A Critique of Digital Reasoning
Before we can improve Wiki design we may need to challenge the limitations of computers
Can the Wiki be cleverer than the computer? (John's Rant)
- Hooray! Google
finally succeeded, where SteveXSteve and Bill did not. Thanks for a decent set of search algorithms...etc.
- But this emphasis on the reader is not where the money is (because authors know more than readers)
- This is why I conceived the IDEAbase system...trying to ensure that knowledge is more shareable
- There are many unhelpful assumptions that are implicit within the digital computer and how it functions
- For example, Shannon's Information Theory is a travesty of how living organisms co-create their worlds...
- A much older problem is formalism - loosely, the triumph of form over content (Edward de Bono)
- mmm...let's see...why not blame Pythagoras and Plato for this approach?...that'll do for now
- But even the idea of separating form from content is presumptuous and dubious...(the world was without name or form - Upanishads)
- Atomising the world into separate bits was handy (e.g. works for ballistics) but a wee bit autistic (i.e. anoraky)
- These left-brain thinkers (from Parmenides/Aristotle through Euler/Descartes to Minsky/Gates) set the agenda for computers
- Some more imaginative thinkers (such as Lovelace, Nelson and Engelbart) did their best...
- But digital computer systems went no further than Doug Engelbart's vision (mouse+windows+keyboard)
- Similarly, networked communication systems have failed to evolve far beyond Ted Nelson's vision (sorry, Sir Tim)
- The Apple design ethos is now a bid for design chic + speed....(whatever happened to 'non-modal user-interface design'?!!!)
- In short - the concept behind Digital Computers remains a pathetic expediency (read Kant) because nerds are left-brainers
- Wiki will not flourish fully unless we acknowledge that humans are emergent, sense-making, somatic creatures
- Humans live in a field of co-knowing, not a matrix of atomistic facts (see Bert Hellinger's work)
- As Wittgenstein said "everyday language is part of the human organism and no less complicated than it"
- We therefore anticipate auspicious reasoning as the norm - e.g. subject-oriented, not just object-oriented programming.
- Perhaps we will encounter a revolution engendered by quantum computing, rather than digital computing
- The start of this revolution is to challenge formalism. Long live the Revolution!
What is Wiki?
- We tend to assume that all computers are communication devices (inspired by left-brainers like Shannon and Boole)
- We valorise information as data...we valorise knowledge as information....we ignore wisdom (too New Age, Utopian, etc.)
- Why can't a Wiki be more like a Blog? some people say...(because my audience wants me to act on a larger stage)
- Wiki is not a book...it is not a car engine...it is not a telephone...it is not a cinema
- Wiki should be a dialect of thought...(what Peirce called a folkway of belief)...journeys can create paths (and vice versa)
- It is part of a team-cultivation system
- It is part of a task-harmonization system
- It achieves the above by offering co-authoring tools and methods
- OK, Wiki is also an information retrieval system...but this should only serve the above purposes