Peer to peer science, network effects, and consilience

Just as the technium is currently in the process of connecting all humans to each other (via the internet), and all devices to each other (ditto), it is also in the process of connecting each idea to all other ideas, so that there is a one unified body of knowledge.

From the extensive meditation by Kevin Kelly, which we discussed 2 days ago.

Here we focus on his treatment of the unity of knowledge, i.e. consilience and how it is influenced by network effects.

Starting point of the argument is why certain aspects of knowledge, such as traditional knowledge, remain unacknowledged until they are integrated within science. But as science becomes more integrated and our new internetworked technologies augment the network effects of such integration, more and more human knowledge will need to become acknowledged.

Kevin Kelly:

“The universe, as the sages in every religion teach us, is really one vast continuum. But to utilize knowledge of this universal continuum we need to expand our technology, which is really a way of expanding our collective mind. Technology’s long term evolution moves science – that is the interconnected, accumulated body of knowledge of all human minds – towards unity, or consilience. Consilience is a term coined in the 1840 by philosopher William Whewell and resurrected recently by E.O. Wilson to indicate the unity of knowledge. Consilience would entail, among other things, a common set of axioms that can be used to adequately explain (and predict) the phenomenon we experience in the ecology of a tundra, the interior fusion of stars, the behavior of teenage social networks, the physics of quantum computing, and the mutation of viruses. Today science is far from consilience.

In addition to uniting the principles of different scientific fields, consilience will also need to bind unrelated bodies of knowledge together, some of it ancient knowledge. Advances in communication technology and the scientific method are doing that.

The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many “facts” that don’t fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. A new theory does not need to have every unexpected detail explained (and rarely does) but it must be woven to some satisfaction into the established order. Every strand of conjecture, assumption, observation is subject to scrutiny, testing, skepticism and verification. Piece by piece consilience is built.

In this way consilience is a type of technology, expanded by technology. Unified knowledge is constructed by the mechanics of duplication, printing, postal networks, libraries, indexing, catalogs, citations, tagging, cross-referencing, bibliographies, keyword search, annotation, peer-review, and hyperlinking. Each epistemic invention expands the web of verifiable facts and links one bit of knowledge to another. Knowledge is thus a network phenomenon, with each fact a node. We say knowledge increases not only when the number of facts increases, but more so when the number and strength of relationships between facts increases. It is the relatedness that gives knowledge its power. Our understanding of gorillas deepens and becomes more useful as their behavior is compared to, indexed with, aligned into, and related to the behavior of other primates. Our consilience is expanded as their anatomy is related to other animals, as their evolution is integrated into the tree of life, as their ecology is connected to the other animals co-evolving with them, as their existence is noted by many kinds of observers, until the facts of gorillahood are woven into the encyclopedia of knowledge in thousands of criss-crossing and self-checking directions. Each strand of enlightenment enhances not only the facts of gorillas, but also the strength of the whole cloth of human knowledge.

And as in any networked system, the larger the pool of nodes that are being linked up in the network, the more powerful it is. Doubling the number of nodes more than doubles its value. To a rough approximation, as the nodes of a network increase linearly, its value grows exponentially. This exponential growth in power means that one larger network is vastly more valuable than two smaller networks with the same total number of members. Let’s say that community “A” has integrated 10 facts into its pool of knowledge. If each fact is related in some way to the others, then the collective knowledge swells exponentially by 10^2, or 100 assertions. At the same time on another part of the planet, community “B” has integrated a different set of 10 facts with a similar value. If a Columbus or encyclopedist were able to combine those two pools of knowledge, the 10 A nodes with the 10 B nodes, and then interrelate those 20 facts into a single integrated web of knowledge, the value of that unified pool is twice the value (400, or 20^2) compared to the sum of the two isolated pools (2 x 100). The mathematics favors a single seamless carpet of knowledge over separate disjoined knowledge. When a self-contained patch of information can be woven into a global consilience it increases the value of all parts.

Today there remain many unconnected pools of knowledge. The unique wealth of traditional wisdom won by indigenous tribes in their long intimate embrace of their natural environment is very difficult (if not impossible) to move out of their native context. Within their system, their sharp knowledge is tightly woven, but it is disconnected from the rest of what we collectively know. A lot of shamanic knowledge is similar. Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains “undiscovered.” Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don’t fit into the larger pattern of the known.

The perceived divisions between types of knowledge, between levels of knowing, and between distinctions in our own standing in the universe are all being steadily leveled by the advance of the technium. Bit by bit technology illuminates the continuum that connects everything. In the usual self-amplifying circle of upcreation, each advance in knowledge also facilitates new inventions, unleashing yet more revealing technology. While our system of science can increase ignorance faster than it can increase knowledge (see the Expansion of Ignorance), new instruments amplify our ways of seeing and powers of systemic thinking. New tools fatten our collective memory and deepen our understanding. Just as the technium is currently in the process of connecting all humans to each other (via the internet), and all devices to each other (ditto), it is also in the process of connecting each idea to all other ideas, so that there is a one unified body of knowledge.

Over the long haul, as the technium becomes more complex, accelerated and sentient, technology tends toward consilience. “

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