Maintaining a sense of wonder

I tweeted that at bedtime on Friday my just-7 daughter had asked 'How do I know this world isn't fake?'

It struck a chord with many of you. In fact I'd hazard a guess to say that it was the single most retweeted thing I've ever published (not said, mind, she said it).

And it's not the first time she has launched into the existential.  A couple of years back she hit me with both: 'if God made everything, who made God'? And on getting into numbers: 'I want to know what is the last number on the number line '

Out of the mouths of babes...

I'd like to think my daughter is spectacularly clever or oh so unique.  But the fact is most of our kids ask questions like this. A lot.

The tragedy is that as we grow up we stop.

A former philosophy professor of mine once described philosophy as 'maintaining the sense of wonder'.  It's a sense of wonder about the world we are all born with.  A sense of wonder we would all do well to try to rekindle.

Happy thinking.

Welcome to the No-Time Web

Time is a construct - a way for us to make sense of a series of events. It is the way we bring clarity to what would otherwise be at risk of being a very confusing reality.
Theoretical physics tells us everything that will ever exist already exists and is at all points in space and time simultaneously.
Perhaps I'm over simplifying and or being far too generalist? What is certain is that the notions of past, present and future are cast seriously into doubt by modern physical thinking; and also that time is the fourth dimension for us three-dimensional dwellers, but that superstring theory requires TEN dimensions.

We don't need to delve much more deeply into this, you will be relieved to know, for us to have a paddle at the edges of these philosophical depths.

Loosely, there are all these additional dimensions, all things that ever happen all happen at once and at every other point in time/space... and we manage to stumble our way through this hard-to-imagine stuff by layering on the 'made in the brain' concepts of time and space. Things appear to happen in order because that's the way we make sense of 'everything'.

A small example. It's widely thought that the way we dream replicates this idea. A whole bucketful of concepts get thrown out and strewn around by our subconscious as we sleep (where time and space is not experienced and so have little value) and these concepts are hurriedly assembled into a story, complete with a linear progression and played out in spaces we can 'get our heads round' as we wake - in order for our conscious mind to make any sense/derive any value from them. The 'dream' if you like, only happens as you wake up. The raw material is generated as you sleep but the plot gets layered on as the conscious mind kicks in.

For many centuries we have supplied a linear narrative to understand the jumble of reality. This makes perfectly excellent sense to us. We plant a seed. It grows. We harvest the outcome. How could it be any other way?

But the emerging reality is a place which is a collection of events. There is no hard and fast order. No hard and fast way in which this reality must be experienced.

In the past (if you'll pardon the continued use of the term) - a mass production world required defined processes with progress contingent on the successful completion of the previous step; a mass production line.

Computers don't function like that when they are processing - Random Access Memory is very different from the indexing you'll find of books in your local library, for example.

And with the web too, we pull information we need at the point we need it. The Web is all of us using all of us as RAM.

This challenges our comfortable linear thinking. It raises doubts about the value of time and 'the right' order that things do or must happen in.

On the web being the first or being the most 'up to date' is less important than being the most relevant - being useful in a particular set of circumstances and from a particular perspective - much more than at a particular time. Hence the rise of the real time web.

In the real time web we find people, things, ideas etc which are useful to us right now. We don't need to have grown-up with the people, we don't need to understand that we must know what A and B are to know why A + B = C (we can go straight to C). We don't need to layer on time or space to make sense of this reality.

What is useful to us at 'this point' is important - not what is newest (a challenge to 'news' that media orgs must get to grips with). Relevant beats recent.

Perhaps the real-time web is in fact a misnomer. Perhaps instead we should call it the no time web. It is a place where processes of progression are less important; where we do loads of things at once - experience lots of things, all at once.

Our growing experience of this has the potential to change the way we experience every element of our reality - not just our online information gathering.

As we learn, we move from temporal order to what some would call chaos. But I wonder if this seeming chaos isn't in fact closer to the reality of our universe than we have ever allowed ourselves to experience before.

The web may be opening our eyes to a RAM reality that sits behind the time-ordered reality we have layered on until now.

Taking those blinkers off is likely to be enlightening and frightening in equal measure.

In search of a new philosophy

Alan Moore is pitching a proposal for next year's SXSW. If you like the sound of it, vote for it.
His 'No Straight Lines Thinking' approach is a rallying call for a new philosophy more appropriate to the networked world.

Disclosure: Alan is a good friend to me, and someone I have worked with in the past and would gladly work with in the future - a true believer in the power of the network.

He says:

The core areas (to investigate) are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.
2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society
3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity
4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship
5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively.
6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.
7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.
8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in
9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

And there's a video to explain a little more:  

The opposite of a snob is your mother

When I saw JP Rangaswami tweeting he was at the recent TED event, I had to ask, what the stand-out for him was.
This (below), was his answer. Given that TED is a pretty well curated collection of brilliance, that this should stand out for JP means a lot to me. I trust it will bring value to you, too.
Alain de Botton challenges what success means. Watch it and my headline will make sense...

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Here be seamonsters: Tonight I'm going to party like its 1303

I don't watch much television. But last night something did catch my eye. BBC4 broadcast a programme titled Inside The Medieval Mind.
It had real resonance for me. The good professor Robert Bartlett, of St Andrew's University, described how medieval man understood the world - as a place of mystery and enchantment.

"The world was a book written by God. But as the Middle Ages drew to a close, it became a place to be mastered, even exploited."

That sounds familiar. The beginning of the Renaissance (let's call it 1304) began the period of disenchantment with the world - as we learned more about it we found there weren't sea monsters, or people with faces in their chests, or with a dog's head. We demystified the world and we did it through travel, exploration and the exchange of information.

We did this in the physical world. So it took 15 centuries for Greek philosophy to reach and impact on the West.

With the emergence of the network in the digital world it feels to me like the end of another era of mystification. I suspect its impact will take rather less than 15 centuries.

I wonder if it is ourselves who will be 'disenchanted' (ie we will demystify our 'selves') this time around?