Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

Revision as of 10:50, 29 August 2020

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.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like?

Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Neil Postman

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of knowledge federation, where initial answers to relevant questions are proposed, and in part implemented in practice.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).

Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

A proof of concept application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a test.

Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following call to action:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Peccei also specified what needed to be done to "change course":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology". In what follows we shall assume that this conclusion has been federated—and focus on the more interesting questions, such as how to "change course"; and in what ways may the new course be different.

In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".

Could the change of 'headlights' we are proposing be "a way to change course"?

A vision

Holotopia is a vision of a possible future that emerges when proper 'light' has been 'turned on'.

Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. But in view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future waned, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is a more attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the holotopia is readily actionable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights, as explained below.

A principle

What do we need to do to "change course" toward the holotopia?

The five insights point to a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by the holotopia's very name. And also by the Modernity ideogram. Instead of reifying our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the wholeness of it all.

Imagine if academic and other knowledge-workers collaborated to serve and develop planetary wholeness – what magnitude of benefits would result!

A method

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole."

To make things whole—we must be able to see them whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described and implemented in the proposed prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

While the characteristics of the holoscope—the design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation, one of them must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope ideogram

To see things whole, we must look at all sides.

The holoscope distinguishes itself by allowing for multiple ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing.

This modernization of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed creation of the ways in which we look at the world—has become necessary in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not "reality pictures", contending for that status with our conventional ones.

In the holoscope, the legitimacy and the peaceful coexistence of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.

We will continue to use the conventional way of speaking and say that something is as stated, that X is Y—although it would be more accurate to say that X can or must (also) be perceived as Y. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way (to use the offered scopes); and to do that collaboratively, in a dialog.

To liberate our worldview from the inherited concepts and methods and allow for deliberate choice of scopes, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy.

Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in proportion.

A discovery of a new way of looking—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct general assessment of an object of study or a situation as a whole (see whether the 'cup' is 'broken' or 'whole') is a new kind of result that is made possible by th general-purpose science that is modeled by the holoscope

To see more, we take recourse to the vision of others. The holoscope combines scientific and other insights to enable us to see what we ignored, to 'see the other side'. This allows us to detect structural defects ('cracks') in core elements of everyday reality—which appear to us as just normal, when we look at them in our habitual way ('in the light of a candle').

All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered as a collection of prototypes. Think of them as composing a 'cardboard model of a city', and a 'construction site'. By sharing them we are not making a case for a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as an academic field, and a real-life praxis.

Scope

What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?

Five Insights ideogram

We use the holoscope to illuminate five pivotal themes, which determine the "course":

Innovation—the way we use our ability to create, and induce change
Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
Epistemology—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning; or "the relationship we have with information"
Method—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life, or "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it"
Values—the way we "pursue happiness", which in the modern society directly determines the course

In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems.

Those structural defects can be remedied.

Their removal naturally leads to improvements that are well beyond the removal of symptoms.

The holotopia vision results.

The key to comprehensive change is the same as it was in Galilei's time—a method that allows for creation of general principles and insights. But since "a great cultural revival" is our next goal, this new method allows for the creation of insights about the most basic themes that mark our social and private existence.

A case for our proposal is thereby also made.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.

Power structure

Scope

What do we need to do, to become capable of "changing course"?

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power.

The power structure insight shows that no dictator is needed.

Albeit in democracy, we are in that situation already.

While the nature of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (which we simply call systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in a certain specific way, they decide what the effects of our work will be.

The power structure determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence shows that they waste a lion's share of our resources. And that they either cause problems, or make us incapable of solving them.

The root cause of this malady is readily found in the way in which systems evolve.

Survival of the fittest favors the systems that are predatory, not the ones that are useful.

This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator. This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the power structure affects our own condition.

The systems provide an ecology, which in the long run shapes our values, and our "human quality". They have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their needs. "The business of business is business"—and if our business is to succeed in competition, we must act in a certain way. We either bend and comply—or get replaced. The effect on the system will be the same.

A consequence, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for bad things to happen. Through socialization, the power structure can co-opt our duty and commitment; and even our heroism and honor.

Bauman's insight that even the holocaust was only a consequence and a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the power structure, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp employees, Bauman argued, were only "doing their job"—in a system whose nature and purpose was beyond their ethical sense, and power to change.

While our ethical sensitivity is tuned to the power structures of the past, we are committing (in all innocence, by acting through the power structures that bind us together) the greatest massive crime in human history.

Our children may not have a livable planet to live on.

Not because someone broke the rules—but because we follow them.

Remedy

The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we develop the capability to update our systems has not remained unnoticed.

The very first step that the The Club of Rome's founders did after its inception, in 1968, was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adapted that as one of our keywords.

The work and the conclusions of this team were based on results in the systems sciences. More recently, in "Guided Evolution of society", systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy made a thorough review of relevant research, and concluded in a truly holotopian tone:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

In 2010, Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to become capable of making further headway on this creative frontier. The procedure we developed is simple: We create a prototype of a system, and organize a transdisciplinary community and project around it, to update it continuously. This enables the insights reached in the participating disciplines to have real or systemic impact directly.

Our very first project of this kind, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, developed a prototype of a public informing that turns perceived problems (that people report directly, through citizen journalism) into systemic understanding of causes and recommendations for action (developed by involving academic and other domain experts, and having their insights made accessible by a communication design team).

The experience with this prototype revealed a general paradox we were not aware of: The senior domain experts we brought together to represent (in this case) journalism cannot change their own system (their full capacity being engaged in performing their role within the system). What they, however, can and need to do is empower their next-generation (students, junior colleagues, entrepreneurs...) to do that. A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to change systems—and hence as a "practical way to craft the future". We subsequently created The Club of Zagreb, as an update (necessary to unravel this paradox) of The Club of Rome. The Holotopia project builds further on the results of this work.

Our portfolio contains about forty prototypes, each of which illustrates systemic innovation in a specific domain. Each prototype is composed by weaving together design patterns—problem-solution pairs, which are ready to be adapted to other design challenges and domains.

The Collaborology prototype, in education, will highlight some of the advantages of this approach.

An education that prepares us for yesterday's professions, and only in a certain stage of life, is obviously an obstacle to systemic change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an emerging area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that dramatically reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in any domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise their "human quality". This in addition gives the students an essential role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .

Collective mind

Scope

We have just seen that our evolutionary challenge and opportunity is to develop the capability to update our institutions or systems, to learn how to make them whole.

Where—with what system—shall we begin?

The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons.

One of them is obvious: If we should use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.

In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to another reason: In social systems, communication is what turns a collection of independent individuals into a system. Wiener made that point by talking about ants and bees. It is the nature of the communication that determines a social system's properties, and behavior. Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis, but let us here use this more contemporary one) the sustainability of a system. The full title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have suitable communication and control.

Diagnosis

That is presently not the case with our core systems; and with our civilization as a whole..

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed.

Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.

To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their communication their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

These calls to action remained, however, without effect.

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. Wiener too entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed.

We have assembled a formidable collection of academic results that shared the same fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we are calling Wiener's paradox. The link between communication and action having been broken—the academic results will tend to be ignored whenever they challenge the present "course" and point to a new one!

To an academic researcher, it may feel disheartening to see so many best ideas of our best minds ignored. Why publish more—if even the most elementary insight that our field has produced, the one that motivated our field and our work, has not yet been communicated to the public?

This sentiment is transformed into holotopian optimism when we look at 'the other side of the coin'—the creative frontier that is opening up. We are invited to, we are indeed obliged to reinvent the systems in which we live and work, by recreating the very communication that holds them together. Including, of course, our own, academic system, and the way in which it interoperates with other systems—or fails to interoperate.

Optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also this commonly ignored fact:

The information technology we now commonly use to communicate with the world was created to enable a paradigm change on that very frontier.

'Electricity', and the 'lightbulb', have just been created—in order to enable the development of the new kinds of 'socio-technical machinery' that our society now urgently needs.

Vannevar Bush pointed to the need for this new paradigm already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" really means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that—given the vast volumes of our information—our knowledge work must be organized in a way that enables us to benefit from each other's thinking. That technology and processes must be devised to enable us to in effect "connect the dots" or think together, as a single mind does. Bush described a prototype system called "memex", which was based on microfilm as technology.

Douglas Engelbart, however, took Bush's idea in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us humans are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system.

Notice that the earlier innovations in this area—including both the clay tablets and the printing press—required that a physical object be transported; this new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in a human nervous system do.

We can now develop insights and solutions together! We can have results instantly!

Engelbart saw in this new technology exactly what we need to become able to handle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which grows at an accelerated rate.

This three minute video clip, which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", offers an opportunity for a pause. Imagine the effects of improving the planetary systems, and our "development, integration and application of knowledge" to begin with. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then our old man put his fingers on his forehead, and looked up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The potential is not only large, it is staggering. The improvement that is both necessary and possible is qualitative—from a system that doesn't work, to one that does.

To Engelbart's dismay, this new "collective nervous system" ended up being use to only make the old processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press. The ones that broadcast information.

The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on our culture; and on "human quality".

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.

But that is exactly what binds us to power structure.

Remedy

What is to be done, to restore the severed link between communication and action?

How can we begin to change our collective mind—as our technology enables, and our situation demands?

Engelbart left us a clear and concise answer; he called it bootstrapping.

His point was that only writing about what needs to be done would not have an effect (the tie between information and action having been broken). Bootstrapping means that we consider ourselves as a part in a larger whole; and that we self-organize, and behave, as it may best serve to restore its wholeness. Which practically means that we either create a new system by using our own minds and bodies, or help others do that.

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline was created by an act of bootstrapping, to enable bootstrapping. What we are calling knowledge federation may now simply be understood as the functioning of a proper collective mind; including all the functions and processes this may require. Obviously, the impending collective mind re-evolution itself requires a system, or an institution, which will assemble and mobilize the required knowledge and human and other resources toward that end. Our first priority must be to secure that. Presently, Knowledge Federation is (a complete prototype of) the transdiscipline for knowledge federation—ready for inspection and deployment. We offer it as a proof-of-concept implementation of our call to action.

The praxis of knowledge federation itself must be federated. In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers, working on technology and processes for collective sense making).

Patty Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at the 2011 An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism workshop in Barcelona

We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to highlight that Knowledge Federation is a true federation—where state of the art knowledge is combined in state of the art systems. The featured participants of our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where our public informing prototype was created, are Patty Coulter (the Director of Oxford Global Media and Fellow of Green College Oxford, formerly the Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism) Mei Lin Fung (the founder of Program for the Future) and David Price (who co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community, and Debategraph—which is now the leading global platform for collective thinking).

Other prototypes contributed other design patterns for restoring the severed link between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 prototype showed what may constitute the federation of a research result—which is written in an esoteric academic vernacular, and has large potential general interest and impact. The first phase of this prototype, completed through collaboration between the author and our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams, and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile, televised and live streamed event, where the result was made public. The third phase, implemented on Debategraph, modeled proper online collective thinking about the result—including pros and cons, connections with other related results, applications etc.

The Lighthouse 2016 prototype is a conceived as a direct remedy for the Wiener's paradox, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This prototype models a system by which an academic community can federate a single message into the public sphere. The message in this case was also relevant—it was whether or not we can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the functioning of our systems (or whether we must use its alternative—namely the knowledge developed in the systems sciences).

Socialized reality

Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",

Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them to do was to 'hit the brakes'; and when the 'bus' they are believed to be 'driving' is inspected, it becomes clear that the 'brakes' too are missing. The job of a politician is to keep 'the bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four years. Changing the 'course' or the system is well beyond what they are able to do, or even imagine doing.

The COVID-19 pandemic may require systemic changes now.

So who, what institution or system, will lead us through our next evolutionary challenge—where we will learn how to recreate the systems in which we live and work; in knowledge work, and beyond?

Both Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them—just as they ignored Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and so many others who followed.

Why?

Isn't the call to restore agency to information and power to knowledge deserving of academic attention?

It is tempting to conclude that the university institution followed the general trend, and evolved as a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

We readily find them in the way in which the university institution originated.

The academic tradition did not originate as a way to practical knowledge, but to freely pursue knowledge for its own sake; in a manner disciplined only by knowledge of knowledge—which philosophers have been developing since antiquity. Wherever this free-yet-disciplined pursuit of knowledge took us, we followed.

And as we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, by highlighting the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest,

it was this free pursuit of knowledge that led to the last "great cultural revival".

We asked:

Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

The key to the positive answer to this question—which is obviously central to holotopia—is in the historicity of "the relationship we have with knowledge"—which Stephen Toulmin explicated so clearly in his last book, "Reurn to Reason", from which the above quotation was taken. So that is what we here focus on.

As Toulmin pointed out, at the time when the modern university was taking shape, it was the Church and the tradition that had the prerogative of telling the people how to conduct their daily affairs and what to believe in. And as the image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! But the censorship and the prison could not stop an idea whose time had come. They were unable to prevent a completely new way to explore the world to transpire from astrophysics, where it originated, and transform first our pursuit of knowledge—and then our society and culture at large.

It is therefore natural that at the universities we consider the curation of this approach to knowledge to be our core role in our society. At the universities, we are the heirs and the custodians of a tradition that has historically led to some of the most spectacular evolutionary leaps in human history. Naturally, we remain faithful to that tradition. We do that by meticulously conforming to the methods and the themes of interests of mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, sociology, philosophy and other traditional academic disciplines, which, we believe, embody the highest standards of knowledge of knowledge. People can learn practical skills elsewhere. It is the university education that gives them them up-to-date knowledge of knowledge—and with it the ability to pursue knowledge correctly in any field of interest.

We must ask:

Can the academic tradition evolve further?

Could this tradition once again give us a completely new way to explore the world?

Can the free pursuit of knowledge, curated by the knowledge of knowledge, once again lead to "a great cultural revival" ?

Can "a great cultural revival" begin at the university?

Diagnosis

In the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error.

From the traditional culture we have adopted a myth far more disruptive of modernization than the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; and that the purpose of information, and of our pursuit of knowledge, is to "know the reality" objectively, as it truly is. It may take a moment of reflection to see how much this myth permeates our popular culture, our society and institutions; how much it marks "the relationship we have with information"—in all its various manifestations.

This fundamental error has subsequently been detected and reported, but not corrected. (We again witness that the link between information and action has been severed.)

It is simply impossible to open up the 'mechanism of nature', and verify that our ideas and models correspond to the real thing!

The "reality", the 20th century's scientists and philosophers found out, is not something we discover; it is something we construct.

Our "construction of reality" turned out to be a complex and most interesting process, in which our cognitive organs and our society or culture interact. From the cradle to the grave, through innumerably many "carrots and sticks", we are socialized to organize and communicate our experience in a certain specific way.

The vast body of research, and insights, that resulted in this pivotal domain of interest, now allows us and indeed compels us to extend the power structure view of social reality a step further, into the cultural and the cognitive realms.

In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann left us an analysis of the social process by which the reality is constructed—and pointed to the role that "universal theories" (which determine the relationship we have with information) play in maintaining a given social and political status quo. An example, but not the only one, is the Biblical worldview of Galilei's persecutors.

To organize and sum up what we above all need to know about the nature of socialization, and its relationship with power, we created the Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread, consisting of three short real-life stories or vignettes. (The threads are a technical tool we developed based on Vannevar Bush's idea of "trails"; we call them "threads" because we further weave them into patterns.) These insights are so central to holotopia, that we don't hesitate to summarize them also here, however briefly.

The first, Odin the Horse story, points to the nature of turf struggle, by portraying the turf behavior of horses.

The second story, featuring Pierre Bourdieu as leading sociologist, shows that we humans exhibit a similar behavior—albeit in far more varied, complex and subtle ways. In effect, Bourdieu's experiences and insights in Algeria, which led to the formulation of his "theory of practice", allow us to perceive the human culture as—a complex 'turf'.

Bourdieu used interchangeably two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to this 'turf'. By calling it a field, he suggested something akin to a magnetic field, which orients our seemingly random or "free" behavior—mostly without anyone noticing that. By calling it a game, he sugged something that structures or "gamifies" our social existence, by giving each of us certain "action capabilities" pertaining to a social role. Those "embodied predispositions" or capabilities, which Bourdieu called "habitus", tend to be transmitted from body to body directly—without anyone noticing that a subtle "turf strife" is at play. Everyone bows to the king, and spontaneously we do too. In this way we are socialized—through innumerably many carrots and sticks—to accept those roles, and the behaviors or capabilities associated with them, as simply the "reality"—and hence as similarly immutable or "objectively" given as the reality of the material world. Bourdieu called this experience, that (our perception of) the social and natural "reality" is the only one possible, doxa.

The third story, featuring Antonio Damasio in the role of a leading cognitive neuroscientist, completes this thread by explaining that we, humans, are not the rational decision makers, as the founding fathers of the Enlightenment made us believe. Each of us has an embodied cognitive filter, which determines what options we are able to rationally consider. This cognitive filter is programmed through socialization. Damasio's insight allows us to understand why we civilized humans don't even rationally consider taking off our clothes and walking into the street naked; and most importantly—why we don't consider changing the systems in which we live and work.

The most important insight reached is the following.

Socialized reality construction constitutes a pseudo-epistemology.

Socialization can make certain things and ideas seem real—and others unreal.

We have deliberately chosen Socrates (the forefather of Academia) and Galilei (a pioneer of science) to represent the academic tradition in our proposal. Both Socrates and Galilei were charged and sentenced for "impiety" (challenging socialized reality), and for epistemology (which Socrates practiced through dialogs, and Galilei by allowing the reason to challenge the truth of the Scripture). Thereby we pointed out that substituting knowledge of knowledge for socialized reality construction has been the core theme of the academic tradition since its inception.

But socialized reality construction is not only or even primarily an instrument of power struggle. It is, indeed, also the way in which the traditional culture reproduces itself and evolves. It is the very 'DNA' of the traditional culture, and often the only one that was available.

We may perceive the traditional "realities"—such as the belief in heavenly reward and the eternal punishment—as instruments of power; and we may also see them as ways in which certain cultural values, and certain "human quality", were maintained. Both perceptions correct; and both are relevant.

It is their historical interplay that is most interesting to study—how the best insights of the best among us, of the historical enlightened beings and "prophets", were diverted to serve the power structure, and turned something quite opposite from what was intended. In the Holotopia project we engage in this sort of study to develop answers to perhaps the most interesting question, in any case from the point of view of the holotopia:

What would our world be like, if we liberated the culture from the power structure?

Some of the consequences of the historical error under consideration (that we adopted reification as "the relationship we have with information") include the following.

Undue limits to creativity. On the one side we have a vast global army of selected, specially trained and publicly sponsored creative workers having to produce more articles in the traditional academic fields as the only way to be academically legitimate. On the other side of our society, and of our planetary ecosystem, in dire need for new ideas, for new ways to be creative. Imagine the amount of benefit that could be reached in that situation— by liberating the contemporary Galilei to once again bring completely new ways to create and handle knowledge!
Severed link between information and action. The (perceived) purpose of information being to complete the 'reality puzzle'—every new piece appears to be equally relevant as the others, and necessary for completing this project. In the sciences, and in media informing, we keep producing large volumes of data every minute—as Neil Postman diagnosed. As the ocean of documents rises, we begin to drown in it. Informing us the people in some functional way becomes impossible.
Loss of cultural heritage. We may as well here focus on the cultural heritage whose purpose was to cultivate "human quality". Already this trivial observation might suffice to make a point: With the threat of eternal fire on the one side, and the promise of heavenly pleasures on the other, a 'field' is created that orients the people's behavior toward what the tradition considered ethical. To see that those ancient myths are, however, only the tip of an iceberg (or more to the point, only elements in a complex ecosystem whose purpose is socialization) a one-minute thought experiment—an imaginary visit to a cathedral—will be sufficient. There is awe-inspiring architecture; frescos of masters of old on the walls; we hear Bach cantatas; and there's of course the ritual. All this comprises an ecosystem—where emotions such as respect and awe make one to listening and learning in certain ways, and advancing further. The complex dynamics of our cultural ecosystem, and the way we handled it, bear a strong analogy with our biophysical environment, with one notable difference: We have neither concepts nor methods, we have nothing equivalent to the temperature and the CO2 measurements in culture—to even diagnose the problems; not to speak about legislating remedies.
"Human quality" abandoned to power structure. Advertising is everywhere. And explicit advertising too is only a tip of an iceberg, the bulk of shich consists of a variety of ways in which "symbolic power" is used to socialize us in ways that suit the power structure interests. As a rule, this proceeds without anyone's awareness, as Bourdieu observed. But the organized and deliberate, and even research-based manipulation should not be underestimated! Here the person and the story of Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda", is iconic.

This conclusion suggests itself.

The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction, as it is believed.

Our socialization only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.

Ironically, our carefully cultivated self-identity—as "objective observers of reality"—keeps us, academic researchers, and information and knowledge at large, on the 'back seat'—and without impact. We can, and do, diagnose problems; but we cannot be an active agent in their solution.

Remedy

In the spirit of the holoscope, we introduce an answer by a metaphorical image, the Mirror ideogram. As the ideograms tend to, the Mirror ideogram too renders the essence of a situation, in a way that points to a way in which the situation may need to be handled—and to some subtler points as well.

The main message of the Mirror ideogram is that the free-yet-methodical pursuit of knowledge, which distinguishes the academic tradition, has brought us to a certain singular situation, which requires that we respond in a certain specific way. The mirror is inviting us, and indeed compelling us to interrupt the busy work we are doing, and to self-reflect in a similar manner and about similar themes as Socrates taught, at the point of the Academia's inception many centuries ago.

When we look at a mirror, we see ourselves—and we see ourselves in the world. The mirror metaphor is intended to reflect two insights, or two changes in our habitual self-identity and self-perception, which a self-reflection about the underlying issues of meaning and purpose, based on the academic insights reached in the past century, will lead us to.

The first insight is that we must put an end to reification. Seeing ourselves in the mirror is intended to signify that the methods and vocabularies of the academic disciplines were not something that objectively existed, and was only discovered. We (the founders of our disciplines) created them. For many reasons, some of which have been stated above, we must liberate ourselves, and the people, from reification of our institutions, our worldviews, and of the very concepts we use to communicate.

The liberation from reification is the liberation from the systems we have been socialized to accept as "reality"—and hence also from the power structure.

Mirror ideogram

The second consequence is the beginning of accountability. The world we see ourselves in is a world that needs new ideas, new ways of thinking, and of being. It's a world in dire need for creative yet methodical and accountable change. We see the key role that information and knowledge have in that world, and that situation.

We see ourselves holding the key.

An important point here is that the academia finds itself in a much larger and more important role than the one it was originally conceived for. The reason is a historical accident: The successes of science discredited the foundations, beginning from its socialized reality, on which the traditional culture relied in its function.

The key question then presents itself:

How should we continue?

Yes, we do want to respond to our new role; indeed we have to, because nobody else can.

At the same time—we do want to continue our tradition, of free–yet-methodical pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

The most interesting insight reflected by the mirror is that we can do both. There is a way to both take care of the fundamental problem (liberate ourselves and the people from reification) and respond to this larger role.

Philosophically, and practically, this seemingly impossible or 'magical' way out of our double-bind, is to walk through the mirror. This can be done in only two steps.

The first is to use what philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—which we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"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."

But if truth by convention has been the way in which the sciences augment the rigor of their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of knowledge work at large?

As we are using this keyword, the truth by convention is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let X be Y. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that x "really is" y is obviously meaningless. A convention is valid only within a given context—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

The second step is to use truth by convention to define an epistemology.

We defined design epistemology by turning the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information—by considering it a human-made thing, and adapting information and the way we handle it to the functions that need to be served) into a convention.

Notice that nothing has been changed in the traditional-academic scheme of things. The academia has only been extended; a new way of thinking and working has been added to it, for those who might want to engage in that new way. On the 'other side of the mirror', we see ourselves and what we do as (part of) the 'headlights' and the 'light'; and we self-organize, and act, and use our creativity freely-yet-responsibly, and create a variety of new methods and results—just as the founding father of science did, at the point of its inception.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the design epistemology is only one of the many ways to manifest this approach. We drafted a parallel between the modernization of science that can result in this way and the emergence of modern art: By defining an epistemology and a methodology by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did—when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters.

As the artists did—we can become creative in the very way in which we practice our profession.

To complete this proposal—to the academia to 'step through the mirror' and to guide our society to a new reality—we developed the two prototypes—of the holoscope (to model the academic reality on the other side) and of the holotopia (to model the social reality).

Technically or academically, each of them is a model of a paradigm—hence we have a paradigm in knowledge work ready to foster for a larger societal paradigm—exactly as the case was in Galilei's time.

We bring these lofty and "up in the air" possibilities down to earth, by discussing one of the more immediately practical consequences of the proposed course of action.

The keywords we've been using all along are all defined by convention.

The discussions of two examples—of design and implicit information—which we offer separately, and here only summarize—will illustrate subtle yet central advantages this approach offers. Each of those keywords has been proposed to corresponding academic communities, and well received. Hence they are also prototypes—illustrating the possibility and the need for assigning purpose, by convention, to already existing academic fields and practices.

The definition of design allowed us to capture the essence of our post-traditional cultural condition—and suggest how we need to adapt to it—in a single word.

We defined design as "alternative to tradition", where design and tradition are two alternative ways to wholeness. Tradition relies on spontaneous, gradual, Darwinian-style evolution. Change is resisted. Small changes are tried—and tested and assimilated in the culture as a whole through generations of use. We practice design when we consider ourselves accountable for the wholeness of the result. The point here is that when tradition cannot be relied on—design must be used.

The situation we are in—as depicted by the bus with candle headlights—can be understood as a result of a transition: We are no longer traditional (our technology evolves by design); but we are not yet designing ("the relationship we have with information" is still traditional). Our proposal can now be understood as the call to complete modernization.

Reification can now be understood as the foundation for truth and meaning that suits the tradition; truth by convention is what empowers us to design.

We proposed this definition, and the insights and the methodology it is pointing to, to the design community as a way to develop its logical foundations. In the PhD Design's online conference the question, "What does it mean to give a doctorate in design?" Or in other words, "What should the academic criteria and the methods in design be based on?" The natural answer, the community leaders thought, would be classical philosophy; it is, after all, a philosophy doctorate that is being awardd. We proposed that classical philosophy as foundation also has its problems. But that we can design a foundation—by using truth by convention, and the approach we've drafted.

We offer the fact that Danish Designers chose our presentation to be repeated as opening keynote at their tenth anniversary conference, out of about three hundred that were shared at the triennial conference of the European Academy of Design, as a sign that this praxis, of assigning a purpose to a discipline and a community, and building a methodology on that basis, can be practically acceptable and useful.

The definition of implicit information and of visual literacy as "literacy associated with implicit information for the International Visual Literacy Association was in spirit similar—and the point was similarly central.

We showed the above ideogram as depicting a situation where two kinds of information—the explicit information with explicit, factual and verbal warning in a black-and-white rectangle, and the visual and "cool" rest—meet each other in a direct duel. Our immeiate point was that the implicit information wins "hands down" (or else this would not be a cigarette advertising). Our larger point was that while our legislation, ethical sensibilities and "official" culture at large are focused on explicit information, our culture is largely created through subtle implicit information. Hence we need a literacy to be able to decode those messages. It is easy to see how this line of thought and action directly continues what's been told above about the negative consequences of reification.

Narrow frame

Scope

We have just seen, by highlighting the historicity of the academic approach to knowledge to reach the socialized reality insight, that the academic tradition—now instituted as the modern university—finds itself in a much larger and more central social role than it was originally conceived for. We look up to the academia (and not to the Church and the tradition) to tell us how to look at the world, to be able to comprehend it and handle it.

That role, and question, carry an immense power!

It was by providing a completely new answer to that question, that the last "great cultural revival" came about.

Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

Diagnosis

How should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend it and handle it?

Nobody knows!

Of course, countess books and articles have been written about this theme since antiquity. But in spite of that—or should we rather say because of that—no consensus has been reached.

Meanwhile, the way we the people look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it, shaped itself spontaneously—from the scraps of the scientific ideas that were available around the middle of the 19th century, when Darwin and Newton as cultural heroes replaced Adam and Moses. What is today popularly considered as the "scientific" worldview shaped itself then—and remained largely unchanged.

As members of the homo sapiens species, this worldview makes us believe, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to comprehend the world in causal terms, and to make rational choices based on such comprehension. 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 traditional cultures, being unable to understand how the nature works, put a "ghost in the machine"—and made us pray to him to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error—and now we can satisfy our needs by manipulating the nature directly and correctly, with the help of technology.

It is this causal or "scientific" understanding of the world that makes us modern. Isn't that how we understood that women cannot fly on broomsticks?

From our collection of reasons why this way of looking at the world is neither scientific nor functional, we here mention two.

The first is that the nature is not a "machine".

The mechanistic or "classical" way of looking at the world that Newton and his contemporaries developed in physics, which around the 19th century shaped the worldview of the masses, has been disproved and disowned by modern science. Even physical phenomena, it has turned out, exhibit the kinds of interdependence that cannot be understood in causal terms.

In "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, described how "the narrow and rigid frame" as the way of looking at the world that our ancestors concocted from the 19th century science was damaging to culture, and in particular to religion and ethical norms on which the "human quality" depended. And how the prominence of "instrumental" thinking and values resulted, which Bauman called "adiaphorisation". Heisenberg explained how the modern physics disproved that worldview. Heisenberg expected that the largest impact of modern physics would be on culture—by allowing it to evolve further, by dissolving the narrow frame.

In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr (considered in Germany as Heisenberg's intellectual and scientific "heir") co-wrote the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message is "We need to learn to think in a new way". The proposed new thinking is conspicuously similar to the one that leads to holotopia: "The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. (...) We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive understanding of our Wirklichkeit (world, or reality), in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize humanity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature (...)"

The second reason is that even complex "machines" ("classical" nonlinear dynamic systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.

It has been observed that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Research in systems sciences, and in particular in cybernetics, has explained that curious phenomenon in a scientific way: The "hell" (which you may imagine as global issues, or the 'destination' toward which our 'bus' is diagnosed to be headed) is largely a result of various "side effects" of our best efforts and "solutions", resulting from "nonlinearities" and "feedback loops" in natural and social systems we are trying to govern.

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 offered builds upon the foundation we proposed related to the socialized reality insight.

We showed how truth by convention allows us to explicitly define a way to look at the world, which allows us to truly comprehend it and handle it.

We called the result a general-purpose methodology; we called our prototype the Polyscopic Modeling methodology or polyscopy.

A methodology is in essence a toolkit; any sort of rules could do, as long as they give us the insights we need. We, however, defined polyscopy by turning the core findings in 20th century science into conventions. (While a thorough federation was conducted, Einstein's "Autobiographical Notes" alone were sufficient for our purpose.) In this way we repaired the severed link between information and action also in this fundamental domain, where scientific findings meet the popular worldview.

The methodology definition is conceived as a handful of crisp and very brief aphorismic axioms; by using truth by convention, we gave them exact interpretation that is needed.

The first postulate defines information as "recorded experience". It is thereby made explicit that the substance communicated by information is not "reality", but human experience. Furthermore, since human experience can be recorded in a variety of ways (a chair is a record of human experience related to sitting and chair making), the notion of information vastly surpasses written documents. This first postulate enables knowledge federation across cultural traditions and fields of interests—by reducing everything to human experience, as common denominator.

The second postulate postulates that the scope (the way we look) determines the view (what is seen). According to this axiom, in polyscopy the experience (and "reality" or whatever is "behind" experience) does not have an a priori structure. We attribute a structure to it with the help of our concepts and other elements of our scope. This postulate enables scope design—and the general-purpose science modeled by the holoscope.

In polyscopy we did not talk about knowledge; knowledge federation was developed later. We may now improvise a new axiom.

Knowledge must be federated

This axiom only expresses clearly the intuitive or conventional idea of "knowledge": If we should ever be able to say that we "know" something, we must federate not only the supporting evidence, but also potential counter-evidence—and hence information in general. This, of course, is what the academic peer reviews are all about; the difference is that peer reviews are limited to a certain subdomain of science—something a general approach to knowledge cannot afford.

An explicitly defined general purpose methodology introduces to knowledge work the kind of change that constitutional democracy introduced to political and legal practice. Even a hated criminal has the right for a fair trial; similarly, even a most implausible idea or experience has the right to be federated. Based on this simple rule of thumb, we could, for instance, not ignore Buddhism because we don't find it appealing; or because we don't believe in reincarnation. The work of knowledge federation is here similar to the work of a dutiful attorney—who does his best to gather suitable evidence, and back his client with a convincing case.

The overall goal, "to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge", can then be served by federating ideas into general insights or principles or rules of thumb—which orient action; and into prototypes—which directly impact the systems in which we live and work.

A methodology allows us to state explicitly what information needs to be like; and what being "informed" means. We modeled this intuitive notion with the keyword gestalt. To be "informed", one needs to have a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example. The knowledge of gestalt is profoundly different from knowing only the data (the room temperatures, CO2 levels etc.).

How can we be uninformed—in the midst of all the information we have? For an intuitive explanation, imagine that you are talking on the phone with your neighbor, that he's at work and you are at home, and that you see that his house is on fire. Yet you talk to him about the sale in the neighborhood fishing equipment store (which interests your neighbor, because he's an avid fisherman. "One cannot not communicate", reads one of Paul Watzlawich's axioms of communication. Although when seen from a factual point of view nothing is wrong our media informing (and with your communication with your neighbor), in this informed approach to information we are proposing it is profoundly and dangerously deceptive, because it communicates a wrong gestalt. The situation we are in may now be understood as a result of such traditional or factual approach to public informing—as the bus with candle headlights metaphor might suggest.

Polyscopy offers a collection of techniques for communicating and 'proving' or justifying general or high-level insights and claims. Knowledge federation is conceived as the social process by which such insights can be created and maintained.

This new approach to academic knowledge work we are proposing, where instead of relying on inherited interests and methods we federate a methodology, is a practical way to respond to the demand for academic accountability, which, we proposed, follows from the situation the academic tradition now finds itself in. And indeed in two ways. It allows us to vastly broaden the scope of academic work, by using the methodology to create new kinds of results—according to the contemporary needs of people and society. And it allows us to define what "scientific thinking" and "scientific worldview" are truly about—in a way that can be read and understood; and in a way that evolves, and remains in sync with the contemporary state of the art of academic knowledge of knowledge.

This approach is similar to the dynamics that led to the emergence of science in Galilei's time—where a certain methodological idea, developed in astrophysics, ended up defining a general approach to knowledge in the sciences. To create the polyscopy as a prototype of a general-purpose methodology we federated methodological insights and techniques across the board:

Patterns have a closely similar function as mathematics does in traditional sciences—and at the same time completely generalize the implementation of this function
Ideograms allow us to include the expressive power and the insights and techniques from art, advertising and information design
Vignettes implement the basic technique from media informing, where an insight or issue is made accessible by telling illustrative and engaging or "sticky" real-life people and situation stories
Threads implement Vannevar Bush's technical idea of "trails" as a way to combine specific ideas into higher-level units of meaning

The following vignette will further illustrate the nuances of this approach, by explaining how a single specific methodological idea—the object oriented methodology in computer programming—has been federated.

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 Ole-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.

Let us here highlight is is the academia's accountability for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language, even the "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.

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.)

To see the extent of this analogy, think of the academia becoming accountable for the tools and processes it provides to the world—both to the people at large and to the practicing academics. Imagine a highly talented young person, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu to make this concrete, learning how to be a researcher. The academia will give Bourdieu a certain way to render his results, which he'll be using throughout his career. The "usability", comprehensibility and in a word—the usefulness of Bourdieu's life work will highly depend on the format in which he'll render his results. This format, however, will not be in his power to change, and it is likely that he won't even think about such change.

Bourdieu is, however only a single drop—and the academia is an endless flow of such people. Could a similar approach as object orientation have a similarly large effects also there, in this much more general application domain? <p>The solution for structuring information we provided in polyscopy, called information holon, is closely similar to the "object" in object oriented methodology. 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.

Information ideogram

The holotopia may now be understood as the circle by which our knowledge federation proposal is federated; a vision is not only provided and published—but already turned into a collaborative strategy game whose goal is to "change course".

A prototype polyscopic book manuscript titled "Information Must Be Designed" 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.

Convenience paradox

Scope

We turn to culture and to "human quality", and ask:

Why is "a great cultural revival" realistically possible?

What insight, and what strategy, may divert our"pursuit of happiness" from material consumption to human cultivation?

We may approach our theme also from a different angle: Suppose we substituted real information, federated from the world traditions, academic disciplines and other relevant sources, for advertising, and allowed it to orient our values and our choices. What new insights would emerge? What difference would they make?

During the Renaissance, preoccupations with "original sin" and "Heavenly reward" were replaced by a pursuit of beauty and happiness here and now—and their celebration through the arts.

What might the next "great cultural revival" be like?

Diagnosis

Nowhere are our cultural biases as clearly visible as here.

To pursue happiness 'in the light of a candle' means to pursue convenience—whatever appears attractive at the moment. Convenience has the added advantage that it appears to us as empirical and exact, and hence "scientific".

There is, in addition, the value of egotism or ego-centeredness—endlessly supported by advertising. Egotism too appears "scientific"—being, according to Darwin, the way in which the nature herself pursues wholeness.

Remedy

The convenience paradox insight—by which we point to a remedial course—may be understood in terms of three more specific insights. In a quite spectacular manner, those three insights become transparent as soon as we abandon our fascination with the stories or socialized realities—and focus on the relevant human experience that our traditions embody.

Human wholeness exists—and it feels dramatically or qualitatively better than what our culture lets us experience, or even conceive of
The way to it is paradoxical—and needs to be illuminated by suitable information
Human quality plays in it an essential role

While these insights will become clear as we make progress toward holotopia, a few hints will suffice to prime that quest.

The first of the three insights, which we've branded "the best kept secret of human culture", is what made our ancestors flock around "enlightened" beings like the Buddha or the Christ. It can, however, also be easily verified by simply asking the people who have "done the work".

To get a glimpse of the second insight, compare the above typical utterances by Lao Tzu, with what Christ taught in his Sermon on the Mount. Why was Teacher Lao saying that "the weak can defeat the strong"? Why did the Christ demand to "turn the other cheek"?

To get a glimpse of the third, we may zoom in on a contemporary story. Coming from a family that gave some of Britain's leading scientists, Aldous Huxley undertook to federate some of the core elements of the new kind of science that we here see emerge. His "Perennial Philosophy" is alone largely sufficient to make a convincing case for the basic insight—that there is a "natural law" governing human wholeness, which we in our culture vastly violate and ignore. On a much more subtle note, the above quotation, from "The Art of Seeing", will suggest that overcoming egotism is necessary even for mastering physical skills!

We conclude this very brief exploration of our cultural blind spots and emergent opportunities by a handful of keywords and prototypes. As always, the design patterns they embody will illustrate our handling of the larger issue at hand—how the change of the relationship we have with information (as modeled by the holoscope) can illuminate the way to "a great cultural revival" (modeled by the holotopia).

We motivated our definition of culture by discussing Zygmunt Bauman's book "Culture as Praxis"—where Bauman surveyed a large number of historical definitions of culture, and reached the conclusion that they are so diverse that they cannot be reconciled with one another. How can we develop culture as praxis—if we don't know what "culture" means? The change of the relationship we have with information, or in other words of epistemology, allowed us to define culture as a way of looking at the real thing or phenomenon—which illuminates its core aspect that tends to be ignored. We defined culture by de defined culture as "cultivation of wholeness", where the keyword cultivation is defined by analogy with planting and watering a seed. A key point here (intended as a parable) is to observe that no amount of dissecting and studying a seed would suggest that it needs to be planted and watered. And hence that cultivation profoundly depends on taking advantage of the experience of others—regarding how certain actions produce certain effects in the long run. As soon as we apply the same idea to human cultivation—similarly spectacular insights and the opportunities come within reach.

We motivated our definition of addiction by observing that evolution equipped us with pleasant and unpleasant emotions to guide our choices toward wholeness. But we humans has devised ways to deceive our perception—by creating attractive and pleasurable things that lead us away from wholeness. We defined addiction as a pattern, and offered it as a conceptual remedy for this anomaly. Since selling addictions has always been lucrative yet destructive, the traditions identified certain activities or things (such as opiates and gambling) as addictions and developed suitable legislation and ethical norms. But with the help of technology, contemporary industries can develop hundreds of new addictions—without us having a way to even recognize them as that.

We defined religion as "reconnection with the archetype". The archetypes here include "justice", "beauty", "truth", "love" and anything else that may make a person overcome egotism and convenience and serve a "higher" ideal.

We developed the "Movement and Qi" educational prototype as a way to add to the conventional academic portfolio a collection of ways to use human body as medium—and work with "human quality" directly.

The book "Liberation" subtitled "Religion beyond Belief" is an ice breaker. It federates "the best kept secret", and creates a dialog.

A great cultural revival

The five insights together compose a vision of "a great cultural revival". They complete the analogy between our time and the situation at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, which we've been pointing to by using the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest.

A revolution in innovation

By bringing a radical improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, through innovation, the Industrial Revolution promised to liberate our ancestors from hardship and toil, so that they may focus on developing culture and "human quality". The power structure, however, thwarted our aspirations. This issue can be resolved, and progress can be resumed, by learning to "make things whole" on the level of the systems in which we live and work.

A revolution in communication

The printing press enabled the Enlightenment by enabling a revolution in literacy and communication. The collective mind insight shows that the new information technology can power a similar revolution—whose effect will be a revolution of meaning. The kind of revolution that can make the differences that needs to make, in a post-industrial society.

A revolution in the relationship we have with information

By reviving the academic tradition (which had remained dormant for almost two thousand years), the Enlightenment empowered our ancestors to use reason to comprehend the world, and to evolve faster. The socialized reality insight shows that the evolution of the academic tradition has brought us to a new turning point—which will liberate us from reifying our inherited systems and worldviews; and to enable our culture to evolve in a similar way and at a similar rate as science and technology have been evolving. This fundamental change will empower us to be creative in ways and on the scale that a "great cultural revival" requires.

A revolution in method

Galilei in house arrest was really science in house arrest. It was this new way to understand the natural phenomena that liberated our ancestors from superstition, and empowered them to understand and change their world by developing technology. The narrow frame insight shows that the "project science" can and needs to be extended into all walks of life—to illuminate all those core issues that science left in the dark.

A revolution in culture

The Renaissance was a "great cultural revival"—a liberation and celebration of life, love, and beauty, by changing the values and the lifestyle, and developing the arts. The convenience paradox insight shows that our culture has once again become a victim of power structure; and that the liberation will lead us to a whole new way of evolving.

The sixth insight

When the five insights are combined together, they readily lead to a more general sixth insight, which is even more germane to the holotopia's message and spirit. The sixth insight may be roughly formulated as follows:

To change anything, we need to change the whole thing.

The reason is the close co-dependence of both the structural problems the five insights reveal, and of their solutions.

We have seen (while exploring the power structure insight) that we will not be able to resolve the characteristic contemporary issues and resume our cultural and societal evolution, unless we learned to direct our power to innovate by using suitable information and knowledge, instead of the "free competition" and the market. But that requires (as we have seen while exploring the collective mind insight) that we restore the severed tie between information and action—that instead of merely broadcasting information, we learn to federate the insights that can motivate and inform action. This, however (as the socialized reality insight showed) requires that we change the relationship we have with information—from considering it as a mirror image of reality, to considering it a vital element of our core systems, which must be adapted to the purposes it needs to serve within those systems.

When that is done (the narrow frame insight showed)—the opportunity opens up to create "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it", to be used both by academic researchers who wish to work in this way, and the general public. And when that is in place (we showed while exploring the convenience paradox insight), the resulting informed way of "pursuing happiness" will lead to completely different values, and direction. Furthermore, the values that result will be exactly those that are needed to empower us to resolve the power structure issue, by self-organizing and co-creating systems that resolve our problems. This closes the circle.

A strategic insight results:

A large change may be easy; small changes may be difficult or impossible.

But a large and comprehensive change has its own logic, or process, or "leverage points".

And the most powerful kind of leverage point, Donella Meadows pointed out, is "the power to transcend paradigms". It is exactly that power that we are proposing to restore.

We summarize the case for our proposal by a warning reaching us from sociology.

Beck continued the above observation:

"Max Weber's 'iron cage' – in which he thought humanity was condemned to live for the foreseeable future – is for me the prison of categories and basic assumptions of classical social, cultural and political sciences."

The 'candle headlights' (inheriting the way we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it) is what keeps us in 'iron cage'.

A created way, modeled by the holoscope, is an academically rigorous way out.

The holotopia is offered as the vision that results.

The Holotopia project is conceived as a way to streamline the actualization of that vision.

When making this proposal, we are not saying anything new; we are indeed only federating the call to action that many have made before us.

We are now, however, backing their calls to action and ideas by federating them, and showing that they form a consistent and complete academic paradigm.

This Holotopia project description will be completed by elaborating:

The Holotopia project is conceived as a co-creative strategy game.

The project is conceived as a space—where we are empowered to use our creativity to "change course", and create a future. This "future", however, begins instantly.

We implement a strategy that federates Margaret Mead's specific insights, how to respond to the situation we are in :

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our whole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."

Margaret Mead

To the above co-creative space we bring a portfolio of assorted tactical assets.

To bring all this down to earth, we describe the pilot project we've developed in art gallery Kunsthall 3.14 in Bergen.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-<div class="page-header" ><h1>Holotopia</h1></div>
+<div class="page-header" ><h1>HOLOTOPIA</h1><br><br><h2>An Actionable Strategy</h2></div>
 <div class="row">
@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 </div> </div>
-<!-- AAA
 <div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-3"><h2>Our proposal</h2></div>
-<div class="col-md-6"><h3>In a nutshell</h3>
+<div class="col-md-6">
 <blockquote>
 The core of our [[Holotopia:Knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]] proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.
@@ Line 30: / Line 28: @@
 "The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."
 </blockquote>
-<p>The objective of our proposal is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.</p>
 </div>
 <div class="col-md-3">
@@ Line 38: / Line 36: @@
 <div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-3"></div>
-<div class="col-md-7"><h3>In detail</h3>
+<div class="col-md-7">
-<p>What would it take to <em>reconnect</em> information with action? </p>
+<p>What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served? </p>
-<p>What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated information as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted it to the purposes that need to be served? </p>
-<p>What would our <em>world</em> be like, if academic researchers retracted the premise that when an idea is published in a book or an article it is already "known"; if they attended to the other half of this picture, the use and usefulness of information, with thoroughness and rigor that distinguish academic technical work? What do the people out there actually <em>need</em> to know?</p>
-<p>What would the academic field that develops this approach to information be like? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And <em>academic communication, and education</em>? </p>
-<blockquote>The substance of our proposal is a <em>complete</em> [[Holotopia:Prototype|<em>prototype</em>]] of [[Holotopia:Knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]], by which those and other related questions are answered. </blockquote>
+<p>By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And <em>academic communication, and education</em>? </p>
-<p><em>Knowledge federation</em> is a [[Holotopia:Paradigm|<em>paradigm</em>]]. Not in a specific field of science, where new paradigms are relatively common, but in "creation, integration and application of knowledge" at large.</p>
+<blockquote>The substance of our proposal is a <em>complete</em> [[Holotopia:Prototype|<em>prototype</em>]] of [[Holotopia:Knowledge federation|<em>knowledge federation</em>]], where initial answers to relevant questions are proposed, and in part implemented in practice. </blockquote>
-<blockquote>Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop <em>knowledge federation</em> as an academic field, and as real-life <em>praxis</em>.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop <em>knowledge federation</em> as an academic field, and a real-life <em>praxis</em> (informed practice).</blockquote>
+<blockquote>Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.</blockquote>
 </div> </div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A proof of concept application</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-6">
+<p>The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a test.</p>
-<div class="row">
+<p>Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—[[Aurelio Peccei]] issued the following call to action: </p>
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2>An application</h2></div>
-<div class="col-md-6"><h3>The situation we are in</h3>
-<p>The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for putting the proposed ideas to a test. Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—[[Aurelio Peccei]] issued the following call to action:
 <blockquote>
 "It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."
 </blockquote>
-</p>
 <p>Peccei also specified <em>what</em> needed to be done to "change course":</p>
@@ Line 77: / Line 72: @@
 <div class="col-md-3"></div>
 <div class="col-md-7">
-<p>This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology". </p>
+<p>This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology". In what follows we shall assume that this conclusion has been <em>federated</em>—and focus on the more interesting questions, such as <em>how</em> to "change course"; and in what ways may the new course be different.</p>
 <p>In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:</p>
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 85: / Line 80: @@
 The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".</p>
-<h3>Can the proposed 'headlights' help us "find a way to change course"?</h3>
+<blockquote>Could the change of 'headlights' we are proposing be "a way to change course"?</blockquote>
-<p>Why did Peccei's call to action remain unanswered? Why wasn't The Club of Rome's purpose—to illuminate the course our civilization has taken—served by our society's regular institutions, as part of their function? Isn't this already showing that we are 'driving with candle headlights'?</p>
+</div> </div>
-<p>If we used <em>knowledge federation</em> to 'illuminate the way'—what difference would that make? </p>
-<blockquote>The Holotopia project is conceived as a <em>knowledge federation</em>-based response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action.</blockquote>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A vision</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-7">
+<blockquote><em>Holotopia</em> is a vision of a possible future that emerges when proper 'light' has been 'turned on'.</blockquote>
+<p>Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. But in view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.</p>
+<p>As the optimism regarding our future waned, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.</p>
+<p>The <em>holotopia</em> is different in spirit from them all. It is a <em>more</em> attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the <em>holotopia</em> is readily actionable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.</p>
-<p>We coined the keyword [[Holotopia:Holotopia|<em>holotopia</em>]] to point to the cultural and social order of things that will result.</p>
+<blockquote>The <em>holotopia</em> vision is made concrete in terms of <em>five insights</em>, as explained below.</blockquote>
-<p>To begin the Holotopia project, we are developing an initial <em>prototype</em>. It includes a vision, and a collection of strategic and tactical assets—that will make the vision clear, and our pursuit of it actionable. </p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 101: / Line 99: @@
 <div class="row">
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A vision</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A principle</h2></div>
-<div class="col-md-7"><h3>The <em>holotopia</em> is not a utopia</h3>
+<div class="col-md-7">
-<p>Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. But in view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.</p>
-<p>As the optimism regarding our future faded, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.</p>
-<p>The <em>holotopia</em> is different in spirit from them all. It is a <em>more</em> attractive vision of the future than what the common utopias offered—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not yet exist. And yet the <em>holotopia</em> is readily realizable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.</p>
-<p>The <em>holotopia</em> vision is made concrete in terms of <em>five insights</em>, as explained below.</p>
+<p><em>What do we need to do</em> to "change course" toward the <em>holotopia</em>?</p>
+<blockquote>The <em>five insights</em> point to a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things  [[Wholeness|<em>whole</em>]].</blockquote>
-<h3>Making things  [[Wholeness|<em>whole</em>]]</h3>
-<p><em>What do we need to do</em> to change course toward the <em>holotopia</em>?</p>
-<blockquote> From a collection of insights from which the <em>holotopia</em> emerges as a future worth aiming for, we have distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things  [[Wholeness|<em>whole</em>]].</blockquote>
 <p>This principle is suggested by the <em>holotopia</em>'s very name. And also by the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>. Instead of <em>reifying</em> our institutions and professions, and merely acting in them competitively to improve "our own" situation or condition, we consider ourselves and what we do as functional elements in a larger system of systems; and we self-organize, and act, as it may best suit the [[Wholeness|<em>wholeness</em>]] of it all. </p>
@@ Line 118: / Line 110: @@
 </div> </div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A method</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-7">
+<p>"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost <em>the sense of the whole</em>." </p>
+<blockquote>To make things [[Wholeness|<em>whole</em>]]—<em>we must be able to see them whole</em>! </blockquote>
+<p>To highlight that the <em>knowledge federation</em> methodology described and implemented in the proposed <em>prototype</em> affords that very capability, to <em>see things whole</em>, in the context of the <em>holotopia</em> we refer to it by the pseudonym <em>holoscope</em>. </p>
+<p>While the characteristics of the <em>holoscope</em>—the design choices or <em>design patterns</em>, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation, one of them must be made clear from the start.</p>
-<div class="row">
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2>A method</h2></div>
-<div class="col-md-7"><h3>We see things whole</h3>
-<p>"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost <em>the sense of the whole</em>." </p>
-<blockquote>To make things whole—<em>we must be able to see them whole</em>! </blockquote>
-<p>To highlight that the <em>knowledge federation</em> methodology described in the mentioned <em>prototype</em> affords that very capability, to <em>see things whole</em>, in the context of the <em>holotopia</em> we refer to it by the pseudonym <em>holoscope</em>.</p>
-<p>The characteristics of the <em>holoscope</em>—the design choices or <em>design patterns</em>, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation. One characteristic, however, must be made clear from the start.</p>
-<h3>We look at all sides</h3>
 <p>
 [[File:Holoscope.jpeg]]<br>
 <small>Holoscope <em>ideogram</em></small>
 </p>
-<p>If our goal would be to put a new "piece of information" into an existing "reality picture", then whatever challenges that reality picture would be considered "controversial". But when  our goal is to see whether something is <em>whole</em> or 'cracked', then our attitude must be different.</p>
 <blockquote>To see things whole, we must look at all sides.</blockquote>
-<p>In the <em>paradigm</em> we are proposing, every statement, or model, or <em>view</em>, is necessarily a simplification, which resulted from a certain specific way of looking or <em>scope</em>. Views that show the whole from a specific angle (as exemplified by the above picture) are called <em>aspects</em></p>
-<p>The aim of this presentation being to challenge the <em>exclusiveness</em> of our present social and academic <em>paradigm</em> in order to propose an update, we will of necessity present views that are, relative to this <em>paradigm</em>, "controversial".  The views we are about to share may make you leap from your chair. You will, however, be able to relax and enjoy this presentation, if you consider that the communication we invite you to engage in with us  <em>is</em> academically rigorous—but with a different <em>idea</em> of rigor. In the <em>holoscope</em> we take no recourse to "reality". Coexistence of multiple ways of looking at any theme or issues (which in the <em>holoscope</em> are called <em>scopes</em>) is axiomatic. And so is the assumption that we <em>must</em> overcome our habits and resistances and look in new ways, if we should see things whole and finding a new course.</p>
-<p>Although we have created all our claims, and <em>prototypes</em>, to our best ability, to be perfectly coherent and rigorous, and to stand to scrutiny, <em>we do not need to make such claims</em>, and we are not making them. Everything here is <em>prototypes</em>. Our invitation is not for adopting them as a "new reality"—but to begin a <em>dialog</em>, and by doing that co-create a social process by which our "realities", and the ways we create them, will be continuously evolving.</p>
+<p>The <em>holoscope</em> distinguishes itself by allowing for <em>multiple</em> ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called <em>scopes</em>. The <em>scopes</em> and the resulting <em>views</em> have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing.</p>
-<blockquote>We invite you to be with us in the manner of the <em>dialog</em>—to <em>genuinely</em> share, listen and co-create.</blockquote>
+<p>This <em>modernization</em> of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed <em>creation</em> of the ways in which we look at the world—has become <em>necessary</em> in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not "reality pictures", contending for that status with our conventional ones.</p>
-<p>Indeed, in the communication space where you are now invited to join us, in which this <em>holotopia</em> presentation is an integral part, launching an attack at a presented view from the old power positions would be as little sensible as claiming the validity of a scientific result by arguing that it was revealed to the author in a vision.</p>
+<blockquote>In the <em>holoscope</em>, the legitimacy and the peaceful coexistence of multiple ways to look at a theme is axiomatic.</blockquote>
-<h3>We modified science</h3>
+<p>We will continue to use the conventional way of speaking and say that something <em>is</em> as stated, that <em>X</em> <em>is</em> <em>Y</em>—although it would be more accurate to say that <em>X</em> can or must (also) be perceived as <em>Y</em>. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way (to use the offered <em>scopes</em>); and to do that collaboratively, in a [[dialog|<em>dialog</em>]].</p>
-<p>To liberate our thinking from the  inherited concepts and methods, and allow for deliberate choice of <em>scopes</em>, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy. </p>
+<p>To liberate our worldview from the inherited concepts and methods and allow for deliberate choice of <em>scopes</em>, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy. </p>
 <blockquote>
 Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the <em>tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention</em>. The <em>holoscope</em> is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see <em>any</em> chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in proportion.
 </blockquote>
+<p>A discovery of a new way of looking—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct general assessment of an object of study or a situation as a whole (see whether the 'cup' is 'broken' or 'whole') is a new <em>kind of result</em> that is made possible by th general-purpose science that is modeled by the <em>holoscope</em></p>
+<p>To see more, we take recourse to the vision of others. The <em>holoscope</em> combines scientific and other insights to enable us to see what we ignored, to 'see the other side'. This allows us to detect structural defects ('cracks') in core elements of everyday reality—which appear to us as just normal, when we look at them in our habitual way ('in the light of a candle'). </p>
+<p>All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered as a collection of <em>prototypes</em>. Think of them as composing a 'cardboard model of a city', and a 'construction site'.  By sharing them we are not making a case for a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as an academic field, and a real-life <em>praxis</em>. </p>
 </div> </div>
 <div class="page-header" ><h2>Five insights</h2></div>
 <div class="row">
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2></h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2><em>Scope</em></h2></div>
 <div class="col-md-7">
+<blockquote>What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?</blockquote>
 <p>
 [[File:FiveInsights.JPG]]<br>
 <small>Five Insights <em>ideogram</em></small>
 </p>
+<p>We use the <em>holoscope</em> to illuminate five <em>pivotal</em> themes, which <em>determine</em> the "course":</p>
-<h3>Before we begin</h3>
-<p>What theme, what evidence, what "new discovery" might have the force commensurate with the momentum with which our civilization is rushing onward—and have a <em>realistic</em> chance to make it "change course"?</p>
-<p>We offer these [[Holotopia:Five insights|<em>five insights</em>]] as a <em>prototype</em> answer. </p>
-<p>They result when we apply the <em>holoscope</em> to illuminate five pivotal themes:
 <ul>
-<li>Innovation (how we use our ability to create, and induce change)</li>
+<li><b>Innovation</b>—the way we use our ability to create, and induce change</li>
-<li>Communication (how information technology is being used)</li>
+<li><b>Communication</b>—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled</li>
-<li>Epistemology (fundamental premises on which our handling of information is based)</li>
+<li><b>Epistemology</b>—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning; or "the relationship we have with information"</li>
-<li>Method (how truth and meaning are created)</li>
+<li><b>Method</b>—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life, or "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it"</li>
-<li>Values (how we "pursue happiness")</li>
+<li><b>Values</b>—the way we "pursue happiness", which in the modern society <em>directly</em> determines the course</li>
-</ul> </p>
+</ul>
-<p>For each of these five themes, we show that our conventional way of looking made us ignore a principle or a rule of thumb, which readily emerges when we 'connect the dots'—when we <em>combine</em> published insights. We see that by ignoring those principles, we have created deep <em>structural</em> problems ('crack in the cup')—which are causing problems, and "global issues" in particular.</p>
+<p>In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems.</p>
+<blockquote>Those structural defects <em>can</em> be remedied.</blockquote>
+<p>Their removal naturally leads to improvements that are well beyond the removal of symptoms.</p>
-<p>A 'scientific' approach to problems is this way made possible, where instead of focusing on symptoms, we understand and treat their deeper, structural causes—which <em>can</em> be remedied. </p>
+<blockquote>The <em>holotopia</em> vision results.</blockquote>
-<p>In the spirit of the <em>holoscope</em>, we only summarize each of the <em>five insights</em>—and provide evidence and details separately.</p>
+<p>The key to comprehensive change is the same as it was in Galilei's time—a method that allows for creation of general principles and insights. But since "a great cultural revival" is our next goal, this new method allows for the creation of insights <em>about the most basic themes that mark our social and private existence</em>. </p>
-</div> </div>
+<blockquote>A case for our proposal is thereby also made.</blockquote>
+<p>In the spirit of the <em>holoscope</em>, we here only summarize the <em>five insights</em>—and provide evidence and details separately.</p>
+</div> </div>
@@ Line 193: / Line 198: @@
 <h3><em>Scope</em></h3>
-<p>"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. We look at the <em>way</em> in which man uses his  power to <em>innovate</em> (create, and induce change). </p>
+<blockquote><em><b>What</b> do we need to do</em>, to become capable of "changing course"?</blockquote>
-<blockquote>We look at the way our civilization follows in its evolution; or metaphorically, at 'the itinerary' of our 'bus'. </blockquote>
+<p>"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power. </p>
-<p>We readily observe that we use competition or "survival of the fittest" to orient innovation, not information and "making things whole". The popular belief that "the free competition" or "the free market" will serve us better, also makes our "democracies" elect the "leaders" who represent that view. But is that view warranted?</p>
+<blockquote>The [[Power structure|<em>power structure</em>]] insight shows that no dictator is needed.</blockquote>
-<blockquote>Genuine revolutions include new ways to see freedom and power; <em>holotopia</em> is no exception. </blockquote>
+<p>Albeit in democracy, we are in that situation <em>already</em>.</p>
-<p>We offer this [[Keyword|<em>keyword</em>]], [[power structures|<em>power structure</em>]], as a means to that end. Think of the <em>power structure</em>  as a new way to conceive of the intuitive notion "power holder", who might take away our freedom, or be our "enemy". </p>
-<p>While the nature of <em>power structures</em> will become clear as we go along, imagine them, to begin with, as institutions; or more accurately, as <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> (we'll here call them simply <em>systems</em>).</p>
-<p>Notice that <em>systems</em> have an <em>immense</em> power—<em>over us</em>, because <em>we have to adapt to them</em> to be able to live and work; and <em>over our environment</em>, because by organizing us and using us in a specific ways, <em>they determine what the effects of our work will be</em>.</p>
-<blockquote>The <em>power structures</em> determine whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions. </blockquote>
-<h3>Diagnosis</h3>
+<p>While the nature of the <em>power structure</em> will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> (which we simply call <em>systems</em>).</p>
-<p>How suitable are <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> for their all-important role?</p>
+<p>Notice that <em>systems</em> have an <em>immense</em> power—<em>over us</em>, because <em>we have to adapt to them</em> to be able to live and work; and <em>over our environment</em>, because by organizing us and using us in a certain specific way, <em>they decide what the effects of our work will be</em>. </p>
-<p>Evidence, circumstantial <em>and</em> theoretical, shows that they waste a lion's share of our resources. And that they <em>cause</em> problems, or make us incapable of solving them.</p>
+<blockquote>The <em>power structure</em> determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions. </blockquote>
-<p>The reason is the intrinsic nature of evolution, as Richard Dawkins explained it in "The Selfish Gene". </p>
+<h3>Diagnosis</h3>
-<blockquote>"Survival of the fittest" favors the <em>systems</em> that are by nature predatory, not the ones that are useful. </blockquote>
+<p>How suitable are <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> for their all-important role?</p>
-<p>[https://youtu.be/zpQYsk-8dWg?t=920 This excerpt]  from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as law professor created to <em>federate</em> an insight he considered essential) explains how the corporation, the most powerful institution on the planet, evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, such as the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect "killing machine".  [https://youtu.be/qsKQiVJkEvI?t=2780 This scene] from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how our <em>systems</em> affect <em>our own</em> condition.</p>
+<blockquote>Evidence shows that they waste a lion's share of our resources. And that they either <em>cause</em> problems, or make us incapable of solving them.</blockquote>
-<blockquote>Why do we put up with such <em>systems</em>? Why don't we treat them as we treat other human-made things—by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served?</blockquote>
+<p>The root cause of this malady is readily found in the way in which <em>systems</em> evolve. </p>
-<p>The reasons are interesting, and in <em>holotopia</em> they'll be a recurring theme. </p>
+<blockquote>Survival of the fittest favors the <em>systems</em> that are predatory, not the ones that are useful. </blockquote>
-<p>One of them we have already seen: We do not <em>see things whole</em>. When we look in conventional ways, the <em>systems</em> remain invisible for similar reasons as a mountain on which we might be walking.</p>
-<p>A reason why we ignore the possibility of adapting <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> to the functions they have in our society, is that they perform for us a <em>different</em> function—of providing structure to power battles and turf strifes. Within a <em>system</em>, they provide us "objective" and "fair" criteria to compete;  and in the world outside, they give us as system <em>system</em> "competitive edge".</p>
+<p>[https://youtu.be/zpQYsk-8dWg?t=920 This excerpt]  from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to <em>federate</em> an insight he considered essential) explains how the most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("Externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator.  [https://youtu.be/qsKQiVJkEvI?t=2780 This scene] from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the <em>power structure</em> affects <em>our own</em> condition.</p>
-<p>Why don't media corporations <em>combine</em> their resources to give us the awareness we need? Because they must <em>compete</em> with one another for our attention—and use only "cost-effective" means.</p>
+<p>The  <em>systems</em> provide an ecology, which in the long run shapes our values, and our "human quality". They have the power to <em>socialize</em> us in ways that suit <em>their</em> needs. "The business of business is business"—and if our business is to succeed in competition, we <em>must</em> act in a certain way. We either bend and comply—or get replaced. The effect on the <em>system</em> will be the same.</p>
-<p>The most interesting reason, however, is that the <em>power structures</em> have the power to <em>socialize</em> us in ways that suit <em>their</em> interests. Through <em>socialization</em>, they can adapt to their interests both our culture <em>and</em> our "human quality".</p>
 <p>
 [[File:Bauman-PS.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<p>A result is that bad intentions are no longer needed for cruelty and evil to result. The <em>power structures</em> can co-opt our sense of duty and commitment, and even our heroism and honor.</p>
+<p>A consequence, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for bad things to happen. Through <em>socialization</em>, the <em>power structure</em> can co-opt our duty and commitment; and even our heroism and honor.</p>
-<p>Zygmunt Bauman's key insight, that the concentration camp was only a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the <em>power structure</em>, needs to be carefully digested and internalized: While our ethical sensibilities are focused on the <em>power structures</em> of yesterday, we are committing the greatest  [https://youtu.be/d1x7lDxHd-o massive crime] in human history (in all innocence, by only "doing our job" within the <em>systems</em> we belong to).</p>
+<p>Bauman's insight that even the holocaust was only a consequence and a special case, however extreme, of (what we are calling) the <em>power structure</em>, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp  employees, Bauman argued, were only "doing their job"—in a <em>system</em> whose nature and purpose was beyond their ethical sense, and power to change. </p>
-<blockquote>Our civilization is not "on the collision course with nature" because someone violated the rules—but <em>because we follow them</em>.</blockquote>
+<p>While our ethical sensitivity is tuned to the <em>power structures</em> of the past, we are committing (in all innocence, by acting through the <em>power structures</em> that bind us together) the greatest  [https://youtu.be/d1x7lDxHd-o massive crime] in human history.</p>
+<blockquote>Our children may not have a livable planet to live on.</blockquote>
+<p>Not because someone broke the rules—<em>but because we follow them</em>.</p>
 <h3>Remedy</h3>
-<p>The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we learned to collaborate and adapt our <em>systems</em> to their contemporary roles and our contemporary challenges  has not remained unnoticed. Alredy in 1948, in his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener explained why competition cannot replace 'headlights and steering'. Cybernetics was envisioned as a <em>transdisciplinary</em> academic effort to help us understand <em>systems</em>, so that we may adapt their structure to the functions they need to perform. </p>
+<p>The fact that we will not "solve our problems" unless we develop the capability to update our <em>systems</em> has not remained unnoticed. </p>
 <p>
@@ Line 243: / Line 245: @@
 </p>
-<p>The very first step the founders of The Club of Rome did after its inception in 1968 was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adopted that as one of our <em>keywords</em>. </p>
+<p>The very first step that the The Club of Rome's founders did after its inception, in 1968, was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave "making things whole" on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adapted that as one of our <em>keywords</em>. </p>
+<p>The work and the conclusions of this team were based on results in the systems sciences. More recently, in "Guided Evolution of society", systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy made a thorough review of relevant research, and concluded in a truly <em>holotopian</em> tone:</p>
+<blockquote>We are the <em>first generation of our species</em> that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed <em>chosen people</em>. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because <em>what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.</em></blockquote>
-<p>The Knowledge Federation was created as a system to enable <em>federation</em> into systems. To bootstrap <em>systemic innovation</em>. The method is to create a <em>prototype</em>, and a <em>transdiscipline</em> around it to update it continuously. This enables the information created in disciplines to be woven into systems, to have real or <em>systemic</em> impact.</p>
+<p>In 2010,  Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to become capable of making further headway on this creative frontier. The procedure we developed is simple: We create a [[prototype|<em>prototype</em>]] of a system, and organize a <em>transdisciplinary</em> community and project around it, to update it continuously. This enables the insights reached in the participating disciplines to have real or <em>systemic</em> impact <em>directly</em>.</p>
-<p>The <em>prototypes</em> are created by weaving together <em>design patterns</em>. Each of them is a issue-solution pair. Hence each roughly corresponds to a discovery (of an issue), and an innovation (a solution). A <em>design pattern</em> can then be adapted to other design challenges and domains. The <em>prototype</em> shows how to weave the relevant <em>design patterns</em> into a coherent whole.</p>
+<p>Our very first project of this kind, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, developed a [[prototype|<em>prototype</em>]] of a public informing that turns perceived problems (that people report directly, through citizen journalism) into <em>systemic</em> understanding of causes and recommendations for action (developed by involving academic and other domain experts, and having their insights made accessible by a communication design team). </p>
-<p>While each of our <em>prototypes</em> is an example, the Collaborology educational <em>prototype</em> is offered as a canonical example. It has about a dozen <em>design patterns</em>, solutions to questions how to make education serve transformation of society—instead of educating people for society as is.</p>
+<p>The experience with this <em>prototype</em> revealed a general paradox we were not aware of: The senior domain experts we brought together to represent (in this case) journalism <em>cannot change their own system</em> (their full capacity being engaged in performing their role within the system). What they, however, can and need to do is empower their next-generation (students, junior colleagues, entrepreneurs...) to do that. A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to change <em>systems</em>—and hence as a "practical way to craft the future". We subsequently created The Club of Zagreb, as an update (<em>necessary</em> to unravel this paradox) of The Club of Rome. The Holotopia project builds further on the results of this work.</p>
-<p>Each <em>prototype</em> is also an experiment, showing what works in practice. Our very first <em>prototype</em> of this kind, the Barcelona Ecosystem for Good Journalism 2011, revealed that the prominent experts in a system (journalism) cannot change the system they are part of. The key is to empower the "young" ones. We created The Game-Changing Game. And The Club of Zagreb.</p>
+<p>Our portfolio contains about forty [[prototype|<em>prototypes</em>]], each of which illustrates [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]] in a specific domain.  Each <em>prototype</em> is composed by weaving together [[design pattern|<em>design patterns</em>]]—problem-solution pairs, which are ready to be adapted to other design challenges and domains.</p>
+<p>The Collaborology <em>prototype</em>, in education, will highlight some of the advantages of this approach.</p>
+<p> An education that prepares us for yesterday's professions, and only in a certain stage of life, is obviously an obstacle to <em>systemic</em> change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an <em>emerging</em> area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that <em>dramatically</em> reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in <em>any</em> domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise their "human quality". This in addition gives the students an essential role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .</p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 262: / Line 270: @@
 <div class="col-md-7"><h3>Scope</h3>
+<p>We have just seen that our evolutionary challenge and opportunity is to develop the capability to update our institutions or <em>systems</em>, to learn how to make them <em>whole</em>.</p>
-<p>If our next evolutionary task is to make institutions or <em>systems</em> <em>whole</em>—<b>where</b> shall we begin?</p>
+<blockquote><b>Where</b>—with what system—shall we begin?</blockquote>
-<p>Handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons. One of them is that if we'll use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.</p>
-<p>Norbert Wiener contributed another reason: In <em>social</em> systems, communication is what  <em>turns</em> a collection of independent individuals into a system. In his 1948 book Wiener talked about the communication in ants and bees to make that point. Furthermore, "the tie between information and action" is <em>the</em> key property of a system, which cybernetics invites us to focus on. The full title of Wiener's book was  "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, and to "change course" when the circumstances demand that (Wiener used the technical term "homeostasis", which we may here interpret as "sustainability")—the system must have <em>suitable</em> communication and control.</p>
+<p>The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for several reasons. </p>
+<p>One of them is obvious: If we should use information as guiding light and not competition, our information will need to be different.</p>
+<p>In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to another reason: In <em>social</em> systems, communication is what  <em>turns</em> a collection of independent individuals into a system. Wiener made that point by talking about ants and bees. It is the nature of the communication that determines a social system's properties, and behavior.  Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis, but let us here use this more contemporary one) the <em>sustainability</em> of a system. The full title of Wiener's book was  "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have <em>suitable</em> communication and control.</p>
 <h3>Diagnosis</h3>
+<p>That is presently <em>not</em> the case with our core systems; and with our civilization as a whole..</p>
 <blockquote>The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed. </blockquote>
-<p>Our society's communication-and-control is broken, and it has to be restored.</p>
+<p>Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.</p>
 <p>
 [[File:Bush-Vision.jpg]]
 </p>
-<p>To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising <em>their own</em> communication their <em>next</em> highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.</p>
+<p>To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising <em>their</em> communication their <em>next</em> highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.</p>
-<p>These calls to action remained, however, without effect. And it is not difficult to see why.</p>
+<blockquote>These calls to action remained, however, without effect.</blockquote>
-<p>"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm.</p>
+<p>"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. <em>Wiener too</em> entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed.</p>
-<blockquote><em>Wiener too</em> entrusted his results to the communication whose tie with action had been severed!</blockquote>
+<p>We have assembled a formidable collection of academic results that shared the same fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we are calling [[Wiener's paradox|<em>Wiener's paradox</em>]]. The link between communication and action having been broken—the academic results will tend to be ignored <em>whenever they challenge the present "course"</em> and point to a new one!</p>
-<p>We have assembled an interesting collection of academic results that shared a similar fate, as illustration of the phenomenon we are calling [[Wiener's paradox|<em>Wiener's paradox</em>]].</p>
+<p>To an academic researcher, it may feel disheartening to see so many best ideas of our best minds ignored. Why publish more—if even the most <em>elementary</em> insight that our field has produced, the one that <em>motivated</em> our field and our work, has not yet been communicated to the public?</p>
-<p>It may be disheartening, especially to an academic researcher, to see so many best ideas of our best minds unable to benefit our society. But this sentiment quickly changes to <em>holotopian</em> optimism, when we look at the vast creative frontier this is pointing to; which Vannevar Bush pointed to in 1945. </p>
+<p>This sentiment is transformed into <em>holotopian</em> optimism when we look at 'the other side of the coin'—the creative frontier that is opening up. We are invited to, we are indeed <em>obliged</em> to reinvent <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>, by recreating the very communication that holds them together. Including, of course, our own, academic system, and the way in which it interoperates with other systems—<em>or fails</em> to interoperate. </p>
-<p>Optimism turns into enthusiasm, when the information technology, which we all now use to communicate with the world, is taken into consideration.</p>
+<p>Optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also <em>this</em> commonly ignored fact:</p>
-<blockquote>Core elements of the contemporary information technology were <em>created to enable a paradigm change</em> on that creative frontier.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>The information technology we now commonly use to communicate with the world was <em>created</em> to enable a paradigm change on that very frontier.</blockquote>
-<p>Vannevar Bush already pointed to this new paradigm, indeed already in the title, "As We May Think", of his 1945 article. His point was that "thinking" really means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that our knowledge work must be organized in such a way <em>that we may benefit from each other's "thinking"</em>—and in effect think <em>together</em>, as a single mind does. He described a <em>prototype</em> system called "memex", which was based on microfilm as technology.</p>
+<p>'Electricity', and the 'lightbulb', have just been created—in order to <em>enable</em> the development of the new kinds of 'socio-technical machinery' that our society now urgently needs.</p>
-<p>Douglas Engelbart, however, took this development in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when we, humans, are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together in a similar way as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system. While all earlier innovations in this area—from clay tablets to the printing press—required that a physical medium that bears a message be physically <em>transported</em>, this new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" <em>concurrently</em>, as cells in a human nervous system do.</p>
+<p>Vannevar Bush pointed to the need for this new paradigm already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" really means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that—given the vast volumes of our information—our knowledge work must be organized <em>in a way that enables us to benefit from each other's thinking</em>. That technology and processes must be devised to enable us to in effect "connect the dots" or think <em>together</em>, as a single mind does. Bush described a <em>prototype</em> system called "memex", which was based on microfilm as technology.</p>
-<blockquote> We can now think and create—together!</blockquote>
+<p>Douglas Engelbart, however, took Bush's idea in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us humans are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected together into a network—then the overall result is that we are connected together as the cells in a human organism are connected by the nervous system. </p>
-<p>[https://youtu.be/cRdRSWDefgw This three minute video clip], which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", offers an opportunity for a pause. Imagine the effects of improving the <em>system</em> by which information is produced and put to use; even "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then he put his fingers on his forehead: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The potential not only large; it is <em>staggering</em>. The improvement that can and needs to be achieved is not only large, it is <em>qualitative</em>— from a system that doesn't really fulfill its function, to one that does.</p>
+<p>Notice that the earlier innovations in this area—including both the clay tablets and the printing press—required that a physical object be <em>transported</em>; this new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" <em>concurrently</em>, as cells in a human nervous system do.</p>
-<p>By collaborating in this new way, Engelbart envisioned, we would become able to comprehend our problems and respond to them incomparably faster than we do. Engelbart foresaw that the <em>collective intelligence</em> that would result would enable us to tackle the "complexity times urgency of our problems", which he saw as growing at an accelerated rate or "exponentially". </p>
+<blockquote> We can now develop insights and solutions  <em>together</em>! We can have results <em>instantly</em>!</blockquote>
-<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>Engelbart saw in this new technology exactly what we need to become able to handle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which grows at an accelerated rate. </p>
+<p>[https://youtu.be/cRdRSWDefgw This three minute video clip], which we called "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", offers an opportunity for a pause. Imagine the effects of improving the planetary <em>systems</em>, and our "development, integration and application of knowledge" to begin with. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then our old man put his fingers on his forehead, and looked up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The potential is not only large, it is <em>staggering</em>. The improvement that is both necessary and possible is <em>qualitative</em>—from a system that doesn't work, to one that does.</p>
+<p>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. The ones that <em>broadcast</em> information. </p>
 <p>
 [[File:Giddens-OS.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<p>The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on culture. And on "human quality".</p>
+<blockquote>The above observation by Anthony Giddens points to the impact this has had on our culture; and on "human quality".</blockquote>
 <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>But <em>ontological security</em> is what <em>binds us</em> to <em>power structure</em>. </p>
+<p>But that is exactly what <em>binds us</em> to <em>power structure</em>. </p>
 <h3>Remedy</h3>
-<blockquote><em>What is to be done</em>, if we should be able to use the new technology to change our <em>collective mind</em>?</blockquote>
+<p><em>What is to be done</em>, to restore the severed link between communication and action?</p>
+<blockquote><em>How can we begin to change our collective mind</em>—as our technology enables, and our situation demands?</blockquote>
+<p>Engelbart left us a clear and concise answer; he called it <em>bootstrapping</em>.</p>
-<p>Engelbart left us a clear answer in the opening slides of his "A Call to Action" presentation, which were prepared for a 2007 panel that Google organized to share his vision to the world, but were not shown(!).</p>
+<p>His point was that only <em>writing</em> about what needs to be done would not have an effect (the tie between information and action having been broken). <em>Bootstrapping</em> means that we consider ourselves as a part in a larger whole; and that we self-organize, and behave, as it may best serve to restore its <em>wholeness</em>. Which practically means that we either <em>create</em> a new system by using our own minds and bodies, or help others do that.</p>
+<p>The Knowledge Federation <em>transdiscipline</em> was created by an act of <em>bootstrapping</em>, to enable <em>bootstrapping</em>. What we are calling <em>knowledge federation</em> may now simply be understood as the functioning of a proper <em>collective mind</em>; including all the functions and processes this may require. Obviously, the impending <em>collective mind</em> re-evolution itself requires a <em>system</em>, or an institution, which will assemble and mobilize the required knowledge and human and other resources toward that end. Our first priority must be to secure that. Presently, Knowledge Federation is (a complete <em>prototype</em> of) the <em>transdiscipline</em> for <em>knowledge federation</em>—ready for inspection and deployment. We offer it as a proof-of-concept implementation of our call to action.</p>
+<p>The <em>praxis</em> of  <em>knowledge federation</em> itself must be <em>federated</em>. In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers, working on technology and processes for collective sense making). </p>
 <p>
-[[File:DE-one.jpeg]]
+[[File:BCN2011.jpg]]<br>
+<small>Patty Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at the 2011 An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism workshop in Barcelona</small>
+</p>
+<p>We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to highlight that Knowledge Federation is a true federation—where state of the art knowledge is combined in state of the art <em>systems</em>. The featured participants of our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where our public informing <em>prototype</em> was created, are Patty Coulter (the Director of Oxford Global Media and Fellow of Green College Oxford, formerly the Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism) Mei Lin Fung (the founder of Program for the Future) and David Price (who co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community, and Debategraph—which is now the leading global platform for collective thinking).
 </p>
-<p>In the first slide, Engelbart emphasized that  "new thinking" or a "new paradigm" is needed. In the second, he pointed out what this "new thinking" was. </p>
+<p>Other <em>prototypes</em> contributed other <em>design patterns</em> for restoring the severed link between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 <em>prototype</em> showed what may constitute the <em>federation</em> of a research result—which is written in an esoteric academic vernacular, and has large potential general interest and impact. The first phase of this <em>prototype</em>, completed through collaboration between the author and our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams, and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile, televised and live streamed event, where the result was made public. The third phase, implemented on Debategraph, modeled proper online collective thinking about the result—including pros and cons, connections with other related results, applications etc. </p>
+<p>The Lighthouse 2016 <em>prototype</em> is a conceived as a <em>direct</em> remedy for the <em>Wiener's paradox</em>, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This <em>prototype</em> models a system by which an academic community can <em>federate</em> a single message into the public sphere. The message in this case was also relevant—it was whether or not we can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the functioning of our <em>systems</em> (or whether we must use its alternative—namely the knowledge developed in the systems sciences). </p>
-<blockquote>
+</div> </div>
-<p>We ride a common economic-political vehicle traveling at an ever-accelerating pace through increasingly complex terrain.</p>
-<p>Our headlights are much too dim and blurry. We have totally inadequate steering and braking controls. </p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>There can be no doubt that <em>systemic innovation</em> was the direction Engelbart was pointing to. He indeed published an ingenious methodology for <em>systemic innovation</em> <em>already in 1962</em>, six years before Jantsch and others created theirs in Bellagio, Italy; and he used this methodology throughout his career. </p>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>[[Holotopia:Socialized reality|<em>Socialized reality</em>]]</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-7"><h3><em>Scope</em></h3>
+<p>
+<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> political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them to do was to 'hit the brakes'; and when the 'bus' they are believed to be 'driving' is inspected, it becomes clear that the 'brakes' too are missing. The job of a politician is to keep 'the bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four years. <em>Changing</em> the 'course' or the <em>system</em> is well beyond what they are able to do, or even imagine doing.</p>
-<p>Engelbart also made it clear what needs to be our next step—by which the spell of the <em>Wiener's paradox</em> is to be broken. He called it "bootstrapping"—and we adopted <em>bootstrapping</em> as one of our <em>keywords</em>. The point here is that only <em>writing</em> about what needs to be done (the tie between information and action being broken) will not lead to a desired effect; the way out of the paradox, or <em>bootstrapping</em>, means that we <em>act</em>—and either create a new system with our own minds and bodies, or actively help others do that.</p>
+<p>The COVID-19 pandemic may require systemic changes <em>now</em>.</p>
-<p>What we are calling <em>knowledge federation</em> is the 'collective thinking' that the new informati9on technology enables, and our society requires.</p>
+<blockquote>So <b>who</b>, what institution or <em>system</em>, will lead us through our <em>next</em> evolutionary challenge—where we will learn how to recreate <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>; in <em>knowledge work</em>, and beyond?</blockquote>
-<p>The Knowledge Federation <em>transdiscipline</em> was created by an act of <em>bootstrapping</em>, to enable <em>bootstrapping</em>. Originally, we were a community of knowledge media researchers and developers, developing the <em>collective mind</em> solutions that the new technology enables. Already at our first meeting, in 2008, we realized that the technology that we and our colleagues were developing has the potential to change our <em>collective mind</em>; but that to realize that potential, we need to self-organize differently.</p>
+<p>Both Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them—just as they ignored Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and so many others who followed. </p>
-<p>Ever since then have been <em>bootstrapping</em>, by developing <em>prototypes</em> with and for various communities and situations.</p>
+<p>Why?</p>
-<p>Among them, we highlight
+<p>Isn't the call to restore agency to information and power to knowledge deserving of academic attention?</p>
-<ul>
-<li>Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism, IEJ2011</li>
-<li>Tesla and the Nature of Creativity, TNC2015</li>
-<li>The LIghthouse 2016</li>
-</ul> </p>
-<p>The first, IEJ2011m, shows how researchers, journalists, citizens and creative media workers can collaborate to give the people exactly the kind of information they need—to be able to orient themselves in contemporary world, and handle its challenges correctly.</p>
-<p>The second, TNC2015, shows how to <em>federate</em> a result of a single scientist—which is written in an inaccessible language, and has high potential relevance to other fields and to the society at large.</p>
-<p>The third, The Lighthouse 2016, empowers a community of researchers (the concrete <em>prototype</em> was made for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences) to <em>federate</em> a single core insight that the society needs from their field. (Here the concrete insight was that "the free competition" cannot replace "communication and control" and provide "homeostasis"—as Wiener already argued in Cybernetics, in 1948.)</p>
-<p>Together, those three <em>prototypes</em> constitute a <em>prototype</em> solution to the <em>Wiener's paradox</em>.</p>
+<p>It is tempting to conclude that the university institution 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>
+[[File:Toulmin-Vision2.jpeg]]
+</p>
-</div> </div>
+<p>We readily find them in the way in which the university institution <em>originated</em>.</p>
+<p>The academic tradition did not originate as a way to practical knowledge, but to <em>freely</em> pursue knowledge for its own sake; in a manner disciplined only by [[knowledge of knowledge|<em>knowledge of knowledge</em>]]—which philosophers have been developing since antiquity. Wherever this free-yet-disciplined pursuit of knowledge took us, we followed.</p>
-BBB -->
+<p>And as we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, by highlighting the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest,
+<blockquote>it was this <em>free</em> pursuit of knowledge that led to the <em>last</em> "great cultural revival".</blockquote>
+</p>
-<div class="row">
+<p>We asked:
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2>[[Holotopia:Socialized reality|<em>Socialized reality</em>]]</h2></div>
+<blockquote>Could a similar advent be in store for us today?</blockquote></p>
-<div class="col-md-7"><h3><em>Scope</em></h3>
-<p>
-<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> those people love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them was to 'pull the brakes'; and when our 'bus' is more closely inspected, it becomes clear that also its 'brakes' are dysfunctional.</p>
-<p>So <b>who</b> will lead us through the next urgent task on evolutionary agenda—empower us to update <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>?</p>
+<p>The key to the positive answer to this question—which is obviously central to <em>holotopia</em>—is in the <em>historicity</em> of "the relationship we have with knowledge"—which Stephen Toulmin explicated so clearly in his last book, "Reurn to Reason", from which the above quotation was taken. So that is what we here focus on.</p>
-<p>Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" as institution 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>As Toulmin pointed out, at the time when the modern university was taking shape, it was the Church and the tradition that had the prerogative of telling the people how to conduct their daily affairs and what to believe in. And as the image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! But the censorship and the prison could not stop an idea whose time had come. They were unable to prevent a completely <em>new</em> way to explore the world to transpire from astrophysics, where it originated, and transform first our pursuit of knowledge—and then our society and culture at large.</p>
-<p>Why?</p>
+<p>It is therefore natural that at the universities we consider the curation of this <em>approach</em> to knowledge to be our core role in our society. At the universities, we are the heirs and the custodians of a tradition that has historically led to some of <em>the</em> most spectacular evolutionary leaps in human history. Naturally, we remain faithful to that tradition. We do that by meticulously conforming to the methods and the themes of interests of mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, sociology, philosophy and other traditional academic disciplines, which, we believe, <em>embody</em> the highest standards of <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>. People can learn practical skills elsewhere. It is the <em>university</em> education that gives them them up-to-date <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>—and with it the ability to pursue knowledge correctly in <em>any</em> field of interest.</p>
-<p>It is tempting to conclude that the <em>academia</em> followed the general trend, and became a <em>power structure</em>. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.</p>
+<p>We must ask:</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.
+<blockquote>Can the academic tradition evolve further? </blockquote>
-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 certain "academic" standards for pursuing knowledge. The university's core social role, or that is in any case how 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 academically correct or qualified way in <em>any</em> domain.</p>
-<p>In the opening paragraph of this website we brought up the image of Galilei in house arrest, to pointe out that this fundamental and seemingly only "philosophical" pursuit has a tremendous power. 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. "A great cultural revival" was a result. In the opening of our website we asked "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?" </p>
+<p>Could this tradition <em>once again</em> give us a completely <em>new</em> way to explore the world?</p>
-<p>In what follows we offer an affirmative answer to that question.</p>
+<p>Can the free pursuit of knowledge, curated by the <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>, once again lead to "a great cultural revival" ?</p>
-<p>In what follows you will recognize <em>the core of our proposal</em>—we'll propose to change the relationship we have with information. But here we'll make a case for that proposal on fundamental or <em>academic</em> grounds.</p>
+<blockquote>Can "a great cultural revival" <em>begin</em> at the university?</blockquote>
-<blockquote>The spontaneous pursuit of <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> has brought us to a point where changing the relationship we have with information has become immanent—also for intrinsic or <em>fundamental</em> reasons.</blockquote>
 <h3>Diagnosis</h3>
-<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>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 purpose of information, and of knowledge, is to allow us to know the reality "objectively", as it truly is. </p>
+<blockquote>In the course of our modernization, we made a <em>fundamental error</em>.</blockquote>
+<p>From the traditional culture we have adopted a <em>myth</em> far more disruptive of modernization than the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; and that the purpose of information, and of our pursuit of knowledge, is to "know the reality" objectively, as it truly is. It may take a moment of reflection to see how much this <em>myth</em> permeates our popular culture, our society and institutions; how much it marks "the relationship we have with information"—in all its various manifestations.</p>
+<p>This fundamental error has subsequently been detected and reported, but not corrected. (We again witness that the link between information and action has been severed.)</p>
-<blockquote>The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.</blockquote>
 <p>
 [[File:Einstein-Watch.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<p>There is simply no way, scientists found out, to open the 'mechanism of nature'  and verify that our models <em>correspond</em> to the real thing.</p>
+<p><em>It is simply impossible</em> to open up the 'mechanism of nature', and verify that our ideas and models <em>correspond</em> to the real thing!</p>
-<p>So what, then, are the origins of our "reality picture"? How do we decide whether something is "true"?</p>
+<blockquote>The "reality", the 20th century's scientists and philosophers found out, is not something we discover; it is something we <em>construct</em>. </blockquote>
-<p>"Reality", it has been reported, is not something we discover; it is something we <em>create</em>. Hence we shall from here on prefer to use the verb, <em>reification</em>. </p>
+<p>Our "construction of reality" turned out to be a complex and most interesting process, in which our cognitive organs and our society or culture interact. From the cradle to the grave, through innumerably many "carrots and sticks", we are <em>socialized</em> to organize and communicate our experience <em>in a certain specific way</em>. </p>
-<p>Part of our "reality construction" is performed by 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; and through innumerable 'carrots and sticks', throughout our lives, we are induced to "see the reality" in a certain specific way—the way of our culture.</p>
-<p>There are at least two reasons why we should not waste more time, but abandon this dangerous "reality myth" as we abandoned other such myths and prejudices from the past. </p>
+<p>The vast body of research, and insights, that resulted in this pivotal domain of interest, now allows us and indeed <em>compels us</em>  to extend the <em>power structure</em> view of social reality a step further, into the cultural and the cognitive realms.</p>
-<p>To see the first, we invite you to a simple, one-minute thought experiment. We invite you to follow us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral. No, this has nothing to do with religion; we shall use the cathedral as one of our metaphorical images or <em>ideograms</em>, to help us see things in proportion and make a point.</p>
+<p>In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann left us an analysis of the social process by which the reality is constructed—and pointed to the role that "universal theories" (which determine the relationship we have with information) play in maintaining a given social and political status quo. An example, but not the only one, is the Biblical worldview of Galilei's persecutors.</p>
-<p>What strikes us, as we enter, is the architecture, which inspires awe. We hear the music play: Is it Bach's cantatas? Or Allegri's Miserere? There are frescos by masters of old on the walls. If the cathedral of your choice is the St. Peter's in Rome, then Michelangelo's frescos are near. And there is the ritual...</p>
+<p>To organize and sum up what we above all need to know about the <em>nature</em> of <em>socialization</em>, and its relationship with power, we created the Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio [[thread|<em>thread</em>]], consisting of three short real-life stories or [[vignette|<em>vignettes</em>]]. (The <em>threads</em> are a technical tool we developed based on Vannevar Bush's idea of "trails"; we call them "threads" because we further weave them into <em>patterns</em>.) These insights are so central to <em>holotopia</em>, that we don't hesitate to summarize them also here, however briefly.</p>
-<p>There is also a little book on each bench. 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—point to the difference in the importance of the roles of the factual or "objective" information—and the one that is <em>implicit</em> in everything else we call "culture"—whose role is to create (let's call it that) a <em>symbolic environment</em> by which our <em>socialization</em> takes place. By which our inclinations to feel and think in a certain way, and our values and our "human quality" are created. We are making no value judgment, and you should not do that either. We are only pointing to a role or a <em>function</em>.</p>
-<p>What happens with this function when we, considering the <em>worldview</em> to be the point, replace the worldview of the tradition with the "scientific" one? Who becomes responsible for our <em>socialization</em>? The answer is obvious. A superficial look around will suffice to see just how much our contemporary <em>symbolic environment</em> is a product of advertising—whose function is to give us the kind of "human quality" that will make us consume more, so the economy may grow; and not to help us become the kind of people who will <em>make things whole</em>.  But explicit advertising is, of course, only a tip of an iceberg, through which our <em>socialization</em> is takes place.</p>
+<p>The first, Odin the Horse story, points to the nature of turf struggle, by portraying the turf behavior of horses. </p>
-<p>So the first reason why we need to abandon the "reality myth" is that it it alienates us from a lion's share of our cultural heritage—and makes us abandon the creation of culture and "human quality" to <em>power structure</em>. </p>
+<p>The second story, featuring Pierre Bourdieu as leading sociologist, shows that we humans exhibit a similar behavior—albeit in far more varied, complex and subtle ways. In effect, Bourdieu's experiences and insights in Algeria, which led to the formulation of his "theory of practice", allow us to perceive the human culture as—a complex 'turf'.</p>
+<p>
+[[File:Bourdieu-insight.jpeg]]
+</p>
+<p>Bourdieu used interchangeably two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to this 'turf'. By calling it a field, he suggested something akin to  a magnetic field, which orients our seemingly random or "free" behavior—mostly without anyone noticing that. By calling it a game, he sugged something that structures or "gamifies" our social existence, by giving each of us certain "action capabilities" pertaining to a social role. Those "embodied predispositions" or capabilities, which Bourdieu called "habitus", tend to be transmitted from body to body <em>directly</em>—without anyone noticing that a subtle "turf strife" is at play. Everyone bows to the king, and spontaneously we do too. In this way we are <em>socialized</em>—through innumerably many carrots and sticks—to accept those roles, and the behaviors or capabilities associated with them, as simply <em>the</em> "reality"—and hence as similarly immutable or "objectively" given as the reality of the material world. Bourdieu called this experience, that (our perception of) the social <em>and</em> natural "reality" is the only one possible, <em>doxa</em>. </p>
-<p>The second reason is the role in which "constructed reality" plays within the <em>power structure</em>. </p>
+<p>The third story, featuring Antonio Damasio in the role of a leading cognitive neuroscientist, completes this <em>thread</em> by explaining that we, humans, are <em>not</em> the rational decision makers, as the founding fathers of the Enlightenment made us believe. Each of us has an <em>embodied</em> cognitive filter, which <em>determines what options</em> we are able to rationally consider. This cognitive filter is <em>programmed</em> through <em>socialization</em>. Damasio's insight allows us to understand why we civilized humans don't even rationally <em>consider</em> taking off our clothes and walking into the street naked; <em>and most importantly</em>—why we don't consider changing <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>.</p>
-<p>It could be sufficient for our purpose to only point to "Social Construction of Reality", where Berger and Luckmann pointed out that throughout history, the "universal theories" (about the nature of reality and how it is to be understood) have been used  to <em>legitimize</em> a given social order. But this theme being central to <em>holotopia</em>, we here give a gist of a more thorough explanation.</p>
+<p>The most important insight reached is the following.</p>
-<p>This being only a teaser and a summary, we do that by giving only broad contours of a <em>thread</em>—in which three short stories or <em>vignettes</em> and strung together to compose a larger insight.</p>
+<blockquote><em>Socialized reality</em> construction constitutes a <em>pseudo-epistemology</em>.</blockquote>
-<p>The first <em>vignette</em> in this <em>thread</em> is a real-life event, where two Icelandic horses living outdoors, aging Odin the Horse and New Horse, are engaged in turf strife. We'll ask you to just imagine their long hairs waving in the wind, and their display of power—as Odin, who had been the stallion and the king of the turf, tries to keep New Horse away from his mares.</p>
+<p>Socialization can make certain things and ideas seem real—and others unreal.</p>
-<p>
+<p>We have deliberately chosen Socrates (the forefather of Academia) and Galilei (a pioneer of science) to represent the academic tradition in our proposal. Both Socrates and Galilei were charged and sentenced for "impiety" (challenging <em>socialized reality</em>), and for <em>epistemology</em> (which Socrates practiced through <em>dialogs</em>, and Galilei by allowing the reason to challenge the truth of the Scripture). Thereby we pointed out that substituting <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> for <em>socialized reality</em> construction has been <em>the</em> core theme of the academic tradition since its inception. </p>
-[[File:Bourdieu-insight.jpeg]]
-</p>
+<blockquote>But <em>socialized reality</em> construction is not only or even primarily an instrument of power struggle. It is, indeed, also <em>the</em> way in which the traditional culture reproduces itself and evolves. It is the very 'DNA' of the traditional culture, and often the only one that was available.</blockquote>
+<p>We may perceive the traditional "realities"—such as the belief in heavenly reward and the eternal punishment—as instruments of power; <em>and</em> we may also see them as ways in which certain cultural values, and certain "human quality", were maintained. Both perceptions correct; and both are relevant. </p>
-<p>The second story involves 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 how it works through creation and use of what he called "symbolic power". Our point will be to combine these two stories, and show that "we have a problem" (or more to the point—that we need to see things in that way), which we have not yet seen and understood. We too are (need to see ourselves as) "territorial animals"; only our 'turf strifes' are incomparably more diverse and subtle than the ones of the horses—just as much as our culture is more complex than theirs. </p>
+<p>It is their historical <em>interplay</em> that is most interesting to study—how the best insights of the best among us, of the historical enlightened beings and "prophets", were diverted to serve the <em>power structure</em>, and turned something quite <em>opposite</em> from what was intended. In the Holotopia project we engage in this sort of study to develop answers to perhaps <em>the</em> most interesting question, in any case from the point of view of the <em>holotopia</em>:</p>
-<p>Bourdieu has two keywords for this symbolic 'turf', "field" and "game", which he uses interchangeably. He calls it a "field"—to suggest both a field of activity such as an academic community or discipline or any other institution; <em>and</em> something akin to a gravitational field or a magnetic field—which subtly, without us noticing, orients our seemingly random behavior in a certain specific direction. When he refers to it as "game", he suggests that there are certain semi-permanent roles in it, and allowable 'moves', which serve to organize our 'turf strife' in some specific way.</p>
+<blockquote>What would our world be like, if we <em>liberated</em> the culture from the <em>power structure</em>?</blockquote>
-<p>To explain the mechanism by which the <em>symbolic power</em> induces a field, Bourdieu uses additional two keywords, which have a long academic history: "habitus" and "doxa". The habitus includes embodied behaviors and predispositions, which are part of everyone's 'role' in the 'game'. A king has a certain distinct habitus; and so do its pages. The doxa refers to a form of experience, or a belief, that the given social order is <em>the</em> reality. "Orthodoxy" is a related terms, where multiple "realities" are acknowledged to coexist, of which only one is the "right" one. Doxa ignores even the <em>possibility</em> of alternatives. Here we may complete this brief sketch by observing that the habitus is an instrument, by which the positions on the symbolic 'turf' are maintained through direct, body-to-body action (everyone bows to the king, and you do too). Doxa then serves as cement, to make it all stable and permanent.</p>
+<p>Some of the consequences of the historical error under consideration (that we adopted <em>reification</em> as "the relationship we have with information") include the following.</p>
-<p>Antonio Damasio completes this <em>thread</em> as a cognitive neuroscientist, to help us see that these "embodied predispositions" reach far deeper and wider into our cognitive structure and inclinations than what was believed earlier. That they act as a cognitive filter—determining our priorities, and even <em>what</em> we may consciously consider as possible. (Why, for instance, we don't consider the option of taking off our pajamas and running into the street naked.)</p>
+<ul>
+<li><b>Undue limits to creativity</b>. On the one side we have a vast global army of selected, specially trained and publicly sponsored creative workers having to produce <em>more</em> articles in the traditional academic fields as the <em>only</em> way to be academically legitimate. On the other side of our society, and of our planetary ecosystem, in dire need for <em>new</em> ideas, for <em>new</em> ways to be creative. Imagine the amount of benefit that could be reached in that situation— by <em>liberating</em> the contemporary Galilei to once again bring completely <em>new</em> ways to create and handle knowledge!</li>
-<p>And now our point.</p>
+<li><b>Severed link between information and action</b>. The (perceived) purpose of information being to complete the 'reality puzzle'—every new piece appears to be equally relevant as the others, and necessary for completing this project. In the sciences, and in media informing, we keep producing large volumes of data every minute—as Neil Postman diagnosed. As the ocean of documents rises, we begin to drown in it. Informing us the people in some functional way becomes impossible.</li>
+<li><b>Loss of cultural heritage</b>. We may as well here focus on the cultural heritage whose purpose was to cultivate "human quality". Already this trivial observation might suffice to make a point: With the threat of eternal fire on the one side, and the promise of heavenly pleasures on the other, a 'field' is created that orients the people's behavior toward what the tradition considered ethical. To see that those ancient myths are, however, only the tip of an iceberg (or more to the point, only elements in a complex ecosystem whose purpose is <em>socialization</em>) a one-minute thought experiment—an imaginary visit to a cathedral—will be sufficient. There is awe-inspiring architecture; frescos of masters of old on the walls; we hear Bach cantatas; and there's of course the ritual. All this comprises an ecosystem—where emotions such as respect and awe make one to listening and learning in certain ways, and advancing further. The complex dynamics of our <em>cultural</em> ecosystem, and the way we handled it, bear a strong analogy with our biophysical environment, with one notable difference: We have neither concepts nor methods, we have nothing equivalent to the temperature and the CO2 measurements in culture—to even diagnose the problems; not to speak about legislating remedies. </li>
-<blockquote> In our hitherto modernization we have learned to harness the power of the rivers, the sun, the wind and the atom. What remained as our next task is to harness the power that has remained as the <em>largest</em> in our Earthly abode—the power of our socialization. It is the largest because it determines how all those other powers will be used. </blockquote>
+<li><b>"Human quality" abandoned to <em>power structure</em></b>. Advertising is everywhere. And <em>explicit</em> advertising too is only a tip of an iceberg, the bulk of shich consists of a variety of ways in which "symbolic power" is used to <em>socialize</em> us in ways that suit the <em>power structure</em> interests. As a rule, this proceeds without anyone's awareness, as Bourdieu observed. But the organized and <em>deliberate</em>, and even research-based manipulation should not be underestimated! Here the [https://youtu.be/lOUcXK_7d_c person and the story of Edward Bernays], Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda", is iconic.</li>
+</ul>
-<p>The <em>socialized reality</em>, as we've just outlined it, is the reason why we, for instance, still use 'candles' as 'headlights'; we have <em>reified</em> them as such. For us, the candles <em>are</em> headlights. The work of journalists, and of scientists, is not a means to an end; science "is" what the scientists do, things like physics, biology and chemistry. </p>
-<p>Our social reality is kept from evolving by a doxa—which is deeply grounded in the way in which we see the function of information; and of knowledge.</p>
+<p>This conclusion suggests itself.</p>
-<p>But if information and knowledge should now liberate us—as they did our ancestors following Galilei's time—then once again the very relationship we have with information will need to change.</p>
+<blockquote>The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction, as it is believed.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>Our <em>socialization</em> only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.</blockquote>
-<!-- XXX
+<p>Ironically, our carefully cultivated self-identity—as "objective observers of reality"—keeps us, academic researchers, and information and knowledge at large, on the 'back seat'—and without impact. We can, and do, diagnose problems; but we cannot be an active agent in their solution.</p>
 <h3>Remedy</h3>
+<p>In the spirit of the <em>holoscope</em>, we introduce an answer by a metaphorical image, the Mirror <em>ideogram</em>. As the <em>ideograms</em> tend to, the Mirror <em>ideogram</em> too renders the essence of a situation, in a way that points to a way in which the situation may need to be handled—<em>and</em> to some subtler points as well.</p>
+</div> </div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"></div>
+<div class="col-md-6">
+<p>The main message of the Mirror [[ideogram|<em>ideogram</em>]] is that the free-yet-methodical pursuit of knowledge, which distinguishes the academic tradition, has brought us to a certain singular situation, which requires that we respond in a certain specific way. The <em>mirror</em> is inviting us, and indeed <em>compelling</em> us to interrupt the busy work we are doing, and to self-reflect in a similar manner and about similar themes as Socrates taught, at the point of the Academia's inception many centuries ago.</p>
+<p>When we look at a mirror, we see ourselves—and we see ourselves <em>in the world</em>. The [[mirror|<em>mirror</em>]] metaphor is intended to reflect two insights, or two changes in our habitual self-identity and self-perception, which a self-reflection about the underlying issues of meaning and purpose, based on the academic insights reached in the past century, will lead us to. </p>
-<p>We use the <em>mirror</em> as metaphorical image, in a similar way as we use the bus with candle headlights, to point to the academic and cultural situation that resulted. The spontaneous pursuit of knowledge, and the <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> that resulted, brought us to the <em>mirror</em>. The <em>mirror</em> symbolizes coming back to the original academic values, and ethos: self-reflection; and the Socratic dialog, about the meaning and purpose of what we do. But now in the light of <em>contemporary</em> knowledge of knowledge. It symbolizes also a new self-awareness and self-image that will result: We are not <em>above</em> the world, observing it "objectively"; we are <em>in</em> the world—and have a role in it.</p>
+<p>The first insight is that we must put an end to <em>reification</em>. Seeing ourselves in the <em>mirror</em> is intended to signify that the methods and vocabularies of the academic disciplines were not something that objectively existed, and was only discovered. <em>We</em> (the founders of our disciplines) <em>created</em> them. For <em>many</em> reasons, some of which have been stated above, we must liberate ourselves, and the people, from <em>reification</em> of our institutions, our worldviews, and of the very concepts we use to communicate. </p>
+<blockquote>The liberation from <em>reification</em> is the liberation from the <em>systems</em> we have been socialized to accept as "reality"—and hence also from the <em>power structure</em>.</blockquote>
+</div>
+<div class="col-md-3">
+<p>
+[[File:Mirror2.jpg]]<br>
+<small>Mirror <em>ideogram</em></small>
+</p>
+</div> </div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"></div>
+<div class="col-md-7">
+<p>The second consequence is the beginning of <em>accountability</em>. The world we see ourselves in is a world that needs <em>new</em> ideas, new ways of thinking, and of <em>being</em>. It's a world in dire need for creative yet methodical and <em>accountable</em> change. We see the key role that information and knowledge have in that world, and that situation. </p>
-<p>We may place this idea into existing philosophy of science with recourse to Herbert Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial". A new <em>kind of</em> science has emerged, Simon observed, which does not study natural phenomena but man-made things, to help people make them better. Examples include computer science and economics. Our point is that there is an urgent need for a new "science of the artificial"—where our handling of information will be handled in an organized, scientific way.</p>
-<p>The <em>mirror</em> as a symbol points out that <em>both</em> the epistemological state of the art <em>and</em> the situation our civilization is in demand that we do that. </p>
+<blockquote>We see ourselves <em>holding</em> the key.</blockquote>
-<p>When we self-reflect in front of the <em>mirror</em> about the fundamental premises, we are compelled to replace "reality" as foundation for our work with information with <em>reification</em>—which denotes something we do. <em>We</em>, or our predecessors, have <em>created</em> the methods we used; they are not something that objectively existed, and was only discovered. </p>
+<p>An important point here is that the <em>academia</em> finds itself in a much larger and more important role than the one it was originally conceived for. The reason is a historical accident: The successes of science discredited the <em>foundations</em>, beginning from its <em>socialized reality</em>, on which the traditional culture relied in its function.</p>
-<p>And when we also see the condition of the world we are in, we are compelled to replace <em>reification</em> with <em>accountability</em>. Realizing that the claim that we are only "doing our job", which means reporting "objectively" what we see—we also realize that we have a key role to play in the world in change; and we have to adapt to that role, to be able to perform in it successfully. </p>
+<p>The key question then presents itself:</p>
-<p>The <em>mirror</em> also stands for a surprising, seemingly magical solution to our cultural entanglement.</p>
+<blockquote>How should we continue?</blockquote>
-<blockquote>We can go <em>through</em> the <em>mirror</em>—and into a completely <em>new</em> academic and social reality.</blockquote>
+<p>Yes, we do want to respond to our new role; indeed <em>we have to</em>, because nobody else can.</p>
-<p>This is done in three easy steps.</p>
+<p>At the same time—we do want to continue our tradition, of free–yet-methodical pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.</p>
+<p>The most interesting insight reflected by the <em>mirror</em> is that we <em>can</em> do both. There is a way to <em>both</em> take care of the fundamental problem (liberate ourselves and the people from <em>reification</em>) <em>and</em> respond to this larger role.</p>
+<p>Philosophically, <em>and</em> practically, this seemingly impossible or 'magical' way out of our double-bind, is to walk through the <em>mirror</em>. This can be done in only two steps.</p>
+<p>The first is to use 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>The first—what makes this apparent magic <em>academically</em> possible—is <em>truth by convention</em>. Quine identified it as a phase, and a sign of maturing, that every field of science goes through. <em>Truth by convention</em>, where we <em>postulate</em> the meaning of words by making a convention, is the natural alternative, and antidote, to <em>reification</em>. It is the natural "Archimedean point" for once again giving information, and knowledge, the power to "move the world". </em>.
-<p>The next step is to use <em>truth by convention</em> to <em>postulate</em> an <em>epistemology</em>. In the <em>holoscope</em>, we postulated the <em>design epistemology</em>—which turns the "relationship we have with information" we are proposing into a convention. A convention is not a reality claim, so there is no need for consensus; the <em>holoscope</em> is simply a tool or a toolkit. <em>Truth by convention</em> is its principle of operation.</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>The third and last step is <em>methodology</em> definition—where we spell out the fundamental assumptions. At this point they become <em>known</em>; they become part of our "social contract"! We can then <em>define</em> what the word like "information" and "culture" mean, even give them purpose. Once again the consensus is not needed—such definitions are binding only <em>within</em> the <em>methodology</em>.</p>
+<p>But if  <em>truth by convention</em> has been the way in which <em>the sciences</em> augment the rigor of their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of <em>knowledge work</em> at large?</p>
-<blockquote>This key step is not a deviation from the academic tradition—but its straight-line continuation.</blockquote>
+<p>As we are using this [[keyword|<em>keyword</em>]], the [[truth by convention|<em>truth by convention</em>]] is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let <em>X</em> be <em>Y</em>. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that <em>x</em> "really is" <em>y</em> is obviously meaningless. A  convention is valid only <em>within a given context</em>—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.</p>
-<p>The result is that the <em>academia</em> now has the historical privilege, and the obligation—because its social role, and because of the academic tradition it institutionalizes—to guide the society <em>through</em> the <em>mirror</em>. To <em>liberate</em> the "oppressed".</p>
+<p>The second step is to use <em>truth by convention</em> to define an <em>epistemology</em>.</p>
-<p>On the other side of the <em>mirror</em>, we find ourselves in a completely new academic and cultural reality—where we are free to, and empowered to, be creative in ways in which our new situation requires. We can
+<p>We defined [[design epistemology|<em>design epistemology</em>]] by turning the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information—by considering it a human-made thing, and adapting information and the way we handle it to the functions that need to be served) into a convention.</p>
-<ul>
+<p>Notice that nothing has been changed in the traditional-academic scheme of things. The <em>academia</em> has only been <em>extended</em>; a new way of thinking and working has been added to it, for those who might want to engage in that new way. On the 'other side of the <em>mirror</em>', we see ourselves and what we do as (part of) the 'headlights' and the 'light'; and we self-organize, and act, and use our creativity freely-yet-responsibly, and create a variety of new methods and results—just as the founding father of science did, at the point of its inception. </p>
-<li><b>Liberate the academic researchers</b>—<em>the</em> key resource in these demanding times—from <em>reifying</em> their disciplines; and from the traditional "observer" role—and empower them to perceive themselves as <em>creators</em> and not mere <em>observers</em> of our world; and to create the <em>way</em> they do their work to begin with</li>
-<li><b>Liberate the people</b> from <em>reification</em> the institutions—and hence from the <em>systems</em>, and the <em>power structure</em></li>
+<p>In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the <em>design epistemology</em> is only one of the many ways to manifest this approach. We drafted a parallel between the <em>modernization</em> of science that can result in this way and the emergence of modern art:  By defining an <em>epistemology</em> and a <em>methodology</em> by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did—when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by using the techniques of Old Masters. </p>
-<li><b>Liberate the people</b> from <em>reification</em> of their "needs" and other forms of "reality" perception—and take up "human development", as we shall see later</blockquote>  </li>
-<li><b>Liberate our language, and method, and worldview</b>  from the reification of inherited concepts—and empower us to create completely <em>new</em> ways of seeing the world, and speaking and acting</li>
-</ul>
-<p>The concepts defined by convention are called <em>keywords</em>; we've been using them all along.</p>
+<blockquote>As the artists did—we can become creative <em>in the very way in which we practice our profession.</em></blockquote>
-<p>We turned "information" into a <em>keyword</em> by defining it as "recorded experience". The substance of <em>information</em>, according this definition, is not "reality" but human experience—where "experience" is interpreted in a most general sense, to include also results of academic work and other forms of insight as  (to use the colloquial phrase) "aha experiences". <em>Information</em> is, according to this definition, not only written text, but <em>any</em> artifacts that embody human experience.</p>
+<p>To complete this proposal—to the <em>academia</em> to 'step through the <em>mirror</em>' and to guide our society to a new reality—we developed the two <em>prototypes</em>—of the <em>holoscope</em> (to model the academic reality on the other side) and of the <em>holotopia</em> (to model the social reality).</p>
-<p><em>Information</em> includes also <em>prototypes</em>. Instead of only writing articles and <em>observing</em> the world—on the other side of the <em>mirror</em> the researchers can give their insights <em>direct</em> impact on systems. Hereby <em>information</em> is given agency; knowledge is given its power to make a difference.</p>
+<p>Technically or academically, each of them is a model of a <em>paradigm</em>—hence we have a <em>paradigm</em> in <em>knowledge work</em> ready to foster for a larger societal <em>paradigm</em>—exactly as the case was in Galilei's time.</p>
-<blockquote>And to rebuild the <em>culture</em>.</blockquote>
+<p>We bring these lofty and "up in the air" possibilities down to earth, by discussing one of the more immediately practical consequences of the proposed course of action.</p>
-<p>While we are eager to show our <em>prototype</em> portfolio to illustrate these abstract ideas and make them concrete, we leave that for the detailed modules and here only share two examples. They are both <em>keywords</em> and <em>prototypes</em>—because these two <em>keywords</em> have already been proposed to the academic communities they originally belong to, and proven to be well received and useful.</p>
-<p>We defined <em>design</em> as "alternative to <em>tradition</em>". By this definition, <em>design</em> and <em>tradition</em> are two alternative ways to secure the  <em>wholeness</em> of the human systems and nature, where <em>tradition</em> relies on what's been inherited from the past and modifies it only exceptionally and carefully; and where <em>design</em> is the alternative—where we <em>consciously</em> and deliberately curate <em>wholeness</em>. The point of this definition is that in a post-traditional culture, or in other words in the "modernity", <em>tradition</em> no longer works, and <em>design</em> must be used. </p>
+<p>The [[keyword|<em>keywords</em>]] we've been using all along are all defined by convention.</p>
-<p>This leads to a more precise interpretation of the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>, and our contemporary situation: We are no longer <em>traditional</em>; but we are not yet <em>designing</em>. Our contemporary difficulties are a result.</p>
+<p>The discussions of two examples—of [[design|<em>design</em>]] and [[implicit information|<em>implicit information</em>]]—which we offer separately, and here only summarize—will illustrate subtle yet central advantages this approach offers. Each of those [[keyword|<em>keywords</em>]] has been proposed to corresponding academic communities, and well received. Hence they are also [[prototype|<em>prototypes</em>]]—illustrating the possibility and the need for assigning purpose, by convention, to already <em>existing</em> academic fields and practices.</p>
-<p>Our call to action can then be understood as a way to operationalize the key step—to modernize <em>information</em></p>
+<p>The definition of <em>design</em> allowed us to capture the essence of our post-traditional cultural condition—and suggest how we need to adapt to it—in a single word.</p>
-<p>The second <em>keyword</em> is the definition of <em>implicit information</em> as <em>information</em> where no explicit claims are made; where human experience is coded, and embodied, in cultural artifacts of all kinds.</p>
+<p>We defined <em>design</em> as "alternative to <em>tradition</em>", where <em>design</em> and <em>tradition</em> are two alternative ways to <em>wholeness</em>. <em>Tradition</em> relies on spontaneous, gradual, Darwinian-style evolution. Change is resisted. Small changes are tried—and tested and assimilated in the culture as a whole through generations of use. We practice <em>design</em> when we consider ourselves accountable for the <em>wholeness</em> of the result. The point here is that when <em>tradition</em> cannot be relied on—<em>design</em> must be used.</p>
-<p>We can now interpret our <em>cultural</em> situation by saying that while we've been focused on the <em>explicit</em>—on understanding how the world works etc.—we've been culturally dominated by the <em>implicit information</em>, and the "symbolic power" it embodies. This definition gives the <em>implicit information</em> citizenship rights—and empower us to treat it, and hence also <em>culture</em>, with the kind of thoroughness and care that have hitherto been reserved to traditional scientific pursuits.</p>
+<p>The situation we are in—as depicted by the bus with candle headlights—can be understood as a result of a transition: We are no longer <em>traditional</em> (our technology evolves by <em>design</em>); but we are not yet <em>designing</em> ("the relationship we have with information" is still <em>traditional</em>). Our proposal can now be understood as the call to <em>complete</em> modernization. </p>
-<p>The research in the humanities will, of course, have a lead role to play. But to be able to do that—it needs to liberate itself <em>reifications</em>, and the observer role, and dare to <em>create</em> the methods that will give their findings the impact they need to have.</p>
+<p><em>Reification</em> can now be understood as the foundation for truth and meaning that suits the <em>tradition</em>; <em>truth by convention</em> is what empowers us to <em>design</em>.</p>
-<p>How exactly this may need to be done is the next theme on our agenda.</p>
-</div> </div>
+<p>We proposed this definition, and the insights and the methodology it is pointing to, to the design community as a way to develop its logical foundations. In the PhD Design's online conference the question, "What does it mean to give a doctorate in design?" Or in other words, "What should the academic criteria and the methods in design be based on?" The natural answer, the community leaders thought, would be classical philosophy; it is, after all, a <em>philosophy</em> doctorate that is being awardd. We proposed that classical philosophy as foundation also has its problems. But that we can <em>design</em> a foundation—by using <em>truth by convention</em>, and the approach we've drafted. </p>
-<div class="row">
+<p>We offer the fact that Danish Designers chose our presentation to be repeated as opening keynote at their tenth anniversary conference, out of about three hundred that were shared at the triennial conference of the European Academy of Design, as a sign that this praxis, of assigning a purpose to a discipline and a community, and building a methodology on that basis, can be <em>practically</em> acceptable and useful. </p>
-<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>We have now come to the second half of this exploration of the <em>holotopia</em>'s philosophical underpinnings. We divided them by following, roughly, the traditional philosophical lines of division—so that <em>socialized reality</em> covered the "epistemology", while now w'll talk about "ontology". Ontology is the study of "what is" or of the "being", which then naturally leads to an understanding of the right information or knowledge, to inform us about what is. But here, as explained already, our orientation will be more practical, and we'll explore <b>how</b> we may need to "look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it". When we opened this introduction to <em>holotopia</em> by comparing our present way of looking at the world with a pair of candle headlights, we obviously implied that there is a <em>much</em> better way. </p>
-<p>This question becomes especially interesting when we consider it in the light of the task we've taken up, of <em>federating</em> Aurelio Peccei's call to action, to "find a way to change course", by beginning a "great cultural revival". Clearly—and we highlighted that by talking about Galilei in house arrest—the <em>last</em> "great cultural revival" was largely a result of a new way to look at the world, which liberated us from the worldview of the Scripture and empowered us to use the reason, and the human experience, to <em>understand</em> the world. Our question was, and is all along—"Could a similar advent be in store for us today?"</p>
-<p>This question is also most pertinent in the context of our proposal to <em>academia</em>, to establish <em>knowledge federation</em> as an academic field and a real-life [[praxis|<em>praxis</em>]]. And especially so in the light of the <em>accountability</em> argument we've presented in <em>socialized reality</em>—according to which the <em>academia</em> must consider itself accountable for the way of looking at the world it gives to the researcher, and the lay person (its core function in the society to tell us what is "right" information leading to "right" knowledge—so that we may pursue it in all walks of life). To highlight the importance of this role, imagine an extraordinarily gifted young man entering the <em>academia</em>. Let's call him Pierre Bourdieu, to be concrete. The academic toolkit given to this young man as part of his academic training, which he'll henceforth simply take for granted, as part of his job and self-identity, will largely determine how useful or <em>usable</em> the results of his career will be to the society. </p>
+<p>The definition of <em>implicit information</em> and of <em>visual literacy</em> as "literacy associated with <em>implicit information</em> for the International Visual Literacy Association was in spirit similar—and the point was similarly central.</p>
+<p>
+[[File:Whowins.jpg]]
+</p>
+<p>We showed the above <em>ideogram</em> as depicting a situation where two kinds of information—the <em>explicit information</em> with explicit, factual and verbal warning in a black-and-white rectangle, and the visual and "cool" rest—meet each other in a direct duel. Our immeiate point was that the <em>implicit information</em> wins "hands down" (or else this would not be a cigarette advertising). Our larger point was that while our legislation, ethical sensibilities and "official" culture at large are focused on <em>explicit information</em>, our culture is largely created through subtle <em>implicit information</em>. Hence we need a <em>literacy</em> to be able to decode those messages. It is easy to see how this line of thought and action directly continues what's been told above about the negative consequences of <em>reification</em>. </p>
-<p>Imagine the effects on the rest of us, and our culture—if <em>we</em> can be educated, and legislated, to think in a new way! Isn't that the <em>natural</em> way to "cultural revival"?</p>
-<p>Herein lies the <em>academia</em>'s immense power: It holds the key to "great cultural revival" (provided a better "course" for handling information and knowledge can be found). </p>
+</div> </div>
-<h3>Diagnosis</h3>
-<blockquote>So what <em>is</em> "right" knowledge? <br>
+<div class="row">
-Nobody knows! </blockquote>
+<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>Of course, innumerable views of this core philosophical issue have been contributed since as far back as our collective memory can reach. But no consensus or "official narrative" has as yet emerged.</p>
+<p>We have just seen, by highlighting the <em>historicity</em> of the academic approach to knowledge to reach the <em>socialized reality</em> insight, that the academic tradition—now instituted as the modern university—finds itself in a much larger and more central social role than it was originally conceived for. We look up to the <em>academia</em> (and not to the Church and the tradition) to tell us <b>how</b> to look at the world, to be able to comprehend it and handle it. </p>
-<p>So all we can do here to begin exploring this all-important question is share what <em>we</em>'ve been told while growing up. We'll simplify and caricature—and point to an issue that is the <em>key</em> to changing our situation.</p>
+<p>That role, and question, carry an immense power!</p>
+<p>It was by providing a completely <em>new</em> answer to that question, that the last "great cultural revival" came about.</p>
-<blockquote>So what <em>is</em> "right" knowledge? What <em>is</em> the right foundation for creating truth and meaning? Nobody knows! </blockquote>
+<p>Could a similar advent be in store for us today?</p>
-<p>Of course, innumerable views of this core philosophical issue have been contributed since as far back as our collective memory can reach. But no "official narrative" or consensus has as yet emerged.</p>
-<p>So all we can do here to begin this exploration is share what <em>we</em>'ve been told, while we were growing up. We'll simplify and caricature—to point to an issue that calls for attention.</p>
+<h3>Diagnosis</h3>
-<p>As members of the <em>homo sapiens</em> species, we were informed, we have the evolutionary prerogative to understand the world, and to make choices rationally. Give the <em>homo sapiens</em> a correct understanding of the natural world, he'll know exactly how to go about satisfying "his needs", which he no doubt knows because he can experience them directly. But the traditions got it all wrong! Being unable to understand how the nature works, our ancestors invented a "ghost in the machine"—and prayed to <em>him</em> to give them what they wanted. Science corrected this error. It <em>removed</em> the "ghost"—and told us how the nature, or 'the machine', <em>really</em> works. </p>
+<blockquote>How <em>should</em> we look at the world, to be able to comprehend it and handle it? </blockquote>
+<blockquote>Nobody knows! </blockquote>
-<p>This gigantic step—removing the "ghost in the machine"—is what modernization was really all about! Isn't that how we came to understand, finally, that women can't fly on broomsticks?</p>
+<p>Of course, countess books and articles have been written about this theme since antiquity. But in spite of that—or should we rather say <em>because</em> of that—no consensus has been reached.</p>
-<p>We can now combine scientific understanding of causes with technology, and get out the nature exactly what we want and need!</p>
-<p>Of course, some social instruments also need to be in place to make it all work. The <em>homo sapiens</em> needs a similarly "objective reality picture" about what's happening in the social world, so that also there he can make informed, rational decisions.. That's what the media informing provides him. And when his wants and needs contradict with those of another, he needs "the free market" and "the free elections" to serve as perfect scales, and assure that justice, the will of the majority, will prevail.</p>
-<p>And culture—what about the culture? Some people, mostly older, still like to go to classical music concerts and to the theatre. And we also have researchers in the humanities, who <em>study</em> culture. But their role in practical reality is not very clear. Anyhow they never seem to agree with one other.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the way we the people look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it, shaped itself spontaneously—from the scraps of the scientific ideas that were available around the middle of the 19th century, when Darwin and Newton as cultural heroes replaced Adam and Moses. What is today popularly considered as the "scientific" worldview shaped itself then—and remained largely unchanged.</p>
-<p>Popular myths of this kind, which began to take hold of our culture around the middle of the 19th century, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes were replaced by Darwin and Newton, were proven wrong in 20th century science and philosophy.</p>
+<p>As members of the <em>homo sapiens</em> species, this worldview makes us believe, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to comprehend the world in causal terms, and to make rational choices based on such comprehension. 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 traditional cultures, being unable to understand how the nature works, put a "ghost in the machine"—and made us pray to him to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error—and now we can satisfy our needs by manipulating the nature directly and correctly, with the help of technology. </p>
-<blockquote>It has turned out that <em>we</em> got it wrong.</blockquote>
+<p>It is this causal or "scientific" understanding of the world that makes us modern. Isn't that how we understood that women cannot fly on broomsticks?</p>
-<p>From our collection of reasons, why this approach to social construction of truth and meaning makes us socially dysfunctional and culturally lame, we'll highlight only two.</p>
+<p>From our collection of reasons why this way of looking at the world is neither scientific nor functional, we here mention two.</p>
 <p>
 [[File:Heisenberg–frame.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<blockquote>The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>The first is that the nature is not a "machine".</blockquote>
-<p>Modern physics proved that <em>scientifically</em>—by showing that small <em>quanta</em> of matter exhibited behaviors that could not be 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 <em>narrow frame</em> would be removed. </p>
-<p>In "Physics and Philosophy" Heisenberg describes our zeitgeist as we know it, including our worldview <em>and</em> our values, to explain how it followed from the assumptions that the scientists <em>proved</em> wrong.</p>
+<p>The mechanistic or "classical" way of looking at the world that Newton and his contemporaries developed in physics, which around the 19th century shaped the worldview of the masses, has been disproved and disowned by modern science. Even <em>physical</em> phenomena, it has turned out, exhibit the <em>kinds of</em> interdependence that cannot be understood in causal terms.</p>
-<blockquote>We have thrown out the baby with the bathwater!</blockquote>
+<p>In "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, described how "the narrow and rigid frame" as the way of looking at the world that our ancestors concocted from the 19th century science was damaging to culture, and in particular to religion and ethical norms on which the "human quality" depended. And how the prominence of "instrumental" thinking and values resulted, which Bauman called "adiaphorisation". Heisenberg explained how the modern physics <em>disproved</em> that worldview. Heisenberg expected that <em>the</em> largest impact of modern physics would be on culture—by allowing it to evolve further, by dissolving the <em>narrow frame</em>.</p>
-<p>We've eliminated lots of myths and prejudices—but we also eliminated the core elements of culture that were rooted in them.</p>
+<p>In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr (considered in Germany as Heisenberg's intellectual and scientific "heir") co-wrote the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message is "We need to learn to think in a new way". The proposed new thinking is conspicuously similar to the one that leads to <em>holotopia</em>: "The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. (...) We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive understanding of our <em>Wirklichkeit</em> (world, or reality), in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize humanity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature (...)"</p>
+<blockquote>The second reason is that even complex "machines" ("classical" nonlinear dynamic systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.</blockquote>
 <p>
 [[File:MC-Bateson-vision.jpeg]]
 </p>
+<p>It has been observed that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Research in systems sciences, and in particular in cybernetics, has explained that curious phenomenon in a <em>scientific</em> way: The "hell" (which you may imagine as global issues, or the 'destination' toward which our 'bus' is diagnosed to be headed) is largely a result of various "side effects" of our best efforts and "solutions", resulting from "nonlinearities" and "feedback loops" in natural and social systems we are trying to govern. </p>
-<blockquote>The second reason is that even the "classical" systems cannot be understood in causal therms.</blockquote>
-<p>This, indeed, is <em>the</em> main message that we as society needed to receive from cybernetics, and from the systems sciences at large.</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>
 "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 582: / Line 637: @@
 </p>
-<p>As the things are, the simplification that marks our thinking, of a complex reality to simple causes and effects, has been diagnosed again and again as <em>the</em> source of our problems.</p>
+<h3>Remedy</h3>
+<p>The remedy we offered builds upon the <em>foundation</em> we proposed related to the <em>socialized reality</em> insight. </p>
+<blockquote>We showed how <em>truth by convention</em> allows us to explicitly <em>define</em> a way to look at the world, which allows us to <em>truly</em> comprehend it and handle it.</blockquote>
+<p>We called the result a general-purpose <em>methodology</em>; we called our <em>prototype</em> the Polyscopic Modeling <em>methodology</em> or [[polyscopy|<em>polyscopy</em>]]. </p>
+<p>A <em>methodology</em> is in essence a toolkit; any sort of rules could do, as long as they give us the insights we need. We, however, defined <em>polyscopy</em> by turning the core findings in 20th century science into conventions. (While a thorough <em>federation</em> was conducted, Einstein's "Autobiographical Notes" alone were sufficient for our purpose.) In this way we repaired the severed link between information and action <em>also in this fundamental domain</em>, where scientific findings meet the popular worldview.</p>
+<p>The <em>methodology</em> definition is conceived as a handful of crisp and very brief aphorismic axioms; by using [[truth by convention|<em>truth by convention</em>]], we gave them exact interpretation that is needed.</p>
+<p>The first postulate defines <em>information</em> as "recorded experience". It is thereby made explicit that the substance communicated by information is not "reality", but human experience. Furthermore, since human experience can be recorded in a variety of ways (a chair is a record of human experience related to sitting and chair making), the notion of <em>information</em> vastly surpasses written documents. This first postulate enables <em>knowledge federation</em> across cultural traditions and fields of interests—by reducing everything to human experience, as common denominator. </p>
+<p>The second postulate postulates that the [[scope|<em>scope</em>]] (the way we look) determines the <em>view</em> (what is seen). According to this axiom, in <em>polyscopy</em> the experience (and "reality" or whatever is "behind" experience) does not have an a priori structure. We <em>attribute</em> a structure to it with the help of our concepts and other elements of our <em>scope</em>. This postulate enables  <em>scope design</em>—and the general-purpose science modeled by the <em>holoscope</em>. </p>
+<p>In <em>polyscopy</em> we did not talk about knowledge; <em>knowledge federation</em> was developed later. We may now improvise a new axiom.</p>
+<blockquote><em>Knowledge</em> must be <em>federated</em></blockquote>
+<p>This axiom only expresses clearly the intuitive or conventional idea of "knowledge": If we should ever be able to say that we "know" something, we must <em>federate</em> not only the supporting evidence, but also potential counter-evidence—and hence <em>information</em> in general. This, of course, is what the academic peer reviews are all about; the difference is that peer reviews are limited to a certain subdomain of science—something a <em>general</em> approach to knowledge cannot afford.</p>
-<p>But the tie between information and action having been broken—they of course remained without effect.</p>
+<p>An explicitly defined <em>general purpose methodology</em> introduces to knowledge work the kind of change that constitutional democracy introduced to political and legal practice. Even a hated criminal has the right for a fair trial; similarly, even a most implausible idea or experience has the right to be <em>federated</em>. Based on this simple rule of thumb, we could, for instance, <em>not</em> ignore Buddhism because we don't find it appealing; or because we don't believe in reincarnation. The work of <em>knowledge federation</em> is here similar to the work of a dutiful attorney—who does his best to gather suitable evidence, and back his client with a convincing case.</p>
+<p>The overall goal, "to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge", can then be served by <em>federating</em> ideas into general insights or principles or rules of thumb—which orient action; and into <em>prototypes</em>—which <em>directly</em> impact <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>.</p>
-<h3>Remedy</h3>
+<p>A <em>methodology</em> allows us to state explicitly what information needs to be like; and what being "informed" means. We modeled this intuitive notion with the keyword [[gestalt|<em>gestalt</em>]]. To be "informed", one needs to have a <em>gestalt</em> that is appropriate to one's situation. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example. The knowledge of <em>gestalt</em> is profoundly different from knowing only the data (the room temperatures, CO2 levels etc.).  </p>
+<p>How can we be uninformed—in the midst of all the information we have? For an intuitive explanation, imagine that you are talking on the phone with your neighbor, that he's at work and you are at home, and that you see that his house is on fire. Yet you talk to him about the sale in the neighborhood fishing equipment store (which interests your neighbor, because he's an avid fisherman. "One cannot not communicate", reads one of Paul Watzlawich's axioms of communication. Although when seen from a <em>factual</em> point of view nothing is wrong our media informing (and with your communication with your neighbor), in this <em>informed</em> approach to information we are proposing it is profoundly and dangerously deceptive, because it communicates a wrong <em>gestalt</em>. The situation we are in may now be understood as a result of such <em>traditional</em> or <em>factual</em> approach to public informing—as the bus with candle headlights metaphor might suggest.</p>
+<p><em>Polyscopy</em> offers a collection of techniques for communicating and 'proving' or <em>justifying</em> general or <em>high-level</em> insights and claims. <em>Knowledge federation</em> is conceived as the social process by which such insights can be created and maintained.</p>
+<p>This new approach to academic knowledge work we are proposing, where instead of relying on inherited interests and methods we <em>federate</em> a <em>methodology</em>, is a practical way to respond to the demand for academic <em>accountability</em>, which, we proposed, follows from the situation the academic tradition now finds itself in. And indeed in two ways. It allows us to vastly <em>broaden</em> the scope of academic work, by using the <em>methodology</em> to create new kinds of results—according to the contemporary needs of people and society. <em>And</em> it allows us to <em>define</em> what "scientific thinking" and "scientific worldview" are truly about—in a way that can be read and understood; and in a way that <em>evolves</em>, and remains in sync with the <em>contemporary</em> state of the art of academic <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>.</p>
-<p>A useful precedent, and template, is found in the repertoire of the sciences of the artificial—in computer science.</p>
+<p>This approach is similar to the dynamics that led to the emergence of science in Galilei's time—where a certain methodological idea, developed in astrophysics, ended up defining a <em>general</em> approach to knowledge in the sciences. To create the <em>polyscopy</em> as a <em>prototype</em> of a <em>general-purpose methodology</em> we <em>federated</em> methodological insights and techniques across the board:</p>
-<p>A closely similar situation arose in the early days of computer programming, when the buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which ended up in a chaos. [https://holoscope.info/2019/02/07/knowledge-federation-dot-org/#InformationHolon The story] is interesting, but here we only summarize the main points, or lessons learned or <em>design patterns</em> we've adopted.</p>
+<ul>
+<li>[[pattern|<em>Patterns</em>]] have a closely similar function as mathematics does in traditional sciences—and at the same time completely generalize the implementation of this function</li>
+<li>[[ideogram|<em>Ideograms</em>]] allow us to include the expressive power and the insights and techniques from art, advertising and information design</li>
+<li>[[vignette|<em>Vignettes</em>]] implement the basic technique from media informing, where an insight or issue is made accessible by telling illustrative and engaging or "sticky"  real-life people and situation stories</li>
+<li>[[thread|<em>Threads</em>]] implement Vannevar Bush's technical idea of "trails" as a way to combine specific ideas into higher-level units of meaning</li>
+</ul>
-<p>The first and most important is <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, usable, well-structured code. Let's put the <em>academia</em> in that frame of reference, and a most empowering view emerges. To see it, imagine that an unusually gifted young man comes to <em>academia</em>; to make the story concrete, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu will spend a lifetime uses the toolkit the <em>academia</em> has given him. He will not think about changing it—and why would he; each journal has a given article format, and the refereeing process etc. Imagine now if what he produces, along with so many others, is "spaghetti code"—something so complex, that a newcomer can only with extreme difficulty, and perhaps with a lifetime of work (he must first <em>become</em> a sociologist) understand his contribution.</p>
-<p>Imagine the contribution to human knowledge we would make by radically improving this 'toolkit'!</p>
+<p>The following [[vignette|<em>vignette</em>]] will further illustrate the nuances of this approach, by explaining how a single specific methodological idea—the object oriented methodology in computer programming—has been <em>federated</em>.</p>
-<p>The second point is technical—the practical way to do this is to create a "methodology". A methodology has all the core elements of a <em>paradigm</em>—it includes a way <em>to conceive of</em> programming; methods for creating programs and structuring programs; and technical programming tools, such as a programming language and a compiler, for putting them into practice. As we shall see in a moment, we did something closely similar. Here the winning principle was the "object oriented methodology", developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kirsten Nygaard.</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>
 [[File:Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg]]
 </p>
+<p>They are drawn from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Ole-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 third and final point is even more technical: The only way to understand a dynamic system is in terms of a <em>hierarchy</em> of concepts. Object oriented methodology's main concept or tool is to conceive programming as modeling dynamic systems, in terms of "objects"—each of which "hides implementation" and "exports function"—which can then be easily integrated in higher-level objects. </p>
+<p>Let us here highlight is is the <em>academia</em>'s  accountability for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language, even the "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. </p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 611: / Line 698: @@
 <div class="col-md-6">
-<p>What we did was closely similar: We created a general-purpose methodology, which enables one to <em>choose</em> the scope, choose a high-level concept (such as "climate change", or "culture", or "happiness") and create an core insight—to be exported into higher-level objects.</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>And we created the <em>information holon</em>!</p>
+<p>To see the extent of this analogy, think of the <em>academia</em> becoming accountable for the tools and processes it provides to the world—<em>both</em> to the people at large <em>and</em> to the practicing academics. Imagine a highly talented young person, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu to make this concrete, learning how to be a researcher. The <em>academia</em> will give Bourdieu a certain way to render his results, which he'll be using throughout his career. The "usability", comprehensibility and in a word—the <em>usefulness</em> of Bourdieu's life work will highly depend on the format in which he'll render his results. This format, however, will not be in his power to change, and it is likely that he won't even think about such change.</p>
-</div>
+<p>Bourdieu is, however only a single drop—and the <em>academia</em> is an endless <em>flow</em> of such people. Could a similar approach as object orientation have a similarly large effects also there, in this much more general application domain?
-<div class="col-md-3">
+<p>The solution for structuring information we provided in <em>polyscopy</em>, called <em>information holon</em>, is closely similar to the "object" in object oriented methodology. 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 class="col-md-3">
 [[File:Information.jpg]]<br>
 <small>Information <em>ideogram</em></small>
 </div> </div>
 <div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-3"></div>
 <div class="col-md-7">
-<p>The Polyscopic Modeling <em>methodology</em> <em>prototype</em> shows how a general-purpose methodology can be created—to enable abstraction, and creation of principles, rules of thumb etc. in <em>any</em> domain.</p>
+<p>The <em>holotopia</em> may now be understood as the <em>circle</em> by which our <em>knowledge federation</em> proposal is <em>federated</em>; a vision is not only provided and published—but already turned into a collaborative strategy game whose goal is to "change course".</p>
-<p>Of the various <em>prototypes</em> that may illustrate this method we here point to only one: "<em>Information</em> Must Be <em>Designed</em>" book manuscript. Here the claim made in the title is <em>justified</em> in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it. The book is an <em>information holon</em>, where the insight created is what we've been talking about all along—that we can no longer live with only the <em>traditional</em> approach to information; that <em>information</em> must be modernized, or <em>designed</em>. </p>
+<p>A <em>prototype</em> <em>polyscopic</em> book manuscript titled "<em>Information</em> Must Be <em>Designed</em>" 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>This book, of course, provides a template for any other such result. And most importantly, it is also a <em>prototype</em> showing what may result from <em>developing</em> this approach to knowledge—which is the core of our proposal.</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>. </p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 640: / Line 728: @@
 <div class="col-md-7"><h3><em>Scope</em></h3>
-<p>In this last of the <em>five insights</em>, we answer the question that has remained as perhaps most intriguing—and <em>portray</em> "a great cultural revival" that is now ready to emerge. To see what this may mean practically, think of the world in Galilei's time. Concerns about "original sin" and "eternal punishment" were soon to be replaced; happiness and beauty would be lived here and now, and elevated and celebrated by the arts. What might the <em>next</em> "great cultural revival" be like? </p>
+<p>We turn to culture and to "human quality", and ask: </p>
-<p>Another place to begin is what we've just proposed—to develop a <em>general purpose methodology</em>, or 'generalized science', which allows us to <em>federate</em> cultural insights emanating from ancient and contemporary cultural traditions, religions, schools of therapy <em>and</em> science, that would allow us to create insights, rules of thumb or principles in <em>any</em> domain of choice. We are about to apply our <em>prototype</em> to the pivotal issue, the one that gives our cultural evolution or our 'bus' its direction—the question of human aims and values. To inform our "pursuit of happiness". What insights, what new discoveries might emerge?</p>
+<blockquote>
+<b>Why</b> is "a great cultural revival" realistically possible?</blockquote>
+<p>What insight, and what strategy, may divert our"pursuit of happiness" from material consumption to human cultivation?</p>
+<p>We may approach our theme also from a different angle: Suppose we substituted <em>real</em> information, <em>federated</em> from the world traditions, academic disciplines and other relevant sources, for advertising, and allowed it to orient our values and our choices. What new insights would emerge? What difference would they make?</p>
+<p>During the Renaissance, preoccupations with "original sin" and "Heavenly reward" were replaced by a pursuit of beauty and happiness here and now—and their celebration through the arts.</p>
+<blockquote> What might the <em>next</em> "great cultural revival" be like? </blockquote>
 <h3>Diagnosis</h3>
-<p>The insight we propose is closely similar to the <em>academic</em> one resulting from the self-reflection with the help of the metaphorical [[mirror|<em>mirror</em>]]; the discovery that emerges is as simple as—the discovery of ourselves.</p>
+<p>Nowhere are our cultural biases as clearly visible as here. </p>
+<p>To pursue happiness 'in the light of a candle' means to pursue <em>convenience</em>—whatever <em>appears</em> attractive at the moment. <em>Convenience</em> has the added advantage that it appears to us as empirical and exact, and hence "scientific". </p>
+<p>There is, in addition, the value of <em>egotism</em> or ego-centeredness—endlessly supported by advertising. <em>Egotism</em> too appears "scientific"—being, according to Darwin, the way in which the nature herself pursues <em>wholeness</em>. </p>
+<h3>Remedy</h3>
-<p>The values that will be challenged are the ones that resulted by looking at the world through the <em>narrow frame</em>, as we've just described. First of all (in the more <em>private</em> pursuits) the value of <em>convenience</em> (or "instant gratification"), which <em>appeared</em> as "scientific" because it roughly corresponds to the scientific experiment. And then (in the more social ones) the value of <em>egotism</em> (or "egocenteredness"), which appears to follow as "natural" from Darwin's theory. And relying on "free competition" to take care of <em>wholeness</em>. </p>
+<p>The <em>convenience paradox</em> insight—by which we point to a remedial course—may be understood in terms of three more specific insights. In a quite spectacular manner, those three insights become transparent as soon as we abandon our fascination with the stories or <em>socialized realities</em>—and focus on the <em>relevant</em> human experience that our traditions embody.</p>
-<p>Both values ignore systems—first of all the natural ones, and then also social. Both are the environments, whose quality largely determines our life quality. They have, however, a difference—that in culture we have no CO2 and CO2 quotas; and that the destruction can be <em>more</em> pervasive, and remain unnoticed.</p>
+<ul>
+<li><em>Human wholeness exists</em>—and it feels dramatically or <em>qualitatively</em> better than what our culture lets us experience, or even conceive of</li>
-<p>What we, however, focus on here is the third system—ourselves. The observation that our "values" made us neglect how our choices influence our own condition, including our <em>capability to feel</em> in the long run. And that by 'seeing ourselves in the <em>mirror</em>',  we become liberated from <em>objectifying</em> our own emotional responses—that when we feel something is attractive, or repulsive, it "really is" so. </p>
+<li><em>The way to it is paradoxical</em>—and needs to be illuminated by suitable information</li>
-<blockquote>The way in which we emotionally react to stimuli from the outside will turn out to be <em>the</em> most fertile ground for improvement.</blockquote>
+<li><em>Human quality</em> plays in it an essential role</li>
+</ul>
-<p>Completely ignored!</p>
+<p>While these insights will become clear as we make progress toward <em>holotopia</em>, a few hints will suffice to prime that quest.</p>
-<h3>Remedy</h3>
+<p>The first of the three insights, which we've branded "the best kept secret of human culture", is what made our ancestors flock around "enlightened" beings like the Buddha or the Christ. It can, however, also be easily verified by simply asking the people who have "done the work".</p>
-<p>When we apply the <em>holoscope</em> to this most fertile realm of questions, three insights emerge.</p>
-<p>The first is the <em>convenience paradox</em>—that <em>convenience</em> is a deceptive and useless value, behind which <em>enormous</em> cultural opportunities have remained hidden. The idea of a "couch potato" provides a common-sense illustration—but, we show, the depth and breadth of possibilities for improving our condition through long-term cultivation is beyond what most of us will dare to consider possible.</p>
 <p>
 [[File:LaoTzu-vision.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<p>The second insight is what we propose to call "the best kept secret of human culture": Human <em>wholeness</em> does exist; and it feels, and looks, incomparably better than most of us will dare to imagine. It is this that drove people to the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and other founders of religion. We represent them all here by Lao Tzu, who is often considered the founder of "Taoism". "Tao" literally means "way". The point here is to develop one's way of live, and culture, based on on <em>where the way is leading to</em>—and not (only) based on how attractive a direction may feel at the moment.</p>
+<p>To get a glimpse of the second insight, compare the above typical utterances by Lao Tzu, with what Christ taught in his Sermon on the Mount. Why was Teacher Lao saying that "the weak can defeat the strong"? Why did the Christ demand to "turn the other cheek"?</p>
-<p>The most fascinating insight is reached as soon as we ignore the differences in worldview, what the adherents of different religion "believe in"—and pay attention to the <em>symbolic environment</em> they produce, and the kind of values and way of being they nourish. Compare, for instance, the above Lao Tzu's observations with what Christ told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. </p>
 <p>
 [[File:Huxley-vision.jpeg]]
 </p>
-<p>The third insight is that the <em>transcendence</em> of <em>egotism</em> is a key element of the "way". </p>
+<p>To get a glimpse of the third, we may zoom in on a contemporary story. Coming from a family that gave some of Britain's leading scientists, Aldous Huxley undertook to <em>federate</em> some of the core elements of the new kind of science that we here see emerge. His "Perennial Philosophy" is alone largely sufficient to make a convincing case for the basic insight—that there <em>is</em> a "natural law" governing human wholeness, which we in our culture vastly violate and ignore. On a much more subtle note, the above quotation, from "The Art of Seeing", will suggest that <em>overcoming</em> egotism is necessary even for mastering <em>physical</em> skills!</p>
-<p>Lao Tzu is often pictured as riding a bull, which signifies that he conquered and tamed his ego. We here quote Aldous Huxley, to point out that transcending <em>egotism</em> is so much part of our <em>wholeness</em>, that even <em>physical</em> effort and effortlessness—which we now handle exclusively by developing the technology—is conditioned by it. </p>
-<p>Concrete <em>prototypes</em>: Definition of <em>religion</em> as "reconnection with archetypes". </p>
+<p>We conclude this very brief exploration of our cultural blind spots and emergent opportunities by a handful of <em>keywords</em> and <em>prototypes</em>. As always, the [[design pattern|<em>design patterns</em>]] they embody will illustrate our handling of the larger issue at hand—how the change of the relationship we have with information (as modeled by the <em>holoscope</em>) can illuminate the way to "a great cultural revival" (modeled by the <em>holotopia</em>).</p>
-<p>The book "Liberation" subtitled "Religion beyond Belief" is an ice breaker. It <em>federates</em> "the best kept secret", and creates a <em>dialog</em>. </p>
+<p>We motivated our definition of <em>culture</em> by discussing Zygmunt Bauman's book "Culture as Praxis"—where Bauman surveyed a large number of historical definitions of culture, and reached the conclusion that they are so diverse that they cannot be reconciled with one another. How can we develop culture as <em>praxis</em>—if we don't know what "culture" means? The change of the relationship we have with information, or in other words of <em>epistemology</em>, allowed us to define <em>culture</em> as a <em>way of looking</em> at the real thing or phenomenon—which illuminates its core <em>aspect</em> that tends to be ignored. We defined  <em>culture</em> by de defined <em>culture</em> as "<em>cultivation</em> of <em>wholeness</em>", where the keyword <em>cultivation</em> is defined by analogy with planting and watering a seed. A key point here (intended as a parable) is to observe that no amount of dissecting and studying a seed would suggest that it needs to be planted and watered. And hence that <em>cultivation</em> profoundly depends on taking advantage of the experience of others—regarding how certain actions produce certain effects <em>in the long run</em>. As soon as we apply the same idea to <em>human</em> cultivation—similarly spectacular insights and the opportunities come within reach.</p>
+<p>We motivated our definition of <em>addiction</em> by observing that evolution equipped us with pleasant and unpleasant emotions to guide our choices toward <em>wholeness</em>. But we humans has devised ways to deceive our perception—by creating attractive and pleasurable things that lead us <em>away</em> from <em>wholeness</em>.  We defined <em>addiction</em> as a <em>pattern</em>, and offered it as a conceptual remedy for this anomaly. Since selling addictions has always been lucrative yet destructive, the <em>traditions</em> identified certain activities or <em>things</em> (such as opiates and gambling) as addictions and developed suitable legislation and ethical norms. But with the help of technology, contemporary industries can develop hundreds of <em>new</em> addictions—without us having a way to even recognize them as that. </p>
+<p>We defined <em>religion</em> as "reconnection with the <em>archetype</em>". The <em>archetypes</em> here include "justice", "beauty", "truth", "love" and anything else that may make a person overcome <em>egotism</em> and <em>convenience</em> and serve a "higher" ideal.</p>
-<p>Movement and Qi is a template how to put the <em>language</em> of "movement" (doing something with the body) into the academic repertoire. And how to put the heritage of the world traditions such as yoga and qigong into academic repertoire.</p>
+<p>We developed the "Movement and Qi" educational <em>prototype</em> as a way to add to the conventional academic portfolio a collection of ways to use human <em>body</em> as medium—and work with "human quality" directly.</p>
+<p>The book "Liberation" subtitled "Religion beyond Belief" is an ice breaker. It <em>federates</em> "the best kept secret", and creates a <em>dialog</em>. </p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 689: / Line 795: @@
 <div class="col-md-7">
-<p>The <em>five insights</em> have been chosen to reflect five <em>aspects</em> of the last "great cultural revival", to which we point by bringing up the image of Galilei in hose arrest. Our point is that when those five centrally important aspects of our society's 'drive into the future' are no longer looked at by using the <em>inherited</em> ways of looking at the world ('in the light of a pair of candles') but by a deliberately <em>designed</em> way (represented by the <em>holoscope</em>), or in other words when our minds and eyes are liberated from the habit and the tradition and we allow ourselves to <em>create</em> the way we look at the world—then once again the blind spots and the opportunities for creative action are seen that <em>naturally</em> lead to a deep and comprehensive change.</p>
+<p>The <em>five insights</em> together compose a vision of "a great cultural revival". They complete the analogy between our time and the situation at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, which we've been pointing to by using the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest.</p>
-<p>Hence the <em>five insights</em> together reveal a vast creative frontier, where dramatic improvements can be reached. And which <em>together</em> constitute "a great cultural revival"—each of them being a piece in the large puzzle, a mechanism that unleashes our creative potential on such major scale.</p>
 <h3>A revolution in innovation</h3>
-<p>By bringing a radical improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, through innovation, the Industrial Revolution liberated our ancestors from the toil for survival, and empowered them to devote themselves to more humane pursuits such as developing their "human quality", by developing culture. Or so we were told. The real story may, however, be entirely different. Research has shown that the hunger-gatherers used only a small fraction of their time for hunting and gathering. The <em>power structure</em> insight shows that not only today—but throughout history the improvements in effectiveness and efficiency in human work have been largely wasted by the <em>systems in which we live and work</em></p>
+<p>By bringing a radical improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, through innovation, the Industrial Revolution promised to liberate our ancestors from hardship and toil, so that they may focus on developing culture and "human quality".  The <em>power structure</em>, however, thwarted our aspirations. This issue can be resolved, and progress can be resumed, by learning to "make things whole" on the level of <em>the systems in which we live and work</em>.</p>
-<p>We saw, by illuminating those systems and the way in which they evolve, that this age-old negative trend in our evolution can be countered by innovating differently—through [[systemic innovation|<em>systemic innovation</em>]], or by "making things whole". And how this <em>socio-technical</em> innovation can, finally, liberate us from toil and empower us to engage in cultural revival.</p>
 <h3>A revolution in communication</h3>
-<p>The printing press enabled the Enlightenment by enabling a revolution in literacy, and in communication.  The <em>collective mind</em> insight shows that the new information technology enables a <em>similar</em> revolution—whose effects will not be only a mass production of volumes of information, but most importantly a revolution in the production of <em>meaning</em>. A revolution where information is considered and treated as the lifeblood of human society—and enabled to make all the differences it can and needs to make, in a post-industrial society.</p>
+<p>The printing press enabled the Enlightenment by enabling a revolution in literacy and communication.  The <em>collective mind</em> insight shows that the new information technology can power a <em>similar</em> revolution—whose effect will be a revolution of <em>meaning</em>. The kind of revolution that can make the differences that needs to make, in a post-industrial society.</p>
-<h3>A revolution in vision</h3>
+<h3>A revolution in the relationship we have with information</h3>
-<p>The Enlightenment was a combined revolution; our ancestors were first empowered to use their reason to <em>understand</em> the world; and then to see that the royalties were not divinely ordained, but indeed part of a human-made <em>power structure</em>. The whole revolution, however, began as a relatively minor epistemological innovation in astrophysics. By putting the Sun into the center of the Solar system, a scientific explanation of the movement of the planets became possible. We have seen that a <em>continuation</em> of that revolution is now due, by which all <em>reification</em> is seen as obsolete and a product of <em>power structure</em>; and in particular the <em>reification</em> of our worldview, and of our <em>systems</em>. By liberating the <em>academia</em> from the pitfall of <em>reification</em>, we can both empower ourselves to adapt our <em>systems</em> to the purposes they need to serve <em>and</em> liberate the vast global army of academic researchers from the disciplinary constraints on creativity—and empower them to be creative in ways and on the scale that a "great cultural revival" enables and requires.</p>
+<p>By reviving the academic tradition (which had remained dormant for almost two thousand years), the Enlightenment empowered our ancestors to use reason to comprehend the world, and to evolve faster. The <em>socialized reality</em> insight shows that the evolution of the academic tradition has brought us to a new turning point—which will liberate us from  <em>reifying</em> our inherited <em>systems</em> and worldviews; and to enable our culture to evolve in a similar way and at a similar rate as science and technology have been evolving. This <em>fundamental</em> change will empower us to be creative in ways and on the scale that a "great cultural revival" requires.</p>
 <h3>A revolution in method</h3>
@@ Line 713: / Line 815: @@
 <h3>A revolution in culture</h3>
-<p>The Renaissance <em>was</em> a "great cultural revival"—a liberation and celebration of life, love, and beauty, by changing the values and the lifestyle, and developing the arts. The <em>convenience paradox</em> insight illuminates two <em>dimensions</em> of this most fertile creative domain we've neglected—the time dimension, and the inner one. When this is done, a completely new <em>direction</em> of human pursuits readily emerge as natural—where our goal is the cultivation of inner <em>wholeness</em>, by developing culture.  </p>
+<p>The Renaissance <em>was</em> a "great cultural revival"—a liberation and celebration of life, love, and beauty, by changing the values and the lifestyle, and developing the arts. The <em>convenience paradox</em> insight shows that our culture has once again become a victim of <em>power structure</em>; and that the liberation will lead us to a whole new <em>way</em> of evolving.</p>
-<p>This new revolution perhaps finds its most vivid expression in re-evolution of religion—by which an age-old conflict between science and religion is seen as a conflict between two <em>power structures</em>, which hindered the evolution of <em>both</em> our understanding of the world and our understanding of our selves. And how a completely <em>new</em> phase in this relationship can now begin.</p>
 </div> </div>
@@ Line 721: / Line 821: @@
 <div class="row">
-<div class="col-md-3"><h2>The 6th insight</h2></div>
+<div class="col-md-3"><h2>The sixth insight</h2></div>
 <div class="col-md-7">
+<p>When the <em>five insights</em> are combined together, they readily lead to a more general <em>sixth insight</em>, which is even more germane to the <em>holotopia</em>'s message and spirit. The <em>sixth insight</em> may be roughly formulated as follows:</p>
+<blockquote>To change anything, we need to change the whole thing.</blockquote>
+<p>The reason is the close co-dependence of both the structural problems the <em>five insights</em> reveal, and of their solutions.</p>
+<p>We have seen (while exploring the <em>power structure</em> insight) that we will not be able to resolve the characteristic contemporary issues and resume our cultural and societal evolution, unless we learned to direct our power to innovate by using suitable information and knowledge, instead of the "free competition" and the market. But that requires (as we have seen while exploring the <em>collective mind</em> insight) that we restore the severed tie between information and action—that instead of merely broadcasting information, we learn to <em>federate</em> the insights that can motivate and inform action. This, however (as the <em>socialized reality</em> insight showed) requires that we change the relationship we have with information—from considering it as a mirror image of reality, to considering it a vital element of our core <em>systems</em>, which must be adapted to the purposes it needs to serve within those <em>systems</em>. </p>
+<p>When that is done (the <em>narrow frame</em> insight showed)—the opportunity opens up to <em>create</em> "the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it", to be used both by academic researchers who wish to work in this way, and the general public. And when that is in place (we showed while exploring the <em>convenience paradox</em> insight), the resulting <em>informed</em> way of "pursuing happiness" will lead to completely different values, and direction. Furthermore, the values that result will be exactly those that are needed to empower us to resolve the <em>power structure</em> issue, by self-organizing and co-creating <em>systems</em> that <em>resolve</em> our problems. This closes the circle.</p>
+<p>A <em>strategic</em> insight results:</p>
-<h3>These solutions compose a <em>paradigm</em></h3>
+<blockquote>A large change may be easy; small changes may be difficult or impossible.</blockquote>
-<p>The five issues, and their solutions, are closely co-dependent; the key to resolving them is the relationship we have with information (the <em>epistemology</em> by which the proposed <em>paradigm</em> is defined).  </p>
+<p>But a large and comprehensive change has its own logic, or process, or "leverage points". </p>
-<ul>
+<p>And the most powerful <em>kind of</em> leverage point, [http://kf.wikiwiki.ifi.uio.no/CONVERSATIONS#Donella Donella Meadows pointed out], is "the power to transcend paradigms". It is exactly that power that we are proposing to restore.</p>
-<li>The <em>power structure</em> issue cannot be resolved (we cannot begin "guided evolution of society", as Bela H. Banathy called the new evolutionary course that is emerging) without resolving the <em>collective mind</em> issue (by creating a knowledge-work infrastructure that provides "evolutionary guidance")</li>
-<li>The resolution of the <em>collective mind</em> issue requires that we resolve the <em>socialized reality</em> issue (that instead of <em>reifying</em> our present institutions or systems, and the way in which we look at the world, we consider them as functional elements in a larger whole)</li>
-<li>The resolution of the <em>socialized reality</em> issue follows from <em>intrinsic</em> considerations—from the reported anomalies, and published epistemological insights (Willard Van Orman Quine identified the transition to truth by convention as a sign of maturing that has manifested itself in the evolution of every science)</li>
+<p>We summarize the case for our proposal by a warning reaching us from sociology.</p>
-<li>The resolution of the <em>narrow frame</em> issue, by developing a general-purpose <em>methodology</em>, is made possible by just mentioned <em>epistemological</em> innovation</li>
+<p>
-<li>The resolution of the <em>convenience paradox</em> issue is made possible by <em>federating</em> knowledge from the world traditions, by using the mentioned methodology</li>
+[[File:Beck-frame.jpeg]]
-<li>The <em>power structure</em> issue can only be resolved when we the people find strength to overcome self-serving, narrowly conceived values, and collaborate and self-organize to create radically better <em>systems in which we live and work</em></li>
+</p>
-</ul>
+<p>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>The 'candle headlights' (<em>inheriting</em> the way we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it) is what keeps us in 'iron cage'.</p>
+<blockquote>A <em>created</em> way, modeled by the <em>holoscope</em>, is an academically rigorous way out.</blockquote>
+<p>The <em>holotopia</em> is offered as the vision that results.</p>
+<p>The Holotopia project is conceived as a way to streamline the actualization of that vision.</p>
+<p>When making this proposal, we are not saying anything new; we are indeed only <em>federating</em> the call to action that <em>many</em> have made before us.</p>
+<p>
+[[File:Jantsch-university.jpeg]]
+</p>
+<p>We are now, however, backing their calls to action and ideas by <em>federating</em> them, and showing that they form a consistent and complete <em>academic</em> paradigm.</p>
+</div> </div>
+<b><BIG>This Holotopia project description will be completed by elaborating:</BIG></b>
+<div class="page-header" ><h2>A strategy</h2></div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"></div>
+<div class="col-md-6">
-<p>Hence we have an overarching new insight.</p>
+<blockquote>The Holotopia project is conceived as a co-creative strategy game.</blockquote>
-<blockquote>A comprehensive change can be easy—even when smaller and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible.</blockquote>
+<p>The project is conceived as a space—where we are empowered to use our creativity to "change course", and <em>create</em> a future. This "future", however, begins instantly.</p>
-<p>The global system does maintain a self-destructive <em>homeostasis</em>. It resist the changes that are contrary to its nature.</p>
+<p>We implement a strategy that <em>federates</em> Margaret Mead's specific insights, how to respond to the situation we are in :
+<blockquote>
+"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our whole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."
+</blockquote> </p>
+</div>
-<p>We have seen that, however, <em>the system as a whole</em> is ripe for change.</p>
+ <div class="col-md-3">
+[[File:Mead.jpg]]<br>
+<small>Margaret Mead</small>
+</div> </div>
-<p>And that the key to that change, the "systemic leverage point", is to change the relationship we have with information.</p>
+<div class="page-header" ><h2>Tactical assets</h2></div>
-<p>We have also seen (and called it the <em>socialized reality</em> insight) that this change is now due also for fundamental reasons, because our <em>knowledge of knowledge</em> demands it. And hence that the spontaneous evolution of the academic tradition has brought us to that point.</p>
-<p>This completes the analogy with Galilei's time—which is or main line of argument, in the case for developing <em>knowledge federation</em> as an academic field, and a real-life <em>praxis</em>.</p>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"></div>
+<div class="col-md-7"><p>To the above co-creative space we bring a portfolio of assorted <em>tactical assets</em>. </p>
 </div> </div>
+<div class="page-header" ><h2>A pilot project</h2></div>
+<div class="row">
+<div class="col-md-3"></div>
+<div class="col-md-7"><p>To bring all this down to earth, we describe the pilot project we've developed in art gallery Kunsthall 3.14 in Bergen. </p>
+[[File:KunsthallDialog01.jpg]]
+<br>
+<!-- CCC
 <div class="page-header" ><h2>A strategy</h2></div>
@@ Line 844: / Line 1,004: @@
-<!-- YYY
+<!-- ZZZ
@@ Line 1,251: / Line 1,411: @@
 <p>Concrete <em>prototypes</em> include educational ones, the Movement and Qi course shows how to embed the work with "human quality" in academic scheme of things—by <em>federating</em> the therapy traditions and employing the body (not only books) as the medium.</p>
 <p>The big news is that <em>wholeness exists</em>; and that it involves the value of serving <em>wholeness</em> (and foregoing egocentricity)—which closes the cycles to <em>power structure</em>.
+-------
+<blockquote>Why do we put up with such <em>systems</em>? Why don't we treat them as we treat other human-made things—by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served?</blockquote>
+<p>The reasons are interesting, and in <em>holotopia</em> they'll be a recurring theme. </p>
+<p>One of them we have already seen: We do not <em>see things whole</em>. We don't see <em>systems</em> when we look in conventional ways—as we don't see the mountain on which we are walking.</p>
+<p>A reason why we ignore the possibility of adapting <em>the systems in which we live and work</em> to the roles they have in our society is that they perform for us a <em>different</em> role—they provide a stable structure to our various power battles and turf strifes. Within our <em>system</em>, they provide us "objective" and "fair" criteria for competing for positions; and in the world outside, they give us as a system the "competitive edge".</p>
+<p>This, for instance, is the reason why the media corporations don't <em>combine</em> their resources and give us the awareness we need; they must <em>compete</em> with one another—and use whatever means are the most "cost-effective" for acquiring our attention.</p>
+<p>The most interesting reason—which we will revisit and understand more thoroughly below—is that the <em>power structures</em> have the power to <em>socialize</em> us in ways that suit <em>their</em> interests. This basic idea, of <em>socialization</em>, can however be understood if we think of our
+-------
+ in the opening slides of his "A Call to Action" presentation, which were prepared for a 2007 panel that Google organized to share his vision to the world (but not shown!).</p>
+<p>
+[[File:DE-one.jpeg]]
+</p>
+<p>In the first slide, Engelbart emphasized that  "new thinking" or a "new paradigm" is needed. In the second, he pointed out what this "new thinking" was. </p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>We ride a common economic-political vehicle traveling at an ever-accelerating pace through increasingly complex terrain.</p>
+<p>Our headlights are much too dim and blurry. We have totally inadequate steering and braking controls. </p>
+</blockquote>
+-------
+<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>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>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>
+<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>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>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>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>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>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>
+<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>
+-------
+<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 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 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>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>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>We are incapable of changing our <em>systems</em>, because we have been <em>socialized</em> to accept them as reality.</blockquote>
+<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>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><em>Reification</em> underlies <em>both</em> problems. It is what <em>keeps us</em> in 'iron cage'.</p>
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Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

Revision as of 10:50, 29 August 2020

Contents

HOLOTOPIA

An Actionable Strategy

Imagine...

Our proposal

A proof of concept application

A vision

A principle

A method

Five insights

Scope

Power structure

Scope

Diagnosis

Remedy

Collective mind

Scope

Diagnosis

Remedy

Socialized reality

Scope

Diagnosis

Remedy

Narrow frame

Scope

Diagnosis

Remedy

Convenience paradox

Scope

Diagnosis

Remedy

A great cultural revival

A revolution in innovation

A revolution in communication

A revolution in the relationship we have with information

A revolution in method

A revolution in culture

The sixth insight

A strategy

Tactical assets

A pilot project