Holotopia: Socialized reality

H O L O T O P I A:    F I V E    I N S I G H T S

Socialized reality

The Enlightenment replaced one foundation stone (faith in the tradition, represented by the Scriptures), by another (trust in reason, empowered by knowledge)—and "a great cultural revival" was the result. Are the conditions ripe for a similar change today?

We will here be talking about "the core of our proposal"—about changing our very relationship with information.

Stories

"Reality" is a shaky foundation

"Correspondence with reality" cannot be verified. The very idea that what we see or experience or grasp by an "aha experience" corresponds to reality tends to be a product of illusion.

Why base our pursuit of knowledge—an all-important human activity—on a criterion that cannot be verified; and which itself tends to be a product of illusion?

To federate this point of view we provide two quotations. The first one is by Einstein and Infeld, from "The Evolution of Physics"; the second one is from Einstein's "Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge". Both are presented here.

"Reality" is constructed

Our mind (including our cognitive apparatus) is not a camera obscura; what we call "reality" is constructed by our mind and our culture.

Constructivism in physics

Even our common sense is a product of (our and our culture's) experience, with things such as pebbles and waves of water. We have no reason to believe that it will still function when applied to things we do not have in experience—such as small quanta of matter. A complete argument, based on the double-slit experiment, is in Oppenheimer's essay "Uncommon Sense".

By stating his "epistemological credo", in the introductory pages of his "Autobiographical Notes", Einstein too legitimized this position; see it quoted here.

Reality construction in biology, psychology and sociology

During the 20th century, the philosophical preoccupation with reality (how to find a way to reality by right thinking), gave way to the studies of the ways in which we construct reality—in biology of perception, psychology and sociology. In our commentary we represented them by Maturana, Piaget and Berger and Luckmann, see it (with introduction) here.

This experpt from Berger and Luckmann's classic "Social Construction of Reality" will be especially relevant:

As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such.

This theory about the nature of reality, then, becomes an instrument par excellence for legitimizing the given social reality:

Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become ‘problematic’. Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right – right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts.