Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

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<p>In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heisenberg's intellectual "heir", co-authored the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message was "We have to learn to think in a new way". The new way of thinking, conspicuously impregnated by "seeing things whole" and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, was shown to follow from the worldview of new physics, and the environmental and larger social crisis.</p>  
 
<p>In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heisenberg's intellectual "heir", co-authored the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message was "We have to learn to think in a new way". The new way of thinking, conspicuously impregnated by "seeing things whole" and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, was shown to follow from the worldview of new physics, and the environmental and larger social crisis.</p>  
  
<p>The second reason is that even mechanisms, when they are complex, cannot be understood in causal terms.</p>  
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<p>The second reason is that even mechanisms, when they are complex, (or technically even <em>classical</em> nonlinear and dynamic or "complex" systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.</p>  
  
<p>This insight is the <em>main</em> one we needed to acquire from the systems sciences, and from cybernetics in particular.</p>  
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<p>This is yet another core insight that we the people needed to acquire from the systems sciences, and from cybernetics in particular.</p>  
  
 
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<h3>Remedy</h3>  
 
<h3>Remedy</h3>  
  
<p>A useful precedent, and template, is found in the repertoire of the sciences of the artificial—in computer science.</p>  
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<p>The remedy we proposed is to spell out the rules, by defining a <em>general-purpose methodology</em> as a convention; and by turning it into a <em>prototype</em> and developing it continuously—to represent the state of the art of relevant knowledge, and technology.</p>  
<p>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>
 
  
<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>  
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<p>Our <em>prototype</em> is called Polyscopic Modeling <em>methodology</em>, and nicknamed <em>polyscopy</em>. </p>  
  
<p>Imagine the contribution to human knowledge we would make by radically improving this 'toolkit'!</p>  
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<p>This approach allows us to <em>specify</em> what "being informed" means (by claiming it not as a "fact about reality", but as a convention, and part of a practical toolkit). In <em>polyscopy</em>, the intuitive notion, when one may be considered "informed", is made concrete by the technical keyword <em>gestalt</em>; one is informed, if one has a <em>gestalt</em> that is appropriate to one's situation. An <em>appropriate gestalt</em> interprets a situation in a way that points to right action—and you'll easily recognize now that we'll be using this idea all along, by rendering our general situation as the Modernity <em>ideogram</em>, and our academic one as the Mirror <em>ideogram</em>. Suitable techniques for communicating and 'proving' or <em>justifying</em> such claims are offered, most of which are developed by generalizing the standard toolkit of science.</p>  
  
<p>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>  
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<p>Most of the <em>design patterns</em> of this <em>methodology prototype</em> are <em>federated</em>; and we here give a single example of a source, to point in a brief and palpable way to some of the important nuances, and to give due credit.</p>
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<p>A situation with overtones of a crisis, closely similar to the one we now have in our handling of information at large, arose in the early days of computer programming, when the buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which nobody was able to understand and correct.  [https://holoscope.info/2019/02/07/knowledge-federation-dot-org/#InformationHolon The story] is interesting, but here we only highlight the a couple of main points and lessons learned.</p>
  
 
<p>  
 
<p>  
 
[[File:Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg]]
 
[[File:Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg]]
 
</p>  
 
</p>  
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<p>They are drawn from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Old-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard. The first one is that—to understand a complex system—<em>abstraction</em> must be used. We must be able to <em>create</em> concepts on distinct levels of generality, representing also distinct angles of looking (which, you'll recall, we called <em>aspects</em>). But that is exactly the core point of <em>polyscopy</em>, suggested by the methodology's very name.</p>
  
<p>The 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>
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<p>The second point we'd like to highlight is is the <em>accountability</em> for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language including the native "machine language" of the computer will allow the programmers to create <em>any</em> sort of program. The creators of the "programming methodologies", however, took it upon themselves to provide the programmers the kind of programming tools that would not only enable them, but even <em>compel</em> them to write comprehensible, reusable, well-structured code. To see how this reflects upon our theme at hand, our proposal to add systemic self-organization to the <em>academia</em>'s repertoire of capabilities, imagine that an unusually gifted young man has entered the <em>academia</em>; to make the story concrete, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. Young Bourdieu will spend a lifetime using the toolkit the <em>academia</em> has given him. Imagine if what he produces, along with countless other selected creative people, is equivalent to "spaghetti code" in computer programming! Imagine the level of improvement that this is pointing to!</p>  
 
 
  
 
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<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>And we created the <em>information holon</em>!</p>  
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<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>
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<p>The solution for structuring information we provided in <em>polyscopy</em>, called <em>information holon</em>, is closely similar. Information, represented in the Information <em>ideogram</em> as an "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. The circle represents the point of it all (such as "the cup is whole"); the square represents the details, the side views. </p>
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<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>  
 
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<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>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>  
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<p>The <em>prototype</em> <em>polyscopic</em> book manuscript titled "<em>Information</em> Must Be <em>Designed</em>" book manuscript is structured as an <em>information holon</em>. Here the claim made in the title (which is the same we made in the opening of this presentation by talking about the bus with candle headlights) is <em>justified</em> in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it.</p>  
  
<p>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>  
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<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>.
  
 
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<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>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>
 
  
 
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Revision as of 09:38, 11 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.jpg Modernity ideogram


Scope

The question we'll explore here is the one posed by the Modernity ideogram: How do we need to "look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it".

We build part of our case for the holoscope and the holotopia by developing an analogy between the last "great cultural revival", where a fundamental change of the way we look at the world (from traditional/Biblical, to rational/scientific) effortlessly caused nearly everything to change. Notice that to meet that sort of a change, we do not need to convince the political and business leaders, we do not need to occupy Wall Street. It is the prerogative of our, academic occupation to uphold and update and give to our society this most powertful agent of change—the standard of "right" knowledge.


Diagnosis

So how should we look at the world, try to comprehend it and handle it?
Nobody knows!

Of course, countess books and articles have been written that could inform an answer to this most timely question. But no consensus has emerged—or even a consensus about a method by which that could be achieved.

That being the case, we'll begin this diagnostic process by simply sharing what we've been told while we were growing up. Which is roughly as follows.

As members of the homo sapiens species, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to understand the world, and to make rational choices based on such understanding. Give us a correct model of the natural world, and we'll know exactly how to go about satisfying "our needs", which we of course know because we can experience them directly. But the traditions got it all wrong! Being unable to understand how the nature works, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to the ghost to give us what we needed. Science corrected this error. It removed the "ghost", and told us how 'the machine' really works.

Of course no rational person would ever write this sort of a silly idea. But—and this is a key point in this diagnosis—this idea was not written. It has simply emerged—around the middle of the 19th century, when Adam and Moses as cultural heroes were replaced for so many of us by Darwin and Newton. Science originated, and shaped its disciplinary divisions and procedures before that time, while still the tradition and the Church had the prerogative of telling people how to see the world, and what values to uphold.

From a collection of reasons why this popular idea of what constitutes the "scientific worldview" needs to be updated, we here mention only two.

Heisenberg–frame.jpeg

The first reason is that the nature is not a mechanism.

The mechanistic or "classical" worldview of 19th century's science was disproved and disowned by modern science. Even the physical reality cannot be understood as a mechanism, or explained in "classical" or "causal" terms. Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, expected that the largest impact of modern physics would be on popular culture—because the way of looking at the world that it took over from the 19th century's science, which he called the "narrow frame" (and which we adapted as a keyword), would be removed.

In "Physics and Philosophy" Heisenberg described how the destruction of religious and other traditions on which the continuation of culture and "human quality" depended, and the dominance of "instrumental" thinking and values (which Bauman called "adiaphorisation") followed from the assumptions that the modern physics proved were wrong.

In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr, Heisenberg's intellectual "heir", co-authored the Potsdam Manifesto, whose title and message was "We have to learn to think in a new way". The new way of thinking, conspicuously impregnated by "seeing things whole" and seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole, was shown to follow from the worldview of new physics, and the environmental and larger social crisis.

The second reason is that even mechanisms, when they are complex, (or technically even classical nonlinear and dynamic or "complex" systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.

This is yet another core insight that we the people needed to acquire from the systems sciences, and from cybernetics in particular.

MC-Bateson-vision.jpeg

It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There is a scientific reason for that: The "hell" (which you may imagine as the global issues, or as the destination toward which our 'bus' is currently taking us) consisting largely of "side effects" of our best efforts, and "solutions". <p> Hear Mary Catherine Bateson (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, and the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who pioneered both fields) say:

"The problem with Cybernetics is that it is not an academic discipline that belongs in a department. It is an attempt to correct an erroneous way of looking at the world, and at knowledge in general. (...) Universities do not have departments of epistemological therapy!"


Remedy

The remedy we proposed is to spell out the rules, by defining a general-purpose methodology as a convention; and by turning it into a prototype and developing it continuously—to represent the state of the art of relevant knowledge, and technology.

Our prototype is called Polyscopic Modeling methodology, and nicknamed polyscopy.

This approach allows us to specify what "being informed" means (by claiming it not as a "fact about reality", but as a convention, and part of a practical toolkit). In polyscopy, the intuitive notion, when one may be considered "informed", is made concrete by the technical keyword gestalt; one is informed, if one has a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. An appropriate gestalt interprets a situation in a way that points to right action—and you'll easily recognize now that we'll be using this idea all along, by rendering our general situation as the Modernity ideogram, and our academic one as the Mirror ideogram. Suitable techniques for communicating and 'proving' or justifying such claims are offered, most of which are developed by generalizing the standard toolkit of science.

Most of the design patterns of this methodology prototype are federated; and we here give a single example of a source, to point in a brief and palpable way to some of the important nuances, and to give due credit.

A situation with overtones of a crisis, closely similar to the one we now have in our handling of information at large, arose in the early days of computer programming, when the buddying industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which nobody was able to understand and correct. The story is interesting, but here we only highlight the a couple of main points and lessons learned.

Dahl-Vision.-R.jpeg

They are drawn from the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Old-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard. The first one is that—to understand a complex system—abstraction must be used. We must be able to create concepts on distinct levels of generality, representing also distinct angles of looking (which, you'll recall, we called aspects). But that is exactly the core point of polyscopy, suggested by the methodology's very name.

The second point we'd like to highlight is is the accountability for the method. Any sufficiently complete programming language including the native "machine language" of the computer will allow the programmers to create any sort of program. The creators of the "programming methodologies", however, took it upon themselves to provide the programmers the kind of programming tools that would not only enable them, but even compel them to write comprehensible, reusable, well-structured code. To see how this reflects upon our theme at hand, our proposal to add systemic self-organization to the academia's repertoire of capabilities, imagine that an unusually gifted young man has entered the academia; to make the story concrete, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. Young Bourdieu will spend a lifetime using the toolkit the academia has given him. Imagine if what he produces, along with countless other selected creative people, is equivalent to "spaghetti code" in computer programming! Imagine the level of improvement that this is pointing to!


The object oriented methodology provided a template called "object"—which "hides implementation and exports function". What this means is that an object can be "plugged into" more general objects based on the functions it produces—without inspecting the details of its code! (But those details are made available for inspection; and of course also for continuous improvement.)


The solution for structuring information we provided in polyscopy, called information holon, is closely similar. Information, represented in the Information ideogram as an "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. The circle represents the point of it all (such as "the cup is whole"); the square represents the details, the side views.

When the circle is a gestalt, it allows this to be integrated or "exported" as a "fact" into higher-level insights; and it allows various and heterogeneous insights on which it is based to remain 'hidden', but available for inspection, in the square. When the circle is a prototype it allows the multiplicity of insights that comprise the square to have a direct systemic impact, or agency.

Information.jpg
Information ideogram


The prototype polyscopic book manuscript titled "Information Must Be Designed" book manuscript is structured as an information holon. Here the claim made in the title (which is the same we made in the opening of this presentation by talking about the bus with candle headlights) is justified in four chapters of the book—each of which presents a specific angle of looking at it.

It is customary in computer methodology design to propose a programming language that implements the methodology—and to bootstrap the approach by creating a compiler for that language in the language itself. In this book we did something similar. The book's four chapters present four angles of looking at the general issue of information, identify anomalies and propose remedies—which are the design patterns of the proposed methodology. The book then uses the methodology to justify the claim that motivates it—that makes a case for the proposed paradigm, by using the paradigm. </div> </div>