De-textualising knowledge
An enquiry in to man's alienation from knowledge.
SOCRATES:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
‘Modern’ crisis is a crisis in cognition.
Some aspect of knowledge is to be recreated, reinvented and relived each time a human being is born and this is what would have helped the human being to live wisely or to co exist wisely on earth with other living beings. The knowledge that reminds the human being of its connection with nature. Perhaps the knowledge that all living beings possess to lead a harmonious life.
Unfortunately with modern human beings dependence on external, codified knowledge this wisdom was lost. If evolution had this in its design then instead of children 70 year olds and 700 year olds would have been given birth.
The whole tragedy of modernity is a direct result of codification ofknowledge. With textualisation of knowledge senses become the tools of the textualised mind and notions and belief replace knowledge. For true and authentic knowing to happen autonomy of sense becomes a must and text to become the tools to record experience.
In the digital age 'organisability' and 'softwareability' is becoming thecriterion for what constitute knowledge. With the change in what constitutesknowledge and how knowledge is accessed the third cognitive shift is already underway. There will be a total change in the paradigm.Many years ago a similar shift happened which went unnoticed. That was theshift from experiential paradigm to textual paradigm. Textualisation ofknowledge altered the notion of what constitute knowledge.Knowledge and process of knowing has undergone three fundamental cognitiveshifts depending on the process of creating knowledge. The knowledge inthese three paradigms-experiential, textual and digital are very differentfrom each other even though for the people belonging to these respectiveparadigms their knowledge is very much real. And these are the three mostbasic worldviews.With each paradigm shift there is reorganization as to what constitutesknowledge and hence experience itself is altered and this further leads tofurther cognitive shifts. Some experiential modes are dropped and new onesare added.
Textual paradigm.
The dependence on codified/memorized knowledge must have caused the evolutionary pressure to evolve text in order to release the burden of memorizing.
What I mean by textual paradigm is the knowledge created by means of text.
Text replaces experience as the means of knowing. The cognition is effected by text.
I came across the following in the net.
(Key questions regarding the nature of the reciprocal relationships between technology and cognitive processes were already raised more than two thousand years ago by Plato. In response to a question posed by his student Phaedrus, Socrates refers to one of the gods in Egypt who presented to the King his recent invention, writing: "Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories: my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom" (Hamilton & Cairns, 1961 pp. 520). Writing is presented as a new and powerful cognitive technology that may liberate the mind from the necessity of carrying a large number of details and facts. By allowing the storage of the knowledge elsewhere, "outside" the mind, it now becomes possible to divert valuable cognitive energy to more complex thought processes. But, King Tammuz' response was not long in coming: "…If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder". And moreover, "… by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing".)
Knowledge/experience/world view in the textual paradigm underwent several changes and knowledge got restructured in the process. Textualisation ofknowledge altered the notion of what constitute knowledge.When knowledge got textualised the feelings and emotions were dropped.
The word intuition was out of use for many years and it came back few years ago when textual cultures started addressing its fragmentation, alienation and rootless ness .The over use of reason and logic and the neglect of intuition is due to textualisation ofknowledge and by extension to the corresponding experiential mode itcreated. The textual experience is linear and fragmented which is the onlyway text can mediate.Imagination is a word overused by textual cultures as text demandsimagination. where as in experiential cultures the reality is alwayspresent.At several levels one can see the fragmentation in textual cultures.The internal fragmentation has made us to fragment our perception andcompartmentalize and reorder the world to suit our textual notions aboutlife. Textual experience being personal and independent of others separated theself from community. The individual and the ego must have began at thispoint. Textual cognition must have caused fragmentation, alienation, boredom etcThe self is fragmented as male and female ,as body and mind and aschildhood, youth and old age. Spontaneous activities were broken up in toplanning and doing thus thought and action got fragmented so are beauty and ethics. Entertainment and boredom has become the new dichotomies.Boredom is also another of those qualities typical of modern mindset and sois waste. The internal fragmentation has made us fragment the outer world.Thus beauty and knowledge which is an integral act is divided in toart,science and language, and into artists and scientists. Politics,ethicsreligion were also separated.Education has been the most powerful tool to condition and colonize thepeople as it has completely overturned the worldview of the so-callededucated people of the world all over. It just replaced religioussuperstition to scientific superstition. It turned us into believers of adifferent kind. It turned us from active creators and inventers of knowledgeto passive believers of text and experts. We no longer use our senses andfeelings and experience to know the world. We are taught abouteverything-including beauty.Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. Beauty is what trulymakes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world. Beautyis what creates culture- the food, the architecture, the music, the artifacts, variousdance forms and agriculture (knowledge).Even the spiritual state of being here and now also became impossible withthe textual culture. A total act of being in the present encompasses bothpast and the future. Our relationship with the text is itself an absence ofthe present. Textualisation removes the present and creates only the past orthe future.Another word that got popularized is abstraction. Textual experience is anabstract experience. As far as Authenticity is concerned experience isauthentic and original. It cannot become second hand. Text by its very nature issecond hand.Our relationship to the unknown, which was of awe and wonder probably changedwith textualisation as the knowledge is acquired with in the comforts of thenon-threatening text. The same must be the case with "controlling" nature.Even beauty which is an exclusive domain of the senses and experience gottextualised and it became a matter for intellectual activities.
Music gets written down as text which can be ‘read’.Children because of their natural tenacity remained out side the textualworld so also some women. I would further claim even the true scientist who have time and again disapproved the conventional educational systems also belong to the experiential paradigm.
The crises in modern schooling is precisely due the conflict in these two paradigms. The adults who belong to the textual culture is attempting to textualise children as early as possible. This can also be seen as a conflict in intuition and reason or of two ways of knowing. The one which wants to recreate, reinvent and relive and the other which wants to impose.(Democracy?)
The left brain/ right brain division is actually the result of fragmentation caused by the textual schooling process.
Even at the activity level mechanization brought in mechanical and repetitiveact further alienating the person from the present. Both at the level of activity andmind being here and now became unnecessary.
With the removal of unknown from our experience predictability / planningand reasoning became the dominant relationship to the outside.Many people belonging to the textual culture is realizing the crisis and arealso coming out with several solutions but are unable to break free as allthese solutions are textual.
Systems thinking/ holistic approach, their engagement with spirituality etc are attempts in overcoming these crisis.The solutions to make the learning holistic is by adding more 'sensitive' subjects like ecology, gender, study of other cultures etc.Whole is not a result of adding fragments.The infinite is not the addition of finites.This is the quality of the mind which is holistic, spiritual ,in communionwith beauty all the time.
De-textualisation is essentially recovering the autonomy of senses andexperience. A reconnection to the life sustaining knowledge accessible onlyto the selfless minds.It will be interesting to look at the world that belongs to the experientialparadigm.
Experiential paradigm.If we consider knowledge to be a biological response to sustain life, thenthe present level of estrangement between man and nature is unimaginable.How could knowledge and destruction go hand in hand to the extent that thevery survival of the earth now edges on the brink of cessation? Knowledge,devoid of the biological content fostered the grounds for depredation.This biological response is what is inbuilt in the knowledge of experientialcultures. Indigenous knowledge the result of collaboration between peopleand their surroundings guided by the natures need to preserve all life.Thebiological element in knowledge is what has made the indigenous communitiesto create 'life sustaining' knowledge. The autonomy of the sense guide the people to access life sustainingknowledge. The so called indigenous knowledge (This is a term invented bythe textual world) is the knowledge of experiential paradigm.For over a decade now-since 1988to be a precise, I have been in a processof unlearning and through creative engagement with the rural and tribal artisan communities. The unlearning process I am involved in is intended toscrub off the western influence that I had gathered through the years of"learning " in the alienating environs of some of the elitist institutionsin the country. In 1991 or so I decided to stop reading altogether as I wasonly building on the already formed framework of the western knowledge. Inorder to see clearly and authentically I felt I need to clean myself of allisms that dictated my cognition.After years of spending time with the rural tribal communities who werestill free from modern schooling and were still very much part of theindigenous knowledge system I began to see the fundamental differencebetween the two knowledge systems.Once ,few years ago while I was in the process of developing exercises andactivities to help children learn pottery, I was intrigued by the way withwhich the master potters arrive at a form. I wondered how the things theymake could be so beautiful. I was keen to know what guides them to arriveat a particular form . Mulling over it for several days I realized thatthere is a biological assistance that guides our sense of beauty. Peopleundefiled by modern ways are far more open and receptive to this biologicalguidance.This internal capacity and the external natural systems collaborate in somemanner to produce a distinct aesthetic quality to their lives. The rural,tribal or non literate communities seem to act holistically endowing anaesthetic quality to their every act. What we understand as culture is aresult of this collaboration.Sense of Beauty: In a profound sense, it is a community's sense of beautythat delineates its culture. When a society or community loses its authenticsense of beauty or subjugates its sense of beauty to the corruption of alieninfluences, it loses its authentic culture.The classical forms in the human culture came about by this process. Theseare archetypal forms that came out as and when the need arose. The pyramids,the tombs, the ancient places of worship all over the world, the folkdances, traditional music, traditional healing systems are all evolved by avery different process than the one adopted by ‘Modernity’. These must have been theintuitive leaps of humanity.
Children in natural learning cultures are like any other newborn animal. Thenature has its ways to make them grow and all the skills of an adult worldis introduced in the games, ‘toys’ children make. The way they explore theworld of senses by the interaction with the nature and the world of naturethrough the senses. Senses are a two way tool. to know out side and inside.
Digital paradigm.
And now with the information technology text is being replaced bycomputer.The computers criterion for dropping various elements from the textualknowledge would depend on the manageability and softwareability.Like text it would also bring in new elements in the realm of what theyclaim as knowledge.The comfort in seeking knowledge is far greater and they can also fake partof the reality though miniaturized and frozen. This could altogether removeimagination and bring in surety as they did see the event howeverminiaturized or even unreal it may be.To quote from a writing on ' Human Nature and the Digital Culture: The Casefor Philosophical Anthropology' by Dennis M. Weiss of York College ofPennsylvania "Where this world is chaotic and difficult to comprehend, thecomputer offers us the image of a world of order, logic, reason, andtransparency. While we may have lost our cosmological map in this world, thecomputer offers us a ready replacement: the pristine, orderly lines of theflowchart, which becomes the new image of an orderly and computable nature.Flowchart, program, and microchip become part of the new cosmology. To thehomeless and the rootless of this fragile world, images of the web spanningthe globe, of the Internet encircling the world, of Netscape providing uswith connections to the world are comforting on a metaphysical level. Theyassure us that we too may once again master the world and hold it in ourhands. Our own lives gain a sense of order and stability when reflected backto us in our Web pages. While we may have little control over the worldaround us, we can define the world and our links to it via our own home page".
The calamity of virtualization of knowledge will be far more destructive andelusive. Already the ICT shareholders are claiming many advantages over thetextual knowledge.The ultimate loss is that of human creativeness and the life atlarge.If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be distorted anddestructive.
The natural state of being is to be creative ,And in the creative stateone is authentic and original.To be authentic and original means to be inventing all the time,to be discovering all the time; to be new all the time.This brings in concrete and first hand experience as the basis forwhat is knowledge.Senses are our tools that connects us to the concrete experience as well asour inner nature.This demands us to sharpen or sensitize our senses as that is ourprimary tools for knowing.Beauty seems to be the spiritual way of relating to nature.Sense of beauty is experienced when the experiencer and experiencedbecome one however momentarily it may be.It happens when all over senses are awake and we receive life inits totality.
An enquiry in to man's alienation from knowledge.
SOCRATES:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
‘Modern’ crisis is a crisis in cognition.
Some aspect of knowledge is to be recreated, reinvented and relived each time a human being is born and this is what would have helped the human being to live wisely or to co exist wisely on earth with other living beings. The knowledge that reminds the human being of its connection with nature. Perhaps the knowledge that all living beings possess to lead a harmonious life.
Unfortunately with modern human beings dependence on external, codified knowledge this wisdom was lost. If evolution had this in its design then instead of children 70 year olds and 700 year olds would have been given birth.
The whole tragedy of modernity is a direct result of codification ofknowledge. With textualisation of knowledge senses become the tools of the textualised mind and notions and belief replace knowledge. For true and authentic knowing to happen autonomy of sense becomes a must and text to become the tools to record experience.
In the digital age 'organisability' and 'softwareability' is becoming thecriterion for what constitute knowledge. With the change in what constitutesknowledge and how knowledge is accessed the third cognitive shift is already underway. There will be a total change in the paradigm.Many years ago a similar shift happened which went unnoticed. That was theshift from experiential paradigm to textual paradigm. Textualisation ofknowledge altered the notion of what constitute knowledge.Knowledge and process of knowing has undergone three fundamental cognitiveshifts depending on the process of creating knowledge. The knowledge inthese three paradigms-experiential, textual and digital are very differentfrom each other even though for the people belonging to these respectiveparadigms their knowledge is very much real. And these are the three mostbasic worldviews.With each paradigm shift there is reorganization as to what constitutesknowledge and hence experience itself is altered and this further leads tofurther cognitive shifts. Some experiential modes are dropped and new onesare added.
Textual paradigm.
The dependence on codified/memorized knowledge must have caused the evolutionary pressure to evolve text in order to release the burden of memorizing.
What I mean by textual paradigm is the knowledge created by means of text.
Text replaces experience as the means of knowing. The cognition is effected by text.
I came across the following in the net.
(Key questions regarding the nature of the reciprocal relationships between technology and cognitive processes were already raised more than two thousand years ago by Plato. In response to a question posed by his student Phaedrus, Socrates refers to one of the gods in Egypt who presented to the King his recent invention, writing: "Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories: my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom" (Hamilton & Cairns, 1961 pp. 520). Writing is presented as a new and powerful cognitive technology that may liberate the mind from the necessity of carrying a large number of details and facts. By allowing the storage of the knowledge elsewhere, "outside" the mind, it now becomes possible to divert valuable cognitive energy to more complex thought processes. But, King Tammuz' response was not long in coming: "…If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder". And moreover, "… by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing".)
Knowledge/experience/world view in the textual paradigm underwent several changes and knowledge got restructured in the process. Textualisation ofknowledge altered the notion of what constitute knowledge.When knowledge got textualised the feelings and emotions were dropped.
The word intuition was out of use for many years and it came back few years ago when textual cultures started addressing its fragmentation, alienation and rootless ness .The over use of reason and logic and the neglect of intuition is due to textualisation ofknowledge and by extension to the corresponding experiential mode itcreated. The textual experience is linear and fragmented which is the onlyway text can mediate.Imagination is a word overused by textual cultures as text demandsimagination. where as in experiential cultures the reality is alwayspresent.At several levels one can see the fragmentation in textual cultures.The internal fragmentation has made us to fragment our perception andcompartmentalize and reorder the world to suit our textual notions aboutlife. Textual experience being personal and independent of others separated theself from community. The individual and the ego must have began at thispoint. Textual cognition must have caused fragmentation, alienation, boredom etcThe self is fragmented as male and female ,as body and mind and aschildhood, youth and old age. Spontaneous activities were broken up in toplanning and doing thus thought and action got fragmented so are beauty and ethics. Entertainment and boredom has become the new dichotomies.Boredom is also another of those qualities typical of modern mindset and sois waste. The internal fragmentation has made us fragment the outer world.Thus beauty and knowledge which is an integral act is divided in toart,science and language, and into artists and scientists. Politics,ethicsreligion were also separated.Education has been the most powerful tool to condition and colonize thepeople as it has completely overturned the worldview of the so-callededucated people of the world all over. It just replaced religioussuperstition to scientific superstition. It turned us into believers of adifferent kind. It turned us from active creators and inventers of knowledgeto passive believers of text and experts. We no longer use our senses andfeelings and experience to know the world. We are taught abouteverything-including beauty.Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. Beauty is what trulymakes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world. Beautyis what creates culture- the food, the architecture, the music, the artifacts, variousdance forms and agriculture (knowledge).Even the spiritual state of being here and now also became impossible withthe textual culture. A total act of being in the present encompasses bothpast and the future. Our relationship with the text is itself an absence ofthe present. Textualisation removes the present and creates only the past orthe future.Another word that got popularized is abstraction. Textual experience is anabstract experience. As far as Authenticity is concerned experience isauthentic and original. It cannot become second hand. Text by its very nature issecond hand.Our relationship to the unknown, which was of awe and wonder probably changedwith textualisation as the knowledge is acquired with in the comforts of thenon-threatening text. The same must be the case with "controlling" nature.Even beauty which is an exclusive domain of the senses and experience gottextualised and it became a matter for intellectual activities.
Music gets written down as text which can be ‘read’.Children because of their natural tenacity remained out side the textualworld so also some women. I would further claim even the true scientist who have time and again disapproved the conventional educational systems also belong to the experiential paradigm.
The crises in modern schooling is precisely due the conflict in these two paradigms. The adults who belong to the textual culture is attempting to textualise children as early as possible. This can also be seen as a conflict in intuition and reason or of two ways of knowing. The one which wants to recreate, reinvent and relive and the other which wants to impose.(Democracy?)
The left brain/ right brain division is actually the result of fragmentation caused by the textual schooling process.
Even at the activity level mechanization brought in mechanical and repetitiveact further alienating the person from the present. Both at the level of activity andmind being here and now became unnecessary.
With the removal of unknown from our experience predictability / planningand reasoning became the dominant relationship to the outside.Many people belonging to the textual culture is realizing the crisis and arealso coming out with several solutions but are unable to break free as allthese solutions are textual.
Systems thinking/ holistic approach, their engagement with spirituality etc are attempts in overcoming these crisis.The solutions to make the learning holistic is by adding more 'sensitive' subjects like ecology, gender, study of other cultures etc.Whole is not a result of adding fragments.The infinite is not the addition of finites.This is the quality of the mind which is holistic, spiritual ,in communionwith beauty all the time.
De-textualisation is essentially recovering the autonomy of senses andexperience. A reconnection to the life sustaining knowledge accessible onlyto the selfless minds.It will be interesting to look at the world that belongs to the experientialparadigm.
Experiential paradigm.If we consider knowledge to be a biological response to sustain life, thenthe present level of estrangement between man and nature is unimaginable.How could knowledge and destruction go hand in hand to the extent that thevery survival of the earth now edges on the brink of cessation? Knowledge,devoid of the biological content fostered the grounds for depredation.This biological response is what is inbuilt in the knowledge of experientialcultures. Indigenous knowledge the result of collaboration between peopleand their surroundings guided by the natures need to preserve all life.Thebiological element in knowledge is what has made the indigenous communitiesto create 'life sustaining' knowledge. The autonomy of the sense guide the people to access life sustainingknowledge. The so called indigenous knowledge (This is a term invented bythe textual world) is the knowledge of experiential paradigm.For over a decade now-since 1988to be a precise, I have been in a processof unlearning and through creative engagement with the rural and tribal artisan communities. The unlearning process I am involved in is intended toscrub off the western influence that I had gathered through the years of"learning " in the alienating environs of some of the elitist institutionsin the country. In 1991 or so I decided to stop reading altogether as I wasonly building on the already formed framework of the western knowledge. Inorder to see clearly and authentically I felt I need to clean myself of allisms that dictated my cognition.After years of spending time with the rural tribal communities who werestill free from modern schooling and were still very much part of theindigenous knowledge system I began to see the fundamental differencebetween the two knowledge systems.Once ,few years ago while I was in the process of developing exercises andactivities to help children learn pottery, I was intrigued by the way withwhich the master potters arrive at a form. I wondered how the things theymake could be so beautiful. I was keen to know what guides them to arriveat a particular form . Mulling over it for several days I realized thatthere is a biological assistance that guides our sense of beauty. Peopleundefiled by modern ways are far more open and receptive to this biologicalguidance.This internal capacity and the external natural systems collaborate in somemanner to produce a distinct aesthetic quality to their lives. The rural,tribal or non literate communities seem to act holistically endowing anaesthetic quality to their every act. What we understand as culture is aresult of this collaboration.Sense of Beauty: In a profound sense, it is a community's sense of beautythat delineates its culture. When a society or community loses its authenticsense of beauty or subjugates its sense of beauty to the corruption of alieninfluences, it loses its authentic culture.The classical forms in the human culture came about by this process. Theseare archetypal forms that came out as and when the need arose. The pyramids,the tombs, the ancient places of worship all over the world, the folkdances, traditional music, traditional healing systems are all evolved by avery different process than the one adopted by ‘Modernity’. These must have been theintuitive leaps of humanity.
Children in natural learning cultures are like any other newborn animal. Thenature has its ways to make them grow and all the skills of an adult worldis introduced in the games, ‘toys’ children make. The way they explore theworld of senses by the interaction with the nature and the world of naturethrough the senses. Senses are a two way tool. to know out side and inside.
Digital paradigm.
And now with the information technology text is being replaced bycomputer.The computers criterion for dropping various elements from the textualknowledge would depend on the manageability and softwareability.Like text it would also bring in new elements in the realm of what theyclaim as knowledge.The comfort in seeking knowledge is far greater and they can also fake partof the reality though miniaturized and frozen. This could altogether removeimagination and bring in surety as they did see the event howeverminiaturized or even unreal it may be.To quote from a writing on ' Human Nature and the Digital Culture: The Casefor Philosophical Anthropology' by Dennis M. Weiss of York College ofPennsylvania "Where this world is chaotic and difficult to comprehend, thecomputer offers us the image of a world of order, logic, reason, andtransparency. While we may have lost our cosmological map in this world, thecomputer offers us a ready replacement: the pristine, orderly lines of theflowchart, which becomes the new image of an orderly and computable nature.Flowchart, program, and microchip become part of the new cosmology. To thehomeless and the rootless of this fragile world, images of the web spanningthe globe, of the Internet encircling the world, of Netscape providing uswith connections to the world are comforting on a metaphysical level. Theyassure us that we too may once again master the world and hold it in ourhands. Our own lives gain a sense of order and stability when reflected backto us in our Web pages. While we may have little control over the worldaround us, we can define the world and our links to it via our own home page".
The calamity of virtualization of knowledge will be far more destructive andelusive. Already the ICT shareholders are claiming many advantages over thetextual knowledge.The ultimate loss is that of human creativeness and the life atlarge.If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be distorted anddestructive.
The natural state of being is to be creative ,And in the creative stateone is authentic and original.To be authentic and original means to be inventing all the time,to be discovering all the time; to be new all the time.This brings in concrete and first hand experience as the basis forwhat is knowledge.Senses are our tools that connects us to the concrete experience as well asour inner nature.This demands us to sharpen or sensitize our senses as that is ourprimary tools for knowing.Beauty seems to be the spiritual way of relating to nature.Sense of beauty is experienced when the experiencer and experiencedbecome one however momentarily it may be.It happens when all over senses are awake and we receive life inits totality.
