Holotopia

HOLOTOPIA

An Actionable Strategy

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

Our proposal

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."

Neil Postman

What would information and our handling of information be like, if we treated them as we treat other human-made things—if we adapted them to the purposes that need to be served?

By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would information be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted and applied? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

The substance of our proposal is a complete prototype of knowledge federation, where initial answers to relevant questions are proposed, and in part implemented in practice.

Our call to action is to institutionalize and develop knowledge federation as an academic field, and a real-life praxis (informed practice).

Our purpose is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

All elements in our proposal are deliberately left unfinished, rendered as a collection of prototypes. Think of them as composing a 'cardboard model of a city', and a 'construction site'. By sharing them we are not making a case for a specific 'city'—but for 'architecture' as an academic field, and a real-life praxis.

A proof of concept application

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 call to action:

"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."

Aurelio Peccei

This conclusion, that we are in a state of crisis that has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century thinkers. Arne Næss, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei explained his call to action:

"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".

A vision

Holotopia is a vision of a future that becomes accessible when proper 'light' has been 'turned on'.

Since Thomas More coined this term and described the first utopia, a number of visions of an ideal but non-existing social and cultural order of things have been proposed. In view of adverse and contrasting realities, the word "utopia" acquired the negative meaning of an unrealizable fancy.

As the optimism regarding our future waned, apocalyptic or "dystopian" visions became common. The "protopias" were offered as a compromise, where the focus is on smaller but practically realizable improvements.

The holotopia is different in spirit from them all. It ismore attractive than the futures the utopias projected—whose authors either lacked the information to see what was possible, or lived in the times when the resources we have did not exist. And yet the holotopia is readily attainable—because we already have the information and other resources that are needed for its fulfillment.

The holotopia vision is made concrete in terms of five insights, as explained below.

A principle

What do we need to do to "change course" toward holotopia?

The five insights point to a simple principle or rule of thumb—making things whole.

This principle is suggested by holotopia's name. And also by the Modernity ideogram. 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 of 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!

A method

"The arguments posed in the preceding pages", Peccei summarized in One Hundred Pages for the Future, "point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole."

To make things whole—we must see things whole!

To highlight that the knowledge federation methodology described and implemented in the proposed prototype affords that very capability, to see things whole, in the context of the holotopia we refer to it by the pseudonym holoscope.

While the characteristics of the holoscope—the design choices or design patterns, how they follow from published insights and why they are necessary for 'illuminating the way'—will become obvious in the course of this presentation, one of them must be made clear from the start.

Holoscope ideogram

To see things whole—we must look at all sides!

The holoscope distinguishes itself by allowing for multiple ways of looking at a theme or issue, which are called scopes. The scopes and the resulting views have similar meaning and role as projections do in technical drawing.

This modernization of our handling of information—distinguished by purposeful, free and informed creation of the ways in which we look at a theme or issue—has become necessary in our situation, suggests the bus with candle headlights. But it also presents a challenge to the reader—to bear in mind that the resulting views are not "reality pictures", contending for that status with one other and with our conventional ones.

In the holoscope, the legitimacy of multiple views of a theme is axiomatic.

To liberate our worldview from the inherited concepts and methods and allow for deliberate choice of scopes, we used the scientific method as venture point—and modified it by taking recourse to insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy.

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.

A way of looking or scope—which reveals a structural problem, and helps us reach a correct assessment of an object of study or situation—is a new kind of result that is made possible by (the general-purpose science that is modeled by) the holoscope.

We will continue to use the conventional way of speaking and say that something is as stated, that X is Y—although it would be more accurate to say that X can or needs to be perceived (also) as Y. The views we offer are accompanied by an invitation to genuinely try to look at the theme at hand in a certain specific way (to use the offered scopes); and to do that collaboratively, in a dialog.

Five insights

Scope

What is wrong with our present "course"? In what ways does it need to be changed? What benefits will result?

Five Insights ideogram

We apply the holoscope and illuminate five pivotal themes, which determine the "course":

• Innovation—the way we use our growing ability to create, and induce change
• Communication—the social process, enabled by technology, by which information is handled
• Epistemology—the fundamental assumptions we use to create truth and meaning; which determine the relationship we have with information
• Method—the way in which truth and meaning are constructed in everyday life; or the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it
• Values—the way we "pursue happiness"; or choose "course"

In each case, we see a structural defect, which led to perceived problems. We demonstrate practical ways, partly implemented as prototypes, in which those structural defects can be remedied. We see that their removal naturally leads to improvements that reach far beyond the solution to problems.

The holotopia vision results.

In the spirit of the holoscope, we here only summarize the five insights—and provide evidence and details separately.

Power structure

Scope

What might constitute "a way to change course"?

"Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it", observed Peccei. Imagine if some malevolent entity, perhaps an insane dictator, took control over that power!

The power structure insight explains why no dictator is needed.

While the nature of the power structure will become clear as we go along, imagine it, to begin with, as our institutions; or more accurately, as the systems in which we live and work (which we simply call systems).

Notice that systems have an immense power—over us, because we have to adapt to them to be able to live and work; and over our environment, because by organizing us and using us in certain specific ways, they decide what the effects of our work will be.

The power structure determines whether the effects of our efforts will be problems, or solutions.

Diagnosis

How suitable are the systems in which we live and work for their all-important role?

Evidence shows that the power structure wastes a lion's share of our resources. And that it either causes problems, or makes us incapable of solving them.

The root cause of this malady is in the way systems evolve.

Survival of the fittest favors the systems that are predatory, not those that are useful.

This excerpt from Joel Bakan's documentary "The Corporation" (which Bakan as a law professor created to federate an insight he considered essential) explains how the most powerful institution on our planet evolved to be a perfect "externalizing machine" ("externalizing" means maximizing profits by letting someone else bear the costs, notably the people and the environment), just as the shark evolved to be a perfect predator. This scene from Sidney Pollack's 1969 film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" will illustrate how the power structure affects our own condition.

The systems provide an ecology, which in the long run shapes our values and "human quality". They have the power to socialize us in ways that suit their survival interests. "The business of business is business"; if our business is to succeed in competition, we must act in ways that lead to that effect. To the system it makes no difference whether we bend and comply, or get replaced.

A consequence, Zygmunt Bauman diagnosed, is that bad intentions are no longer needed for bad things to happen. Through socialization, the power structure can co-opt our duty and commitment, and even heroism and honor.

Bauman's insight that even the Holocaust was a consequence and a special case, however extreme, of the power structure, calls for careful contemplation: Even the concentration camp employees, Bauman argued, were only "doing their job"—in a system whose character and purpose were beyond their field of vision, and power to change.

While our focus is on the power structures of the past, we are committing—in all innocence, by acting only through the power structures we are part of—a massive crime of a completely new kind.

Our children may not have a livable planet to live on.

Not because someone broke the rules—but because we follow them.

Remedy

The fact that we will not solve our problems unless we develop the capability to update our systems has not remained unnoticed.

The very first step that the The Club of Rome's founders made after its inception, in 1968, was to convene a team of experts, in Bellagio, Italy, to develop a suitable methodology. They gave making things whole on the scale of socio-technical systems the name "systemic innovation"—and we adopted that as one of our keywords.

The work and the conclusions of this team were based on results in the systems sciences. In the year 2000, in "Guided Evolution of Society", systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy surveyed the relevant research, and concluded in a true holotopian tone:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These two are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

In 2010 Knowledge Federation began to self-organize to enable further progress on this frontier.

The method we use is simple: We create a prototype of a system, and a transdisciplinary community and project around it to update it continuously. The insights in participating disciplines can then have real or systemic effects.

Our very first prototype of this kind, the Barcelona Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism in 2011, was of a public informing that identifies systemic causes of perceived problems (reported by people directly, through citizen journalism), and proposes systemic solutions (by involving academic and other experts).

A year later we created The Game-Changing Game as a generic way to change systems—and hence as a "practical way to craft the future"; and based on it The Club of Zagreb, an update of The Club of Rome.

Each of about forty prototypes in our portfolio is a result of applying systemic innovation in a specific domain. Each of them is conceived in terms of design patterns—problem-solution pairs ready to be adapted to other applications and domains.

The Collaborology prototype, in education, will illustrate the advantages of systemic innovation (see also this course flyer).

An education that prepares us only for traditional professions, once in a lifetime, is an obvious obstacle to systemic change. Collaborology implements an education that is in every sense flexible (self-guided, life-long...), and in an emerging area of interest (collaborative knowledge work, as enabled by new technology). By being collaboratively created itself (Collaborology is created and taught by a network of international experts, and offered to learners world-wide), the economies of scale result that dramatically reduce effort. This in addition provides a sustainable business model for developing and disseminating up-to-date knowledge in any domain of interest. By conceiving the course as a design project, where everyone collaborates on co-creating the learning resources, the students get a chance to exercise and demonstrate "human quality". This furthermore gives the students a role in the resulting 'knowledge-work ecosystem' (as 'bacteria', extracting 'nutrients') .

Collective mind

Scope

We have just seen that our key evolutionary task is to make institutions whole.

Where—with what institution or system—should we begin?

The handling of information, or metaphorically our society's 'headlights', suggests itself as the answer for two reasons.

One of them is obvious: If information and not competition is to be our guide, then our information will need to be made suitable for that role.

In his 1948 seminal "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener pointed to the second reason: In social systems, communication—which turns a collection of independent individuals into a coherently functioning entity— is the system. It is the communication system that determines how the system as a whole will behave. Wiener made that point by talking about the colonies of ants and bees. Cybernetics has shown—as its main point, and title theme—that "the tie between information and action" has an all-important role, which determines (Wiener used the technical keyword "homeostasis", but let us here use this more contemporary one) the system's sustainability. The full title of Wiener's book was "Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To be able to correct their behavior and maintain inner and outer balance, to be able to "change course" when the circumstances demand that, to be able to continue living and adapting and evolving—a system must have suitable communication-and-control.

Diagnosis

Presently, our core systems, and our civilization as a whole, do not have that.

The tie between information and action has been severed, Wiener too observed.

Our society's communication-and-control is broken; it needs to be restored.

To make that point, Wiener cited an earlier work, Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think", where Bush pointed to the broken connection between scientific information, and public awareness and policy. Bush urged the scientists to make the task of revising their communication their next highest priority—the World War Two having just been won.

These calls to action remained without effect.

"As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved," observed David Bohm. Wiener too entrusted his insight to the communication whose tie with action had been severed. We have assembled a collection of examples of similarly important academic results that shared a similar fate—to illustrate a general phenomenon we call Wiener's paradox.

As long as the connection between communication and action is broken—the academic results that challenge the present "course" or point to a new one will be ignored.

A researcher may feel disheartened to see so many best ideas of our best minds ignored. What's the use of all the hard work and publishing—when the public ignores even our most basic insights, which are necessary for understanding the relevance of the nuances we are now working on?

This sentiment is, however, transformed to holotopian optimism, as soon we look at the vast creative frontier that is opening up. We are empowered to, we are indeed obliged to reinvent the academic system that determines how we collaborate, and what the effects of our work will be.

And optimism will turn into enthusiasm, when we consider also this ignored fact:

The network-interconnected interactive digital media technology, which is in common use, was created to enable a new paradigm on that frontier.

The 'lightbulb' has already been created—for the purpose of providing our society the vision it needs.

We, however, still use 'candles'.

Vannevar Bush pointed to this new paradigm, which we call collective mind, already in his title, "As We May Think". His point was that "thinking" means making associations or "connecting the dots". And that given our vast volumes of information—technology and processes would have to be devised that enable us to "connect the dots" or think together, as a single mind does. Bush described a prototype system called "memex", based on microfilm as technology.

Douglas Engelbart took Bush's idea in a whole new direction—by observing (in 1951!) that when each of us humans are connected to a personal digital device through an interactive interface, and when those devices are connected into a network—then the overall result is that we are interconnected in the manner in which the cells in a human organism are connected by the organism's nervous system.

All earlier innovations in this area—from the clay tablets to the printing press—required that a physical medium with the message be physically transported.

This new technology allows us to "create, integrate and apply knowledge" concurrently, as cells in the human organism do.

We can develop insights and solutions together.

We can be "collectively intelligent".

Engelbart conceived this new technology to enable us, and our systems, to tackle the "complexity times urgency" of our problems, which he saw as growing at an accelerated rate.

But this, Engelbart observed, requires that we think differently; that we use the technology to make systems whole.

This three minute video clip, which we dubbed "Doug Engelbart's Last Wish", will give us a chance to pause and reflect; see what all this practically means. Think about the prospects of improving our institutional and civilizational collective minds. Imagine "the effects of getting 5% better", Engelbart commented with a smile. Then he put his fingertips on his forehead and looked up: "I've always imagined that the potential was... large..." The improvement that is both necessary and possible is not just stupendously large; it is qualitative—from communication that doesn't work, and systems that don't work, to ones that do.

To Engelbart's dismay, our new "collective nervous system" ended up being used to do no better than make the old processes and systems more efficient. The ones that evolved through the centuries of use of the printing press. The ones that broadcast data, and overwhelm us with information.

Anthony Giddens pointed to the effects of our dazzled and confused collective mind on culture; and on "human quality".

Our sense of meaning having been drowned in an overload of data, in a reality that's become too complex to comprehend—we resort to "ontological security". We find meaning in learning a profession, and performing in it competitively.

Information, and the way we handle it, bind us to power structure.

Remedy

How can we repair the severed tie between communication and action?

How can we change our collective mind—as our situation demands, and our technology enables?

Engelbart left us a simple answer: Bootstrapping.

Writing what needs to be done will not lead to solution (the tie between information and action being broken). Bootstrapping demands that we self-organize, and act, as it may best serve to restore systems to wholeness.

Bootstrapping means that we either create functional systems with the material of our own minds and bodies, or help others do that.

The Knowledge Federation transdiscipline was conceived by an act of bootstrapping, to enable bootstrapping.

What we are calling knowledge federation is an umbrella term for a variety of activities and social processes that together comprise a well-functioning collective mind. Their development and dissemination obviously requires a new body of knowledge, and a new institution.

The critical task, however, is to weave the state of the art knowledge and technology directly into systems.

Paddy Coulter, Mei Lin Fung and David Price speaking at our "An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism" workshop in Barcelona

We use the above triplet of photos ideographically, to highlight that we are doing that.

In 2008, when Knowledge Federation had its inaugural meeting, two closely related initiatives were formed: Program for the Future (a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Doug Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Global Sensemaking (an international community of researchers and developers of collective mind technology and processes). The featured participants of our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where our public informing prototype was created, are Paddy Coulter (the Director of Oxford Global Media and Fellow of Green College Oxford, formerly the Director of Oxford University's Reuter Program in Journalism) Mei Lin Fung (the founder of Program for the Future) and David Price (who co-founded both the Global Sensemaking R & D community and Debategraph—which is now the leading global platform for collective thinking).

Other prototypes contributed other design patterns for restoring the severed tie between information and action. The Tesla and the Nature of Creativity TNC2015 prototype showed how to federate a research result that has general interest, which is written in an academic vernacular (of quantum physics). The first phase of this prototype, where the author collaborated with our communication design team, turned the academic article into a multimedia object, with intuitive, metaphorical diagrams and explanatory interviews with the author. The second phase was a high-profile, live streamed public event, where the result was announced and discussed. The third phase was online collective thinking about the result, on Debategraph.

The Lighthouse 2016 prototype is conceived as a direct remedy for the Wiener's paradox, created for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences. This prototype models a system by which an academic community can federate an answer to a socially relevant question (combine their resources in making it reliable and clear, and communicate it to the public).

The question in this case was whether can rely on "free competition" to guide the evolution and the operation of our systems; or whether the alternative—the information developed in the systems sciences—should be used.

Socialized reality

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

The job of a political leader is to keep 'the bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four years. Changing 'course', by changing the system, is beyond what politicians can do, or even imagine doing.

The COVID-19 pandemic may demand systemic changes now.

Who—what institution or system—will lead us through these and so many other urgent and imposing creative challenges?

Both Erich Jantsch and Doug Engelbart believed "the university" would have to be the answer, and made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them.

There are evidently two ways in which the social role of the university is perceived: The role the university must fulfill (claim the emerging paradigm thinkers) if our civilization is to continue; and the role that we, academic professionals, consider ourselves to be in.

We shall see that the roots of this dichotomy are in our institution's history. And that the key to resolving it is in the historicity of the academia's relationship with information—as Stephan Toulmin pointed out in "Return to Reason", and we summarized and commented in a blog post.

We shall see why changing the relationship we have with information is mandated both on pragmatic and on fundamental grounds.

We shall see why changing the relationship we have with information—which is in academia's hands—is the natural "way to change course".

Diagnosis

We will come to understand the situation the university institution is in as a consequence of three events in this institution's history. The first two will allow us to understand the origins of the academic self-perception; the third to see why this self-perception needs to change.

The first event is the university institution's inception within the antique philosophical tradition, and concretely as Plato's Academy.

John Marenbon described the mindset of the Academy as follows (in "Early Medieval Philosophy"; the boldface emphasis is ours):

Plato is justly regarded as a philosopher (and the earliest one whose works survive in quantity) because his method, for the most part, was to proceed to his conclusions by rational argument based on premises self-evident from observation, experience and thought. For him, it was the mark of a philosopher to move from the particular to the general, from the perceptions of the senses to the abstract knowledge of the mind. Where the ordinary man would be content, for instance, to observe instances of virtue, the philosopher asks himself about the nature of virtue-in-itself, by which all those instances are virtuous. Plato did not develop a single, coherent theory about universals (for example, Virtue, Man, the Good, as opposed to an instance of virtue, a particular man, a particular good thing); but the Ideas, as he called universals, play a fundamental part in most of his thought and, through all his different treatments of them, one tendency remains constant. The Ideas are considered to exist in reality; and the particular things which can be perceived by the senses are held to depend, in some way, on the Ideas for being what they are. One of the reasons why Plato came to this conclusion and attached so much importance to it lies in a preconception which he inherited from his predecessors. Whatever really is, they argued, must be changeless; otherwise it is not something, but is always becoming something else. All the objects which are perceived by the senses can be shown to be capable of change: what, then, really is? Plato could answer confidently that the Ideas were unchanging and unchangeable, and so really were. Consequently, they—and not the world of changing particulars—were the object of true knowledge. The philosopher, by his ascent from the particular to the general, discovers not facts about the objects perceptible to the senses, but a new world of true, changeless being.

The highlights we made in Marenbon's text allow us to point to the first reason for academic self-perception:

The university has its roots in a philosophical tradition whose goal was to pursue true knowledge, conceived as the knowledge of "unchanging and unchangeable reality".

Every rational method must ultimately rely on premises or axioms that are not rationally provable, which are considered "self-evident from observation, experience and thought". The fundamental axiom here was that true knowledge is "the knowledge of reality". The only question then was how that knowledge was to be reached.

The second event determined the way in which this question has been answered.

The second event was that in the course of the Enlightenment science acquired a social role it was not prepared to fulfill.

It was Aristotle, Plato's star student, who applied the Academia's rational method to a variety of themes. The recovery of Aristotle was a milestone in the intellectual history of the Middle Ages; but the Scholastics used his method to argue the truth of the Scripture.

Aristotle's physics was common sense: Objects tend to fall down; heavier objects tend to fall faster. Galilei proved him wrong by throwing stones of varying size from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He devised a mathematical formula, by which the speed of a falling object could be calculated exactly. To the human mind about to become modern, Galilei (and the forefathers of science he here represents) demonstrated the superiority of the scientific way to truth.

We may now interpret Toulmin's above cryptic observations as follows: How could the rational method of Galilei and Newton, which was conceived for exploring questions that "had no day-to-day relevance to human welfare"—assume such an all-important role and become the model and the foundation for pursuing knowledge in general?

As the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest, when science was taking shape, the relationship people had with information was in the custody of the Church—which controlled it firmly! The scientists were allowed to pursue their interests because they "had no day-to-day relevance to human welfare". But the frontier thinkers considered the fundamental axiom to be self-evident; so when the scientists proved that "earlier theological accounts of Nature" were wrong, and offered to replace them by mathematically exact and experimentally demonstrable "natural laws"—it seemed equally self-evident that science was the way to true knowledge.

This allows us to formulate the second reason for academic self-perception:

During the Enlightenment, science assumed the role of our society's trusted way to knowledge.

We seem to take it for granted that the way to true knowledge, which is the knowledge of "unchanging and unchangeable reality", is equally "unchanging and unchangeable"; and that it is constituted by the laboratories and departments of "basic science". By design of the academic system, knowledge can only grow incrementally, by adding more to the already existing "reality picture"; by design, we have no provisions for updating our way to knowledge, when knowledge, technology and society's needs demand that.

The university has no way to transform 'candles' into 'lightbulbs'.

The third event, and the reason why this has to change, is that the fundamental axiom has been disproven and disowned by science itself.

While we federated this fact carefully, to see it, it is sufficient to read Einstein. (In our condensed or high-level manner of speaking, Einstein has the role of the icon of "modern science"; quoting Einstein is a way to say "here is what the modern science has been telling us".)

It is simply impossible, Einstein remarked (while writing about "Evolution of Physics" with Leopold Infeld), to open up the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our ideas and models correspond to the real thing. We cannot even conceive of such comparison! Science is only an "attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought".

In a moment we will propose an altogether different approach to founding truth and meaning—independent of "reality" and "correspondence theory".

We will propose a way to allow the relationship we have with information, and the way we look at the world, to evolve continuously—as knowledge of knowledge evolves. Instead of calcifying the way to knowledge as what science is, we will show how to make it evolve as a function of what science knows.

But before we do that, let us illustrate the depth and the breadth of the gulf that now separates the popular understanding of "language, truth and reality" (to borrow Whorf's timely title, already 80 years old), and what we actually know about those matters.

A vast and profoundly creative foundations frontier is opening up.

Let us visit it, however briefly, and see how profoundly our handling of everyday matters is likely to change, when we attend to due fundamental change.

We condense a spectrum of academic insights to a handful of engaging stories or vignettes; and we combine vignettes into threads—where they enhance one another, and sometimes produce a dramatic overall effect.

The Piaget–Lakoff–Oppenheimer thread will show how profoundly the 20th century scientific insights altered the idea of right knowledge that marked the academia's ascent. The Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread will project "changing the relationship we have with information" as a necessary political act—necessary if we should be free to understand our world, and create our future.

We shall see who, or what, keeps 'Galilei in house arrest' today—without censorship or prison.

As a cognitive psychologist studying "the construction of reality in the child", Jean Piaget observed that children develop their conception of reality by manipulating physical objects. By studying "the metaphors we live by" as a cognitive linguist, George Lakoff concluded that abstract thinking is largely metaphorical—that we use our experiences with relationships between physical objects as templates. By exploring why quantum physics is so difficult to comprehend, Robert Oppenheimer concluded (in "Uncommon Sense") that the small quanta of matter-energy defy common sense by behaving in ways that are different from anything we have in experience.

Scientific truth is not and cannot be confined to what "makes sense", Richard Feynman observed (in "The Character of Physical Law"):

"It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions."

But this turns Plato's conception of true knowledge on its head, doesn't it?

Even more dramatic are the changes in our understanding of power and freedom—that scientific insights now demand.

In "Social Construction of Reality", Berger and Luckmann described the social process by which "reality" is constructed. They pointed to the role that a certain kind of reality construction called "universal theories" (theories about the nature of reality, which determine how truth and meaning are to be created) play in maintaining a given social and political order of things. The Biblical worldview of Galilei's prosecutors—which invested the monarch with some of Almighty's absolute power— is a historical example.

The Odin–Bourdieu–Damasio thread encodes the uniquely interesting social psychology of reality construction.

It offers a clue to a mystery: Why we may "love our children above all else"—and still commit them to a dystopian future?

Since we already offered an outline of this thread, we here only highlight some of the 'dots' that need to be connected.

Through the turf behavior of horses as metaphor, Odin the Horse vignette points to an instinctive drive that we humans also share—to dominate and control; and to expand our 'turf', whatever it may be. Even if we may not want to take part in the human 'turf strife', we still live in the ecology that is created by it, and suffer the consequences.

As an alert witness of Algeria's war for independence, Pierre Bourdieu saw how power morphed in modernity—from the "classical" instruments such as censorship and prison, to the "symbolic" ones, woven in modern economy and culture.

Bourdieu's theory allows us to conceive of our social and cultural "reality" as symbolic 'turf'.

Bourdieu used two keywords—"field" and "game"—to refer to that 'turf'. By calling it a field, he suggested something akin to a magnetic field, which orients our seemingly random or free behavior, without us noticing. By calling it a game, he portrayed it as something that structures or 'gamifies' our social existence—by giving each of us a certain set of 'action capabilities', in accordance with our role. "The boss" has a certain body language and tone of voice; so does "his secretary". Bourdieu used the keyword "habitus" to point to symbolic 'action capabilities'. The "habitus", according to Bourdieu, tends to be transmitted from body to body directly. Everyone kneels down when the king enters the room; and naturally we do too.

Bourdieu's repeated emphasis that a "habitus" is "both structured and structuring" merits careful consideration.

The cultural 'turf' is a structured result of historical 'turf strifes'.

Bourdieu's "field" is the social-psychological aspect of power structure.

Bourdieu's keyword "doxa" (which he adopted from Weber, who adopted it from Aristotle) points to the role that "the reality picture" plays in the symbolic power game. "Doxa" is the experience that our social order of things is as immutable and as real as the physical reality we live in. "Orthodoxy" admits that there are other possibilities, but considers only one of them to be "right"; "doxa" denies even the possibility of alternatives.

The third vignette allows us to understand why the socialized reality picture can have such an uncanny cognitive grip.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, Damasio explained the anatomy and the physiology of the doxic experience. Damasio's is a simple result with profound consequences: When a certain nerve that connects the brain with the body is severed, the patient preserves the capability to reason rationally—and loses the capability to estimate relevance and set priorities. Damasio concluded that while the brain does the thinking, the body determines what we are (capable of) thinking.

In a book titled "Descartes' Error", Damasio explained why the "homo sapiens" self-image that the modernity gave us is profoundly misleading:

We are not the rational decision makers, as the modernity made us believe. It is not our brain but our body, that decides what options we'll prefer, or even rationally consider.

To honor this update to our species-character, we adapted Johan Huizinga's keyword homo ludens ("man the game-player"; or the socialized or pre-consciously 'programmed' human).

We are both the homo sapiens and the homo ludens.

We are cognitively equipped for maintaining two distinct "reality pictures", and two different sets of values—those we uphold rationally; and those we embody.

This gives us an interesting angle of looking at the university—because clearly the academia's social role should be to help us make progress along the homo sapiens evolutionary path.

We now condense the above cognitive and epistemological insights to a single point.

The relationship we have with information is a result of a historical error.

This error has been detected and reported, but not corrected.

Its practical consequences include:

• Stringent limits to creativity. A vast global 'army' of selected, trained and publicly sponsored creative men and women are obliged to confine their work to only observing the world—by looking at it through the lenses of traditional disciplines.
• Severed tie between information and action. The perceived purpose of information being to complete the 'reality puzzle'—every new "piece of information" appears to be just as relevant as any other; and also necessary for completing the 'puzzle'. Enormous amounts of information are produced "disconnected from usefulness"—as Postman diagnosed.
• Reification of institutions. Our "science", "democracy", "public informing" and other institutions have no explicitly stated purposes, against which their implementations could be evaluated; they simply are their implementations. It is for this reason that we still use 'candles as headlights'.
• Destruction of culture. To see it, join us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral: There is awe-inspiring architecture; Michelangelo's Pietà meets the eye, and his frescos are near by. Allegri's Miserere is reaching us from above. And then there is the ritual. This, and a lot more, comprises the human-made 'ecosystem' called "culture", where "human quality" grows. A tradition's "reality picture" is an integral part of that ecosystem, only a means to an end, not an end in itself. When we discredited the ancient myths, we took away the tradition's bearings. 'Cultural species' are now going extinct; but there we don't have 'the temperature and the CO2 measurements', to diagnose the problems and propose policies.
• Culture abandoned to power structure. It is sufficient to to look around: Advertising is everywhere. And explicit advertising is only a tip of an iceberg. Variuos kinds of "symbolic power" are being used to socialize us as unaware consumers or willing voters; the story of Edward Bernays (Freud's American nephew who became "the pioneer of modern public relations and propaganda") is emblematic.

The following conclusion suggests itself:

The Enlightenment did not liberate us from power-related reality construction.

Our socialization only changed hands—from the kings and the clergy, to the corporations and the media.

Remedy

The Mirror ideogram characterizes the academic situation we are in, and points to the way in which that situation needs to be handled.

Twenty-five centuries of evolution of our tradition have brought us here, in front of this metaphorical mirror. Our situation demands that we restore the original academic ethos, and engage in a self-reflective dialog.

A purpose of this dialog is to rid ourselves of socialized and inflated "knowing". But instead of appealing only to common sense and logic, as Socrates did with his contemporaries at the point of Academia's inception—we now have the epistemological insights of the 20th century science and philosophy to work with. The taste bits we have just seen may already show why such a dialog will be a game changer.

Mirror ideogram

An informed self-reflective dialog will thoroughly change our self-perception.

When we see ourselves in the mirror, we see ourselves in the world. The mirror symbolizes self-awareness; it points to the need to put ourselves into the picture. We are not hovering above the world, and looking at it "objectively". We are in the world—and have an active part in it.

The world we see ourselves in, when we look at the mirror, is a world in dire need—for the kind of integrity, creativity and daring that our academic forefathers manifested, and gave our tradition the high esteem that we now enjoy. We see that now our tradition has a pivotal, vitally important role in that world.

The mirror symbolizes the downfall of reification, and the ascent of accountability.

But its main role is to point to an unexpected way in which the evolution of the academic tradition can and needs to continue. There is no way around (the epistemological insights represented by) the mirror. The academia's evolution appears to have come to a standstill. But there is a natural way out of this evolutionary entanglement—which may at first glance seem incredible, even 'magical':

We can step right through the mirror—and guide our society accordingly!

On the other side of the mirror, a whole new academic and cultural order of things is waiting for us to develop. It is the academia's historical privilege to liberate and guide the oppressed—which are all of us; both "the 99%" and "the 1%".

The holoscope and the holotopia model the academic and the social-and-cultural order of things on the other side of the mirror.

What makes this key step, through the mirror, technically possible is what Villard Van Orman Quine called "truth by convention"—and we adapted as one of our keywords.

Quine opened "Truth by Convention" by observing:

"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 has been the way in which the sciences improve their logical foundations—why not use it to update the logical foundations of knowledge work at large?

Truth by convention is common in mathematics: "Let X be Y. Then..." and the argument follows. Insisting that X "really is" Y is obviously meaningless. A convention is valid within a given context—which may be an article, or a theory, or a methodology.

Truth by convention allows us to build a completely new foundation for truth and meaning—by defining a methodology.

Our methodology prototype, of which the holoscope is an extension, is formally called Polyscopic Modeling and nicknamed polyscopy.

The epistemology of polyscopy, which is defined by convention, is called design epistemology. We defined design epistemology by rendering the core of our proposal (to change the relationship we have with information) as a convention.

In the "Design Epistemology" research article (published in the special issue of the Information Journal titled "Information: Its Different Modes and Its Relation to Meaning", edited by Robert K. Logan; see this blog highlight with a link to the article) where we articulated this proposal, we made it clear that the design epistemology is only one of the many ways to implement the proposed methodological approach to information and knowledge. We drafted a parallel between the modernization of science that can result in this way, and the advent of modern art; by defining a methodology by convention, we can do in the sciences as the artists did, when they liberated themselves from the demand to mirror reality, by emulating the technique of Old Masters.

As the founders of science did, and as contemporary artists do—on the other side of the mirror we can create the ways in which we practice our profession.

The advantages of the methodological approach to truth and meaning include:

• Real academic freedom: When we no longer reify the worldview and the methods of our disciplines, we become empowered to be creative in entirely new ways. But to get there, we must face an interesting technical obstacle: Whatever we say within the traditional-academic and cultural order of things, even when that is "we are constructing reality"—by default we are saying how the things "really are", out there in "reality". Truth by convention allows us to liberate ourselves from reification completely, with no residue left.
• Real academic rigor. Truth by convention is the natural antidote to "relativism", which the 20th century epistemological insights have led us to ("if even science is constructing reality—what makes you believe that your constructed reality is any better than mine?"). Truth by convention is a practical way to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge. If we imagine the methodological approach to knowledge as 'lever' that can empower us to 'move the world' forward—then truth by convention is the requisite 'Archimedean point'.
• Real accountability. When we reflect in front of the mirror, we learn to disassociate information from "reality", and to see it as the core element of power. A written methodology is to work with information as a constitution is to social organization.
• The capability for continuous self-renewal. A methodology is a prototype. And as all prototypes do, a methodology evolves continuously—by federating relevant knowledge.

The polyscopy definition comprises eight aphorismic conventions called postulates. By applying truth by convention, each of them is given an interpretation.

A brief vignette, explaining how this all started, will enable us to contextualize the methodological approach in contemporary-academic order of things, and give it a reality touch.

In 1995, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Brussels Free University invited scientists and artists to "an interdisciplinary reflection on science, society, art and human action", called "Einstein Meets Magritte".

At the section "Worldviews and the Problem of Synthesis" we showed a variant of the above slide, featuring a fragment of Einstein's "epistemological credo" and Magritte's "The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe) side by side—and commented that the 'meeting point' that Einstein and Magritte shared with so many contemporary thinkers was the insight that we must distinguish between things in reality and our representations. We then explained how the methodological approach, combined with that insight, makes it possible to resolve "the problem of synthesis"; or metaphorically—to 'complete the Tower of Babel'.

The first two postulates of polyscopy definition render Einstein's "epistemological credo" as a convention; here is how Einstein defined it, in "Autobiographical Notes":

I shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my epistemological credo. I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books. (…) The system of concepts is a creation of man, together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual system. (…) All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for this inquiry in the first place.

The first postulate of polyscopy defines information:

Information is recorded experience.

According to this convention, the substance of information is not reality but human experience.

The first postulate enables extraction of meaning from cultural artifacts. The differences of language and worldview are bridged by reducing them to experience as 'common denominator'. Even a common object such as a chair can be considered as information—because it records experience about sitting and chair making. Objects, customs, myth... become information—and we consider it our duty to extract, communicate and and preserve whatever might be of relevance.

The first postulate enables also creation of artifacts. It empowers us to use or create other ways to record, communicate and put to use information, beyond traditional books and articles. In knowledge federation, as we have seen, the prototype, more than the printed text, tends to be the medium of choice.

The second postulate defines the way in which polyscopy handles truth and meaning.

The scope determines the view.

According to this convention, reality (or whatever is behind experience) is not assumed to have an a priori structure, which can be "discovered". Rather, like the ink blot in the Rorschach test, it is something to which we freely ascribe meaning.

The second postulate enables the creation of meaning on all levels of generality. We create scopes and views to look and see in new ways. And to synthesize the information from disparate artifacts, which the first postulate allows us to extract.

The second postulate makes distinct ways to attribute meaning to things both possible and legitimate. With Piaget, we confirm that "the mind organizes the world by organizing itself". The "aha" experience, which results when we have understood an object of study in a certain way (for instance when we have scientifically understood its "causes"), does not imply that we have seen "the reality".

The question must be asked: What will hinder us from amassing disparate interpretations of experience, and drowning in information ever deeper?

The answer is that the perceived consistency or coherence is only one part of the justification of a given view. In addition, we must either show that the view is relevant, because it leads to a new insight ('the cup is cracked'); or that the scope used is a necessary way to look at the theme (if we should be able to assert that 'the cup is whole').

Polyscopy definition provides four criteria—to replace and supplement the traditional factual truth ("correspondence with reality"). One of them is the relevance criterion—which postulates that less relevant information should not hide or obscure the more relevant one. If our house is on fire, then the news about the sale in a fishing gear store is not relevant.

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The second postulate demands furthermore an attitude in communication, which we point to by the keyword dialog. We engage in a dialog when we genuinely do our best to let go of our habitual ways of looking, and stay open to new ways to see things.

Notice how different the resulting idea of "truth", and way to "truth", are from the naive or traditional ones. And from the ones that led to the inception of Academia.

We do not consider it an axiom that right knowledge is the knowledge of "unchanging and unchangeable reality"; on the contrary! Right knowledge is not a fixed "reality picture", to which we keep adding details. Our "realities" never cease to change and evolve. And the ways in which we pursue knowledge don't either.

The "new purpose" that (Jantsch claimed) the university would have to adopt, "of increasing the capability of society for continuous self-renewal", follows also from intrinsic or fundamental considerations.

Both knowledge, and the way to knowledge, evolve by federating knowledge.

Instead of relying on our culture's, or "tribe's", "ontological commitments", and eliminating whatever fails to fit in—we undertake to find a way of looking by which an implausible "reality" may make sense—as it did to the person who proposed it; or to the culture that upheld it.

Let us apply this principle to Plato.

Let us examine in what way he might have been right, when claiming that "Ideas", and not the experiential facts and details that constitute our reality, should be considered as right knowledge.

But we are indeed in the midst of seeing that! The five insights are nothing but—ideas! They are general views, principles, rules of thumb. And isn't the fact that we are—in spite of the overabundance of factual knowledge—ignoring and violating such basic principles, amply demonstrating that Plato was right!

We may put also culture, and "human quality", on this cognitive map.

A moment ago, when we used the cathedral as an example of a traditional 'ecosystem', where "human quality" grows, we were well aware that we violated some of our academic "tribe's" ontological commitments. Wasn't the Church that very power structure that held Galilei in house arrest—and inhibited progress?

The point is that both views are correct. And both are necessary for understanding the cultural situation we are in; and what we need to do.

Culture, and any of our systems, is a result of two interacting "fields": of power structure; and of what we call culture—which includes whatever supports our ascent to wholeness.

Any of our systems could be used as illustration. Consider the martial art tradition: No sooner had a man acquired enough "human quality" to transcend his self-interest and be a hero—than we put a sword into his hand and sent him to kill our "enemies" for us. The Japanese samurai, for instance, polished "human quality" to quite an extreme degree. How was it used? The daimyos used it to wage perpetual wars with one another; the peasants, who paid the costs, were treated as lesser humans or worse.

Acknowledging that we are living in socialized reality, we undertake to handle knowledge in ways that liberate us.

Isn't that what the academic tradition has been about since its inception?

And yet a whole new development has become possible:

We can liberate the culture from the power structure!

If we imagine Bánáthy's "conscious evolution" or "guided evolution of society" as 'culture construction', then knowledge federation may be understood as 'architecture'. The key to liberation is to extend knowledge federation, or 'architecture', to include the construction of the 'foundations' as well.

And if we use the simile of constitutional democracy to characterize this cultural revolution—then we'll observe that today even a most hated criminal is given the right to "fair trial".

We must extend that principle to ideas.

Like a dutiful attorney, knowledge federation does its best to support every idea or cultural artifact, however implausible and foreign to our zeitgeist, with a solid case.

So let us right away walk the talk, and see what will transpire if we apply that principle to Socrates' and Galilei's prosecutors—the academia's archenemy.

Both Socrates and Galilei were tried for "impiety", which is a certain kind of arrogance. And indeed, as we have seen, the reliance on reason, which the modernity gave us, did have that quality. Where it worked well—notably for developing science and technology—the result was astounding progress. Where it didn't—notably for developing culture, and "human quality"—the result was a decay.

Instrumental, or "adiaphorized" values resulted.

One might say that this was the error we are now expiating.

We bootstrap a remedial trend by developing prototypes.

The very first application, which was submitted to "Worldviews and the Problem of Synthesis" as the companion article to the mentioned one, showed how relevant experiences can be combined across historical periods and cultural traditions, to inform and thoroughly redirect our "pursuit of happiness"—and in that way redeem our cultural heritage. We will come back to it while discussing the fifth insight, the convenience paradox.

A book manuscript draft with title "What's Going on" and subtitle "A Cultural Renewal" answers the question asked in its title in an entirely uncommon way:

Instead of the usual variety of spectacular events that took place on a specific day, the book describes a single, slow development, "a cultural revival", taking place in our time—which provides the context necessary for comprehending specific events, and orienting action.

Cultural Renewal ideogram

As the Cultural Revival ideogram suggests—our visible problems, like cracks in an apartment building, are consequences of a fault in our culture's foundation—which needs to taken care of before normal living and further construction can be resumed.

"Experience", "communication and "reasoning" are singled out as three ways to found information; art, tradition and science are defined as the corresponding aspects of culture. The foundation problem—which is shown to arise in all walks of life—is that instead of consciously founding information (as an architect would, when constructing a building), we tend to 'build' our beliefs on whatever 'terrain' we happen to find them. The prolific use of convenience is an example we shall come back to in a moment. And there are numerous others.

A cultural revival is to culture as architecture is to house construction.

Two concrete examples—the definitions of design and of visual literacy—will illustrate some of the advantages of using truth by convention to found academic work. Each of them is an example of substituting truth by convention for reification in an already existing academic field—and thereby giving the existing praxis an explicitly stated and up-to-date direction and purpose. The fact that those proposals were welcomed by the target communities suggests that this line of work may not need a new paradigm to become practical.

The example of design illustrates how the approach we are proposing can be used to provide both a rigorous academic foundation and a timely new direction to an academic field (this chronological summary provides links for in-depth exploration).

The definition of "design" gives us another way to understand our contemporary situation, and our proposal.

We defined design as "the alternative to tradition", where design and tradition are (by convention) two alternative ways to wholeness. Tradition relies on spontaneous and incremental Darwinian-style evolution. Change is resisted; small changes are tested and assimilated through generations of use. We practice design when we consider ourselves accountable for wholeness.

Design must be used when tradition cannot be relied on.

Design must be in place when the rate change is too fast; or when the traditional order of things is no longer respected and maintained.

The situation we are in, which we pointed to by the bus with candle headlights metaphor, can now be understood as a result of a transition: We are no longer traditional; and we are not yet designing. Our call to action can be understood as the call to complete modernization—and become able to evolve in a new way.

Reification can now be understood as the foundation that suits tradition; truth by convention as the one that suits design.

The second example: Our definition of implicit information, and of visual literacy as "literacy associated with implicit information, for the International Visual Literacy Association, was in spirit similar—but its point was different (see this summary).

We showed the above ideogram to highlight that again and again, on our contemporary-cultural scene, two kinds of information face each other in duel: The explicit information, represented by the factual warning in the black-and-white rectangle; and the implicit information, represented by the colorful and "cool" rest. The implicit information wins "hands down"—or else this would not be a cigarette advertising. The larger point here, of course, is that while legislation, ethical sensibilities and "official" culture tend to be focused on explicit information, our culture tends to be dominated and in effect created by counterculture—through implicit means.

We need visual literacy to be able to

• understand our heritage
• understand how subtle messages affect us
• create implicit information—and redeem our culture from power structure

Narrow frame

Scope

We have just seen that the academic tradition—instituted as the modern university—finds itself in a much larger and more central social role than it was originally conceived for. We look up to the academia, and not to the Church and the tradition, for answers to the pivotal question:

How should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?

That role, and that question, carry an immense power!

It was by providing a completely new answer to that question, that the last "great cultural revival" came about.

Diagnosis

So how should we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it?

No one knows!

Of course, countess books and articles have been written about this theme since antiquity. But in spite of that—or should we say because of that—no consensus has been reached.

Since nobody felt accountable for supplying it, the way we the people look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it, shaped itself spontaneously—from odds and ends of science as they appeared to the public around the middle of the 19th century, when Darwin and Newton as cultural heroes were replacing Adam and Moses. What is today popularly considered as the "scientific worldview" took shape then—and remained largely unchanged.

As members of the homo sapiens species, this worldview would make us believe, we have the evolutionary privilege to be able to comprehend the world in causal terms, and make rational choices. Give us a correct model of the world, and we'll know exactly how to satisfy our needs (which we also know, because we can experience them directly). But the traditional cultures got it all wrong: Having been unable to explain the natural phenomena, they put a "ghost in the machine", and made us pray to him to give us what we needed. Science corrected that error—and now we can satisfy our needs by manipulating the mechanisms of nature directly, with the help of technology.

It is this causal or "scientific" understanding of the world that made us modern. Isn't that how we understood that women cannot fly on broomsticks?

While it is undoubtedly correct that the way we look at the world enabled us to wash away a wonderful amount of prejudice—it is also true that we have thrown out the 'baby' (culture) with the bath water.

From our collection of reasons why this way of looking at the world is obsolete and needs to be changed, we here mention only two.

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

The mechanistic way of looking at the world that Newton and his contemporaries developed in physics, which around the 19th century shaped the worldview of the masses, was later disproved and disowned by modern science. Research in physics showed that even the physical phenomena exhibit the kinds of interdependence that cannot be understood in "classical" or causal terms.

In "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg, one of the progenitors of this research, described how "the narrow and rigid" way of looking at the world that our ancestors adapted from the 19th century science damaged culture—and in particular its parts on on which the "human quality" depended, such as ethics and religion. And how as a result the "instrumental" or (as Bauman called them) "adiaphorized" thinking and values became prominent. As we have seen, it is those values that bind us together into wasteful and destructive power structures.

Hear Heisenberg say that he expected that in the long run the philosophical and cultural consequences of atomic physics—the change of how we see everyday problems, and of culture—would be more important than the technical ones.

Heisenberg believed that the most valuable gift of modern physics to humanity would not be nuclear energy or semiconductor technology—but a cultural change, which would result from the dissolution of the rigid frame.

The theme we are touching upon is more than the relationship we have with information; what we are talking about determines the relationship we have with the world, and with each other. A suitable context for understanding its broader import is what Erich Jantsch called the "evolutionary paradigm". Jantsch explained the evolutionary paradigm via the metaphor of a boat in a river, representing a system (which may at the limit be the natural world, or our civilization). When we use the classical scientific paradigm, we position ourselves above the boat, and aim to look at it "objectively". The classical systems paradigm would position us on the boat, and we would seek ways to steer the boat effectively and safely. But when we use the evolutionary paradigm, we perceive ourselves as—water. We are evolution.

The narrow frame determines the way we are as 'water'—and hence our evolutionary "course", and our future.

In 2005, Hans-Peter Dürr (considered in Germany as Heisenberg's scientific "heir") co-wrote the Potsdam Manifesto, whose subtitle and message read "We need to learn to think in a new way". The reasons offered include scientific epistemological insights, and the global condition. The proposed new thinking is closely similar to the one that defines holotopia:

"The materialistic-mechanistic worldview of classical physics, with its rigid ideas and reductive way of thinking, became the supposedly scientifically legitimated ideology for vast areas of scientific and political-strategic thinking. (...) We need to reach a fundamentally new way of thinking and a more comprehensive under­standing of our Wirklichkeit ["reality", or what we consider as "true"], in which we, too, see ourselves as a thread in the fabric of life, without sacrificing anything of our special human qualities. This makes it possible to recognize hu­manity in fundamental commonality with the rest of nature (...)"

The second reason is that even complex mechanisms ("classical" nonlinear dynamic systems) cannot be understood in causal terms.

It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Research in cybernetics explained this scientifically: The "hell" (which you may imagine as global issues, or the 'destination' toward which the 'bus' we are riding in is reportedly headed) tends to be a "side effect" of our best efforts and "solutions", reaching us through "nonlinearities" and "feedback loops" in the natural and social complex systems we are part of.

Hear Mary Catherine Bateson (cultural anthropologist and cybernetician, 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

Truth by convention allows us to explicitly define and academically develop new ways to look at the world.

We called the result a methodology, and our prototype the Polyscopic Modeling methodology or polyscopy.

Polyscopy is a general-purpose methodology; it provides methods for creating insights about any chosen theme—on any level of generality.

Since the main purpose of the Polyscopic Modeling prototype is to point to the advantages of the methodological approach to general knowledge compared to both the narrow frame and the disciplinary approach, we here outline several of its design patterns.

• Polyscopy is a general-purpose methodology. As Abraham Maslow observed, to a person with a hammer in his hand everything looks like a nail. A scientific discipline is a 'hammer'. By virtue of being general-purpose, polyscopy allows for turning the traditional-academic approach to knowledge and to the world inside-out: Instead of having a fixed set of concepts and a method, and applying them where they can be applied (and thus sacrificing purpose to "objectivity")—we provide completely flexible concepts and methods, to be applied wherever reliable information is needed (while continuing to improve the methods). Polyscopy demands that we choose themes and ways of looking according to relevance; and that we create the corresponding information as well as we can. According to sociologists, we live in a post-traditional culture (where we no longer follow in the footsteps of our ancestors), in reflexive modernity (where we make lifestyle and other core choices rationally, by reflecting about them) and in risk society (impregnated by awareness of existential risks, which we don't know how to handle). Our situation demands that we create reliable information about life's basic issues. Reliability, and rigor, here are not in the process, but in (as Erich Jantsch called it) "process of process"—i.e. in the way in which the methods and processes evolve.
• Polyscopy is a prototype; it is explicitly defined by a collection of principles that are defined by convention. Hence it provides explicit guidelines for creating and using information. Those guidelines are themselves federated—and hence subject to change, when the society's needs or the knowledge of knowledge demand that. The formulation of a methodology gives us a way to spell out the assumptions and the rules—and provide the much-needed scientifically-based criteria and methods by which information is handled in our society.
• The method of polyscopy too are federated—by distilling and combining methodological insights in relevant traditions.

The methodological approach allows us to extend the project science to encompass all themes that are of interest—and give priority to the most urgent or vital ones.

A methodology is in essence a toolkit; anything that does the job would do. We, however, defined polyscopy by turning state of the art epistemological and methodological insights into conventions.

By doing hat, we showed how the severed evolutionary tie—between fundamental and methodological insights, and the way we the people look at the world—can be restored.

The methodology definition allows us to state explicitly the criteria that orient everyday handling of information. We used this approach to define, for instance, what being "informed" means. We modeled this intuitive notion with the keyword gestalt. To be "informed", one needs to have a gestalt that is appropriate to one's situation. "Our house is on fire" is a canonical example. The knowledge of a gestalt is profoundly different from only knowing the data (such as the room temperatures and the CO2 levels.). To have an appropriate gestalt means to be moved to do the action that the situation at hand is calling for.

Are we misinformed—in spite of all the information and information technology we own?

Could we be living in a misapprehended "reality"—which obscures from us the true nature of our situation, and the way we need to act?

"One cannot not communicate", reads one of Paul Watzlawick's axioms of communication. Even when everything in a media report is factually correct, the gestalt it conveys implicitly can entirely miss the mark—because we are told what Donald Trump has said; and not Aurelio Peccei.

Polyscopy offers a collection of techniques for 'proving' or justifying, and also communicating, the gestalts and other general or high-level insights and claims. Those techniques are, of course, also federated:

• Patterns, defined as "abstract relationships", are federated from science and mathematics; they have a similar role as mathematical functions do in traditional sciences; by being generally applicable and defined by convention, they no longer constitute a narrow frame
• Ideograms allow us to adapt the techniques from the arts, advertising and communication design, and give expressive power to gestalts, patterns and other insights
• Vignettes implement the basic technique from media informing, where an insight or issue is made accessible by telling illustrative and "sticky" real-life people and situation stories
• Threads implement Vannevar Bush's technical idea of "trails", and provide a way to combine specific insights into higher-level units of meaning

In the manner of a fractal, the following vignette will further explain why we need to federate the we look at the world, to be able to comprehend and handle it—both in the academia and in general; and illustrate the benefits that will result.

A situation with overtones of a crisis arose in the early days of computer programming. The buddying computer industry undertook ambitious software projects—which resulted in thousands of lines of "spaghetti code", which no-one could understand and correct.

The solution was found in creating "computer programming methodologies", of which the "object oriented methodology", developed in the 1960s by Ole-Johan Dahl and Krysten Nygaard, is a prime example. The longer story is interesting but we already shared it, so here we only highlight its main point, and offer a conclusion.

Any sufficiently complete programming language will allow the programmers to create any application program. The creators of the object oriented methodology, however, made themselves accountable for providing the programmers the conceptual and programming tools that would enable them, or even compel them, to write comprehensible, reusable and well-structured code.

When a team of programmers can no longer understand the program they have created, their problem is easily detected—because the program will not compile or run on the computer. But when a human generation can no longer understand the information they have created, or the world this information is supposed to explain—isn't that exactly the situation that The Club of Rome and Aurelio Peccei have diagnosed?

We may conclude from this parallel, and from the socialized reality insight:

The academia too must consider itself accountable for the tools and processes it gives to its members; and to our society at large.

The structuring template the creators of the object oriented methodology conceived and gave to the programmers is called "object". The core purpose of an "object" is to "encapsulate" or "hide" implementation, and provide or "export" function. "Object" is a piece of code that interfaces with the rest of the program through a collection of functions it provides. A printer may provide the function "print"; a scanner the function "scan"—and only those functions are visible in the "higher-level" code. The code by which those functions are implemented is made available separately.

The solution for information structuring we proposed within polyscopy is called information holon (we adapted the keyword "holon" from Arthur Koestler, who used it as a name for something that is both a whole, and a part in a larger whole). An information holon is closely similar to the "object" in object oriented methodology. The information, represented by the "i", is depicted as a circle on top of a square. This suggests the structuring principle, where the square represents a multiplicity of ways of looking, and contributing data and insights, and the circle represents the point of it all (such as 'the cup is broken'). As the case is with the "object", the information holon "encapsulates" the data within the square, and makes only the function available to the rest of the world as the circle.

Information ideogram

When the circle is a general insight or a gestalt, the details that comprise the square are given the power to influence our awareness of issues, and the way in which we handle them. When the circle is a prototype, the multiplicity of insights that comprise the square are given direct systemic impact, and hence agency.

The information holon allows us to implement also the structuring principle, which the creators of the object oriented methodology conceived as the solution to their challenge.

Dahl's point, that "precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time", must be federated and applied in our work with knowledge at large.

This means that we must be able to create small, manageable snapshots of "reality" (or whatever may be its part or issue we are considering), on any desired level of detail or generality; and that we must devise ways of organizing and inter-relating such views to compose a coherently structured whole.

We adapted or federated Dahl's insight by declaring a collection of principles that define polyscopy. We point to them by the metaphor of the mountain—and visually by the triangle in the Information ideogram.

To understand them, imagine taking a mountain walk: We may look at the valley down below, and see lakes, forests and villages; or at the trees that surround us; or zoom in on a flower and inspect its details. In each case, what we see is a simple and coherent view ("coherent" because it represents a single level of detail). It is in the nature of our perception that we are always given a coherent view—along with the awareness of the position our view occupies relative to other views, and to the world at large. The aim of polyscopy is to preserve that basic quality of our perception, which enables us to make sense of our views—by comprehending each of them and by contextualizing them correctly—also in the work with human-made and abstract information.

It is clear that this way of organizing and maintaining knowledge requires on the one side a new collection of social processes, by which the high-level views or circles are kept consistent with the corresponding squares, and with each other. And on the other side a general-purpose methodology, by which we can create new high-level concepts (corresponding to 'village', 'forest' and 'lake'), on any level of generality.

The required social processes are modeled by knowledge federation; the methodology by polyscopy.

The Holotopia prototype may now be understood as the circle that completes our knowledge federation proposal; which federates the proposal.

The Paradigm Strategy Poster—discussed at length in Federation through Conversations—combines the described methods to compose "a roadmap for guided evolution of society"; and " "a way to change course".

It is customary in programming methodology design to showcase the programming language that implements the methodology by creating its first compiler in the language itself. We applied the same approach and created a polyscopic book manuscript, titled "Information Must Be Designed".

In this book we described the paradigm that is modeled by polyscopy; and used polyscopy to make a case for that paradigm. The book's introduction provides a summary.

What we at the time this manuscript was written called information design, has subsequently been completed and rebranded as knowledge federation.

Convenience paradox

Scope

We turn to culture and "human quality", and ask:

Why is "a great cultural revival" realistically possible?

What insight, and what strategy, may divert our "pursuit of happiness" from material consumption and egocentricity to human cultivation?

We approach this theme also from another angle: Suppose we developed the praxis of federating knowledge—and used it to combine the heritage and insights from the sciences, world traditions, therapy schools...

If we used federated knowledge instead of advertising to guide our choices—what changes would develop? What difference would that make?

The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from worries about the original sin and the eternal reward, and they began to pursue happiness and beauty, here and now.

What values might the next "great cultural revival" bring to the fore?

Diagnosis

In the course of modernization we made a cardinal error—by adopting convenience as our cardinal value.

By convenience we mean the unwavering faith—now so common—in direct experience as way to determine what is to be considered as "good", "desirable" and "worthy of being pursued". We define convenience rather broadly, and let it subsume also the closely related value egocenteredness or egocentricity—which we use, for instance, to decide what parties and policies to vote for, based on how their stated agendas affect our own personal needs and desires.

This error can easily be understood as a consequence of the narrow frame—the fact that we've been socialized to mistake the rewarding "aha" emotion when we understand how a certain cause leads to a certain effect as a sign that we've seen the very "reality" of that phenomenon. And so naturally, what feels attractive or pleasant gets reified as "the cause" of happiness. The scientists have the experiment to provide them the reality touch and the data for reasoning and action; the rest of us have convenience.

But convenience is, of course, also a product of our socialized reality. Advertising may promote all kinds of products; but on a more basic level—it always promotes convenience, by appealing to convenience.

And so since we believe that we already know what our goals and purposes should be, the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom has no practical value for us, and no esteem. We not seek information to orient our choices.

Convenience orients even our choice of information!

Remedy

To comprehend the remedy we are about to propose, it is best to imagine that we are already living on the other side of the metaphorical mirror—that we handle information as we now handle other human-made things, by adapting it to the purposes that need to be served. That, furthermore, the narrow frame has been unraveled, and that we are capable of creating basic insights about all basic things in life; not the least—about values.

Imagine that the convenience paradox is common knowledge, that everyone learns it at school, as we now learn "Newton's laws".

We use the Convenience Paradox ideogram to explain the convenience paradox.

Like most of us, the person in the ideogram wants his life to be convenient. But he made a wise choice: Instead of simply following the direction downwards, which feels more convenient, he paused to see whether that direction also leads to a more convenient condition.

It doesn't.

The convenience paradox is a pattern, where a more convenient direction leads to a less convenient situation.

Convenience Paradox ideogram

The iconic image of a "couch potato" is an obvious instance of this pattern: Convenience as value separates us from the rewards that the cultivation of "human quality" can bring. And isn't that what "culture" is really all about?

The image of a child eating her favorite chocolate cake until her tummy hurts will points to another blind spot of convenience: It makes us ignore how our ability to feel changes as a consequence of our choices. When we stimulate our senses in a certain way, a certain pleasant emotion results. But with time and exposure, our senses become desensitized. For all we know, abstaining from convenience, and developing sensitivity, could be a better way to go.

The convenience paradox insight has also some non-obvious, game-changing messages. One of them is that there is an entire realm of happiness, or of fulfillment, or simply a far better way to be human than what our culture permits us to experience. We point to it by using wholeness as goal—and propose it as an informed, or further evolved, alternative to convenience.

Wholeness feels better than pleasurable things.

We can see that when we set aside cultural biases, and federate relevant insights—across cultures, geographical regions, and historical periods.

To begin, we don't need to seek out the enlightened yogis on the foothills of Himalayas; a careful examination of almost any cultural tradition will do, including good old Christianity. Here is, for instance, how C.F. Andrews described the original Christian community (in "Sermon on the Mount"):

"[Through their practice, the early disciples of Jesus found out] that the Way of Life, which Jesus had marked out for them in His teaching, was revolutionary in its moral principles. It turned the world upside down (Acts 17. 6). (...) They found in this new 'Way of Life' such a superabundance of joy, even in the midst of suffering, that they could hardly contain it. Their radiance was unmistakable. When the Jewish rulers saw their boldness, they 'marvelled and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus' (Acts 4. 13). (...) It was this exuberance of joy and love which was so novel and arresting. It was a 'Way of Life' about which men had no previous experience. Indeed, at first those who saw it could not in the least understand it; and some mocking said, 'These men are full of new wine' (Acts 2. 13)."

A closely similar message is reaching us from the biography of Muhammad that Martin Lings composed, also based on earliest testimonies. And of course from other cultures, geographical regions and historical periods. What we see again and again is that the origins of religious or spiritual traditions were not in erroneous beliefs about the origin of the universe—but in an experience that people had when they engaged in a certain kind of practice; or when they were around the people who by engaging in practice came close to wholeness.

The second message of the convenience paradox ideogram is that the way to wholeness is counter-intuitive or paradoxical, and needs to be illuminated by suitable information.

In the ideogram this point is suggested by rendering the way as "yin" (dark or obscure) in the traditional Chinese "yin-yang" ideogram (which is a symbol of wholeness).

Here too Sermon on the Mount ("turn the other cheek") may provide an illustration; by federating across cultures and traditions, we justify or 'prove' this culturally all-important fact.

Lao Tzu is often credited as the founder of Taoism ("tao" literally means "way"). The legendary sage is often portrayed as riding the bull—which signifies that he conquered egotism; that he held convenience by its horns!

In the Convenience paradox article we offer further points of reference that will illustrate the breadth and the depth of the creative frontier that the convenience paradox insights is pointing to—and here only highlight several prototypes that will illustrate some of the research directions on this frontier.

Convenience Paradox prototype

The Convenience Paradox was the very first prototype of application of polyscopy and knowledge federation, presented at the Einstein Meets Magritte transdisciplinary conference in 1995.

The Convenience Paradox was then offered as a prototype result of the research direction that this methodology makes possible.

The ideogram, as we explained above, only points to a question; its main point is to show that our natural and necessary direction is wholeness; and that we do not know how to get there, that direct experience will only deceive us; that we must use suitable information to show us the way.

The ideogram is, however, only the main point, the 'dot of the i' of a large information holon—whose details combine, in an orderly form, a broad variety of insights, ranging from heterogeneous sources and time periods and cultures, that both support the basic insight and show how exactly wholeness is to be pursued.

The Convenience Paradox result showed how polyscopy can be applied to synthesize culturally-relevant insights across cultural tradition—and use them to inform and further evolve our contemporary culture.

The details were organized in terms of four aspects of human wholeness: physical (effort and effortlessness), emotional (happiness), cognitive (creativity) and biochemical (nutrition and metabolism).

Already the physical aspect, in a fractal-like or parabolical way, illustrates the nature of this result, and the power of the approach it introduces: While we try to eliminate effort by developing the technology, the heaviest thing we ever lift up and carry we can never get rid of. We combined the insights of F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais and other pioneers of mind-and-body therapy, to show that a lion's share of our sensation of effort resides in our body as patterns of tension and tensing, which can be eliminated through suitable practice.

Nature-Culture-Health – Information Design

The Nature-Culture-Health – Information Design was a project developed in collaboration with the European Public Health Association, through Prof. Gunnar Tellnes who was then its president.

Aaron Antonovsky is usually considered as the iconic progenitor of "salutogenesis" (creation of health—where instead of seeking to find and eliminate "disease causes", research is focused on factors that contribute to health). Tellnes developed this research further, by applying its results to lifestyle change. In Norway Tellnes developed an organization called Nature-Culture-Health, whose goal is to further health by bringing people into nature, and through cultural activities and lifestyle habits. Our collaboration resulted in several prototypes:

• Together we initiated the Nature-Culture-Health International, see this strategy proposal
• Use of polyscopy to federate the salutogenetic insights, values and practices in everyday life, see this prospectus article
• We developed the key point dialog as a method for empowering awareness and lifestyle change, and applied it as a prototype in three Norwegian municipalities, see this article

At the inaugural meeting of the European Scientific Holistic Medicine Association, organized in 2004 in Copenhagen (by Søren Ventegodt, who in Copenhagen established and led the Quality of Life research insstitute), we showed this information holon and explained that holistic medicine, just as any holistic approach, depends on a different approach to science—which can help us see things whole.

Why is "healthcare" conceived as curing diseases, not as curating health?

At the 2005 conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health in Paris we contributed a result called "Healthcare as a Power Structure", where the power structure theory is applied to elucidate this question. The historiographical data were vignettes about ignored research of Weston Price, Werner Kollath, Francis Pottenger and other pioneers of salutogenesis. By describing our method, we offered a methodological contribution—a way to complement the usual detailed and historiographic practice in this field by developing general "law of change" results. See this abstract.

Movement and Qi

Movement and Qi is a prototype course developed and taught through the University of Oslo PE Department. Since education is a theme of special interest to holotopia, and since this prototype introduced a number of innovations that could be developed further, we here mention some of its design patterns.

Body as medium. Education tends to focus on books and facts; it tends to favor verbal knowledge, and neglect the work with "human quality". This course works directly with the human 'instrument'. Movement is a keyword interpreted as doing something—anything—with the physical self, ranging from work with nutrition and values, to practices such as yoga.

Federating the heritage of the traditions. A vast body of knowledge relevant to "human quality" is waiting to be given citizenship rights in our culture. Qi here is a keyword, which allows for understanding in a simple way that the insights developed in disparate cultural traditions and therapy schools such as shiatsu masage, Alexander technique and qigong all point to the same simple image of human wholeness, and how to work with it. Each class meeting focused on a single technique. The goal was to both introduce a specific way of working with oneself, and often a tradition bringing forth a spectrum of insights—and also illustrate how the specific technique fits into the general qi model, in its own specific way. Notice that no "reality" claims are involved; qi is simply a created general concept, which allows us to make sense of and use the experience of cultural and therapeutic traditions in everyday life and practice.

Overcoming cultural barriers. Cultural barriers still need to be overcome; academic people still tend to consider all that fails to fit the narrow frame as "alternative". To bridge this gap, we devised a marketing strategy, centered around six posters—each bringing forth an entirely different aspect of this course, and work. We placed them in pairs, paired at random, on various bulletin boards around the university. The point here is that although most people who see the posters will not come to the course, their curiosity is still aroused, and the intended positive effect has been made.

Large change is possible

We now summarize the five insights, and show how they point to "a way to change course".

To establish an analogy between our contemporary cultural situation and the situation at the dawn of the historical "great cultural revival", when Galilei was in house arrest, we looked at five pivotal issues, which are the main aspects of that analogy:

• Innovation (analogy with the Industrial Revolution, which revolutionized the efficiency of labor)
• Communication (analogy with the advent of the printing press, which revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge)
• Epistemology (analogy with the Enlightenment, which enthroned direct experience and reason)
• Methodology (analogy with the advent of science, as an informed and effective way to knowledge)
• Values (analogy with the Renaissance, which empowered our ancestors to seek happiness on the earthly realm)

In each case, we saw that the way we comprehend and handle the issue is ripe to be fundamentally changed.

Innovation (power structure insight)

When "free competition" or "the market" steer our growing capability to create and induce change, the systems in which we live and work become power structures—which obstruct natural and human wholeness. A dramatic improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of our work, and of the human condition in general, will result from systemic innovation—when we learn to innovate by making things whole on every scale, and especially on the large scale where changes of institutions or systems are the effect.

Communication (collective mind insight)

We cannot make things whole without seeing them whole.

Our challenge is no longer to mass-produce information, which the printing press made possible, but to co-create meaning. Neil Postman observed:

“We’ve entered an age of information glut. And this is something no culture has really faced before. The typical situation is information scarcity. (…) Lack of information can be very dangerous. (…) But at the same time too much information can be dangerous, because it can lead to a situation of meaninglessness, of people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful, where they live in a culture that is simply committed, through all of its media, to generate tons of information every hour, without categorizing it in any way for you.”

We have seen that the new media technology enables us to self-organize differently, and and think together, as cells in a human mind do.

Epistemology (socialized reality insight)

We will only be able to change our knowledge-work systems when we learn to treat information as we treat other human-made things—by adapting it to the purposes that need to be served.

We have seen that this pivotal and all-important eistemological leap is now mandated on both fundamental and pragmatic grounds. Reification—of worldviews, and of institutions or systems—has been the key instrument of socialization throughout history, by which the power structures imposed their order of things, contrary to our interests, and without our awareness. During the 20th century our self-awareness has evolved dramatically, and we are now able to self-reflect—about the social and cognitive processes by which "realities" are created. We are ready to liberate ourselves—abolishing reification and becoming accountable for the functions or roles that what we do has in our society.

Methodology (narrow frame insight)

Science eradicated prejudice and vastly expanded our knowledge—but only there where the methods and interests of its disciplines could be applied. The epistemology change makes it possible to extend the project "science" to include all questions where knowledge can make a difference.

Values (convenience paradox insight)

When we illuminate the pivotal issue of values by real information—we see that wholeness, not convenience, must be our goal.

The pursuit of wholeness most naturally leads to "a great cultural revival".

It is also the value that makes the competition unfeasible—and empowers us to innovate in a systemic way.

We can begin a comprehensive change

The holotopia vision, which results from the five insights, offers more than what Peccei asked for: Not only "a great cultural revival", but a sweeping and comprehensive change, similar in all respects as the change that developed after Galilei was in house arrest, is now both necessary and possible.

Large change is easy

The five insights confirm also The Club of Rome's and Peccei's strategic point—to not focus on individual problems, but on the general condition from which they all stem.

As we pointed out, also in the above summary, the courses of action he five insights point to are so co-dependent, that any of them requires that we do them all. Norbert Wiener's keyword "homeostasis" can here be used negatively—to point out that an undesirable condition or configuration can also be held in check by the system's tendency to maintain a stable condition, by springing back and nullifying change. A pathological condition can be stable—isn't that what we call "disease"? And isn't that why we don't call a drug a "remedy"—unless it is strong enough to change the body's pathological condition, to reverse its downward course.

Hence what is demanded is a comprehensive and coherent change—of our cultural paradigm as a whole.

To "change course" means to change the paradigm.

The Club of Rome's strategy is further supported by the insight reached in systems sciences—that restoring the ability to shift paradigms is "the most powerful" way to intervene into systems, as Donella Meadows summarized.

Our quest has thereby been reduced to the question:

What do we need to do to restore our society's ability to shift paradigms?

What "systemic leverage point" should we 'put our shoulders on'?

Presently, we have two strong candidates for the role.

One of them is "changing the relationship we have with information". To repair the broken tie between information and action; and between information and meaning. Each of the five insights is, before all—an insight. To see the new course, we must be able to create insights.

The other candidate is the one Peccei was pointing to, the "human quality". To be able to make the change to the new course, once we've seen it, we must see ourselves as parts in a larger whole, and prioritize making things whole to "our own interests".

To "change course", we must make both of those changes.

A strategy

We will not solve our problems

A role of the holotopia vision is to fulfill what Margaret Mead identified as "one necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence" (in "Continuities in Cultural Evolution", in 1964—four years before The Club of Rome was founded):

"(W)e are living in a period of extraordinary danger, as we are faced with the possibility that our whole species will be eliminated from the evolutionary scene. One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."

Still more concretely, as we have just seen, we undertake to respond to this Mead's call to action, by federating the "tremendous advances in the human sciences":

"Although tremendous advances in the human sciences have been made in the last hundred years, almost no advance has been made in their use, especially in ways of creating reliable new forms in which cultural evolution can be directed to desired goals."

We, however, do not claim, or even assume, that "the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved".

Margaret Mead

Hear Dennis Meadows (who coordinated the team that produced The Club of Rome's seminal 1972 report "Limits to Growth") diagnose, recently, that our pursuit of "sustainability" falls short of avoiding the "predicament" that The Club of Rome was warning us about five decades ago:

"Will the current ideas about "green industry", and "qualitative growth", avoid collapse? No possibility. Absolutely no possibility of that. (...) Globally, we are something like sixty or seventy percent above sustainable levels."

We wasted precious time pursuing a dream; hear Ronald Reagan set the tone for it, as "the leader of the free world".

A sense of sobering up, and of catharsis, now needs to reach us from the depth of our problems.

Small things don't matter. Business as usual is a waste of time.

Our very "progress" must now acquire a new—cultural—focus and direction. Hear Dennis Meadows say:

"Will it be possible, here in Germany, to continue this level of energy consumption, and this degree of material welfare? Absolutely not. Not in the United States, not in other countries either. Could you change your cultural and your social norms, in a way that gave attractive future? Yes, you could."

Ironically, our problems can only be solved when we no longer see them as problems—but as symptoms of much deeper cultural and structural defects.

The five insights show that the structural problems now confronting us can be solved.

The holotopia offers more than "an atmosphere of hope". It points to an attainable future that is strictly better than our present.

And it offers to change our condition now—by engaging us in an unprecedentedly large and magnificent creative adventure.

Peccei wrote in One Hundred Pages for the Future (the boldface emphasis is ours):

For some time now, the perception of (our responsibilities relative to "problematique") has motivated a number of organizations and small voluntary groups of concerned citizens which have mushroomed all over to respond to the demands of new situations or to change whatever is not going right in society. These groups are now legion. They arose sporadically on the most variend fronts and with different aims. They comprise peace movements, supporters of national liberation, and advocates of women's rights and population control; defenders of minorities, human rights and civil liberties; apostles of "technology with a human face" and the humanization of work; social workers and activists for social change; ecologists, friends of the Earth or of animals; defenders of consumer rights; non-violent protesters; conscientious objectors, and many others. These groups are usually small but, should the occasion arise, they can mobilize a host of men and women, young and old, inspired by a profound sense of te common good and by moral obligations which, in their eyes, are more important than all others.

They form a kind of popular army, actual or potential, with a function comparable to that of the antibodies generated to restore normal conditions in a biological organism that is diseased or attacked by pathogenic agents. The existence of so many spontaneous organizations and groups testifies to the vitality of our societies, even in the midst of the crisis they are undergoing. Means will have to be found one day to consolidate their scattered efforts in order to direct them towards strategic objectives.

Diversity is good and useful, especially in times of change. The systems scientists coined the keyword "requisite variety" to point out that a variety of possible responses make a system viable, or "sustainable".

The risk is, however, that the actions of "small voluntary groups of concerned citizens" may remain reactive.

From Murray Edelman we adapted the keyword symbolic action, to make that risk more clear. We engage in symbolic action when we act within the limits of the socialized reality and the power structure—in ways that make us feel that we've done our duty. We join a demonstration; or an academic conference. But symbolic action can have only symbolic effects!

We have seen, however, that comprehensive change must be our shared goal.

It is to that strategic goal that the holotopia vision is pointing.

By supplementing this larger strategy, we neither deny that the problems we are facing must be attended to, nor belittle the heroic efforts of our frontier colleagues who are working on their solution.

The Holotopia project complements the problem-based approaches—by adding what is systemically lacking to make solutions possible.

We will not change the world

Like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, the holotopia is a trans-generational construction project.

It is what our generation owes to future generations.

Our purpose is to begin it.

Margaret Mead left us this encouragement:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Mead explained what exactly distinguishes a small group that is capable of making a large difference:

"(W)e take the position that the unit of cultural evolution is neither the single gifted individual nor the society as a whole, but the small group of interacting individuals who, together with the most gifted among them, can take the next step; then we can set about the task of creating the conditions in which the appropriately gifted can actually make a contribution. That is, rather than isolating potential "leaders," we can purposefully produce the conditions we find in history, in which clusters are formed of a small number of extraordinary and ordinary men and women, so related to their period and to one another that they can consciously set about solving the problems they propose for themselves."

Sagrada Familia (for the moment we are borrowing this beautiful photo from the Web)

This—capability to self-organize—is where "human quality" is needed. And that is what we've been lacking!

The five insights have shown that again and again. Our stories are deliberately chosen to be a half-century old—and demonstrate that the "appropriately gifted" have already offered us their gifts. But giants and visionary ideas no longer have a place in the order of things we are living in.

We live in an institutional ecology that gives us "competitive advantage" only if we make ourselves small, sidestep "ideals", and become "little cogs that mesh together". Through innumerably many 'carrots and sticks' we have internalized the little institutional man who fits in, and keeps our larger self on a leash (see this re-edited and pointedly repetitive excerpt from the animated film The Incredibles; its ending will suggest what we must find courage to do).

Our core strategy is to change the institutional ecology that makes us small.

We will not sidestep that goal by adapting to the existing order of things, treating the development of holotopia as "our project" and trying to make it "successful"—within that very order of things we have undertaken to change.

We insist on considering the development of the holotopia as our generation's opportunity and obligation—and hence as your project as much as ours. Our core strategy is to inspire and empower you to contribute to it and make a difference.

We will not change the world.

You will.

Tactical assets

The Holotopia prototype is conceived as a collaborative strategy game, where we make tactical moves toward the holotopia vision.

We make this 'game' engaging and smooth by contributing the following tactical assets.

This text will be corrected, improved and completed by the end of 2020. What is above is hopefully readable; what follows is a rough sketch.

The arts

Holotopia is an art project.

The transformative space created by our "Earth Sharing" pilot project, in Kunsthall 3.14 art gallery in Bergen, Norway.

The idea of "a great cultural revival" brings to mind the image of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in the midst of an old order of things manifesting a new one. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited the urinal, he challenged both the meaning of art and its limits. But the deconstruction of tradition has meanwhile been completed, and the time is now to construct.

What sort of art will manifest the holotopia?

In "Production of Space", Henri Lefebvre offered an answer—which we'll here summarize in holotopia's buddying vernacular.

The core problem with the social system we are living in, Lefebvre observed, is that our past activity, crystalized as power structure, keeps us "alienated" from our intrinsically human quest of wholeness. In our present conditions, "what is dead takes hold of what is alive". Lefebvre proposed to turn this relationship upon its head:

"But how could what is alive lay hold of what is dead? The answer is: through the production of space, whereby living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set of tools, nor simply a commodity."

As an initiative in the arts, Holotopia produces spaces where what is alive in us can overcome what is making us dead.

Five insights

While the role of the arts is to communicate and create, to put 'the dot on the i', the five insights model the holotopia's knowledge base. They ensure that what we communicate and create reflects the state of the art of knowledge in relevant areas of interest. Together, they compose a complete 'i', or 'lightbulb', or "headlights and steering", or "communication and control".

The symbolic language of the arts can condense the five insights to images and objects, place them into physical reality and our shared awareness—as the above paper models may suggest.

The elephant

Elephant ideogram

The role of this metaphorical image, of an invisible elephant, is to point to a quantum leap in relevance and interest, which specific academic and other insights can acquire when presented in the context of "a great cultural revival".

There is an "elephant in the room", waiting to be discovered.

Imagine the 20th century's thinkers touching this elephant: We hear them talk about "the fan", "the water hose" and "the tree trunk". But they don't make sense, and we ignore them.

Everything changes when we realize that what they are really talking about are 'the ear', 'the trunk' and 'the leg' of an immensely large and exotic animal—which nobody has yet seen!

To make headway toward holotopia, we orchestrate 'connecting the dots'.

By manifesting the elephant, we restore agency to information and power to knowledge.

The structuralists undertook to bring rigor to the study of cultural artifacts. The post-structuralists "deconstructed" their efforts, by observing that there is no such thing as "real meaning"; and that the meaning of cultural artifacts is open to interpretation. We can now take this evolution a step further.

What interests us is not what, for instance, Bourdieu "really saw" and wanted to communicate; with the post-structuralists, we acknowledge that even Bourdieu would not be able to tell us that, if he were still around. Yet he undoubtedly saw something that invited a different way to see the world; and undertook to understand it and communicate it by taking recourse to the only paraigm that was available—the old one.

We give the study of cultural artifacts new relevance and rigor—by considering them as signs on the road, which point to a paradigm that now wants to emerge.

Stories

Our stories are vignettes. This in principle journalistic technique allows us to render academic and other insights in a way that makes them palatable to public, and usable to journalists and artists. A vignette is a meme, which may do more than convey ideas.

We here illustrate this technique by a single example, The Incredible History of Doug Engelbart. In a fractal-like way, this story illustrates some of the "incredible" sides of the emerging paradigm, notably its difficulty to be seen and understood. The story will be told in the second book of the Holotopia series (with title "Systemic Innovation" and subtitle "Cybernetics of Democracy"), and here we give only highlights.

Having told variants of that story multiple times, we found several ways to begin it. One of them—which we used to launch the "Doug Engelbart´s Unfinished Revolution - The Program for the Future" PhD seminar at the University of Oslo, and the "Leadership of Systemic Innovation" PhD program at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology—is to frame it as a puzzle: The inventor whose inventions marked the computer era, whom the Silicon Valley recognized as its giant in residence, died in 2013 feeling that he had failed (we offer this fifteen-minute recording, and apologize for the echo). In 2010, Engelbart answered the question "How much of your ideas, Doug, have been implemented?" half-jokingly, by "3.6%".

What is the remaining "96.4%"? What Engelbart's game-changing ideas do we still ignore?

Another way is to tell the story chronologically: In December 1950, a 25-year old engineer was looking at his future career: He had excellent education; he was employed by (what later became) NASA; he was engaged to be married... He saw his future as a straight path to retirement. And he didn't like what he saw. "A man must have a purpose!" Engelbart observed. So right there and then he decided that he would give his career a purpose that would maximize its benefits to mankind.

Engelbart spent three month thinking about the best way to do that. Then he had an epiphany.

Engelbart's thinking, which led to his epiphany, was manifestly systemic.

Did Engelbart really find the best way to improve the human condition?

The title slide of Engelbart's presentation at Google (inserted into Knowledge Federation's template).

The third way is to begin at the end—and tell about Engelbart's "A Call to Action" panel presentation at Google, in 2007; as we did in this blog report. Doug was then at the end of his career, ready to give his last message to the world. But somehow—and no doubt incredibly—the title slide and with it his "call to action"; and the first four slides, which provided the necessary context for understanding the rest—were not even shown! The Youtube page with the recording of this event bears the title "Inventing the Computer Mouse". Is that the achievement by which Engelbart should be remembered?

What Engelbart contributed was the elephant, not (just) the mouse!

The Incredible History of Doug is the story of a contemporary Galilei—who is kept 'in house arrest' by the narrowness of our vision.

Its incredible side mirrors the rest of us—as a generation of people who have become so admirably technology-savvy; and so incredibly idea-blind!

Wikipedia illustrates this vividly, by writing (in its article about "The Mother of All Demos"): "Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot"." Yes, the demonstration was an impressive feat of technology; the ideas that were behind it are still ignored.

So what were Engelbart's important ideas?

One of them we have seen: The collective mind paradigm. To give our systems the faculty of vision—and make them, and us, capable of following a sane course. That idea we also offered as the solution to our "puzzle" (hear this recording).

But there was an even larger one.

In 1962, six years before Jantsch and others would convene in Bellatgio, Italy, Engelbart contributed an original method for systemic innovation. It was the very "evolutionary guidance" that our society was in need for..

Let us illustrate it by using it to explain Engelbart's "call to action".

Engelbart used this slide to explain his systemic innovation method.

Engelbart's method, which he called "augmentation", was based on what he called "capability hierarchy". You'll understand it if you imagine a human being with no technology or culture—and all the rest comprising various ways to "augment" his innate capabilities, individual and collective. The capability hierarchy has two sides or aspects, the "human system" and the "tool system". The capability to communicate in writing, for example, requires certain tool system components such as the clay tablets or the printing press; and certain human system components such as literacy and education.

A good way to innovate, Engelbart observed, is by identifying a capability that has become necessary; and the human system and tool system components that would make it possible.

It was in this way that Engelbart identified the capability "to cope with the complexity and urgency of problems" as the one which must be given priority.

And the network-interconnected interactive digital media technology as the enabling tool.

What was still missing—and what his call to action was about—was the capability to "bootstrap" the corresponding "human system" change.

But isn't that what we've been talking about all along?

These were, however, Engelbart's largest and most basic ideas—in the context of which his numerous technical inventions must be understood. We mention two of them as examples.

The idea of the "open hyperdocument system" can be comprehended if we think about document processing as it is today: Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop... Those are tools that

• create and process traditional document types (books, articles, photographs...)
• by using proprietary document formats

The open hyperdocument system is a collection of interoperable media tools, which can be combined together as one would combine Lego blocks, to create any multimedia document format and workflow one might be able to imagine.

The open hyperdocument system is what is needed to enable the knowledge work media and processes to evolve—and to enable us to substitute 'the lightbulb' for 'the candle'.

Engelbart experimented extensively with hierarchical and flexible information representation—which is, as we have seen, what 'the lightbulb' needs to be like.

The second example we want to mention is a collection of keywords and templates for knowledge-work infrastructures that may compose a collective mind. Examples are the "networked improvement community" and the "A, B and C levels" of creative activity. Any human activity has the hands-on "A-level", where people for instance make shoes, and the "B-level" where they improve the shoes and the shoe making. The goal of the "C-level" activity is to improve the improvers. Engelbart observed that while B-level activities tend to be task-specific and hence different from one other, the C-level activities tend to be uniform across applications; and that this commonality of structure offered an uncommonly fertile ground for creative action. Engelbart envisioned that the B-level work would be organized in terms of "networked improvement communities" or "NICs"; and that the C-level work would be structured as a "NIC of NICs".

Knowledge Federation prototypes this idea.

The mirror

The mirror lands itself to artistic creation; snapshots from Vibeke Jensen's Berlin studio.

Let us begin with the obvious: The mirror is a visual and symbolic object par excellence. In holotopia, however, its symbolism is further enriched by a wealth of concrete interpretations.

The mirror reflects the holotopia's enchanting, 'magical' touch.

There is an unexpected, wonderful and seemingly magical way out of the "problematique"; a natural and effective way to transform our situation. We do not need to colonize another planet (we would anyhow bring to it our cultural malaise). We can move to a different reality here and now—by seeing the world differently. Or metaphorically—by stepping through the mirror.

The mirror tells us that we need to look at the world by putting ourselves into the picture.

The mirror makes us aware of our socialized cognitive biases, and instructs us to use knowledge to see both ourselves and the world.

It has been pointed out that Donald Trump does not believe in science. But when we carefully examine ourselves in the mirror, we see don't do that either! Little Greta Thunberg does. She lives in the reality created by the scientists, and acts in a way that is consistent with it. But she was diagnosed of Asperger syndrome, and doesn't count as a counterexample. The truth is that all of us "normal" humans live in a socialized reality, created through body-to-body interaction; which is now vastly augmented by ever-present immersive media.

The mirror symbolizes the abolition of reification, and the ascent of accountability. By liberating ourselves from reification, we liberate ourselves from socialized reality and from power structure. We become empowered to create the way in which we see the world, to change our institutions, to begin "a great cultural revival".

The mirror is also a symbol of academic transformation.

In addition to the 'magical' solution to the "problematique", the mirror also has a sober side—where it reflects the need for academic self-reflection and transformation. This need is imposed academically and rigorously by the knowledge of knowledge we own.

Being a revolution of awareness, the holotopia has in academia its most powerful ally.

We defined the academia as "institutionalized academic tradition" to make that point transparent. And we made Socrates be the icon of academia, as its intellectual father. By telling the story Plato told in Apology, we show that the academia's point of inception was an act of liberation from socialized reality; Socrates used the dialogue as technique to shake off the "doxa" of the day. We created a way of looking at the contemporary university as an institutionalization of that tradition.

At first glance, our job now may seem so much easier than what Socrates and Galilei had to do—because the academic tradition is in power!

But there's a rub: Ironically, by being in power, the academic tradition is also part of the power structure! It is both a 'turf' in itself—and part of a larger 'turf'. This is easily seen if we acknowledge that, culture-wise, anything goes as long as it doesn't violate "scientific truth". A division of power is established similar in spirit to what existed in Galilei's time—albeit completely different in implementation.

Can we mobilize enough academic "human quality" to once again make the kind of difference that the academic tradition is called upon to make?

Finally, the mirror tells us most concretely how to begin "a great cultural revival", and make decisive progress toward developing "human quality". "Know thyself" has always been the battle cry of human cultivation. And isn't that what the mirror most naturally reflects?

We now have the great insights of 20th century science and philosophy, and the heritage of the world traditions—to help us know ourselves!

All we need to do is restore knowledge to power.

The dialog

The dialog, just as the mirror, is an entire aspect of the holotopia. This keyword defines an angle of looking from which the holotopia as a whole can be seen, and needs to be seen.

The mirror and the dialog are inextricably related to one another: Our invitation is not only to self-reflect, but also and most importantly to have a dialog in front of the mirror. The dialog is not only a praxis, but also an attitude. And the mirror points to the core element of that attitude—which David Bohm called "proprioception". But let's return to Bohm's ideas and his contribution to this timely cause in a moment.

The dialog is a key element of the holotopia's tactical plan: We create prototypes, and we organize dialogs around them, as feedback mechanisms toward evolving them further. And this dialog itself, as it evolves—turns us who participate in it into bright new 'headlights'!

Everything in our Holotopia prototype is a prototype. And no prototype is complete without a feedback loop that reaches back into its structure, to update it continuously. Hence each prototype is equipped with a dialog.

This point cannot be overemphasized: Our primary goal is not to warn, inform, propose a new way to look at the world—but to change our collective mind. Physically. Hands-on.

The dialog is an instrument for changing our collective mind.

The dialog, even more than the mirror, brings up an association with the academia's inception. Socrates was not convincing people of a "right" view to see "reality"; he was merely engaging them in a self-reflective dialog, the intended result of which was to see the limits of knowledge—from which the change of what we see as "reality" becomes possible.

Let us begin this dialog about the dialog by emphasizing that the medium here truly is the message: As long as we are having a dialog, we are making headway toward holotopia. And vice-versa: when we are debating or discussing our own view, aiming to enforce it on others and prevail in an argument, we are moving away from holotopia—even when we are using that method to promote holotopia itself!

The attitude of the dialog here follows from the fundamental premises, which are part of the socialized reality and the narrow frame insights—and which are axiomatic to holotopia. Hence coming to the dialog 'wearing boxing gloves' (manifesting the now so common verbal turf strife behavior) is as ill-advised as making a case for an academic result by arguing that it was revealed to the author in a vision.

But what is the dialog?

Instead of giving a definitive answer—let us turn this keyword, dialog, into an abstract ideal goal, to which we will draw closer and closer by experimenting, and evolving. Through a dialog. We offer the following stories as both points of reference, and as illustration of the kind of difference that the dialog as new way to communicate can mean, and make.

David Bohm's "dialogue"

While through Socrates and Plato the dialog has been a foundation stone of the academic tradition, David Bohm gave this word a completely new meaning—which we have undertaken to develop further. The Bohm Dialogue website provides an excellent introduction, so it will suffice to point to it by echoing a couple of quotations. The first is by Bohm himself.

There is a possibility of creativity in the socio-cultural domain which has not been explored by any known society adequately.

We let it point to the fact that to Bohm the "dialogue" was an instrument of socio-cultural therapy, leading to a whole new co-creative way of being together. Bohm considered the dialogue to be a necessary step toward unraveling our contemporary situation.

The second quotation is a concise explanation of Bohm's idea by the curators of Bohm Dialogue website.

Dialogue, as David Bohm envisioned it, is a radically new approach to group interaction, with an emphasis on listening and observation, while suspending the culturally conditioned judgments and impulses that we all have. This unique and creative form of dialogue is necessary and urgent if humanity is to generate a coherent culture that will allow for its continued survival.

As this may suggest, the dialog is conceived as a direct antidote to power structure-induced socialized reality.

Carl Jung's shadow

Carl Jung pointed to a useful insight for understanding the dialog, by his own lead keyword "shadow". In a non-whole world, we become "large" by ignoring or denying or "repressing" parts of our wholeness, which become part of our "shadow". The larger we are, the larger the "shadow". It follows us, scares us, annoys us. And it contains what we must integrate, to be able to grow.

The dialog may in this context be understood as a therapeutic instrument, to help us discharge and integrate our "shadow".

Dialog and epistemology

Bohm's own inspiration (story has it) is significant. Allegedly, Bohm was moved to create the "dialogue" when he saw how Einstein and Bohr, who were once good friends, and their entourages, were unable to communicate at Princeton. Allegedly, someone even made a party and invited the two groups, to help them overcome their differences, but the two groups remained separated in two distinct corners of the room.

The reason why this story is significant is the root cause of the Bohr-Einstein split: Einstein's "God does not play Dice" criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory; and Bohr's reply "Einstein, stop telling god what to do!" While in our prototype Einstein has the role of the icon of "modern science", in this instance it was Bohr and not Einstein who represented the epistemological position we are supporting. But Einstein later reversed his position— in "Autobiographical Notes". This very title mirrors Einstein as an artist of understatement; "Autobiographical Notes" is really a statement of Einstein's epistemology—just as "Physics and Philosophy" was to Heisenberg. While the fundamental assumptions for the holoscope have been carefully federated, it has turned out that federating "Autobiographical Notes" is sufficient, see Federation through Images).

The point may or may not be obvious: Even to Einstein, this icon of "modern science", the dialog was lacking to see that we just cannot "tell God what to do"; that the only thing we can do is observe the experience—and model it freely.

But Einstein being Einstein—he finally did get it. And so shall we!

Dialog and creativity

Bohm's experience with the "dialogues" made him conclude that when a group of people practices it successfully, something quite wonderful happens—a greater sense of coherence, and harmony. It stands to reason that the open and humble attitude of the dialog is an important or a necessary step toward true creativity.

And creativity, needless to say, is yet another key aspect of holotopia, and a door we need to unlock.

We touched upon the breadth and depth of this theme by developing our Tesla and the Nature of Creativity prototype—and we offer it here to prime our future dialogs about it.

Dialog and The Club of Rome

There is a little known red thread in the history of The Club of Rome; the story could have been entirely different: Özbekhan, Jantsch and Christakis, who co-founded The Club with Peccei and King, and wrote its statement of purpose, were in disagreement with the course it took in 1970 (with The Limits to Growth study) and left. Alexander Christakis, the only surviving member of this trio, is now continuing their line of work as the President of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. "The Institute for 21st Century Agoras is credited for the formalization of the science of Structured dialogic design." (Wikipedia).

Bela H. Banathy, whom we've mentioned as the champion of "Guided Evolution of Society" among the systems scientists, extensively experimented with the dialog. For many years, Banathy was staging a series of dialogs within the systems community, the goal of which was to envision social-systemic change. With Jenlink, Banathy co-edited two invaluable volumes of articles about the dialogue.

Dialog and democracy

In 1983, Michel Foucault was invited to give a seminar at the UC Berkeley. What will this European historian of ideas par excellence choose to tell the young Americans?

Foucault spent six lectures talking about an obscure Greek word, "parrhesia".

[P]arrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

Foucault's point was that "parrhesia" was an essential element of Greek democracy.

This four-minute digest of the 2020 US first presidential debate will remind us just how much the spirit of dialog is absent from modernity's oldest democracy; and from political discourse at large.

Dialog and new media technology

A whole new chapter in the evolution of the dialogue was made possible by the new information technology. We illustrate an already developed research frontier by pointing to Jeff Conklin's book "Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems", where Bohm dialogue tradition is combined with Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), which Kunz and Rittel developed at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.

The Debategraph, which we already mentioned, is transforming our collective mind hands-on. Contrary to what its name may suggest, Debategraph is an IBIS-based dialog mapping tool. While he was the Minister for Higher Education in Australian government, Peter Baldwin saw that political debate was not a way to understand and resolve issues. So he decided to retire from politics, and with David Price co-founded and created Debategraph to transform politics, by changing the way in which issues are explored and decisions are made.

In Knowledge Federation, we experimented extensively with turning Bohm's dialog into a 'high-energy cyclotron'; and into a medium through which a community can find "a way to change course". The result was a series of so-called Key Point Dialogs. An example is the Cultural Revival Dialog Zagreb 2008. We are working on bringing its website back online.

Dialog as a tactical asset

When it comes to using the dialog as a tactical asset—as an instrument of cultural change toward the holotopia—two points need to be emphasized:

• We define the dialog, and we insist on having a dialog
• We design our situations, and we use the media, in ways make that deviations from the dialog obvious

When a dialog is recorded, and placed into the holotopia framework, violations become obvious—because the attitude of the dialog is so completely different! We may see how this made a difference in the Club of Rome's history, where the debate gave unjust advantage to the homo ludens turf players—who don't use "parrhesia", but say whatever will earn them points in a debate, and smile confidently, knowing that the "truth" of the power structure, which they represent, will prevail! The body language, however, when placed in the right context, makes this game transparent. See [this example, where Dennis Meadows is put off-balance by an opponent.

Hence the dialog—when adopted as medium, and when mediated by suitable technology and camera work—becomes the mirror; it becomes a new "spectacle" (in Guy Debord's most useful interpretation of this word). We engage the "opinion leaders", and use the dialog to re-create the conventional "reality shows"—in a manner that shows the contemporary realities in a way in which they need to be shown:

• When a dialog is successful, the result is timely and informative: We witness how our understanding and handling of core social realities are changing
• When unsuccessful, the result is timely and informative in a different way: We witness the resistance to change; we see what is holding us back

Ten themes

Everything in holotopia is a potential theme for a dialog. Indeed, everything in our holotopia prototype is a prototype; and a prototype is not complete unless there is a dialog around it, to to keep it evolving and alive.

In particular each of the five insights will, we anticipate, ignite a lively conversation.

We are, however, especially interested in using the five insights as a framework for creating other themes and dialogs. The point here is to have informed conversations; and to show that their quality of being informed is what makes all the difference. And in our present prototype, the five insights symbolically represent that what needs to be known, in order to give any age-old or contemporary theme a completely new course of development.

The five insights, and the ten direct relationships between them, provide us a frame of reference—in the context of which both age-old and contemporary challenges can be understood and handled in entirely new ways.

Here are some examples.

How to put an end to war?

What would it take to really put an end to war, once and for all?

The five insights allow us to understand the war as just an extreme case among the various consequences of our general evolutionary course, by "the survival of the fittest"—where the populations that developed armies and weapons had "competitive advantage" over those who "turned the other cheek". It is that very evolutionary course that the Holotopia project undertakes to change.

We offered the Chomsky–Harari–Graeber thread as a way to understand the evolutionary course we've been pursuing, and the consequences it had. Noam Chomsky here appears in the role of a linguist—to explain (what he considers a revolutionary insight reaching us from his field) that the human language did not develop as an instrument of communication, but of worldview sharing. Yuval Noah Harari, as a historian, explains why exactly that capability made us the fittest among the species, fit to rule the Earth. David Graeber's story of Alexander the Great illustrates the consequences this has had—including the destruction of secular and sacral culture, and turning free people into slaves.

We then told about Joel Bakan's "The Corporation", to show that while the outlook of our society changed since then beyond recognition—the nature of our cultural and social-systemic evolution, and its consequences, remained in principle the same.

We could have, however, taken this conversation in the making in another direction—by talking about the meeting between Alexander and Diogenes; and by doing that reaching another key insight.

This part of the conversation between Alexander and Diogenes (quoted here from Plutarch) is familiar :

And when that monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, "Yes," said Diogenes, "stand a little out of my sun."

In his earlier mentioned lectures about "parrhesia", Foucault tells a longer and more interesting story—where Diogenes (who has the most simple lifestyle one could imagine) tells Alexander (the ruler of the world) that he is "pursuing happiness" in a wrong direction. You are not free, Alexander, Diogenes tells him; you live your life in fear; you hold onto your royal role by force:

" I have an idea, however, that you not only go about fully armed but even sleep that way. Do you not know that is a sign of fear in a man for him to carry arms? And no man who is afraid would ever have a chance to become king any more than a slave would."

Alienation

This theme offers to reconcile Karl Marx with "the 1%", the Western philosophical tradition with the Oriental ones, and the radical left with Christianity.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy introduces "alienation" in a way that is easily integrated in the order of things represented by holotopia:

"The concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological or social ill; namely, one involving a problematic separation between a self and other that properly belong together."

Or to paraphrase this in the vernacular of holotopia:

Alienation is what separates us from wholeness.

We offer the Hegel-Marx-Debord thread as a way put the ball in play for a conversation about this theme. This thread has not yet been written, so we here sketch it briefly.

To Hegel, "alienation" was a life-long pursuit. The way we see the world is subject to errors, Hegel observed; so we are incapable of seeing things whole, in order to make them whole. Hegel undertook to provide a remedy, by developing a philosophical method.

Marx continued Hegel's pursuit in an entirely different way. Having seen the abysmal conditions that the mid-19th century workers lived in, he grew diffident of philosophizing and of his own class background. The working class—the majority of humans—cannot pursue wholeness, because they must labor under conditions that someone else created for them. Science liberated us from so many things, Marx also observed, in the spirit of his time—why not apply its causal thinking to the societal ills as well? Logically, he identified "expropriation" as necessary goal; and a revolution as necessary means. Seeing that the religion hindered the working class from fulfilling its historical revolutionary role, Marx chose to disqualify it by calling it "the opium of the people".

Marx was of course in many ways right; but he made two errors. The first we'll easily forgive him, if we take into account that he too, unavoidably perhaps for a rational thinker in his age, looked at the world through the narrow frame: He sidestepped "human quality", and adopted "instrumental thinking". Where Marx's agenda was successful, "the dictatorship of the proletariat" ended up being only—the dictatorship! In the rest of world, the "left" understood that to have power, it must align itself with power structure—and became just another "right"!

The second error Marx made was to ignore that also the capitalists were victims of power structure. They too would benefit from pursuing wholeness instead of power and money. Gandhi, of course, saw that, and that was his great contribution to the methodology of group conflict resolution. But Gandhi's thinking was of holistic-Oriental, not instrumental.

Having failed to see there was a "winning without fighting" strategy—the left and remained on the losing side of the power scale until this day.

An interesting side effect of this development was that, having bing disowned by the "left", Christ became an emblem of the "right"—which is ironic: Jesus was a revolutionary! His only reported act of violence was "expelling the money changers from the temple of God".

Guy Debord added to this theme a whole new chapter, by observing that the immersive audio-visual technology gave to alienation a whole new medium and course—which Marx could not have possibly predicted.

By placing this conversation in the context of the convenience paradox insight on the one side, and the power structure insight on the other, we recognize the power structure—which includes all of us—as "enemy"; and wholeness—for all of us—as goal.

Enlightenment 2.0

By placing this conversation about the reissue of "enlightenment" in the context of the convenience paradox insight and the collective mind insight, two most interesting venues for transdisciplinary cross-fertilization are opened up.

One of them is to use knowledge federation and contemporary media technology, powered by artistic and other techniques, to federate the kind of insights that can make the convenience paradox transparent, and inform "a great cultural revival".

The other one is to use the insights into the nature of human wholeness to inform the development and use of contemporary media technology. How do computer games, and the ubiquitous advertising, really affect us? In Intuitive introduction to systemic thinking we offered a couple of further interesting historical reference points, to motivate a reflection about this theme.

Here Gregory Bateson's important keyword "the ecology of the mind", and Neil Postman's closely related one "media ecology", can set the stage for federating a human ecology that will make us spirited and enlightened, not despondent and dazzled.

Academia quo vadis?

This title is reserved for the academic self-reflective dialog in front of the mirror, about the university's social role, and future.

A number of 20th century thinkers claimed that the development of transdisciplinarity was necessary; Erich Jantsch, for instance, who saw the "inter- and transdisciplinary university" as the core element of our society's "steering and control', necessary if our civilization will gain control over its newly acquired power, and steer a viable course; Jean Piaget saw it from the point of view of cognitive psychology (although Piaget is usually credited for coining this keyword, Jantsch may have done that before him); Werner Heisenberg saw it from the fundamental angle of "physics and philosophy", as we have seen.

By placing the conversation about the academia's future in the context of the socialized reality insight and the narrow frame insight, and in that way making it informed by a variety of more detailed insights, we showed that the epistemological and methodological developments that took place in the last century enable transdisciplinarity; that its development can be seen as the natural and necessary next step in the university institution's evolution; and that our global condition mandates that we take that step.

Jey Hillel Bernstein wrote in a more recent survey:

"In simultaneously studying multiple levels of, and angles on, reality, transdisciplinary work provides an intriguing potential to invigorate scholarly and scientific inquiry both in and outside the academy."

This conversation may take a number of different directions.

One of them is to be a dialog about knowledge federation as a concrete prototype of a "transdiscipline". Such a dialog is indeed the true intent of our proposal; we are not proposing another methodological and institutional 'dead body'—but a way for the university to evolve its institutional organization and its methods, by federating insights into an evolving prototype.

A completely one would be to discuss the university's ethical norms and guidance. Should we be pursuing our careers in traditional disciplines? Or consider ourselves as parts in a larger whole, and adapt to that role?

This particular approach to our theme, however, also has a deeper meaning; and that's the one that its title is pointing to. Nearly two thousand years ago the ethical and institutional foundation of the Roman Empire was shaking, and the Christian Church stepped into the role of a guiding light. Can the university assume that role today?

Keywords

A warning reaches us from sociology.

"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."

By creating keywords, by using truth by convention, we liberate thought and action from the "iron cage".

We have seen numerous examples of keywords; each of the five insights is one. We here discuss additional three—which will illustrate the larger issues in a fractal-like way.

Culture

In "Culture as Praxis", Zygmunt Bauman surveyed a large number of historical definitions of culture, and concluded that they are too diverse to be reconciled.

We do not know what "culture" means!

Not a good venture point for developing culture as praxis (informed practice).

We defined culture as "cultivation of wholeness", and cultivation by analogy with planting and watering a seed (which suits also the etymology of "culture") . In this way we defined a specific way of looking at culture, and pointed to its specific aspect—exactly the one that we tended to ignore, while we looked at it through the narrow frame. No amount of dissecting and studying a seed would suggest that it needs to be planted and watered; the difference between an apple eaten up and the seeds thrown away—and a tree full of apples each Fall—is made by relying on the experience of others who have undergone this process, and seen it work.

There is, however, an obvious difference between the two kinds of cultivation, the agricultural and cultural one: In this latter one, both 'seeds' and 'trees' are inside ourselves, and hence invisible. This has historically presented an insurmountable challenge, to communicate cultural insights. But to us this is also a most wonderful opportunity—because we have undertaken to develop communication consciously, by tailoring it to what needs to be communicated.

Addiction

Selling addictions being a famously lucrative yet destructive line of work, the traditional cultures developed legal and ethical norms to keep it under control. But the traditions reified the addictions—as things, such as opiates, or activities, such as gambling. What will hinder businesses from using new technologies to create new addictions?

The evolution gave us senses and emotions to guide us to wholeness. The technology made it possible to deceive our senses—and create pleasurable things and activities that take us away from wholeness.

By defining addiction as a pattern, we made it possible to identify it as an aspect of otherwise useful activities and things. To make ourselves and our world wholes, even such subtle addiction need to be taken care of.

From a large number of obvious or subtle addictions, we here mention only pseudoconsciousness defined as "addiction to information". Consciousness of one's situation and surroundings is, of course, a necessary condition for wholeness. In civilization we can, however, drown this need in facts and data, which give us the sensation of knowing—without telling us what we really need to know, in order to be or become whole.

Religion

In traditional cultures, religion was widely regarded as an integral part of our wholeness. Can this concept, and the heritage of the traditions it is pointing to, still have a function and a value in our own era?

We adapted the definition that Martin Lings contributed, and defined religion as "reconnection with the archetype" (which harmonizes with the etymological meaning of this word). The archetypes include "justice", "motherhood", "freedom", "beauty", "truth", "love" and anything else that may inspire a person to overcome egotism and convenience, and serve a "higher" end.

Since the corresponding ideogram has not yet been drawn, imagine an old-fashioned wheel with spokes. Wherever the spokes meet the outer rim of the wheel, there is an archetype. In the center of the wheel we find the central archetype, which is their 'common denominator'. We might call it "pure archetypal energy"; or "love", or "God".

The iconic image of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will help us highlight some of the nuances. Carol Reed's historical drama "The Agony and the Ecstasy" portrays this event through the relationship of its two main protagonists, Michelangelo (played by Charlton Heston) and Pope Julius II (played by Rex Harrison). Julius was a "warrior Pope"; yet he exercised his piety by enabling the Divinity to speak through the brush of his artist. Through Michelangelo, the film depicts the "agony and ecstasy" of the inspired artist.

Books and publishing

Occasionally we publish books about of the above themes—to punctuate the laminar flow of events, draw attention to a theme and begin a dialog.

Shall we not recreate the book as well—along with all the rest? Yes and no. In "Amuzing Ourselves to Death", Neil Postman—who founded "media ecology"— left us a convincing argument why the book is here to stay. His point was that the book creates a different "ecology of the mind" than the contemporary "immersive" audio-visual media do; it gives us a chance to reflect.

We, however, embed the book exist in an 'ecosystem' of media. By publishing a book we 'break ice' and place a theme—which may or may not be one of our ten themes—into the focus of the public eye. We then let our collective mind digest and further develop the proposed ideas; and by doing that—develop itself!

In this way, a loop is closed through which an author's insights are improved by collective creativity and knowledge—leading, ultimately, to a new and better edition of the book.

Liberation

The book titled "Liberation", with subtitle "Religion beyond Belief", is scheduled to be completed during the first half of 2021, and serve as the first in the series.

In a fractal-like way, this book reflects the holotopia as a whole. We are accustomed to think of "religion" as a firm or dogmatic belief in something, impervious to counter-evidence. The Liberation book turns this idea of religion inside out—so that religion is understood as liberation from not only rigidly held beliefs, but from rigidly held anything.

The age-old conflict, between science and religion, is resolved by the book by further evolving both science and religion.

Prototypes

Prototypes, as we have seen, are a way to federate information by weaving it directly into the fabric of everyday reality. A prototype can be literally anything.

In the Holotopia prototype, everything is a prototype. In that way we subject everything to knowledge-based evolution.

The events are prototypes we have not yet talked abou. They are multimedia and multidimensional prototypes—which include a variety of more specific prototypes. Events are used to 'punctuate the equilibrium'—to create a discontinuity in the ordinary flow of events, draw attention to a theme, create a transformative space, both physical and in media, engage people and make a difference.

In what follows we illustrate this idea by describing the holotopia's Earth Sharing pilot event, which took place in June of 2018 in Bergen, Norway.

Vibeke Jensen, the artist who created what we are about to describe, is careful to avoid interpreting the space, the objects and the interaction she creates. The idea is to use them as prompts, and allow new meaning to emerge through association and group interaction. The interpretation we are about to give is by us others. It is, however, only a possible interpretation.

The physical space where the event took place was symbolic of the purpose of the event. The building used to be a bank in the old center of Bergen, and later became an art gallery. It remained to turn the gallery, holotopia-style, into a transformative space.

The space was upstairs—and Vibeke turned the stairs too into a symbolic object. Going up, the inscription on the stairs reads "bottom up"; going down, it reads "top down". In this way the very first thing that meets the eye is the all-important message, which defines the polyscopy and the holoscope—namely that we can reach insights in those two ways.

The BottomUp - TopDown intervention is a tool for shifting positions. It suggests transcendence of fixed relations between top and bottom, and builds awareness of the benefits of multiple points of view (polyscopy), and moving in-between.

The mirror—the core symbol of holotopia transformation—is seen almost everywhere. In particular, a one-way mirror serves as the entrance into the space that used to be the vault of the bank. One enters the vault by literally stepping through a physical mirror. Instead of money and other physical treasures, the vault is a "safe space" for reflection. The inside of the vault was not illuminated, but one could see the world outside through the semi-transparent door, and reflect on it. From the speakers in the vault one could hear edited fragments from an earlier dialog—offered as information to build on and develop ideas further. There was a bag with seeds hanging in the vault.

We like to think of the objects that populated the space as furniture—and give that world a designed meaning. When one enters a room, the furniture in the room (a sofa, a couple of armchairs...) automatically invites a certain kind of interaction. Our furniture, however, was nothing like conventional furniture; it invites to recreate the interaction. And, of course, it offers certain prompts.