The Invariant Gardener

Jonah Leher’article on willpower is a perfect exemple of the utter emptiness of the current brain rethoric which endlessly repeat that the brain is THE cause of any mental phenomena.

Where do you go with such an idea ? Seemingly nowhere since neuropreach has just this one leitmotiv : « it happens in the brain ».

The article title is just one hysterical way of saying it. Hysterical in the original sense, i.e., based on the blaming of a body part ; thus the self avoids assuming her/his will, hence mental, weaknesses.

But make no mistakes, the paper is interesting because if you are not mesmerized by the neuropropaganda, you will soon discover that ALL the information brought to bear comes from sound psychological experiments. Not even one neuroscientific data is mentioned by the author. So you can appreciate here the power of the brain rhethoric because a casual reading will only let you think that you must « blame it on the brain ».

Now, concerning the psychological content of this paper, what is especially satisfying in the perspective of synthetic psychology is the reference to habits. Sure enough, the weakness of willpower is nowhere more evident than when it comes to breaking bad habits. But what is especially of importance is that when you are thinking in terms of habits, you are done. You don’t need anything else. Because — it’s a synthetic psychology axiom — we are nothing but a bunch of habits. And willpower has to be thought in this context, as William James did 120 years ago. That’s precisely what this paper shows, providing also the best evidence that there’s nothing new under the sun, even with breaking news in scientific research.

The author insists on the metaphor of « will-power as muscle » and it is very interesting because we are then in the domain of force, energy, power and… competition, i.e, the domain of habits, where exercizing, that is, repeating and repeating again the same activity is at the root of learning, development and mastery… over all the competing bad habits :-)

As we are a bunch of habits, doing anything suppose that at some point in time, there is some agreement between our habits, our schemas on what should be done. Like in a parliament, no unanimity is needed, a majority will suffice to give a stable idea of the goal. This means that the competition between different tendencies, different habits has to come to an end. Energy is therefore essential to win. Weak tendencies, weak habits won’t win power and/or access to bodily ressources if they are not sufficiently energetized. Heraclites is correct when stating that « war is the father and king of all », insofar as it reaches victory, that is, decision.

But, there is a but, contrarily to a parliament, the habit chamber can vote every seconds if one is lacking… willpower, that is, commitment to the decision taken.

If a habit in control (the one with which the self is identified) looses energy, it will loose control. All the experiments mentioned by Lehrer fall into this category, whether it’s a old habit (e.g. monitoring food intake) or a new one (a New Year resolution).

So everything boils down to… attention, focusing, dedication, i.e. presence to the fight that occurs constantly between good and bad habits. We tend to think that will is helpfull in this situation. But will is a fiction, as the self-agent agent which supposedly exert this will. The self is like God in a knight tournament. The best knight will win but his victory will be attributed to a God jugdement (jugement de Dieu). It the same for the self. The strongest habit will win and the victory will be attributed to a decision of the self : the will.

It’s a fiction, a social construction, but as reality is also a social construction, we can still use and live by this notion.

Whether we do it or not doesn’t matter. What is essential is to understand James who stressed the fact that attention is the alpha and omega of any decision process.

Lehrer gives a good example of that : if you don’t want to give in to temptation, think to something else. If you can’t, then, you will succumb. Forget will, self, etc. It’s only a matter of who which habit wins the power in you.

And yes, you can… have it. Whoever (whatever habit) you are… :-). Just be present to yourself, aware, conscious, pay attention to what is present and give attention to what has value to you. It’ll win.

So in the end, the question is : why does the neuroscientists go repeating constantly something that everybody knows : mental processes are supported by the brain ? Why ?

Here again, it’s a matter of power. By focusing attention on the neuron, they give power to it, they win power (i.e. money) like sorcerer in ancient culture. They pretend to deal with « the cause » of the phenomenology. As always, it’s a lie.

The cause is in you. Not in your neurons. Don’t blame the brain. Don’t blame yourself either. It’s useless. Just be cautious of what you are thinking, of yourself, of others, of the world. All of this is habits and action in the making, hence your reality. And again, you can change it. Just by paying attention.

It’s not that easy. You may consider engage in some kind of eastern practice of meditation. It helps. We have neuroscientific proofs of it :-)

The first paragraph is a beautiful piece of propaganda for neuroscience :

Recent advances in the neuroscience of emotions are high­lighting connections between cognitive and emotional func­tions that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of learning in the context of schools. (p.3)

Nothing explains such a statement, so this paragraph boils down to a mere annoucement of what is intended :

highlighting new connections between emotional, cognitive, and social func­tioning (p.3)

We may infer that a revolution is awaiting for these « new connections » between psychological dimensions. I’m absolutely thrilled at this idea of learning what these new connections are indeed. Aren’t you ?

But we will have to wait a little

The second paragraph start with an beautiful piece of self-conceit:

Modern biology reveals humans to be fundamentally emo­tional and social creatures. (p.3)

The interesting word here is « reveals ». As if the veil of ignorance was still concealing that truth. Obviously, the authors have a rough and self-centered conception of the history of ideas. Let us remind that in 1756 Hume already stated that  : « Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. »

I would suggest that almost all what is at stake in this article is probably solved by this simple assertion. We will come back to that later.

Concerning the fact that humans are social creatures, of course no revelation occured because of modern biology — unless Aristotle is considered as one of its representative.

But never mind with this illegitimate proudness.

Let’s come to the key argument of this paragraph :

Any com­petent teacher recognizes that emotions and feelings affect stu­dents ’ performance and learning, as does the state of the body, such as how well students have slept and eaten or whether they are feeling sick or well. We contend, however, that the relationship between learning, emotion and body state runs much deeper than many educators realize and is interwoven with the notion of learning itself. (p.3)

Are you exited when reading this ? Lucky you. It appears to me as one more contention without any substance. We’ll still have to wait.

So what about the next big statement ? :

It is not that emotions rule our cognition, nor that rational thought does not exist. It is, rather, that the original purpose for which our brains evolved was to manage our physiology, to optimize our survival, and to allow us to flourish. (p.3)

Not only the authors casually oppose Hume’s statement, they dogmaticly assert trivial statements concerning brain’s functions that give us no light on what is at stake.

So, we are still waiting for the first sound argumentation. I hope that you are not too disappointed.

It appears that propaganda is not the privilege of economics or politics. It is obviously an important tool in the factory of science.

Let’s come to deal with the first article’s abstract . It’s a gold mine with nice sprinkles. Immordino-Yang & Damasio make here two strong assertions. This is the first:

“the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of
cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely
learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning,
are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within
the processes of emotion; we call these aspects emotional thought”.

Does this new concept of “emotional thought” has any value ? Do we need that ? Has a thought devoid of any affect whatsoever been isolated in some laboratory recently ? Have we any proof or, at least, any clue that such an emotionless thought could exist in some situation ? The answer is: no, no, no and no

There’s no need for the concept of “emotional thought”. All thoughts are emotional like all mammals have blood in their veins. The concept of “bloody mammals” won’t help.

The second assertion is the following :

“emotion-related processes are required for
skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured
school environment to real-world decision making because
they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action.”

This statement originates in Damasio’s beautiful book “Descartes’ error” where he explains at length that people who have lost their emotional capacity are no longer able to make judgments or decisions. Their intellectual capacity, even if apparently intact, is of no help when a choice has to be made.

This is an interesting result, sure enough, but what is its meaning from a psychological viewpoint.

Let’s use a metaphore. Do you remember these tournaments between knights that where used as judgments of God in Middle-Age? What would happen if no knights were willing to fight, each for one opposite version of a the “reality” waiting for the judgment of God? Well, no such judgment would ever occur. Indecision would remain, of course.

When there’s no energy invested in the process, no decision can be made. It’s obvious, almost trivial. It’s a logical consequence of the energetic conception of emotions which is now older than a century and which has been defended by many great authors of the XIXth and XXth centuries.

Nothing (really) new under the sun. That’ll be my provisional conclusion for tonight

A colleague of mine recently handed me two articles dealing with neurosciences and education. After their takeover bid attempt of psychology, neurosciences are coveting education as a possible conquest for their empire.

Sadly enough, less and less people seems able to judge this discourse for what it is: a pure rhetoric with no serious argument

In an attempt to help teachers, educators and any person interested by the field of education staying away of what appears to me as useless conceptions, in what follows I will indulge in the activity which always gives me tremendous satisfactions : criticism.

In a serie of posts, I intend to read very closely these two recent articles :

1) “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education” by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio.
2) How Educational Theories Can Use Neuroscientific Data by Daniel T. Willingham and John W. Lloyd  

I don’t have read them yet. So it is supposed to be a kind of challenge. My only conviction is that, anyhow, I will learn something even if I still don’t know what.

My starting point is the fact that in my theory and pratice of psychology I have simply no use of neuroscience. Psychology is an autonomous science. I wouldn’t say so of education science but I am adamant that neurosciences won’t help in the least because my mind of school psychologist is complety devoid of neuroscientific concepts which would be of practical value when operating in the psychological realm.

Of course, this journey inside of the neuroscientific rhetoric will be an excellent opportunity to draw a global perspective of my synthetic conception of psychology

I hope you will have fun as much as I surely will.

Salvador@ECAP2008 (follow the link for the slides)

Sorry for my long absence. I’m that kind of man who can deal with only one task at a time, and I have had too many of them recently. I gave a talk on values in Marocco four weeks ago and some days later, I had the opportunity to express, in the ECAP 2008 conference, my hypotheses regarding the possibility of leveraging collective intelligence for knowledge creation through a « garden of ideas » structure like the one you are visiting.

I got very good feedbacks and I feel like having now a much clearer view of the whole process of knowledge creation « in the wild », i.e., with no peer-review !

As you will see, the slideshow is much more synthetic that the long abstract « Neither Wikipedia, nor Knol… » that you will find in the february 2008 archive.

However, in a new section, I have attemped to give a clear justification of the reason why we simply don’t need anymore an expert peer-review process since (a) prefiltering is useless and open to so many drawbacks and (b) postfiltering is so perfectly achieved by the wise crowd of readers.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions you could make.

In 1963, Magoroh Maruyama issued in the American Scientist a beautiful article devoted to positive feedback processes. It was entitled “The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes » and had been refused 10 times before acceptance (see Per Nyfelt). Maruyama’s idea was that « since its inception, cybernetics was more or less identified as a science of self-regulating and equilibrating systems…[and has] paid less attention to the systems in which the mutual causal effects are deviation-amplifying…[which] are ubiquitous.”

Maruyama lamented that “in contrast to the progress in the study of equilibrating systems, the deviation-amplifying systems have not been given as much investment of time and energy”.

45 years later, nothing has changed. The situation remains desperately biased in favor of negative feedback processes which are all over the place thanks to the many contributors to control theory.

Maruyama’s work is much cited and acknowledged as an important landmark in the history of cybernetics but it had no sequel. Too bad.

Why is it so? Why, if ubiquitous, positive feedback systems are still in the margin of scientific focus? Isn’t the life itself a deviation-amplifying system?

What comes to my mind at this point, is the possibility that Maruyama didn’t go far enough in challenging the empire of negative feedback. He conceived of the second cybernetics as the study of “the deviation-amplifying mutual causal relationships” as opposed to those of “the deviation-counteracting type”.

In spite of its obvious meaningfulness, this opposition is misleading because it is simply not sufficient. The second cybernetics should have defined as the study of positive feedback loops as opposed to negative feedback mechanims.

Where lies the difference? It is quite simple : positive feedback loops are not only deviation amplifying, they are first and foremost reproduction oriented. Deviation-amplifying is a mere side-effect of reproduction. Anything which is a living organization is, in essence, a positive feedback. The more bacteria, dogs, cats or humans you have, the more you will get in a close future. C’est la vie ! The sad thing with the deviation amplifying conception is that it has been an open avenue for anyone willing to reinstate the ultimate power of limiting factors, hence, the necessity of deviation-counteracting regulations.

As expressed by François (1999) “a limitless positive feedback, supposing a considerable — but limited — source to feed on, would indeed quickly turn absolutely destructive. So, it is important to study limits to such a growth.”

That’s precisely what has been done. Positive feedback has just been studied as a possibly disruptive mechanism and the fact that it is the bread and butter of the whole process of life has been disregarded. Most scholars and educated laymen know what an autopoeitic structure is. But how many are aware of the fact that any self-reproducing organization is a positive feedback loop per se? Only a very few of them.

In his PhD thesis in robotics, Thomas Labella definition of positive feedback is just one particular example of a widely disseminated and/or stereotyped misconception:

“Positive feedback: it occurs when small perturbations of the system change its dynamics in such a way as to increase the perturbations themselves. The feedback leads to a snowball amplification of the original perturbations. Perturbations can come from changes in the environment or by some random behaviour of the system.

Negative feedback: it is the opposite of the positive process feedback. Perturbations of the system changing its dynamic have the effect of reducing the causes of the perturbations. In self-organising systems, it usually starts having effects after positive feedback and has the purpose of keeping the system under control. Without negative feedback, a system can literally explode.”

Obviously, for the sake of security, resorting to the negative feedback comes like a reflex and unfortunately, the wording “deviation-amplifying systems” invites such a reaction.

But the problem that I want to stress here is definitely not a mere problem of wording. It is not the more serious problem of the insufficient attention paid to positive feedback processes in scientific investigations. It is much more than that. It is the fact that we have here a tremandous misconception which is left unoticed with the consequence that positive feedback is simply not acknowledge as the essence of reproduction, hence, the essence of any kind of organization. It’s an ontological problem. Positive feedback is simply not acknowledged for what it is : ubiquitous.

In order to get a better understanding of this huge mistake, just try to think of the most normative process in psychology, the most deviation-counteracting dynamics. What could it be if not habit? A habit is the most powerful obstacle to change. We have all noticed that in our everyday life.

But what is a habit if not, also, a positive feedback mechanism, since the more you repeat an act, the more you will repeat it in the future?

What does this contradiction means? It’s quite simple : what stands at the root of both deviation-counteracting and deviation-amplifying mechanisms is just one and the same process : reproduction. Reproduction is the essence of organization since no organization can maintain itself, hence, exist, if it is not capable of self-reproduction. Reproduction is the alpha and the omega of any kind of organization, whether biological, psychological or sociological. Positive feedback loops is all what it takes.

Therefore, let’s come to a foolish hypothesis : anything that exist is an organization, it has to reproduce, hence, it is a positive feedback loop, a circular process or anything that feeds on itself. Negative feedbacks don’t have such a structure.  They don’t feed on themselves. They are definitely not a self-reproducing organization. Quite the opposite. Therefore, from an ontological perspective, a foolish conclusion that seems nonetheless warranted is that they have no existence per se.

Of course, you have a problem with this very idea, don’t you? However, just try to think of the most normative process in biology, the most deviation-counteracting dynamics. What could it be if not natural selection? Well, as you certainly know, natural selection which is all over the place in scientific explanation of evolution, simply doesn’t exist in the ontological sense I am currently addressing. It doesn’t exist, indeed, since natural selection is … a metaphor which has been used by Darwin in order to express in the most obvious fashion that there is no selection agent ! 

Where does selection come from? Wanna bet? From reproduction, of course ; from the differential reproduction which takes place among the population of competing self-reproducing processes. No negative feedback has to be evoked here. All living forms are positive feedback dynamics contributing to a mutually co-selective process. Negative feedback mechanisms appear when attention is restricted to some local aspects of the circular causal chains involved. Negative feedback are mere perceptive bias.

The first cybernetics is about deviation-counteracting systems. The second cybernetics has been an attempt to draw more attention on deviation-amplifying systems. Imitating Maruyama gesture and, most probably, imitating his failure, I would suggest that it is time to confront the fact that, like natural selection, negative feedback don’t exist. It is time to study positive feedback loops as the only things that can emerge from chaos, hence the only things that exist. This study could conveniently be labelled “the third cybernetics”.

As I said in my previous post, the essence of life is… reproduction ! But what about creativity? Sure enough, life is the most creative process ever. But no one can deny that the whole process of life is supported by reproduction. Don’t you think there is a paradox here ?

If any, it has been solved by Darwin’s differential reproduction principle which only means that some will reproduce more than others. Please, feel the beauty of the thing : it is a quasi-tautology and… it has such a huge explanatory value !

As a matter of fact, it has been expressed as a plain tautology by Gregory Bateson who wrote : “what Darwin called ‘Natural Selection’ is the surfacing of the tautology or presupposition that what stays true longer does indeed stay true longer than what stays true not so long (Mind & Nature, 1979:206 (220 in the 1980 Fontana edition).

Bateson was very fond of tautologies and conceived of the world of mental processes (the Creatura) as a slowly self-healing tautology bound to internal consistency of ideas and processes. I love this idea because it give such a role to likeness, similarity and, eventually, reproduction. Indeed, consistency or coherence entails some sort of similarity between two things which are, thus, mutually supportive.

Did it ever occur to you that we say “like” for what we are attracted for? Implicitly -hence strongly- it means that we like what is like. Like what ? Like what we expect, of course ! Hence the reproductive aspect of the psychological organization which is so well known by laymen -and nowadays ignored by most scientists- as “habit”.

We are made of habits. We are nothing but habits. Nothing but a whole bunch of tendencies to reproduce and/or maintain the dynamics of our interactions with the world, i.e., maintain ourselves.

Biological life means reproduction. Psychological life means habit.  It is the great law of stability. As expressed by C.S. Pierce : “underlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits“.

My seed is the following : all what it takes to think the world is acknowledging the generative power of reproduction, which is, always, differential reproduction since variations are inevitable. It seems deceivingly simple and surely naive. Can we seriously hope reducing the complexity of the world to so simple a mechanism?

That what this garden of ideas is all about !

The next seed will concern ontology, i.e., the question of “what reproduces in the first place?”

Thanks to the gentle pressure of Jean Sallantin, the organizer of the next European Conference on Computing and Philosophy that will take place in Montpellier, France from 16 to 18th of June, I have tried to express more precisely what is a garden of ideas. You will find below two abstracts, the short and the long one, which have been submitted to the conference with the hope that they could be found of interest.

Whatever happens, I am already satisfied because I discovered that my idea of a garden of ideas is quite original since there is currently no place in cyberspace for collective and democratic creation of new knowledge. Content creation is everywhere, “information commons” are growing, but the development of original research is still a privilege of the scholarly world. The garden of ideas can bring some changes to this sad state of the art.

Short abstract

In what follows, I will address the possibility of leveraging collective intelligence to develop and nurture the ideas of an individual author aiming at the creation of new knowledge. Currently, the power of the collective intelligence of the social web is limited to mere content creation and is simply not concerned by collective knowledge creation which remains the privilege of the scholar world. This fact has thus far remained in the blindspot of the main actors and commentators of the social web. Finding an alternative seems warranted if we are in the least committed to democracy. After a quick historical apercu of the relation between power and knowledge in the context of the reproduction-variation dialectics which is at the very basis of any living, social or psychological organization, the present time will appear as reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary periods of the 18th and 19th centuries when empowered crowds were on the verge of putting the privileges of their elites to an end. An individual’s freedom and legitimacy of speech and thought regarding knowledge and the facts of science has indeed still to be reclaimed from so-called experts who can, at best, speak of the state of the art but not tell the truth. Since scholarly thinking is a debative, hence collaborative and selective process, opening it to the general public in cyberspace can be done easily and fruitfully. As is well known, peer-reviewed bad or even fraudulent science is not so rare. My stance is that a generalized peer review process based on a user-driven evaluation system would not only offer a safer path to reliable knowledge since each proposal would come under the intense scrutiny of a much wider audience but it could also support, nurture and strengthen innovative approaches before they come under the conformist pressure of Academia. Intended as a genuine collective knowledge creation tool, a « garden of ideas » is an authored collaborative workspace where the collective intelligence of the web can contribute to the development and, possibly, the social validation of a system of thought under the guidance and the inspiration of its creator. It is a kind of « barn raising » in the noosphere. Everybody, whether expert, amateur or novice, can contribute to or initiate such a process, hence its democratic as well as socioconstructivist nature.

Long abstract

The essence of life is reproduction, but life is also at the edge of chaos (Langton, 1990). It operates in a region between order and disorder and has to escape both. The crystal’s stability and the fluid dynamics of smoke are both incompatible with life’s processes (Atlan, 1972). The same is true of ideas. They have a life of their own. They reproduce, develop and die or survive, depending on the balance between replication and variation, both of which are at the heart of adaptive processes.

Ever since their origins and in order to survive, humans have tried hard to escape disorder, i.e., conflict. They have done so through submission to a cultural order formed by consensual representations and activities such as rites, traditions, customs etc. For ages, variations or differences have been very slowly integrated into the conservative process of culture. But since the Renaissance and the uprising of revolutionary crowds against suprahuman authority and order, western societies have been nurturing individual freedom, hence differences, to the point of risking the disruption of culture and other social structures.

With the opening of cyberspace, the problem has reached unprecedented levels and is becoming a source of major concern for all the powers that be : governments, corporations, and religions. A significant part of the control they used to have over which ideas should be allowed to reproduce and which should be forbidden from doing so has been put into the hands of individuals. The slow decay of the traditional forms of authority as well as the development and advancement of new and powerful information technologies have made old and new ideas not only more and more easily accessible to (all) anyone — hence selectively reproduced by individuals, who enjoy freedom of choice —, but also more and more easily produced and published by a user who is no longer an end-user but an author in full.

Paradoxically, it is when the individualistic tendencies of our societies seem to reach their climax that the power of crowds is rediscovered thanks to cyberspace and the web 2.0. Individuals now enjoy more and more freedom of thought and speech, but also freedom of association. The fruits of cooperative online communities appear quite impressive and have gained a legitimate renown like, say, Linux or Wikipedia. The « wisdom of crowds » is becoming a buzzword and intense efforts are accomplished by the entrepreneurial world in order to get better IT capable of taping into the collective intelligence ressources of the web.

However, a close scrutiny of this enjoyable picture reveals the existence of a major blindspot concerning knowledge, and particularly, the creation of knowledge as opposed to mere reproduction (of information). It is a remarkable fact that the creativity of the online community regarding software development is unparalleled with regards to the development of knowledge.

Wikipedia is a great achievement in itself but, as an encyclopedia, it is logically dedicated to the compilation of validated information and therefore openly rejects any kind of original thought or research. In spite of its individualistic turn, the Google project Knol remains oriented toward the production of encyclopedic or authoritative articles, i.e. the mere reproduction of knowledge intended for those who want to learn about any topic. Squidoo aims only at more or less informed personal viewpoints labeled as « lens ». Answers posted on Answers.com are mere… answers which are not supposed to go beyond common knowledge. Thus, the amazing creativity of the social web is understood as a mere content creation resulting in one kind or another of « Information Commons », i.e. repositories devoid of any new knowledge as such. Citizen Science projects attempt to take advantage of the idle human computation capabilities of the general public, but raw data collection is not genuine knowledge.

In sum, cyberspace currently offers no serious example of collective knowledge development « by the people, for the people » when, at the same time, the peer-to-peer networks are empowering individuals in so many ways. Why such an absence?

The most obvious explanation is that scholars have retained many privileges and exclusive rights regarding the production of knowledge. Neither the Renaissance, nor the many political revolutions of the past changed this in any respect : the only community currently allowed to produce new knowledge, i.e., to make discoveries, is the scholarly community. For better or for worse, taxpayers are expected to fund research without saying a word. They can but silently surrender to the marvellous achievements of their knowledgeable elites when, at the same time, the buzz word « society of knowledge » is on everyone’s lips.

It is my contention that, firstly, the new social web tools allow for a truly democratic knowledge creation process, i.e. a collective research dynamic energized by crowdsourcing and, secondly, that there are no serious reasons to be shy about entering the scholar domain, the land of « reliable knowledge ».

The most serious difficulty probably concerns the transition from idea to knowledge. Reliable knowledge is currently understood as resulting from an expert peer reviewing process. But just ask yourself this : « could a generalized peer review supported by the social networks replace the usual team of 2 or 3 reviewers? The answer is all the more obvious because the peer review system has recently come under harsh criticism (see Horton, 2000 ; White, 2003 ; Shatz, 2004 and the Nature debate). There are currently good reasons to think that the peer review process could be easily and advantageously replaced by a user-driven review system (Linkov, 2005 ; Rodriguez et al. 2005). It has to be remembered that the processes of scholarly thinking are first and foremost those of a permanent debate, a conflict of representations aiming at falsification as much as at counter proposal. The dynamic is an endless circulation between consensus and dissensus through hypothesis formation, confirmation and infirmation. It is fairly obvious that the web 2.0 tools nicely serve scholarly discussions, accelerating the tempo of their exchanges as well as widening their range and audience. As a million eyes are far better than 4 or 6 (even expert) eyes, the selection process of ideas —which is the be all and end all of peer reviewing— could not be better supported. In other words, when it comes to suggesting, scaffolding or falsifying an idea, which is the basic business of scholarly thinking, anyone now can and should be allowed to participate since, first, ad hominem reasoning is irrelevant in the process of evaluating ideas (we are all equipotent) and, second, the reliability of an idea depends only of the intensity and the range of criticism to which it is subjected and can withstand.

Since the noosphere is mainly a battlefield where the end result of collective processes are not garanteed, I have addressed a simplified version of the problem of collective knowledge creation. I will focus on an individual’s thought system, asking what could be the easiest way for an author to leverage collective intelligence to the development of her own ideas and, eventually, to knowledge creation?

As underlined by Lanier : « the balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. » In my opinion, a successfull balance is precisely what can be expected from a collaborative exchange between a somehow stochastic input of contributions and an individual thought system already endowed with some coherence, thus more easily organized, maintained and protected against the nuisances of the social web.

The original thought system can be seen as a garden where ideas are seeds planted in a greenhouse and awaiting nurishment from cyberspace. Users of the garden may visit it, take lessons and/or give commentaries, criticisms, suggestions, hypotheses, or even full fetched theses in pro or con. A key aspect is the full acknowledgement each visitor deserves for even her smallest contributions. Planetmath.org with its authority structure —giving full rights to the (contributed) object owner— and the computed ranking of users is a very good example of what could be done in the beginnings. It simply lacks a collaborative research domain where something like the following sections could conveniently be found : the common axiomatics, a glossary/encyclopedia of the fundamental concepts, a partition of the search space, a list of the research programs, a conjectures & refutations section, hypotheses currently being tested, etc.

The gist of the garden’s functionning is that it is garnished with hypotheses waiting to be put to the test. Thus, what is awaited from its visitors is positive or critical attention to a given idea, infirmation, confirmation or variation of the hypothesis.This could also include cooperation with the gardener in some subsection, around one or several hypotheses or even autonomous creation derived from the axiomatics and its corollary. The ranking of the contributors also allows for a corresponding reward if the garden is opened to some kind of advertizing.

Such a project is, hopefully, expected to help raise citizens’ awareness of the current asymetry in the dynamics of knowledge construction. It is also expected to lead to a collective production of ideas, conceptions and theorizations.Their value could help legitimize the implication of any concerned human in the creation process of new knowledge.

Ideas have a life of their own. They reproduce, develop and die. Hence the possibility of a garden of ideas.

But what are ideas?

I would here suggest that ideas are just a part of action, since “the deed is everything” as Nietzsche said.

Ideas are important because they determine (and propel us into) action through perception.

If we are willing to do what has to be done (the quintessential zen attitude) we need to see what has to be seen.

Thus,  what we need to have in the first place is clear ideas concerning the world, others, and ourselves.

This garden of ideas is intended as a place were efficient ideas, i.e. enligthning ideas which gives us a feeling control over our reality will be nurtured.

This is how, in my perspective, things should be :

·        An idea of interest, whether a well structured hypothesis or a mere conjecture, will be a seed put in the hotbed (a wiki section) with some intellectual loam (wiki + blog). I will do my best to give it the best possible shape.

·        As soon the idea attracts some attention and start growing through discussion in the forum or with any other kind of contributions (blog or wiki), it is taken out of the hotbed, and planted in the open fields section of the wiki.

·        There, it may develop as much as needed in any direction.

Here, as in any kind of collective action, the very question is… responsability !

That’s precisely where lies the difference between the Wikipedia project and Google Knol project.

As the gardener, I will take full responsability for what grows in the garden. But yet, I will make every efforts (hopefully with the help of the web 2.0 tools) to keep track of even the minutest contributions of anyone.

In my perspective, anyone who has been contributing to the growth and value of any idea should gain full acknowledgement of it.

I will do my best to be a faithful and caring gardener, especially invariant regarding justice.

But I will also be adamant regarding the one rule of this garden, which is that contributions of any kind have to « cross over » garden’s ideas or themas.

No one will be allowed to expose ideas whose connection with those planted in this garden has not been made explicit.

A loose connection won’t be sufficient. Each contribution has to take a pro or con stance regarding at least one of the garden’s ideas.

What I call the Koenigsberg’s strategy is simply forbidden (I will come to that later, but let’s say for the moment that it is equivalent to the cuckoo’s strategy).

Last notice : suggestion, approval and criticism are equally welcome in this site.

Next contribution : my collection of seeds

I love this sentence. It’s seems meaningless, with a scent of foolishness. But it is so profound. It goes deep into the mysteries of the human psyche. It goes straight to the essence of human cognition, which is …. recognition, i.e., the fact that we are constantly checking our perception on the basis of our memories, looking for some kind of similarity. This is the one habit of the mind.

Notwithstanding our current devotion to ‘difference’, we should acknowledge the fact that looking for sameness is not only a fundamental, yet covert, goal, it has its beauty in itself, which is the fact that we do like what is like what we expected. It’s only when we can match our expectations with our perceptions that we “feel the real thing”. When we keep in touch with reality there’s a correspondance between our representations of reality and reality itself. We then feel in control, hence we feel secure, and we simply love that !

I don’t know what Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he uttered this quasi-tautology but, sure enough, he is inviting us to look at reality as if we were recognizing it, no matter what its present state. We are invited to feel as if we were in control, as if we were secure, hence opened to reality. We are invited to pay attention to the innumerable aspects of our present reality which are fulfilling our expectations, our needs. We are thus invited to perceive, think, feel and act positively.

Of course, what is of interest here, is definitely not positive thinking. It’s the fact that we are in love with sameness but we ignore it. We are constantly looking for some kind of invariance in our lives, but we tend to deny it. We tend to associate sameness and boredom when sameness means stability, hence reality, hence control, hence security, hence comfort, hence pleasure. When reality perfectly matches our expectations, we say “it’s a dream” and we feel joyful.

On this site, we will unrelentingly investigate the consequences of our drive for sameness in every aspects of human life, intending to show how it can be at the root of our creativity like reproduction is the very spring of the whole living phenomenon.

A beautiful example of the presence and the power of sameness in our lives comes from a physicist, Hubert Reeves, who I heard recounting on the radio that after he understood Maxwell’s equations of light, he became afraid that this new understanding would ruin the exquisite pleasure he had just contemplating the beauty of a sunset. Fortunately, he soon discovered that his new knowledge of light just enhanced his pleasure.

He gaves no explanation for that. But his testimony makes sense. The more fulfilled expectations you have, the more pleasure you get. The more you know about history, music, biology etc., the more intense your understanding of all the things around you, the more pleasure you get.

Somehow, knowledge is a garantee of pleasure when interacting with the world. Discovery is so pleasurable because it gives you more knowledge, more control, more pleasure, i.e., more opportunities to think that “things are more like they are now than they ever were before”.

Welcome to my garden of ideas, where you will, hopefully, be able to gain as well as offer some knowledge over humankind and its reality.