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

Socialized reality

Scope

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

So who will lead us through the next and most urgent step on our evolutionary agenda—learning how 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 too followed the general trend, and evolved as 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 to say that something is true?" led to rigorous or "academic" standards for pursuing knowledge. The university's core social role, as we, academic people tend to perceive it, is to uphold those standards. By studying at a university, one becomes capable of pursuing knowledge in an academic way in any domain of interest.

And as we also pointed out, by bringing up the image of Galilei in house arrest, this seemingly esoteric or "philosophical" pursuit was what largely enabled the last "great cultural revival". 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.

We began our presentation of knowledge federation by asking "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?"

Diagnosis

Here is why we felt confident in drafting an affirmative answer to this rhetorical question.

Early in the course of our modernization, we made a fundamental error whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently uncovered and reported, but it has not yet been corrected.

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 role of information is to provide us an "objectively true reality picture", so that we may distinguish truth from falsehood simply by seeing what fits in.

The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.

It has turned out that there is simply no way to open the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our models correspond to the real thing!

How, then, is our "reality picture" being created?

"Reality", reported scientists and philosophers, is not something we discover, but something we construct.

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 a function of 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; why they treated them as if they were not completely human?

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 an update. The second will explain what holds us back—why we've been incapable of treating our systems as we treat other human-made things, by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served.