Pitch

All those candles

Without giving it a thought, we adopted from the traditional culture a myth incomparably more subversive than the myth of creation. This myth has served as the foundation on which our culture has developed.

Looking at Galilei's time and situation, we wonder why it was so difficult for those people back then to see those simple facts—that the Earth is just one of the planets in the Solar system... and that the human mind does have the capacity to understand the world. But by doing that, we fail to recognize the real gift that the story of Galilei has in store for us—the insight into the human condition, whereby it is recognized that we humans can be socialized to believe in almost anything!

Hence instead of being caught up in a battle that was waged and won centuries ago, we must ask whether we too have our socialized reality, which we are now called upon to overgrow, and overcome.

Scope

We have come to the very heart of our matter—our culture's invisible foundations. Our analysis of those foundations is in two parts; we here take up the values, which determine what we consider worth preserving, creating, knowing and acting on. Related to the narrow frame insight we take up the language, the method and other tools which decide what can and can not be built, preserved and considered as "culture".

Recall that we are developing an analogy with Galilei's time and conditions, in response to Aurelio Peccei's diagnoses and recommendations. There can be no doubt that what was going on in Galilei's time was exactly the kind of change that Peccei's calls to action were pointing to. Galilei stands here in an iconic role—representing for us the idea that the reason can be empowered to challenge the conventional wisdom, and the time-honored truths written in the Scripture. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

We are about to see not only a positive answer to that question—but also that this answer follows logically from the information we already own.

In addition to design and tradition, we define and use here another pair of keywords, epistemology and socialization. They will enable us to talk about our theme (how we know that something is "true" or "good" etc.). One might say that the tradition evolves and functions by socialization; and that a post-traditional culture must rely on epistemology. That would be a useful simplification—but an oversimplification none the less.

So let us rather recognize that socialization is and has always been the way in which the human cultures operate. Already in the cradle, and long before our capacity to reflect about those matters has grown, we adopt from our parents patterns of speech and behavior. At school, through innumerably many carrots and sticks, we learn to distinguish between "right" and "wrong". It is best to understand a culture as we understand an ecosystem—where everything depends on everything else; and whose wholeness can be disrupted by human action.

Notice that tradition is our ideal keyword. A culture is by definition capable of producing wholeness through spontaneous evolution, by trial and error and the survival of the fittest. The question is whether we are still capable of doing that, in the post-traditional culture we've created.

The meaning of epistemology may best be explained by looking at the academic tradition through the stories of the two main ions we here chose to represent it, Socrates and Galilei. A closer look will that both were instances of the empowerment of reason to disobey the socialization; and create a new—free and evolving, yet more solid—way to knowledge. Is the contemporary academia still capable of continuing this tradition, by acting accordingly when the circumstances demand that?

Was the Enlightenment's rebellion against the tradition, which still continues today, a disruption of nature-like or paradise-like wholeness?

Or was it a rebellion against a human order of things where people were socialized to obey the kings and the clergy, which kept the evolution in check?

Our point is that it was both. Or more precisely—that to see what has happened to us, and what we need to do now, we need to see our culture's evolution that resulted in the Englightenment in those two ways.

Myths and Errors

"Truth" means "correspondence with reality"

First of all that there is such a thing; and second that it is knowable, and provable.

Information must show us "the reality"

The purpose of information, and the value of information, is to be decided on one criterion alone—whether it shows us "the reality" in an "objectively true" way or not. That this is what distinguishes "real" or "good" information, from nonsense and deception.

A closely related error is to ignore implicit information (in academia, legislature, ethics...), and focus solely on information that explicitly claims something.

View

The evolution of knowledge of knowledge has brought us into this situation; in front of the metaphorical mirror.

This metaphor has several connotations:

• Seeing ourselves; from a situation where we believed (had every reason to believe, or it appeared so) that what we see (with our eyes, our reason, and the refined instruments of science) is the reality, we have evolved to see how we construct what we see; seeing the limits of our seeing, and knowing
• Seeing ourselves in the world; in a human world that is in a completely new situation, and has completely new needs, than when during the Enlightenment and the Scientific and Industrial Revolution, when our present foundations took shape

The substance of our KF proposal, as already noted, is a complete prototype of an academic reality on the other side of the mirror. What we are talking about here is how to 'go through'.

The Mirror idogram

The academia has the prerogative to guide us through the mirror. (Assuming that Peccei was right), it holds the key to our future.

By adopting the rational foundation that the Enlightenment left us, we became able to know, collectively, that women can't fly on broomsticks. Innumerably many superstitions and prejudices were dispelled.

But we have also thrown out the baby with the bathwater. We have no foundation on which we can preserve the traditional heritage. And no foundation for reconstituting the myriad functions of a culture, and hence the wholeness that the traditional culture (we assume) represented.

Consequently, we have abandoned the production of culture to counterculture; to advertisers, political propaganda, superficial interests... We are now molded by those interests. What they need is not "human development"; they mold us to be sheepish, selfish and obedient.

Action

Four courses of action follow as rather obvious, yet necessary, from the self-reflection in front of the mirror.

Truth by convention

A new 'Archimedean point', to replace old formulas such as Descartes' "cogito", and Galilei's "Eppur si muove". We need it to once again give knowledge the power to 'move the world'.

Design epistemology

This new epistemology is roughly what the Modernity ideogram, the bus with candle headlights is saying: Information (and the way we handle it) is a piece in a larger whole; and it must be treated accordingly.

Information is "recorded experience

According to this convention, information, reflects human experience, not "reality".

Anything that records experience is (or can be considered as) information. A chair is information because it embodies the experience about sitting, and chair making. This definition includes, rituals, myths, customs, values and so many other elements of the tradition as potentially containing valuable information

Knowledge federation

The prototype we proposed is of an 'evolutionary organ', which the academia may use to federate information into systemic change, in culture and beyond.

Plan

Three insights will here be federated:

• "correspondence with reality" is a myth
• "reality" is constructed—by our cognitive organs; and our society
• "reality" is a product of socialization

Reality is a myth

It is sufficient to quote einstein

A myth is a popular belief that cannot be verified—but serves certain social and cultural roles.

Two quotations of Einstein, repeated in several places already, including Federation through Images on this website, are sufficient to make this point:

• The closed watch metaphor explains why "correspondence with reality" cannot be verified
• The quotations about the two illusions confirms that "correspondence with reality" is (according to 'modern science') a product of illusion

Reality is constructed

It was described by Piaget, Maturana and Berger and Luckmann, along so many others; read from here.

Reality is socialized

This development—how exactly we learned, painstakingly, that we are not those "objective observers" we believed we were (an assumption based on which so much of our world has been developed)—is so central to the Holotopia project, that we here take time to point to some of its milestones.

Bowing to the king

A story illustrating subtle yet pervasive workings of socialization

Socrates – Galilei

The key point here is Piaget's "the reason organizes the world by organizing itself"

Pavlov – Chakhotin

Pavlov's experiments on dogs (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize) can serve as a parable for socialization

After working with Pavlov in his laboratory, Chakhotin participated in 1932 German elections against Hitler. Understood that Hitler was conditioning or socializing the German people. Wrote "Le viole des foules..." (see the comments, link TBA).

Chakhotin practiced, and advocated, to use non-factual or implicit information to counteract the socialization attempts by political bad guys (see the image on the right). Adding "t" to the familiar Nazi greeting produced "Heilt Hitler" (cure Hitler).

Murray Edelman

Already in the 1960s the researchers knew that the conventional mechanisms of democracy (the elections) don't serve the purpose they were assumed to serve (distribution of power)—because (field research showed) the voters are unfamiliar with the candidates' proposed policies, the incumbents don't tend to fulfill their electoral promises and so on. Edelman contributed an interesting addition: It's not that the elections don't serve a purpose; it's just that this purpose is different from what's believed. The purpose is symbolic (they serve to legitimize the governments and the policies, by making people feel they were asked etc.)

Edelman, as a political science researcher, contributed a quite thorough study of the "symbolic uses of politics".

Freud – Bernays

Freud, famously, fought and won a battle against the prevailing belief in the pure rationality of the human animal, by showing the power of the unconscious. His American nephew, Edward Bernays, saw how Freud's research can be adapted to be used for commercial purposes.

Honored by Life as "one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century", and as "the father of public relations", Bernays gave socialization a scientific foundation—as his titles Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), Public Relations (1945), The Engineering of Consent (1955) might illustrate. "Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways." (Wikipedia)

Berger and Luckmann

Their 1966 "Social Construction of Reality" is a sociology classic. What interests us here is, however, their observation that social reality constructions tend to be turned into "universal theories"—and used to legitimize the political and economic status quo.

The reality of the Scripture, and the king's role as God's earthly representative, are familiar examples from Galilei's time.

But can you think of a more contemporary one?

Bourdieu – Damasio

Bourdieu left us a complete theory of socialization. We honor him as the icon of socialized reality.

Damasio contributed an essential piece in the puzzle—a scientific explanation, from the laboratory of a cognitive neurologist, of the primacy that embodied socialization has over rational thought. His title "Descartes' Error" brings home the main point—Descartes, and the Enlightenment, got it all wrong; we are not rational decision makers!