The notion that knowledge gained during contemplation
within study is superior to that gained during experential involvement with nature
predominates within our learning centres, guiding the analytical education we
receive. The structures of most knowledge gathering institutes assert the importance
of maintaining a distance from the objects of study in nature; with universities,
polytechnics, and schools even built in isolation
from both the natural order and the social order. The 'ivory tower' approach has
dominated for centuries, providing a steady and ever-increasing procession of
information and facts about the things¹ we live with. Culminating in the latter
20th century¹s over saturation of facts;
an environment of knowledge¹ too impossible to comprehend, too perplexing
to remedy, and too pointless to sustain. These facts¹ have [in fact] necessitated
the demand for technology and information processing tools. Critic, Michael Kendrick,
outlines the thesis of neo-luddite Theodore Roszak which exemplifies this situation:
As our world grows increasingly complicated, Roszak warned, we've lost
the ability to make sense of it. Our technology grows more inscrutable,
our politics more convoluted, our foreign policy beyond the comprehension of all
but a few. This cultural complexity, Roszak said, is what is leading so many people
to try to master the Internet. Many people believe that the computer will give
them a way to process and understand the
vast quantities of information that swamp
our daily lives. The development of parallel processing certainly helped us to
manage our information more efficiently. Computer technologies have enabled us
to sort, stack, assemble, pattern, sample, divide
and conquer our analytical achievements with remarkable ease. The analytical
mind after years of long linear processing and serial deduction rejoiced at the
acceleration in reaching sequential conclusions. The electronic parallel processor
was a logical and necessary development to a mind so ingrained to
finding reality in states of succession. Reality is still there, though
not in the material realm of the physical universe where the modern era assumed
it to be. ... I have tried to provide a glimpse
of where that reality may be, in the formal, abstract domain revealed by
mathematics and computation. [T]he computer has, through its simulative powers,
provided what I regard as reassuring evidence that it is still there. (Woolley
254) Woolley looks to mathematical physics and its kin for an authentic
world, because mathematical physics is the most revered of all attempts
to uncover reality. Computation being the cause to legitimate it¹s processes by
elliminating the need for laborious and time-consuming manual thought processing.
But if the end result of linear de-duction and computation is the need
to simulate reality in order to confirm
it¹s presence then such a knowledge can only be reductive. Sequential thought
had forgotten how to claim lateral imagination and vague
intuition as legitimate forms to further understanding. Once Copernicus had eliminated
place as a basis of the human claim to centrality in the universe, we were at
a lost to interpret our spatial experience simultaneously. Descartes replaced
it with the reality of our own mental processeshe coined the famous dictum "I
think, therefore I am"a few words which displaced
spatial experience, created a referential void, and further dissassociated
us from our passages of life. By heralding
deduction as the key to understanding Descartes implicitly disdained intuition
borne of direct involvement: Whereas deduction involves running through ideas
successively in time and retaining some of them in memory, intuition grasps
a nexus of ideas all at once. However, if the mind runs through a chain
of reasoning quickly and easily enough, deduction can be converted to intuition.
Descartes provided the impetus to disdain intuition, if it could be so easily
replaced with punctilious reasoning. But the flip side of such reasoning¹ cast
doubt upon the knowledge of reality (that which firmly established scientific
institutions routinely produce), as it coexists with doubt as to existence
of anything independently of knower. This is the worm in our modern intellectual
and scientific pursuits - that despite all our objective and contemplative stances,
truth¹ may still be relative. We transfer
our wealth of information into cyberspace in the vain hope [unquestioned belief]
that truth will emerge. But what does emerge is simply more information, truth¹
is actually a value, and therefore there is only truth when it is meaningful.¹
Experience is the prerequisite for the creation
of meaningful truths. A major twentieth century philosopher, Henri Bergson,
developed theories that sought to revolutionise linear thought and prioritise
the experential process. Bergson attempted to define the nature of consciousness,
particularly the instinctual stream of consciousness by insisting that we attend
to to our inner experience. He claimed that states of thought or feeling were
interpenetrating organically linked experiences, and that psychology had mislead
people by claiming that these states were separate,
unchanging things experienced successively as one preceeds another. 'Instead of
regarding our inner life as a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other,
we treat it as an array of solid colours set side by side like the beads of a
necklace.' He believed that all is simultaneously present to this consciousness
and that it is perpetually mobile, ceaselessly
transforming its past into its present through memory, so that its present is
composed of an infinite number of interpenetrating tenuous states of being.' Bergson
maintained that analytical reasoning and conceptual knowledge destroyed the inner
state of consciousness when it attempts to divide experience into seperate states.
Bergson believed that 'sequential modes of thought and expression were inadequate
to realize the fullness and complexity of ... modern urban life.' He proposed
that becoming aware of our 'vital impulse'
(the direct, immediate experience of living) and thereby rejecting the 'factitious
unity which the understanding imposes in nature from the outside, we shall perhaps
find its true, inward and living unity.'
Bergson is proposing that we again take account of the passage over¹, a concept
of direct involvement which he terms the vital impulse.¹ Within the merging of
our ceaselessly linked experiences, an organic knowledge
will naturally form by accretion. The main problem with maintaining 'distance'
from the subject is that truth becomes increasingly dissoluble and impossible
to locate. The external observer is firstly limited by the "Heisenberg principle"that
observation destroys the thing observedwhich has always been an obstacle to the
growth of such knowledge. Secondly, the search for simple predictable laws of
nature inevitably encounter setbacks due to the enormous complexity of our universe
and the variability of measurments of the initial conditions. This type of knowledge
inquiry must know everything, measure everything,
and be constantly aware of everything in order to be absolutely correct. 'Truth,'
to date, is nothing more than an intelligent approximation. As designers, we generally
find ourselves compelled to impose on our materials some sort of integration,
whether it be factitious or ficticious.
This is what we do. Our designs are therefore limited in scope and understanding
by the knowledge we have accrued. Despite all our best attempts to be creative,
we will always fail because this method of imposition allows only for an imitation
of nature; we inevitably end up with a simulacrum-a very poor copy without the
essence of the original. For instance, whilst the order of nature continues to
move and evolve according to a changeable interrelated
logic, the nature ordered by human is so precisely controlled and modified
in the search for perfection that the intrinsic quality of the interconnected
cosmos is neglected.