Difference between revisions of "Holotopia"

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Revision as of 12:10, 15 July 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


Our proposal

In a nutshell

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."

Postman.jpg
Neil Postman


In detail

What would information be like if we treated it as we treat other human-made things—by adapting it to the purposes that need to be served?

The substance of our knowledge federation proposal is a complete prototype—by which the proposed handling of information is made concrete, and ready to be implemented in practice.

What consequences will knowledge federation have? How will information be different? How will it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom will it be created? What new information formats will emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How will information technology be adapted? What will public informing be like? And academic communication, and education? The proposed prototype includes detailed answers to those and other related questions.


An application

The situation we are in

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 warning:

"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."

Peccei.jpg
Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that our present crisis 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 "Human Quality", Peccei assessed our contemporary situation as follows:

"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".

Can the proposed 'headlights' help us "find a way to change course"?

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'?

If we used knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'—what difference would that make?

What new "course" would become visible?

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a knowledge federation-based response to Aurelio Peccei's call to action.

A vision

The holotopia is not a utopia

What new 'course' will we see, when we use knowledge federation to 'illuminate the way'?

Since Thomas More coined the term and offered the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. In the view of harsh and sharply contrasting "realities", this concept acquired the negative connotation of an unrealistic fantasy.

As the optimism regarding the humanity's future faded, apocalyptic or "dystopian" future visions became more common. The "protopias" emerged as a compromise, which focus on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It is more positive than what the common utopias—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 it is readily realizable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment. Indeed, the purpose of the Holotopia project, which is being described and proposed on these pages, is to begin to implement this vision in practice—by creating a suitable prototype.

Making things whole

What do we need to do to realize this vision?

From a comprehensive body of insights from which the holotopia emerges as a possible new "course", we have distilled a simple principle or a rule of thumb, which is suggested by the holotopia's very name—to make things whole.

We must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole; and act in ways that make this larger whole more whole.

This direction is what the Modernity ideogram is pointing to: 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 or 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!

Seeing things whole

To make things whole, we must be able to see things whole.

To highlight that the approach to information and knowledge we are proposing affords that very capability, it In the context of the holotopia we often refer to it by its pseudonym holoscope.

The specific characteristics of this approach—the design choices, how they follow from published insights, and why they are necessary to 'illuminate the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation. One of them, however, must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope.jpeg
Holoscope ideogram

If we consider as "true" only that which fits into our conventional "reality picture" or paradigm, then whatever challenges it will be perceived as "controversial". In the holoscope, the co-existence of multiple views, even when they might appear to contradict one another, is axiomatic. Those views are considered as simply ways to see the whole from all sides, so that its condition may be assessed correctly.

And to give unattended to but potentially transformative ideas 'citizenship rights'.

The key novelty in the holoscope is the free and deliberate choice of what we look at and how—which is called scope. Our purpose when creating the holoscope was to adapt the approach to knowledge and various relevant insights that were developed in the sciences, to illuminate the issues that have been left in the dark.

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.

In that context, what we are calling knowledge federation can be understood as a collection of methods and social processes by which this multiplicity and relative hierarchy of views is kept coherent. And of course also in sync with the state of the art in academic disciplines, and the society's needs.

In what follows, we provide only the big picture; we only summarize the general insights that motivate the holotopia vision—and we indicate how they follow from specific insights and results in the more detailed pages or views.

Please bear in mind that we are trying to communicate across paradigms, and must step with care. And that our goal is not to replace the existing "reality picture" by a different one. What we are aiming at is at once more modest and more ambitious—it is to create a social process, in actual practice, by which the way we as people see the world is kept in sync with academic insights, and real-world realities.

What we shall see next is intended to prime that process.