Holotopia

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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 the political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking for was to 'hit the brakes'; and when our 'bus' is inspected, it becomes clear that its 'brakes' too are dysfunctional.

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", and led to all those various good things that we now enjoy. 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 by simply checking whether an idea fits in.

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

Einstein-Watch.jpeg

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, did our "reality picture" come about?

Reality, reported scientists and philosophers, is not something we discover; it is 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 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?

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 systems as we treat other human-made things, by adapting them to the purposes that need to be served.

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 ideograms, to put things in proportion and make a point.

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...

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.

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 explaining 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 socialize people in a certain specific way. To create certain "human quality". Notice that we are not making a value judgment, only pointing to a function.

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 try to make this a scientific and political issue.

So how are our culture, and our "human quality" evolving? To see the answer, it is enough to just look around. To an excessive degree, the symbolic environment 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 socialized to be egotistical consumers; to believe in "free competition"—not in "making things whole".

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. And we have abandoned the creation of culture, and of "human quality", to power structure.

To see our second point, that reality construction is a key instrument of the power structure, 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 legitimize a given social order. But this theme is central to holotopia, and here too we can only get a glimpse of a solution by looking at deeper dynamics and causes.

To be able to do that we devised a thread—in which three short stories or vignettes are strung together to compose a larger insight.

The first vignette 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.

Bourdieu-insight.jpeg

The second story is about sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and his "theory of practice"—where Bourdieu provided a conceptual framework to help us understand how socialization 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.

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 system 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.

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 the reality. "Orthodoxy" acknowledges that multiple "realities" coexist, of which only a single one is "right"; doxa ignores even the possibility of alternatives.

Hence we may understand socialized reality 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 socialized reality relatively permanent.

A vignette involving Antonio Damasio as cognitive neuroscientist completes this thread, by helping us see that the "embodied predispositions" that are maintained in this way have a decisive role, contrary to what the 19th century science and indeed the core of our philosophical tradition made us believe. Damasio showed that our socialized embodied predispositions act as a cognitive filter—determining not only our priorities, but also the options 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).

This conclusion suggests itself: Changing the systems in which we live and work—however rational, and necessary, that may be—is for similar reasons inconceivable.

We are incapable of changing our systems, because we have been socialized to accept them as reality.

We may now condense this diagnosis to a single keyword: reification. We are incapable of replacing 'candle headlights' because we have reified them as 'headlights'! "Science" has no systemic purpose. Science is what the scientists are doing. Just as "journalism" is the profession we've inherited from the tradition.

Beck-frame.jpeg

But reification reaches still deeper—to include the very language we use to organize our world. It includes the very concepts by which we frame our "issues". Ulrich 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."

We may now see not only our inherited physical institutions or systems as 'candles'—but also our inherited or socialized concepts, which determine the very way in which we look at the world.

Reification underlies both problems. It is what keeps us in 'iron cage'.


Remedy

We proposed a way out of this entrapment in two steps.


The first step is to recognize the academic situation these developments have brought us to. We point to it by using the metaphor of the mirror.

The Mirror ideogram points to the nature of our contemporary academic situation, in a similar way as the Modernity ideogram points to our general one. The spontaneous evolution of knowledge of knowledge has brought us here, in front of the mirror. Our situation requires that we interrupt being busy with business as usual, and self-reflect. This self-reflection, about the foundations of what we do, as championed by Socrates and so many of the academia's founding fathers, means returning to our tradition's core questions, practices and values.

Seeing ourselves in the mirror means seeing ourselves in the world. It means recognizing that we are not above the world, looking at it objectively. Our role is not what we believed it was! And anyhow, not only our understanding of epistemology has change—but our world too! And hence also our role in it needs to change. The world we see is a world in dire need—for radically new ideas, for new ways to be creative.

And yes—we also have the academic tradition to take care of. It demands that we develop our every step rigorously and conscientiously. It demands that not ad-hoc demands of the situation, but the knowledge of knowledge should be our guide. How can we reconcile those two sets of demands? What should be our next step?

Mirror2.jpg
Mirror ideogram


The second step—and the answer to this question—is unexpected; even seemingly impossible, or magical.

We can go through the mirror—and into a completely new academic and social reality.

Quine–TbC.jpeg

What makes this apparent magic realistically possible is what Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—and we adapted as one of our keywords. In "Truth by Convention" Quine observed:

"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 is a sign of maturing that the sciences exhibited in their evolution—why not use it to update our knowledge work at large?

That is exactly what we've done.

Truth by convention, as we use this keyword, is the kind of truth that is common in mathematics: "Let x be y. Then..." and the argument follows. Obviously, the claim that x "really is" y is unintended, and anyhow meaningless. We have only made a convention—and other people can make their own. Our convention is valid only within the given context—of an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

We used truth by convention to enable the key step—through the mirror. We did that by defining design epistemology as a convention.

The design epistemology turns the core of our proposal (to consider information not as a representation of reality, but as a systemic component in other systems and to adapt it to its core roles) into a convention.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article, where we articulated this proposal, we drafted a parallel between the 'modernization' of knowledge work we are pointing to, and the emergence of modern art, by which the artists were liberated from the demand to depict the reality, by learning and using the techniques of Old Masters—and empowered to develop a variety of styles, by being creative in the very way in which they used their profession. Our point was that the approach we demonstrated, to use truth by convention and define an epistemology, was a general approach, of which our design epistemology was a single instance.

Understandably, philosophy may not be your interest. The reason we decided to develop this theme on this level of detail, even in this very brief summary, was to make the key point—from which the holotopia follows as a realistic vision and strategy. Namely to draw a parallel between our contemporary situation, and the situation at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, which the iconic image of Galilei here represents. We can now begin to see that a new worldview is ready to emerge, within which what we now consider as just "normal", as just "reality"—will be seen in a similar light as we today see the mindset and the social order that kept Galilei in house arrest. Everything is now entirely different than it was back then; the contemporary power structures don't use censorship, trials and house arrest. And yet the basic power relationships, and their cultural and social consequences, are closely similar.

To make the key step forward, 'through the mirror', we used truth by convention. We could turn anything into a convention; we choose, however, to simply codify the core epistemological insights that challenge the status quo, and serve as anomalies—some of which we've mentioned above. In this way, instead of reifying our practices and merely observing what's wrong—we show a way in which such observations can be used to update the way in which we handle information; and to keep it up to date with the progress of knowledge of knowledge.

A vast creative frontier opens up before us on the other side of the mirror, both academic and cultural; and we developed the holoscope and the holotopia as prototypes, to model them and show what might be possible, if we pursue and develop this new course.

In the same way, language too can be liberated from the tradition; and so can our professional and specifically disciplinary-academic pursuits. We conclude here by only mentioning two examples, each of which illustrates both possibilities (both were proposed to corresponding communities of interest, where they proved welcome, and useful).

Our definition of design, as "the alternative to tradition", introduced design and tradition as two alternative ways to wholeness. Here tradition means relying on what we've inherited from the past, and relying on small changes and "the survival of the fittest"; design is the alternative, where we consciously and intentionally "make things whole". The point is that when tradition can no longer be relied on, design must be used. This pair of keywords allows us to understand the Modernity ideogram, and our situation or the "world problematique" in simple terms: We are no longer traditional; and yet we are not yet designing. We are caught up in an unstable way of evolving, where neither of the options work. Our technology is developed by design—and progressed at an accelerated rate; our culture (represented by the headlights) has remained traditional, and fallen behind.

Our definition of implicit information as information that is not making a factual statement, but is implicit in cultural artifacts, mores etc., and of visual literacy (a definition for the International Visual Literacy Association), as "literacy associated with implicit information", opens up a whole realm of possibilities to be developed. While our ethics, legislature and academic production have been focused on factual, explicit information, we have been culturally (and ethically and politically) dominated by the subtle implicit information, which we have not yet learned to decode, or control. The creation of prototypes—the core activity on the other side of the mirror, by which agency is restored to information—opens up a myriad possibilities for combining art and science. As we shall see, in the Holotopia project this will be our core approach.