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

We have come to the core of our response to Peccei—what is to be done, to begin "a great cultural revival" here and now.

The answer offered will be the same as the core of our proposal—to change the relationship we have with information.

Instead of conceiving "truth" as "an objective picture of reality", and considering the purpose of information to be to provide us "an objective picture of reality", we'll propose to consider information as human-made, and to tailor the way we handle it to the various and sometimes vitally important purposes that need to be served.

The key point here will be to perceive the very notion "reality" as an instrument of socialization.

Scope

This is not to say that reality "really is" that. What we are offering is a scope and a view, or insight. A way in which the wholeness of our culture—of the 'vehicle' whose purpose is to take us to wholeness—is 'cracked'.

Socialization

From the cradle to the grave, through innumerably many carrots and sticks, we are socialized to think and behave in a certain way. Socialization is really the way in whicy cultures function.

The question, then, is—Who does the socialization? In what way? And for what ends?

View

The answer, the view we are offering, is to perceive socialization as largely the prerogative of the power structure. And to perceive reification as an instrument by which people are coerced to accept a certain societal order of things without questioning it.

Further, we propose to perceive the academic tradition as an age-old effort to liberate ourselves from the power structure and the socialized "realities" it imposes—and to evolve further. Wasn't that the reason why Socrates, and Galilei, were tried?

There's been a new event in this age-old development. An error, a bug in the program, has been discovered. The Enlightenment gave us the homo sapiens self-identity. It made us believe that "a normal human being" sees the "reality" as it really is. And that it is a human prerogative to know and to understand "reality". Our democracy and other institutions, our knowledge work, our ethical sensibilities, the way we handle culture—all this has been built on this error as foundation.

We now own all the information needed to perceive this error; and means to correct it. And by doing that, to resume the evolution of knowledge; and of culture and society.

The core insight here is that by liberating ourselves from an age-old myth or a dogma, we can develop a foundation for working with knowledge that is at the same time perfectly robust and rigorous, creative beyond bounds and most importantly accountable.

Action

We propose (a way) to abandon "reality" as foundation altogether. To liberate ourselves from the power structure and the "reality" it's created for us. And to create a pragmatic approach to knowledge, which will accelerate the evolution of culture—on a similar scale and rate as the science and the technology have been evolving.

Stories

Einstein

Throughout our prototypes, Einstein represents "modern science" (if it were federated).

Closed watch argument

Explains why "correspondence with reality" cannot be rationally claimed.

Read it here (links will be provided).

Reality as illusion

Einstein argues that "reality" has been a product of illusion—the "aristocratic illusion" that reason can know "reality", prevalent in philosophy, and the "plebeian illusion" that "reality" is what we perceive through our senses.

Epistemological credo

In the introductory pages of his "Autobiographical notes", where he offers a quick journey through modern physics as he experienced it, Einstein states his "epistemological credo". The epistemology we are proposing is roughly equivalent to it. Already the fact that Einstein states his "epistemological credo" explicitly (instead of assuming that it's "obvious", and hence remaining in the paradigm or "reality" we've been socialized in) is significant.

Galilei

Galilei's claim that the Earth is moving was not a statement of how the things "really are", but a scope. As it is well known, we may place the frame of reference, or the coordinate system, in any way we like. The difference his scope made was, however, that it enabled rigorous, rational understanding of astrophysical phenomena; and ultimately the advent of "Newton's laws" and of science.

As Piaget wrote, "the mind organizes the world, by organizing itself.

Our situation is calling for another such step—where we'll create a way of looking at the world that will enable us to understand the social phenomena in a rigorous way, and to explore them in a way that 'works'.

Odin—Bourdieu—Damasio

Bourdieu's "theory of practice" is a sociological theory of socialization. The story of Bourdieu in Algeria tells how Bourdieu became a sociologist, by observing how the instruments of power morphed from torture chambers, weapons and censorship—and became symbolic.

Damasio contributed a solid academic result to show that we are not rational decision makers; that an embodied pre-rational filter controls what we are rationally able to conceive of.

Damasio's theory beautifully synergizes with Bourdieu's observations that etc. etc.

Bourdieu still saw the issue of power as a kind of a zero sum game (where some are winners, and others are losers). The story of Odin the horse serves to highlight a different possibility—that we may be playing turf games, and creating power structures for no better reason than serving an atavistic, self-destructive part of our psyche...

Antonovsky

Showed how important "sense of coherence is"—even for our health!

The power structure capitalizes on this vital need of ours, by providing us sense of coherence; but at what cost!?

In popular culture

The Matrix is an example of socialized reality.

The Reader is a more nuanced one.

King Oedipus is an archetypal story, showing how socialized reality can make us do exactly the things we are trying to avoid.

IVLA story

While our ethical and legal sensibilities are focused on explicit information, our culture, and our "human quality", are being shaped by the more subtle implicit information.

Literacy associated with implicit information

Chomsky—Harari—Graeber—Bakan

Here we have a Darwinian or memetic view of our culture's evolution. A complete explanation of power structure emergence, and our disempowerment.

Maturana—Piaget—Berger and Luckmann

Studies of reality construction in biology of perception, psychology and sociology.

Nietzsche—Ehrlich—Giddens—Debord

How we lost the personal capability to connect the dots...

Pavlov—Chakhotin

Politics (political propaganda) as socialization. What brought Hitler into power...

Freud—Bernays

For a long time Freud fought an uphill battle to convince the scientific community that we are not as rational as we may like to believe. His nephew turned his insights into good business.