Holotopia

From Knowledge Federation
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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

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else"
Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course 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 inspected, it becomes clear that its 'brakes' too are dysfunctional.

So who will lead us through the next urgent task on evolutionary agenda—empower us to update the systems in which we live and work?

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

Why?

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

As we pointed out in the opening paragraph of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. Our tradition developed from classical philosophy, where the "philosophical" questions such as "How do we know that something is true?" and even "What does it mean 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 any domain.

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?"

In what follows, we offer an affirmative answer to that question.