STORIES
Contents
- 1 Federation through Keywords
- 1.1 Keyword creation is a form for linguistic and institutional recycling.
- 1.2 Keywords enable us to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and see further.
- 1.3 Paradigm
- 1.4 Logos
- 1.5 Design epistemology
- 1.6 Polyscopic methodology
- 1.7 Convenience paradox
- 1.8 Knowledge federation
- 1.9 Systemic innovation
- 1.10 Holoscope
- 1.11 Holotopia
- 1.12 Power structure
- 1.13 Materialism
- 1.14 Dialog
Federation through Keywords
(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, which we can neither comprehend nor resolve by thinking as we did when we created them), we must create new ways to think and speak; but how?
You already know my answer: By federating new ways to see and speak. And here a technical idea—called truth by convention—is absolutely crucial; which is, needless to say, also federated, 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 at large?
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 say something about it precisely; and I'm inviting you, the reader, to see culture as it's been defined. In knowledge federation's technical language this coherent view of a subject or object or whole, from a certain angle or viewpoint or scope, is called its aspect.
Keywords enable us to ascribe to old words like "science" and "religion" a clear new meaning; and give old institutions a clear 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.
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 it is modeled or prototyped by knowledge federation.
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 explain what might appear as a paradox, and motivate this proposal—namely that comprehensive change, of the whole paradigm, can be natural and easy even when small and obviously necessary changes may have been impossible: It is simply useless to try to fit an elephant's ear onto a mouse. But a comprehensive change can only happen when the circumstances for it are ripe.
We live in such a time.
When a whole new paradigm is ready to emerge and already emerging; because all the data points for manifesting it are already there; so that all we need to do to be able to see it is—to connect the dots; or more precisely—to restore our 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 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 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 you, the reader, a glimpse of the emerging paradigm; and by diagnosing the problem—what exactly hinders us from being part of the solution; and by fostering a remedial social process—the dialog.
The revolution I am inviting you to is to liberate us from the spell of the paradigm.
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 for 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; and on a still larger scale—our society-and-culture, and its evolution.
Logos
(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 they use their minds, as I prefer to see it. By and large—the way people use the mind is the paradigm. So I turned the Greek word "logos" into a keyword; and now 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—"demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundation".
"In the beginning was logos and logos was with God and logos was God." I chose the word "logos" as banner to point to the historicity of the way we think; that it has changed before and that it can 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 counterpart for it to be translated. 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 "mystical" 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 had to be explained in ways that are completely comprehensible to the mind—as one would explain the workings of a clockwork.
Science assumed its pivotal social role, of "the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture"—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 former providing know-how and the latter know-what; but then 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.
Logos is in captivity.
The evolution of the way we use the mind is once again held in check; and with it—the evolution of knowledge; and our (cultural) evolution through knowledge. We are in a similar situation as our ancestors were way back then when Galilei was held captive, and with him also science. The 'prison' where logos is in confinement is constituted of the formal "logic"—a collection of mechanical rules which, it is believed, only need to be mechanically followed; and of the suffix "logy" of the traditional disciplines, whose procedures—it is also believed—need to be followed to the letter, because they embody the right way to use the mind.
The key to comprehending what went wrong, and how I propose to correct it, is in the rather amusing ambiguity of the word "foundation"; which Descartes used in the sentence I just quoted. 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—as the case was in mid-19th century—we need to secure that the new foundation is broad enough to hold all cultural heritage—and continue its continued evolution; and solid enough so that we may rely on it, while doing this all-important work.
But this was not what Descartes had in mind!
The way to use the mind that he and his colleagues left us was the result of an entirely different quest—for the way to knowledge that is "right" in an intrinsic sense; because it empowers us to see "reality" as it truly is; which is—they also took it for granted—revealed to the mind as the sensation of absolute clarity and certainty.
It was in this way that we ended up with 'candles' as 'headlights'.
Their actual function was never even considered; our quest of knowledge was conceived—as still is—on the grounds that it is the "right" way to see "reality"; not because it's the best way to implement all the all-important functions that information and knowledge need to fulfill.
Design epistemology
(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've just shared) you consider the fact that the belief on which the whole edifice has been founded—which appeared to justify the use of the new foundation—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 others demanded); and that they even contradicted the common sense (as J. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out in Uncommon Sense). And so it turned out that (just as the case was at the time of Copernicus)—a different way to see the world was necessary to enable the physical science to continue its evolution.
Which now compels us to revisit the foundation (on which we pursue knowledge and secure that culture evolves) for intrinsic or academic or fundamental reasons too! Which is what Werner Heisenberg was warning us about—when he pointed out, in Physics and Philosophy, 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; but for the purpose of this illustration—Einstein's "epistemological credo" (which he left us in Autobiographical Notes as his testament or "obituary") will be sufficient:
“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.
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.
Polyscopic methodology
(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.
Convenience paradox
(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 private lives and in culture, revolves around it); and let me ask What sort of "love"—or what quality of love—is a human being capable of experience? 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 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 far more than we do; so that the experience of poetry and music too can become considerably deeper and 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).
Knowledge federation
(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.
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.
Systemic innovation
(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.
Holoscope
The holoscope principle.
If we, "our species" or global society will be fortunate enough to survive this chaotic, unguided, unconscious and risky transition to guided or conscious evolution—the future generations might look back at our time and see the way we handled information (in "the Age of Information"!) in a similar light as we now see how all those poor and innocent women were treated by Inquisition—as an epitaph of an era; and of a paradigm in urgent need of change.
What do we need to do—to substitute 'the lightbulb' for 'the candle'?
I now invite you to revisit the Holotopia ideogram; and to now take a step 'up' the metaphorical mountain and look at an even larger picture than what those </b></em>five points</b></em> present—and look at the synergy between polyscopic methodology and knowledge federation; and at the horizontal line labeled "information" that joins them. It is only when we've done the necessary work on the theory side—and explained to each other and to the world what information needs to be like, to serve us the people in this moment of need—that we'll also be able to use the new technology to implement the processes that this information requires.
In the holotopia context this larger-than-life opportunity is pointed to by the coined idiom make 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
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 be ready to reconfigure our systems, so that they make the pursuit of human development possible (instead of compelling us to pursue profit and convenience); so that they provide us the ecology of mind that the pursuit of inner wholeness necessitates.
"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
(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!
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.
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 "theory of practice" and Antonio Damasio's revolutionary discovery in cognitive neuroscience) 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. And isn't this what we all are doing?
"Know thyself" has been the battle cry of philosophers through the ages; there is something we the people must urgently get to know about ourselves; which—after having plowed this so field for nearly three decades—I am now ready to offer you as the first step with which the "solutionatique" to (what The Club of Rome called) the "world problematique" must begin; which is the reason why I postponed the Systemic Innovation book to be the second in the series, and decided that Liberation should be the first. It might be best to introduce to you this conclusion by outlining, however briefly, how I reached it.
Before we can take care of "the huge problems now confronting us"—we need to diagnose them correctly; that's the challenge the power structure as keyword points to. While power structure is not one of the five insights, it is one of the core themes of the Liberation book; and it's also been one of the core themes of my work. In the Liberation book I introduce it by talking about Hannah Arendt; who studied Eichman when he was on trial in Israel; and to her surprise found him (not evil but) distinctly ordinary; Eichman did not hate Jews—he followed orders. Hannah Arendt coined "banality of evil" as keyword to pinpoint her insight.
Here on the table in front of me I have Zygmunt Bauman's book Modernity and the Holocaust, which I'm re-reading; where Bauman explained how he reached a similar conclusion—although he expressed it in an entirely different way. The way his fellow sociologists theorized the Holocaust, his point was, contradicts what actually happened—and the historians documented. Bauman wrote this book—as he later explained—"to exort fellow social thinkers to [...] stop viewing the Holocaust as a bizzare and aberrant episode in modern history, and think it through instead as a highly relevant, integral part of that history; 'integral' in the sense of being indispensable for the understanding of what that history was truly about, what it was capable of and why—and the sort of society that has emerged from it, and which we all inhabit." But Bauman did not condense his all-important ideas to a point; it's tempting to think that a suitable methodology has been lacking.
When in 1995 I found myself on this so exquisitely rich realm of creative opportunities, and already making some promising progress, I reconfigured my life and work entirely to be able to dedicate myself fully to its development—knowing that this wold be necessary, if I were to achieve on it anything that might have lasting value. But the reactions to this work that I encounterd—when I were to begin sharing these questions and ideas with my academic colleagues—waere the very opposite from what I anticipated: I expected a spirited conversation; or perhaps disbelief to begin with ("But did you think about..."; or "No, I don't think this can be done in an academic way..."); but what I got was just—silence; and a sense of discomfort! Which I now pinpoint with the formula "You can do anything you like in your own home (office); just don't talk about it here among us normal people (academics)." To remain relatively sane—and be able to complete this project, in my own natural voice, which it necessitates—I withdrew into a virtual quarantine, for several years. I am now preparing to "come out".
And so this conclusion offered itself; which was later confirmed with 100% consistency; you know how mathematical functions have a domain where they are defined (you may divide any real number with any other real number except zero; division with zero is "undefined"):
The domain of application of Logos (presently) excludes systems.
I developed the power structure theory by combining the reported phenomenology I have just outlined with Antonio Damasio's insights in cognitive neuroscience (which he published in a book appropriately called Descartes' Error); and Pierre Bourdieu's "theory of practice" (where he explained how power in society really operates). The overall result was the power structure as an up-to-date model of the all-important notion of "power monger" or "enemy"; as the central subject toward which our all-important pursuit of social justice and freedom are directed; and of course of politics. The point here is to see the enemy (not necessarily as a dictator, or a powerful clique, or "the 1%", but) as a structure—comprising power interests and our beliefs, or information; and also wholeness or the lack of it—both institutional and human. I pointed to insights from technical fields—including stochastic optimization, artificial intelligence and artificial life—to demonstrate that those seemingly distinct entities can not only co-evolve together—but also devise strategies and act as if they were intelligent and alive. And that all this can happen without anyone's conscious intention, or even awareness!
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!
Materialism
(Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix.)
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<p>I am prepared that you may consider all this as (not holotopian but) utopian. So let me tell you why it's not: I'll coin "geocide" as keyword and use it to point out that the "banal evil" is in our time reaching grotesque, surreal dimensions: We are not sending someone else's children in overcrowded trains on a journey of no return; unless we wake up—we'll be doing similar or worse to our own children; by doing no more than "our job" (within the systems as they've become). We'll be accomplices in the geocide by doing no more—than being passive; than remaining unengaged.
When the light of awareness has been turned on—it will be crystal-clear that geocide is not in anyone's "interest"; and that the only way we'll be able to change course is by collaborating instead of competing.
I use "the world" as metaphor, and materialism as keyword, to point to the spell that "reality" (as it presents to us by the systems in which we live and work) keeps us in; and the fact that we won't be able to liberate ourselves unless we develop an independent reference system; which is not a mere description of that "reality". <p>It was tempting to turn "idealism" into a keyword and use it as antonym to materialism; and elevate the cultural condition that restores ideas and ideals to their function, and prominence; but I did something else instead. In Chapter Two I created homo ludens and homo sapiens as a pair of antonyms denoting two 'cultural species' and two distinct ways of evolving; where the homo ludens handles the overwhelming noise and complexity by learning his professional and other roles as one would learn the rules of a game; and by acting in them competitively; and where the homo sapiens is the 'cultural species' and the evolutionary course that constitute the gist of this proposal. I didn't say this in the book—but I'll leave it for you here to reflect on—why homo ludens and homo sapiens are indeed two coherent paradigms: Both see themselves as the future of human evolution; and the other one as going extinct; the homo sapiens looks at the data; the homo ludens simply looks around...
Dialog
(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 dialog is an entirely new way to communicate. David Bohm called it "dialogue" and explained that "it [...] may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated."
The meaning of this keyword is not "conversation", as the word "dialogue" has been commonly used—but the one that follows from the Greek dialogos (through logos). The function of the dialog is to first of all liberate logos; and to then apply it to rebuild our collective mind, or "public sphere" as Jürgen Habermans and his colleagues have been calling it; and make democracy capable of taking care of its negative trends or "problems"; or just simply possible.
The dialog will recreate the way we use new media. Bohm's dialog has been documented by some distinctly smart and knowledgeable people, including Bohm himself—so all we need is to click and explore.
But that's only the beginning; what remains is to federate all that's relevant to this new way of communicating; and then implement it by using the arts, and the new information technology; and divise an ever-growing collection of prototypes (which we'll have an endless fun creating)—which will engender the cultural revival; which is, of course, holotopia initiative's very purpose.
