On Leaving the Garden of Eden

The Edenic myth is about growing beyond and out of cultural comfort zones.  First, we had to deal with exposure as we forsook temperate climates.  "Adam and Eve" clothed themselves out of necessity, not modesty, as they learned how to survive harsher environments.  Modesty followed custom, not vice versa.

Then we learned how to produce and store enough food to last through longer and harsher winters; next we learned how to transport goods, including by sea and eventually air, to facilitate production, storage and distribution of essential goods.

What we learned in the second half of the 20th century is how to inhabit extremes of atmospheric pressure--from the vacuum of space to the breathing of compressed gases underwater.

Each of these advances takes us out of the "Garden of Eden" of our species' current comfort zone, always carrying with us the tools we learned to use in previous advances.

It makes me wonder where the next advance will take us....  Somewhere, no doubt, where outer space, inner space, and cyberspace converge.

And, of course, as individuals we are continually cast out of the Garden as we learn to be ashamed of our previous ignorance/innocence.

The serpent in the Garden is the urge to continually advance, to grow in knowledge, which eventuates in wisdom.  The forbidden fruit is knowledge itself, the fruit of our seemingly unwise desire to leave Eden in search of additional knowledge and greater wisdom.

On Future Education

Future education will consciously include machine learning as well as human learning.  Regardless of whether the learner is a human or a machine, education will be characterized by these traits:

·         peer-to-peer learner networks

·         open source wikis

·         experiential and exploratory

·         process oriented

·         individualized and learner-directed

·         global collaboration

·         interactive use of genuine text

Human learning plus machine learning will spur progress by providing immediate access to knowledge development.  The machines will be primarily concerned with relationships, cross-checking and validating facts as they are collected; the humans will be concerned with interrelationships, appropriating and revealing truths as they are discovered.

"Facts" will consist of data points in all formats: video, voice, music, hypertext, space-time information,¹ and their relationships to humans and other machines.  "Truths" will include opinions, emotions, insights,² and their interrelationships to literature history, mathematics, science, and technology.  As truths are posited in the cloud, they become facts to be cross-checked and validated, then made available for human access, peer review, substantiation, and appropriation.  Thus information becomes knowledge and recursively eventuates as wisdom.³

Self-directed learning automatically adapts curricula to personality type, intelligence strengths, and learning style, whether the learner is a machine or a human.

Most people will not say, "I am a student" or even a learner; fewer yet will claim to be teachers, though we will all fulfill both roles as we access and post information.  We will simply be living our lives—traveling, working, shopping, scuba diving, or whatever—but we will engage in these activities through media that are conscious of themselves as learning organizations.  There will be a role for Blackboard, Moodle, and their heirs, but it will really be tomorrow's Googles, Facebooks, and the like who facilitate this transformation to learning systems that are not merely lifelong—they are eternal.

We will pay for our truths with a currency of facts, finally becoming the prosumers that Alvin Toffler predicted in The Third Wave.

1.  i.e., bioinformatical, logistical, transactional, financial, meteorological, astronomical information, etc.

2.  i.e., medical, economical, cosmological knowledge, etc.

3.  i.e, truth, beauty, and goodness

Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 2

Jaron Lanier ends his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his gig as a philosopher of the early 21st Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

The phase of life we call "childhood" was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read. [...] It has even been claimed that the widespread acceptance of childhood as a familiar phase of human life only occurred in conjunction with the spread of the printing press. (180)

Lanier takes pains to show a physiological basis for metaphor, for metaphor is the route by which we get closer and closer to the nature of consciousness, and that brings us full circle to Chapter 1.

The Part and the Whole

The many in the one is the characteristic of universality;

The many not being the one is the characteristic of particularity;

The universal is formed by many species which are in themselves identical;

Their identity is shown in the difference of each in its own essence;

The principle of the interdependent origination of the one and the many is wonderful integration;

Disintegration means that each retains its own character and does not become the whole.

This all belongs to the realm of wisdom and is not said from the standpoint of worldly knowledge.

By means of this skillful device, you can understand Hua-yen.

Adapted from a verse by Fa-tsang (643-712 CE)
in Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
by Francis H. Cook

The Reconnection

I.

picking the itch
a defrocked flower and
an Indian maid
with a third ear
middle

faceless alabaster
slides head first
into the silty stream as
a pumpkin sun
sets on cattails


II.

starwheel
throwing off suns
helping to remember
stolen dreams

collapsible staircase
ascending
approval
one-on-one

a pair on bikes
"We could catch up."
kaleidoscopic
mushroom cloud

so glad to see
the Blue
amid a whirling field
of stars

There is something more.

a panther in silhouette
against the sunset

a turquoise fly
transmogrifies and

a ruby-throated hummingbird
flies on by


— by Chris "Starbaby" Hayden

as transcribed by Sally Paradise in The Kharma Comes

Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 1

Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)

This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.

Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
(21)

That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!

In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.

Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.

To be continued...

[NOTE: This blog post was four weeks in the making. Part 2 could be four more. :dj]

from "Nixon's Kids (My Generation)"

In fifth grade, an experiment
        Was tried on some of us to see
        If more kids simultaneously
In class was more efficient.

We had not one or two but four
        (To teach us all according to
        The strengths of every student who
Had tested high or low before

On various subjects) one of which
        turned out to be the niece of that
        old Presidential candidate
They'd kicked around: Old Tricky Dick

Himself, who also happened to
        Have lived just down the street from us
        In Yorba Linda. So what does
One do, but hold a vote to choose

Our own class president? It soon
        Got ugly, way beyond just signs
        And slogans, promises and lines,
Until we nearly, once at noon,

Had us a riot by the bars
        At recess when some seven guys
        Deplored the war we fought disguised
As just containment of Karl Marx.

I can't recall who won that day
        But never mind: Miss Nixon went
        To the inauguration bent
On stating America's way.

But having for one's teacher the
        Niece of one so powerful
        Had merit undeniable
And took me places unforeseen.

For instance, once when Nixon flew
        To the southland for a stay
        In his new place in San Clemente,
I dragged my parents, joined those who

Went out to see if Air Force One
        Would sink into the tarmac of
        Our little airstrip. Heads above
The rest he waved, the favorite son,

And I was quite inspired to write
        A news account of that great day.
        I showed it to Miss Nixon, a
Great source for her of no small pride;

She sent it off to Uncle Dick,
        Who sent it to his pilot: shall
        Lt. Col. Ralph B. Al-
Bertazzie tour his bailiwick?

And so we went, my parents and
        The press and I to El Toro
        Where Air Force One awaited for
Our entourage. I took a stand

From that day forth: I'd try to train,
        Become a pilot, hopefully,
        Serve God and country faithfully
And told Miss Nixon of my aim.

But then one day at recess I
        Observed a sonic boom fly by
        When we'd just learned astronomy
And all about the speed of light.

I ran across the asphalt lea
        To my beloved, said in glee:
        "Miss Nixon, everything we see
Is in the past!" She looked at me

And said with utmost certainty,
        "No, it's not!" I turned away
        And never held her in that way
Again. I still think she delayed me.