Here we'll talk about the core of our proposal—to change the very relationship we have with information. And through information, the relationship we have with the world; and with ourselves.

The relationship we have with information, and through information with the world and with ourselves, is founded on unstated beliefs and values. Like the foundations of a house, they hold the entire edifice of our culture, while themselves remaining invisible. That's why we call them simply foundations.

Needless to say, a cultural revival is really just a natural result of a fundamental shift in those foundations. Wasn't that what the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, were really all about?

From the traditional culture we have adopted a myth, incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. That myth now serves the foundation stone on which the edifice of our culture has been erected.

A clue to cultural revival

As movies tend to, Alain Resnais' "My American Uncle" follows its characters through strained relationships with parents, career ups and downs and love-related hopes and disappointments. But "My American Uncle" offers also a meta-narrative, which (we propose) turns it into a new paradigm art project.

In that way, the movie federates a socially relevant insight of a researcher, neuroscientist Henri Laborit. At the end of the movie, Laborit appears on the screen in person, and summarizes this insight:

The unconscious is a formidable instrument. Not only because it holds all that we have repressed, things too painful for us to express, because we'd be punished by society. But also because all that is authorized, even rewarded by society, has been placed in our brain since birth. We're unaware of its presence, and yet it guides our actions. This unconscious, which is not Freud's, is the most dangerous. What we call the personality of an individual is built up from a grab-bag of value judgments, prejudices and platitudes. As he grows older, they become more and more rigid, less and less subject to question. Take away one single stone from this edifice, and it all crumbles. The result is anguish. And anguish stops at nothing, neither murder, nor genocide, nor war, in the case of social groups.

We are beginning to understand by what mechanism, why and how, throughout the history and in the present, the hierarchies of dominance have been established. To go to the moon, we must know the laws of gravity. Knowing the laws of gravity doesn't make us free of gravity. It merely allows us to utilize it.

Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, until they know it has always been used to dominate others, there is little chance that anything will change.

Reality and beyond

Did Moses really return from Mount Sinai with ten commandments, written in stone by God himself?

For centuries, our ancestors considered this a fact. But to a modern mind, the fact that this would violate certain "laws of physics" makes such beliefs untenable.

When Nietzsche observed, famously, that "God is dead", he did not of course mean that God had physically died. Or even that the belief in God lost its bearings in our culture, which was an obvious fact. What he meant was that we, as culture, lost a compendium of functions that had earlier rested on the belief in God as foundations.

Can we survive in a complex world, develop human quality, renew culture...—without principles to live by? Without even a foundation on which such principles could emerge?

"Reality" is a myth

Our contemporary culture too is founded a popular belief—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality"; that "correspondence with reality" can be rationally verified; and that "the scientific worldview" is a result of such verification, and therefore "objectively true".

"Correspondence with reality" cannot be verified

In "Evolution of Physics", Einstein and Infeld explained why "correspondence to reality" cannot be rationally verified, by using the parable of a closed watch. Einstein, furthermore, held the position that the belief that the results of our speculation or reflection correspond to reality is a common product of illusion. Both arguments are summarized and commented [here].

Since our goal is not to give a new "objectively true reality picture", but only to submit a legitimate way of looking at our theme, nothing more needs to be said.

Our culture too has been founded on a myth

It follows that our culture too is founded on a myth.

This can easily be understood, and forgiven, if one takes into account that the belief that "truth" means "correspondence with reality" is deeply engrained in our 'cultural DNA', and even in our language. When I write "worldviews", my word processor underlines the word in red. The word "worldview" doesn't have a plural; since there is only one world, there can be only one worldview—the one that corresponds to that world.

"Reality" is an instrument of socialization

... the mother embracing a child, the decoration that will flatter the narcissism of a warrior, the applause that will accompany a narration of an actor. All this frees will free certain chemical substances in the brain and result in pleasure. (...) Finally, we need to be aware that what penetrates into our nervous system from birth and perhaps even before, in utero, the stimuli that will enter our nervous system come to us essentially from the others, and that we are the others. When we die, it will be the others that we've internalized in our nervous system, who have constructed us, who have constructed our brain, who have filled it up, that will die.

Bourdieu's theory of socialization

In his "theory of practice", Pierre Bourdieu gave us a comprehensive sociological theory of socialization. Here it may be sufficient to just mention his keyword doxa (which he adopted from Max Weber, and whose usage dates all the way back to Plato), which Bourdieu used to point to the experience that the societal order of things in which we live constitutes the only possible one. "Orthodoxy" leaves room for alternatives, of which only one, ours, is "right". Doxa ignores even the possibility of alternatives.

What makes a king "real"

The king enters the room and everyone bows. Naturally, you bow too. Even if you may not feel like doing that, deep inside you know that if you don't bow down your head, you may lose it.

So what is it, really, that makes the difference between "a real king", and an imposter who "only believes" that he's a king? Both consider themselves as kings, and impersonate the corresponding "habitus". In the former case, however, everyone else has also been successfully socialized accordingly.

A "real king" will be treated with highest honors. An imposter will be incarcerated in an appropriate institution. Despite the fact that all too often, a single "real king" caused far more suffering and destruction than all the madmen and criminals combined.

"Reality" is a product of power structure

Symbolic power

What strategy could be more effective for controlling us, for inhibiting our societal and cultural evolution ('keeping Galilei in house arrest'), then to construct the very worldview we collectively share and uphold as "reality"?

The story, which we have not yet told in sufficient detail, is about Bourdieu witnessing in Algeria how power morphed—from censorship, torture and prison (during the Algeria's war for independence, where it was just as it was in Galilei's time), to becoming symbolic power, after Algeria's independence. The point here is that the same power relationships reconfigured themselves, and remained unrecognized as such. This was the insight that made Bourdieu a sociologist.

As a quick illustration, imagine a young Kabylian man who, driven by economic necessity, has just moved to a city. Not only his sense of honor, but even the way he walks and talks are there unappealing, even to the young women who migrated from his very village—because they see something different in movies, and in restaurants...

What is truly revolutionary here is to consider the cultural and societal order of things as a source of power, and hence as a political issue. Even when this power does not manifest itself as ordinary violence, and is not even a result of conscious scheming. Bourdieu's keywords "symbolic power" and "symbolic capital" help us perceive and understand this new sort of power.

We elaborated on these ideas and also on Damasio's that we'll take up next here.

Descartes' Error

Bourdieu's sociological theories synergize most beautifully with the ideas of cognitive neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio.

The point here—which Damasio deftly coded into the very title of his book "Descartes' Error"—is that we are not the rational decision makers, as the founding fathers of the Enlightenment made us believe. Damasio showed that the very contents of our rational mind (our priorities, and what options we are at all capable to conceive of and consider) are controlled by a cognitive filter, which is pre-rational and embodied.

Damasio's theory synergizes beautifully with Bourdieu's "theory of practice", to which it gives a physiological explanation.

Who keeps Galilei in house arrest

We did not really liberate ourselves from the power structure; and from the negative socialization it engender. Our socialization only changed hands—no longer the prerogative of the kings and the clergy, it is now used to subjugate it to new power holders.

This terrain is all too familiar. The anecdotes shared below will serve to remind us how we ended up needing so much human development; and a cultural revival.

The mirror points to a leverage point

Our brief sketch points to academia (and not the Wall Street) as the systemic leverage point, which holds the capability to recreate our society's 'headlights', and hence "reality". The Mirror ideogram we use to summarize the academia's situation, pointing to a course of action—in a similar way as the Modernity ideogram summarizes the situation our society or civilization is in.

Our point

Mirror ideogram

We Mirror ideogram as a visual shorthand symbolizes two pivotal changes in academia's situation: the ending of innocence, and the beginning of accountability.

The end of innocence

It is no longer legitimate to claim the innocence of "objective observers of reality". By seeing ourselves in the mirror, we see that it has along been just us looking at the world, and creating representations of it.

The beginning of accountability

When we see ourselves in the mirror, we see ourselves in the world.

We must pause and self-reflect

As a symbol for the situation, which the academia's evolution so far has brought us to, the mirror demands that we interrupt the academic business as usual and self-reflect—about the meaning and purpose of our work. A genuine academic dialog in front of the mirror is the core of our practical proposal, our call to action.

Enormous gains can be made

The change of the relationship we have with information, which is the core of our proposal, is here symbolized as a perfectly feasible yet seemingly magical next step—through the mirror!

To the proposed dialog in front of the mirror we are offering our two prototypes—of the holoscope and of the holotopia—as models of the academic and the social reality on the other side of the mirror.

Hence our overall proposal—the way we've federated the results of The Club of Rome as summarized by Peccei—is that the academia should step through the mirror; and guide our society to a completely new reality, which awaits on the other side.

Truth by convention and design epistemology

Truth by convention is the truth that suits the design order of things. It is the new foundation stone, to CONSISTENTLY replace reification. 'Archimedean point' for giving knowledge once again the power to 'move the world'.

Design epistemology is what the Modernity ideogram is suggesting—information, and the way we handle it, are considered pieces in a larger puzzle or puzzles. Not the "objective reality" puzzle, but the REAL reality...

Information and implicit information

Information is defined as "recorded experience". The point is that any kind of record of experience is information. So information can be either explicit (where something is explicitly stated or claimed), and implicit (such as the mores of the tradition, beliefs, values etc. etc.). The point of this definition is to broaden the scope.

Visual literacy definition

Visual literacy

In 1969, four visionary researchers saw the need, and initiated the International Visual Literacy Association. What exactly did they see? We introduce their ideas by the following ideogram, see it commented here.

In the above picture the implicit information meets the explicit information in a direct duel. Who wins? Since this poster is a cigarette advertising, the answer is obvious.

And so is this conclusion:

While the official culture is focused on explicit messages and rational discourse, our popular culture is being dominated, and created, by implicit information—the imagery, which we have not yet learned to rationally decode, and counteract.

This prototype is a systemic intervention on a number of levels:

• It showed how an existing academic discipline can be given an explicit definition—and hence a (non-traditional) purpose and orientation
• It showed how to make a definition whose purpose is not reification (defining X to allow for distinguishing what "is" and "is not" X), but perspective (understanding the big point, the purpose of it all)
• It defined visual literacy as literacy concerned with implicit information—and implicit information as the way in which culture tends to be created, as we saw above

Furthermore, like a similar initiative to define "design", this initiative was well received by the corresponding academic community.