we here mention only two.
The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.
The mechanistic or "classical" worldview of 19th century's science was disproved and disowned by modern science. Even the physical reality cannot be understood as a mechanism, or explained in "classical" or "causal" terms. Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, expected that the largest impact of modern physics would be on popular culture—because the way of looking at the world that it took over from the 19th century's science, which he called the "narrow frame" (and which we adapted as a keyword), would be removed.
In "Physics and Philosophy" Heisenberg described how the destruction of religious and other traditions on which the continuation of culture and "human quality" depended, and the dominance of "instrumental" thinking and values (which Bauman called "adiaphorisation") followed from the assumptions that the modern physics proved were wrong.
In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heisenberg's intellectual "heir", co-authored the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message was "We have to learn to think in a new way". The new way of thinking, conspicuously impregnated by "seeing things whole" and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, was shown to follow from the worldview of new physics, and the environmental and larger social crisis.
The second reason is that even mechanisms, when they are complex, (or technically even classical nonlinear and dynamic or "complex" systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.
This is yet another core insight that we the people needed to acquire from the systems sciences, and from cybernetics in particular.
It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There is a scientific reason for that: The "hell" (which you may imagine as the global issues, or as the destination toward which our 'bus' is currently taking us) consisting largely of "side effects" of our best efforts, and "solutions". <p> Hear Mary Catherine Bateson (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, and the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who pioneered both fields) say:
"The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge in general. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!"
Remedy
The remedy we proposed is to spell out the rules, by defining a general-purpose methodology as a convention; and by turning it into a prototype and developing it continuously—to represent the state of the art of relevant knowledge, and technology.
Our prototype is called Polyscopic Modeling methodology, and nicknamed polyscopy.
This approach allows us to specify what "being informed" means (by claiming it not as a "fact about reality", but as a convention, and part of a practical toolkit). In polyscopy, the intuitive notion, when one may be considered "informed", is made concrete by the technical keyword gestalt; one is informed, if one has a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. An appropriate gestalt interprets a situation in a way that points to right action—and you'll easily recognize now that we'll be using this idea all along, by rendering our general situation as the Modernity ideogram, and our academic one as the Mirror ideogram. Suitable techniques for communicating and 'proving' or justifying such claims are offered, most of which are developed by generalizing the standard toolkit of science.
Most of the design patterns of this methodology prototype are federated; and we here give a single example of a source, to point in a brief and palpable way to some of the important nuances, and to give due credit.
A situation with overtones of a crisis, closely similar to the one we now have in our handling of information at large, arose in the early days of computer programming, when the buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which nobody was able to understand and correct. The story is interesting, but here we only highlight the a couple of main points and lessons learned.
They are drawn from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Old-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard. The first one is that—to understand a complex system—abstraction must be used. We must be able to create concepts on distinct levels of generality, representing also distinct angles of looking (which, you'll recall, we called aspects). But that is exactly the core point of polyscopy, suggested by the methodology's very name.
The second point we'd like to highlight is is the accountability for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language including the native "machine language" of the computer will allow the programmers to create any sort of program. The creators of the "programming methodologies", however, took it upon themselves to provide the programmers the kind of programming tools that would not only enable them, but even compel them to write comprehensible, reusable, well-structured code. To see how this reflects upon our theme at hand, our proposal to add systemic self-organization to the academia's repertoire of capabilities, imagine that an unusually gifted young man has entered the academia; to make the story concrete, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. Young Bourdieu will spend a lifetime using the toolkit the academia has given him. Imagine if what he produces, along with countless other selected creative people, is equivalent to "spaghetti code" in computer programming! Imagine the level of improvement that this is pointing to!
The object oriented methodology provided a template called "object"—which "hides implementation and exports function". What this means is that an object can be "plugged into" more general objects based on the functions it produces—without inspecting the details of its code! (But those details are made available for inspection; and of course also for continuous improvement.)
The solution for structuring information we provided in polyscopy, called information holon, is closely similar. Information, represented in the Information ideogram as an "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. The circle represents the point of it all (such as "the cup is whole"); the square represents the details, the side views.
When the circle is a gestalt, it allows this to be integrated or "exported" as a "fact" into higher-level insights; and it allows various and heterogeneous insights on which it is based to remain 'hidden', but available for inspection, in the square. When the circle is a prototype it allows the multiplicity of insights that comprise the square to have a direct systemic impact, or agency.
The prototype polyscopic book manuscript titled "Information Must Be Designed" book manuscript is structured as an information holon. Here the claim made in the title (which is the same we made in the opening of this presentation by talking about the bus with candle headlights) is justified in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it.
It is customary in computer methodology design to propose a programming language that implements the methodology—and to bootstrap the approach by creating a compiler for that language in the language itself. In this book we did something similar. The book's four chapters present four angles of looking at the general issue of information, identify anomalies and propose remedies—which are the design patterns of the proposed methodology. The book then uses the methodology to justify the claim that motivates it—that makes a case for the proposed paradigm, by using the paradigm. </div> </div>