STORIES

Federation through Keywords

– I cannot understand how anyone can make use of the frameworks of reference developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in order to understand the transformation into the post-traditional cosmopolitan world we live in today.

(Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society and Beyond, 2000)

To orient ourselves in the "post-traditional world" (where the traditional recipes no longer work), to step beyond "risk society" (where existential risks lurk in the dark, because we can neither comprehend nor resolve them by thinking as we did when we created them), we must step beyond our inherited or traditional "frameworks of reference", which keep us confined to the proverbial "box"; we must create new ways to think and speak—but how?

Here a technical idea—truth by convention—is key; I adopted it or more precisely federated it from Willard Van Orman Quine, who qualified the transition to "truth by convention" as a sign of maturing that the sciences have manifested in their evolution; so why not use it to mature our pursuit of knowledge as such? Truth by convention is the notion of truth that is usual in mathematics: Let x be... then... It is meaningless to argue whether x "really is" as defined.

Keywords are concepts defined by convention. When I define for instance "culture" by convention, and turn it into a keyword—I am not saying what culture "really is"; but creating a way of looking at an endlessly complex real thing; and projecting it, as it were, onto a plane—so that we may look at at it from a specific angle; and see it and talk about it precisely; and I'm inviting you, the reader, to see culture as it's been defined.

Defined by convention, institutions like "science" or "religion" are no longer reified as what they currently are—but defined as functions that those institutions have—or may need to fulfill; which offers us a way to give old institutions a function, and a new life.

Keyword creation is a form for linguistic and institutional recycling.

Often but not always, keywords are adopted from the repertoire of a frontier thinker, an academic field or a cultural tradition; they then enable us to federate what's been comprehended or experienced in some of our culture's dislodged compartments.

Keywords enable us to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and see further.

Ulrich Beck

Paradigm

I use the keyword paradigm informally, to point to a societal and cultural order of things as a whole; and to explain the strategy for solving "the huge problems now confronting us" that motivates this proposal—which is to enable the paradigm to change. Holotopia is a paradigm; and so is transdisciplinarity, as prototyped by knowledge federation.

We see the emerging paradigm when we connect the dots.

I use the keyword elephant as a nickname to holotopia when I want to be even more informal—and highlight that in a paradigm everything depends on everything else, as the organs of an elephant do; and to motivate the strategy I just mentioned, by pointing to what might seem as a paradox—namely that comprehensive change, of a paradigm as a whole, can be natural and easy even when small and obviously necessary changes may have proven impossible: It is useless to try to fit an elephant's ear onto a mouse; but a paradigm can change effortlessly, almost all by itself—when the circumstances for such a change are ripe.

We live in such a time.

When all the data points for seeing the paradigm we have as dysfunctional and obsolete, and for manifesting a new and radically better one are already there; so that all that remained to be done is—to connect the dots; or more precisely—to restore our collective capability to connect the dots.

The elephant was in the room when the 20th century’s giants wrote or spoke; but we failed to see him because the jungleness of our information; and because of disciplinary and cultural fragmentation; and because our thinking and communication are still as the tradition shaped them. We heard the giants talk about a ‘thick snake’, a ‘fan’, a ‘tree-trunk’ and a ‘rope’, often in Greek or Latin; they didn’t make sense and we ignored them. How differently our information fares when we understand that it was the ‘trunk’, the ‘ear’, the ‘leg’ and the ‘tail’ of a vast exotic ‘animal’ they were talking about; whose very existence we still ignore!

The Liberation book undertakes to facilitate the paradigm change by drafting an analogy between our contemporary situation and the times and conditions when Galilei was in house arrest, when a landslide paradigm change was about to take place; and by giving the reader a glimpse of the emerging paradigm; and by diagnosing the problem—what exactly hinders us from connecting the dots; and by fostering a social process that will empower us to remedy this problem; and continue cultural evolution.

I use the keyword paradigm also more formally, as Thomas Kuhn did—to point to

• a different way to conceive a domain of interest, which
• resolves the reported anomalies and
• opens a new frontier to research and development.

Only here the domain of interest is not a conventional academic field, where paradigm changes have been relatively common—but information and knowledge at large.

Materialism

– The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

(Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix.)

We may now theorize also our existing paradigm. Here materialism is not our contemporary condition as it is—but a theoretical or "ideal" one; where material or "objective reality" itself serves as (the foundation to) the reference system for creating truth and meaning. You'll easily comprehend materialism if you think of our society as a bus rushing at accelerating speed, steered by avoiding trees and ravines: Under materialism, it is "success" and "failure" in "the world" that determine what's considered worth doing. We may also theorize materialism with the help of tradition and design as (theoretical or ideal) ways of evolving and and acting and being in the world; where tradition is inherently conservative (being the manner of evolving that depends on people conforming to what's been inherited, whether they understand it or not), and design is inherently creative: A traditional approach to knowledge will rely on reifying the inherited concepts and order of things, and importantly institutions; so that "religion" is understood as the corresponding existing institutions and belief systems, "science" is what the scientists are doing etc. It is clear that this approach to information and knowledge will make us incapable of comprehending our post-traditional order of things and unraveling the new risks it has brought us.

You may also comprehend materialism as a stage in cognitive evolution. "Doxa" is the keyword that Pierre Bourdieu used (he adopted it from Max Weber; but its usage dates at least as far back as to Aristotle) to point to an interesting cognitive phenomenon: The more familiar and related word "orthodoxy" means believing that one's own worldview or paradigm is the only "right" one; "doxa" ignores even the existence of alternatives; it makes one believe that the existing social reality is in a similar way immutable and real as the physical reality is. To comprehend doxa it is sufficient to imagine that the cognitive mechanisms that the biological ancestors of the homo sapiens developed to orient themselves in physical reality were simply adapted and applied for our societal and cultural "reality"; and used by traditional cultures to develop various instruments of "socialization" and "acculturation". You may now understand materialism as an order of things where "doxa" is how the mind is applied to matters in society and culture. There is nothing in principle wrong with materialism; it's just that it will tend to make us stay put in whatever societal order of things we happen to have—regardless of how obsolete or dysfunctional it may be.

Doxa is the reason why we have candles as headlights.

We simply reified the source of illumination we had, which we've inherited from the past, as headlights! And if we we handled—or mis-handled in this way the system whose function is to provide us vision—one must wonder what other similar errors we may have made, without noticing!

Truth by convention can now be seen as the necessary technical solution—the way to overcome the spell of reification; and move the evolution of culture forward.

Logos

“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”

(René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641)

The natural and perhaps the only way a paradigm can change is by changing the way people think; or the way we use our minds, as I prefer to see it; because by and large—the way we use the mind is our paradigm. So I turned "knowledge federation" into a keyword; intending to use it as a banner, to demarcate the creative frontier where we'll be empowered to do as Descartes and his colleagues did at the point of inception of science—start all the way from the foundation; and rebuild the foundation; and use the new foundation to be creative as they were—and re-create the way we go about pursuing knowledge; so that all the rest can change based on knowledge-based.

"In the beginning was logos and logos was with God and logos was God." I use the word logos to motivate this step; by pointing to the historicity of the way we use the mind; that it has changed in the past and will change again. To Hellenic thinkers logos was the principle according to which God organized the world; which makes it possible to us humans to comprehend the world correctly—provided we align with it the way we use our minds. How exactly we may achieve that—there the opinions differed; and gave rise to a multitude of philosophical schools and traditions.

But "logos" faired poorly in the post-Hellenic world; neither Latin nor the modern languages provided a suitable translation. For about a millennium the Europeans believed that logos had been revealed to us humans by God's own son; and considered questioning that to constitute the deadly sin of pride, and a heresy.

The scientific revolution unfolded as a reaction to earlier "teleological" or theological explanations of natural phenomena; as Noam Chomsky pointed out in his University of Oslo talk "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding", its founders insisted that a "scientific" explanation must not rely on a 'ghost' acting within 'the machine'; that the natural phenomena must be explained in ways that are completely comprehensible to the mind—as one would explain the workings of a clockwork.

Science assumed its contemporary pivotal social role—of "the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture" as Benjamin Lee Whorf called it in Language, Thought and Reality—"without intending to"; that was a side-effect of historical and accidental developments. Initially, science and church or tradition coexisted side by side—the latter providing the know-what and the former the know-how; but then right around mid-19th century, when Darwin stepped on the scene, the way to use the mind that science brought along discredited the mindset of tradition; and it appeared to educated masses that science was the answer; that science was the right way to knowledge.

The key to comprehending how exactly I propose to correct the error I've been telling you about, and modernize the way we think or use the mind, and rebuild the foundation—is in the rather amusing ambiguity of the word "foundation"; which I turned into a keyword in order to give it an entirely different meaning than what Descartes intended in the sentence I just quoted. Because to Descartes and his colleagues the aim was to build the "edifice" of knowledge that is "true" in an objective sense—which would allow us to know "reality" as it truly is; so that—once it's been established so solidly and firmly—this knowledge will last forever. And so naturally—given this mindset—they conceived and instituted science as a way to find this solid and unchanging truth; and to gradually expand this solid and ever-lasting edifice of knowledge.

It was in this way that we ended up with 'candles' as 'headlights'.

Their actual function was never even considered; and this function anyhow subsequently expanded and changed beyond recognition.

What I mean by foundation is what our pursuit of knowledge is founded on; and what the continuities in cultural evolution depend on; so that when this foundation changes—we need to secure that the new foundation is broad enough to hold all cultural heritage—and support its continued evolution; and solid enough so that we may rely on the edifice of knowledge it served to develop.

Rene Descartes

Design epistemology

“[T]he nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people."

(Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1958.)

You'll comprehend the anomaly that this fundational of holotopia's five points undertakes to resolve, if (in addition to what I just said) you consider the fact that the belief on which "the whole edifice" was founded (that the true and lasting knowledge of reality is revealed to the mind as sensation of absolute clarity and certainty; which Descartes immortalized by his epitaph "I think, therefore I am")—was subsequently disproved and disowned by science itself. When scientists became able to zoom in on the small quanta of energy-matter—they found them behaving in ways that could not be explained in the "classical" way (as Descartes and his Enlightenment colleagues demanded); and even that they contradicted contradicted our common sense (as J. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out in Uncommon Sense). Just as the case was at the time of Copernicus—a different way to see the world, and use the mind was necessary to enable the physical science to continue to evolve.

Which now constitutes a compelling academic or fundamental reason (in addition to the pragmatic reasons I've been telling you about) to revisit the foundation (on which we pursue knowledge and secure that culture evolves)! And this was precisely what Werner Heisenberg undertook to point out—when he wrote Physics and Philosophy, in 1958: That the foundation that our general culture imbibed from 19th century science was "so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul or of life." Since "the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided", whatever failed to be founded in this way was considered impossible or unreal. This in particular applied to those parts of our culture in which our ethical sensibilities were rooted, such as religion, which "seemed now more or less only imaginary. [...] The confidence in the scientific method and in rational thinking replaced all other safeguards of the human mind."

The experience of modern physics constituted a rigorous disproof of this approach to knowledge, Heisenberg explained; and concluded that "one may say that the most important change brought about by its results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century." He wrote Physics and Philosophy anticipating that the most valuable gift of modern physics to humanity would be a cultural transformation; which would result from the dissolution of the narrow frame.

As an insight, design eistemology shows that a broad and solid foundation for truth and meaning, and for knowledge and culture, can be developed by following the approach (knowledge federation) that is the subject of this proposal.

The design epistemology originated by federating the state-of-the-art epistemological findings of the giants of 20th century science and philosophy; which I'll here illustrate by quoting a single one—Einstein's "epistemological credo"; which he left us, as his testament, in Autobiographical Notes:

“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 [scientific] inquiry in the first place.”

Design epistemology turns Einstein's "epistemological credo" into a convention.

And adds to it a purpose or function—which I've been telling you about all along.

Since it expresses the phenomenological position (that it is human experience and not "objective reality" that information needs to communicate and make comprehensible), the design epistemology gives us a way to overcome the narrow frame handicap that Heisenberg was objecting to: All cultural artifacts, including rituals, mores and beliefs, can be seen as embodying human experience; instead of simply ignoring what fails to fit our worldview—design epistemology empowers us and even obliges us to carefully consider and federate all forms of human experience that could be relevant to a theme or task at hand.

By convention, human experience has no a priori structure, which we can or need to "discover"; rather, experience is considered as something to which we assign meaning (as one would assign the meaning to an inkblot in Rorschach test). Multiple interpretations or insights or gestalts are always possible; and our task is to identify and produce those that will correct our comprehension and action.

Design epistemology as foundation is broad.

Furthermore, the design epistemology expresses also the constructivist position (that we are constructing interpretations of experience, not "discovering" objectively pre-existing ones) as a convention; and adds to it a purpose (to provide us "evolutionary guidance", or know-what).

Design epistemology as foundation is also solid.

Or "academically rigorous"; because it represents the epistemological state of the art; and because it's a convention. The added purpose can hardly be debated—not only because doing what's necessary to avoid civilizational collapse is hard to argue against; but also because this too is a convention; a different convention, and an altogether different way to knowledge can be created by this approach; to suit a different function.

Appeals to legitimate transdisciplinarity academically—if they were at all considered—were routinely rejected on the account that they lacked "academic rigor". I'm afraid it will turn out that the contemporary academic conception of "rigor" is based on not much more than the sensation of certainty and clarity we experience when we've followed a certain prescribed procedure to the letter—as Stephen Toulmin suggested in his last book Return to Reason. It was logos Toulmin was urging us to return to; and that's what knowledge federation initiative undertakes to enable.

Werner Heisenberg

Polyscopic methodology

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

(Abraham Maslow, Psychology of Science, 1966)

You'll comprehend the anomaly this holotopia's insight points to, if you see method—the category the polyscopic methodology pillar in the Holotopia ideogram stems from—as the toolkit with which we construct truth and meaning; and consider that—as Maslow pointed out—this method is now so specialized, that it compels us to be specialized; and choose our themes and set our priorities (not based on whether they are practically relevant or not, but) according to what this tool enables us to do.

As an insight, the polyscopic methodology points out that a general-purpose methodology (where logos is applied to method), which alleviates this problem, can be created by the proposed approach; by federating the findings of giants of science and the very techniques that have been developed in the sciences; so as to preserve the advantages of science—and alleviate its limitations.

Design epistemology mandates such a step: When we on the one hand acknowledge that (as far as we know) there is no conclusive truth about reality; and on the other hand, that our very existence depends on information and knowledge—we are bound to be accountable for providing knowledge about the most relevant themes (notably the ones that determine our society's evolutionary course) as well as we are able; and to of course continue to improve both our knowledge and our ways to knowledge.

As long as "reality" and its "objective" descriptions constitute our reference system and provide it a foundation—we have no way of evaluating our paradigm critically. The polyscopic methodology empowers us to develop the realm of ideas as an independent reference system; where ideas are founded (not on "correspondence with reality" but) on truth by convention; and then use clearly and rigorously defined ideas to develop clear and rigorous theories—in all walks of life; as it has been common in natural sciences. Suitable theoretical constructs, notably the patterns (defined as "abstract relationships", which have in this generalized science a similar role as mathematical functions do in traditional sciences) enable us to formulate general results and theories, including the gestalts; suitable justification methods (I prefer the word "justification" to the commonly used word "proof", for obvious reasons) can then be developed as social processes; as an up-to-date alternative to "peer reviews" (which have, needless to say, originated in a world where "scientific truth" was believed to be "objective" and ever-lasting).

The details of polyscopic methodology or polyscopy are beyond this brief sketch; and I'll only give you this hint: Once it's been formulated and theorized in the realm of ideas, a pattern can be used to justify a result; since (by convention) the substance of it all is human experience, and since (by convention) experience does not have an a priori "real" structure that can or needs to be "discovered"—a result can be configured as the claim that the dots can be connected in a specific way (as shown by the pattern) and make sense; and its justification can be conceived in a manner that resembles the "repeatable experiment"—which is "repeatable" to the extent that different people can see the pattern in the data. This social social process can then further be refined to embody also other desirable characteristics, such as "falsifiability"; I'll come back to this in a moment, and also show an example.

Abraham Maslow

Convenience paradox

“The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future.”

(Aurelio Peccei, One Hundred Pages for the Future, 1981)

You'll appreciate the relevance of the convenience paradox insight if you consider the category it stems from, values—in the context of our contemporary condition: The pursuit of material production and consumption (our society's evolutionary course that the word materialism here designates) needs to be urgently changed; but to what; and in what way? It seems that everyone who has looked into this question a bit more carefully concluded that the pursuit of humanistic or cultural goals and values will have to be the answer; you can hear this straight from the horse's mouth.

And you'll see the anomaly this point points to if you consider that materialism's way to use the mind considers as possible or relevant or "real" only "the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided", as Heisenberg pointed out; which in the realm of values translates into convenience—whereby those things and only those things that appear attractive to our senses are considered as really worth pursuing (technical science here won't be of much help); and notice that this way ('in the light of a candle') of conceiving the know-what leaves in the dark one whole dimension of physical reality—time; and also an important side or one could even say the important 'half' of the three dimensions of space—its inner or embodied part; I emphasize its importance because while "happiness" (or whatever else we may choose to pursue on similar grounds) appears to be "caused" by events in the outer world—it is inside us that our emotions materialize; and it is there that the difference that makes a difference can and needs to be made.

Did you notice, by the way—when you watched the video I've just shared (and if you haven't watched it, do it now; because it's the state of the world diagnosed by the world's foremost expert—who studied and federated this question for more than four decades—condensed in a six-minute trailer)—how Dennis Meadows, while of course pointing in the right direction, was searching for words that would do it justice; and came up with little more than "knowledge", and "music"?

This is where the Liberation book really takes off!

Its entire first half (its first five chapters) is dedicated to mapping not only specific opportunities, but five whole realms where we may dramatically improve our condition through inner development; whereby a roadmap to inner wholeness is drafted, as the book calls it. The Liberation book opens with an amusing little ruse—where a note about freedom and democracy is followed by the observation that we are free to "pursue happiness as we please"; and I imagined the reader would say "Sure—what could possibly be wrong about that?" But what do we really know about "happiness"? And whether "happiness" is at all what we out to be pursuing? Perhaps "love" could be a better choice? So let me for a moment zoom in on "love" as theme; which hardly needs an explanation—considering how much, both in our personal lives and in our culture, revolves around it: "My baby's gone, and I got the blues, It sure is awful to be lonsesome like me, Worried, weary up in a tree." The Liberation book invites us to look at this theme from a freshly different viewpoint: What sort of "love"—or what quality of love—are any of us really capable of experiencing? Can you imagine a world where (instead of worrying whether "she loves me or not") we are culturally empowered to cultivate love; and our ability to experience love, and importantly—our ability to give love? In the third chapter of the Liberation book, which has "Liberation of Emotions" as title, the phenomenological evidence for illuminating this and related questions is drawn from the tradition of Sufism; in order to demonstrate that love has a spectrum of possibilities that reaches far beyond the outreach of our common experience and even awareness; and that certain kinds of practice, which combine poetry and music with meditation and ethical behavior, can make us, in the long run capable of experiencing the kind of love whose very existence we ignore; which will then make our experience of poetry and music too too incomparably more nuanced and rewarding.

Convenience paradox is the point of a very large information holon; which asserts (and invites us to turn it into shared and acted-upon awareness, to give it the sortof status and treatment that "Newton's Laws" enjoy today) that convenience is a useless and deceptive "value", behind which a myriad opportunities to improve our lives and condition—through cultural pursuits—await to be uncovered; whose rectangle is populated by a broad range of—curated—ways to improve our condition through cultural pursuits or by human development (which Peccei qualified as the most important goal).

Aurelio Peccei

Knowledge federation

“Many years ago, I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems."

(Doug Engelbart, "Dreaming of the Future*, BYTE Magazine, 1995)

You'll comprehend the relevance of this holotopia's point if you think of communication—the category from which it stems—as the technology-enabled social process by which relatively autonomous individuals are organized into a 'collective organism' of society; which determines this collective organism's capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems. You'll see the anomaly it undertakes to unravel if you consider that the "digital technology"—the interactive, network-interconnected digital media you and I use to read email and browse the Web—has been envisioned (by Doug Engelbart—in 1951 already!) and developed (by his SRI-based team, and publicly demonstrated in 1968) to sere as "a collective nervous system" and enable a quantum leap in the evolution of our social organisms (by giving them a collective mind , and hence vision, and awareness); and that this technology is still largely used to send back and forth messages and publish or broadcast documents—i.e. to implement and speed up the sort of processes that the old technologies of communication made possible. You'll have a glimpse of the depth of this anomaly if you consider that our most creative and best qualified minds are still busy producing pages and pages of text—even though it's been diagnosed very long ago that a different social process must be in place to make this production useful (but needless to say, those warnings too got lost in "information glut").

Our 2010 workshop—where we began to self-organize as a transdiscipline—was called "Self-Organizing Collective Mind"; we invited a couple of dozen of hand-picked experts—to represent the spectrum of expertise that a transdiscipline of this kind may require—and asked them to self-organize in a way that would enable collective mind re-evolution in other society's systems. The creative leaders of Program for the Future—the R & D community that Mei Lin Fung initiated in Palo Alto to continue and complete the work on implementing Engelbart's vision—were part of this initiative since its inception.

Knowledge Federation's Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015 workshop in Sava Center, Belgrade.

As an insight, knowledge federation stands for the fact that a radically better communication is possible; which will make the sort of difference the Modernity ideogram points to. We made this point transparent by developing a portfolio of prototypes—real-life models of socio-technical systems in communication; which I'll here illustrate by briefly showing our Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015 prototype; where a result of an academic researcher, Dejan Raković of the University of Belgrade, was federated in three phases:

• the first phase made the result comprehensible to lay audiences; by turning this technical research article into a multimedia object (by knowledge federation's communication design team) where its main points were extracted and made comprehensible by explanatory diagrams or ideograms; and further clarified by (placing on them links to) recorded interviews with the author
• the second phase made the result known and at the same time discussed in space—by staging a televised high-profile dialog at Sava Center Belgrade
• the third phase constituted a technology-enabled global social process (we used DebateGraph) by which the result was processed further, .

Also the theme of Raković's result was relevant to our purpose: He first demonstrated phenomenologically (by referring to Nikola Tesla's own descriptions of his creative process) that the "outside the box" creativity we now vitally need requires a different way to use the mind and different ecology of mind from what's become usual; and then theorized this creative process within the paradigm of quantum physics. Just imagine if the way we (teach the young people how to) think at our schools and universities is the kind that the machines are now capable of doing—and unlike what we humans out to be doing at this pivotal moment of our history! "So you are developing a collective Tesla", Serbian TV anchor commented while interviewing our representative; and rendered the gist of our initiative better than I have been able to.

Doug Engelbart

Systemic innovation

“The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it. With technology having become the most powerful change agent in our society, decisive battles will be won or lost by the measure of how seriously we take the challenge of restructuring the ‘joint systems’ of society and technology.”

(Erich Jantsch, Integrative PLanning for the "Joint Systems" of Society and Technology—the Emerging Role of the University, MIT Report,1969)

You'll see the relevance of that this insight if you imagine the systems in which we live and work as gigantic machines, comprising people and technology; and acknowledge that they determine how we live and work, and importantly—whether the effects of our work will be problems, or solutions. We had a professional photographer at our Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015 event in Belgrade; and she photographed me showing my smartphone to the people in the dialog; which I did to point to the surreal contrast between the dexterity that went into to creation of the minute little thing I was holding in my hand—and the complete negligence of those incomparably larger and equally more important systems we now vitally depend on—to give us vision! You'll begin to see the anomaly this point points to, if you—considering that the system whose function is to (help us) give direction to our creative efforts (by providing us know-what) is still a 'candle'—ask What about all others? How suitable are our financial system, our governance, our international corporation and our education for their all-important roles? Don't they too need to be adapted to the exigences of the post-traditional cosmopolitan world we live in?

In Chapter Seven of the Liberation book I introduced Erich Jantsch's legacy and vision most briefly (and left the details to Book Two of holotopia series) by qualifying them as environmental movement's forgotten history; and its ignored theory; which we need to be able to act instead of only reacting. And I introduced systemic innovation (where we update the systems in which we live and work)—whose name I adopted from Jantsch and turned into a keyword—by outlining most briefly my 2013 talk "Toward a Scientific Comprehension and Handling of Problems"; where I drafted a parallel between systemic innovation and scientific medicine—which distinguishes itself by comprehending and handling unwanted symptoms in terms of the anatomy and pathophysiology that underlie them!

Bánáthy wrote in Designing Social Systems in a Changing World: “I have become increasingly convinced that [people] cannot give direction to their lives, they cannot forge their destiny, they cannot take charge of their future—unless they also develop the competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and reclaim their right to do so. This is what true empowerment is about.” For a while I contemplated calling this insight "The systems, stupid!"—and paraphrasing Bill Clinton's 1992 winning electoral slogan "The Economy, stupid!" Well, of course—in a society where the survival of businesses depends on their ability to sell people things—you have to keep the economy growing if you want to keep business profitable and people employed. But economic growth is not "the solution to our problem"! Systemic innovation is—being (by definition) what makes us capable of adapting systems to their function; instead of letting them shape and dictate what we do and how—all the way to the bitter end.

At knowledge federation's 2011 workshop at Stanford University, within the Triple Helix IX international conference, I introduced systemic innovation as an emerging and necessary or remedial trend in innovation; and (the organizational structure developed and represented by) knowledge federation as an (institutional or systemic) enabler of systemic innovation. We work by creating a prototype of a system and organizing a transdiscipline around it—to update it according to the state-of-the-art insights that its members bring from their disciplines; and to strategically change the corresponding real-life system or systems.

Erich Jantsch

Holoscope

See things whole.

The holoscope principle.

You may now be sensing some of that enlightened optimism that distinguishes the holotopia: We do not need to wrestle with "the 1%"; we don't need to convince the politicians; information—as the most powerful medium, the strategic leverage point for changing course—is in our hands; in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there look up to us to tell them how to think (and we also have education in our control); we have the prerogative to say what information needs to be like. To ignite the paradigm change—all we really need to do is to revive and revisit some of those age-old "philosophical" or "academic" questions; not just in academic fora, of course—but bring them out there into the world, among the people, where they can and need to make a difference; or in a word—we need to federate those academic themes.

You'll see the power of this approach even more clearly if you now take a (metaphorical) step back (or if you go further up the metaphorical mountain)—and look at an even larger picture; which you'll also see if you take another look at the Holotopia ideogram.

Were two of the ten themes have special roles, and are highlighted. The first (going upward) has the label information; and connects polyscopic methodology (and method as category) on its left with knowledge federation (and communication as category) on its right.

It is only when we've did our job on the theory or methodology side, and explained what information needs to be like—including both its structure and its methods and processes—that we become capable of implementing the corresponding social process and recreate our communication. And furthermore, and most importantly—it is the combination of this theoretical act (and of course all the empowerment that goes with it, through education etc.) with the actual creation of (processes of) information—that provides us a uniquely powerful basis for solving "the huge problems now confronting us"; by changing an obsolete paradigm.

In the holotopia context this larger-than-life opportunity is pointed to by the coined idiom see things whole as the missing guiding principle or rule of thumb—which will direct (how we handle) information; and by holoscope as keyword met aphorizing information as the 'instrument' that will result and enable us to see things whole.

Holotopia

Make things whole.

The holotopia principle.

One more horizontal line comes forth to meet the eye on the Holotopia ideogram—the one that has "action" as label; and joins convenience paradox on the left with systemic innovation on the right; which points to another all-important synergy: It is only when we've comprehended how vast are the opportunities to improve our inner or personal wholeness—that we'll know that the pursuit of success or fortune in the systems as they are has a radically better alternative; and be ready and indeed eager to reconfigure our systems, so that they make the pursuit of our inner wholeness possible. And vice versa—it is by adapting our systems to the functions they need to serve in our society (instead of letting them evolve as means to give us a competitive advantage against other systems, or in other words as (part of) the power structure—that we'll have the free time and the peace of mind necessary for developing those finer potentialities that will bring us into the next phase of our evolution.

All five points point to a single course of action—as the way to pursue and manifest the potentialities of both our inner and our societal or environmental wholeness: Make things whole.

"A way to change course" is now as simple as one-two-three-go; where

• One is to update the way we use the mind; to correct the foundation on which we are building the edifice of knowledge
• Two is to update information—to enable us tosee things whole
• Three is act differently—and make things whole.

Power structure

“Modernity did not make people more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people. Under the sign of modernity, evil does not need any more evil people. Rational people, men and women well riveted into the impersonal, adiaphorized network of modern organization, will do perfectly.”

(Zygmunt Bauman Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, 1995)

All this was "known" a half-century ago; and yet this simple and obvious "go" remained—a no-go!

Before we can reasonably undertake to solve "the huge problems now confronting us"—we must diagnose them correctly.

Power structure is not one of holotopia's five points; but it is a theme that permeates the Liberation book; one could say that the "liberation" is the liberation from power structure. The power structure theory in a fractal-like way displays the essence of holotopia as paradigm and the challenges and the nature of the impending paradigm change.

Before I tell you more about it, it may be useful to bring all this down to earth by telling you how I became interested in this theme; how I experienced the power structure. When in 1995 I reconfigured my academic work all the way from algorithm theory, which was the theme of my dissertation, in order to focus fully to basic questions regarding information, and began to develop some of these ideas and see the depth and breadth of the frontier that was opening up in front of me—I expected a completely different reaction on the part of my academic friends and colleagues than what actually happened. I expected a spirited conversation; and perhaps disbelief to begin with. But the spirited conversation I expected never happened; not even with my closest academic friends! What I got instead was—silence; and a vague sense of discomfort; obviously I was doing something I wasn't supposed to do; but even that was not articulated. Having been trained as a theoretical scientist, practically as a mathematician, it was not difficult to me to realize that the reasoning mind has a certain (rather narrowly confined) domain of definition or application; as mathematical operations and functions do; beyond which is a vast taboo zone. At first this was a disconcerting and even disheartening experience: What hope do we have to ever come to terms with "the huge problems now confronting us"—without being able to think or talk about them in a way that can lead to solutions? But then I realized that what I was witnessing was the problem; which we'll have to study and diagnose and remedy before we can reasonably hope to liberate ourselves from the spell of the paradigm and continue evolving.

So I undertook a systematic study of relevant areas, including of course the humanities, which I knew very little about; and applied the methodology I was developing to developing a high-level view of the relationship between power and belief. The power structure theory resulted.

As a keyword, the power structure is an update to the traditional ideas of political "enemy" and (as a) power monger or power holder (threat to our liberties). It is an invisible and unrecognized contemporary enemy that holds logos or evolution of knowledge and culture or (metaphorically) 'Galilei' in check. But power structure is not a conspiracy theory but the exact opposite: It is not a clique of conspirators somewhere out there scheming against us—but it's all of us working against our best interests, and even intentions; perfectly unaware that there might be a power problem in all of this.

Technically, power structure is not a physical entity but a pattern (abstract relationship); comprising three identifiable entities—power interests, information (and our ideas and awareness) and wholeness (both outer or systemic, and inner or human quality)—and their subtle relationships. The relationships are not physical but evolutionary; basic insights from technical fields (stochastic optimization, artificial intelligence and artificial life) are used to establish the possibility or existence and the nature of those relationships; basic insights from humanities (work of Hannah Arendt, Zygmund Bauman; Pierre Bourdieu's work related to "symbolic power", and his "theory of practice" that explains its dynamic; and Antonio Damasio's revolutionary insights in cognitive neuroscience, expounded in his book appropriately titled Descartes' Error, are used to theorize and justify it. The point of it all is that the power interests, the condition of our world and our selves and in particular the condition and structure of our systems and importantly our society-and-culture's 'software", including our values, ideas, worldviews etc—are so closely related that we need to see them as one single entity. The power structures exist at distinct levels of generality or details—so that smaller power structures compose together those larger ones; the power structure theory shows (and explains why) they are all so closely related (because they co-evolve and by co-evolving adjust to each other) that we are justified in seeing it all as just the (one single) power structure.

Several metaphors can be used to make this new sort of entity comprehensible and palpable. One of them is cancer: The power structure is not a thing but a deformation of society's healthy organs and tissues; which—if allowed to grow uncontrolled, if the society's 'immune system' is not equipped to counteract it and handle it—can proliferate and be fatal. Here the holoscope fits right in—as 'instrument' that is necessary for diagnosing this problem (just as the microscope has been instrumental in comprehending and diagnosing human diseases).

Another metaphor is to see the subtle power as a magnetic field; and self-interest that stems from self-centeredness as 'magnetism'; which harmonizes with Pierre Bourdieu's notions "field" and "game", which he used to point to roughly the same dynamic and phenomenon. Here you may imagine us immersed in a magnetic field, which subtly orients our seemingly free movement and behavior; as iron chips may be aligned with the field of a magnet. But here it is better to imagine us the people as small magnets—where magnetism is our (narrowly perceived) self-interest. As we align our own power with the field—the field becomes stronger. The power structure also 'gamifies' our social existence.

Arendt's "banality of evil" is here most useful as a concept; and the analogy with the Holocaust—which Bauman so thoroughly developed. His point being that Holocaust was not some odd thing that happened to modernity—but just an extreme symptom of its own pervasive problem and nature; which—by being so extreme—invites us and even obliges us to comprehend it and theorize it correctly.

I am considering to use geocide as keyword; in order to energize this all-important consideration. The point being that we are about to commit a "banal evil" that vastly surpasses anything that happened in the past—just by being passive; just by "doing our job" within "adiaphorized" institutions (Bauman used this keyword "adiaphorized" to point to the way of thinking or using the mind that is the main point here; which is rational in a mechanistic way—i.e. devoid of any ethical or emotional content; we do something because it's "our job", or "good business" etc. The BIG point of it all is that to be culpable of geocide—it suffices to just think and act in this "adiaphorized" way.

To be part of the power structure—and hence part of the problem—it suffices to "play the game"...

The power structure theory can be used to explain and understood a spectrum of familiar phenomena in a new way; the relationship between religious belief and worldly power, which the Galilei metaphor (with which the Liberation book begins) points to. We may now see that the beliefs that kept the evolution of knowledge in check have nothing to do with religion as such; that they had everything to do with the social role that the institutions of religion had. Could something similar be happening today again, without us noticing? In Chapter Nine of Liberation, which has "Liberation of Science" as title, I quote from Berger and Luckmann's sociology classic Social Construction of Reality; where they wrote:

“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.”

You may now comprehend this proposal and initiative as a political act; whose aim is to liberate us from "reality"–based legitimations of contemporary "habitualization and institutionalization".

The power structure theory sets the stage for holotopian politics.

Which is no longer "us against them" as it has been through history—but all of us against the power structure.

That the revolution to which I'm inviting you will be pursued (not through confrontation but) through collaboration!

Zygmunt Bauman

Dialog

“As long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved.”

(David Bohm, Problem and Paradox.)

When the way we use the mind is the root of our problems—then this is no longer a problem but a paradox; which turns all our "problems" into paradoxes!

The function of the dialog is to dissolve the paradox.

The point here is that the dialog is not a conversation; it is not even a system; it is a function in society or culture and an evolving prototype implementing this function. The function is the liberation of logos from materialism or power structure; and our own liberation through logos. The key to it all is to develop an entirely different way to be together; and communicate, and collaborate; which is not self-centered but on the contrary—where we liberate ourselves from the spell of "the world" in order to genuinely see and re-create the world.

The Liberation book is not a book in the classical sense—a way to tell you some interesting things about the world and ourselves; it is part of the dialog whose function is to prime the dialog.

Dialog may also be seen as an antidote to the media "spectacle" that keeps us immersed in "the world"—which produces another, real spectacle; where real people collaborate to liberate themselves from nonsense and rise to the occasion—and be part of an evolutionary quantum leap; and evolve an ecology of mind or "public sphere" that gives awareness to democracy.

David Bohm