Dear FIS colleagues,
One of the aspects of the discussion started by James concerns the
medieval achievements on collective or social intelligence, so to speak.
I mean, we can see how the crucial civil institutions for the emergence
of modern societies in the Western world were started around this
period: universities, corporations, urban & merchant & labor democratic
councils, pluralism of hierarchies, liberal arts & mechanical arts,
common language and culture for science and scholarship... From the
point of view of "social information science" a deeper understanding is
needed on what kind of processes made some cultures start up an
open-ended process of transformation while others were left in
stagnation or in decline.
Thus the medieval paradigm needs a more rigorous historical and
informational analysis than the worn cliches of "dark" "backwarded" and
the like. The contrast with our own times may be quite interesting.
Social collective intelligence of our times is far below the
performances of technological and scientific systems ---up to the
obvious point that planetary or civilized survival is far from granted.
The medievals had "Liberal Arts" (Trivium and Quadrivium), and
"Mechanical Arts"; we have hundreds, thousands of techno-scientific and
humanistic disciplines. But societies can hardly increase their
collective wisdom, improve their "knowledge recombination". As very
often argued in this list, it is a whole conceptual chain we do not make
much sense yet: information, knowledge, intelligence, knowledge
integration ... Is there anything to learn about contemporary knowledge
recombination from the backwarded medievals? I think so!
........
........
In a different matter, people waiting for more down to earth discussions
will be happy to know the prospects for next discussion sessions: _on
information theory_ (chaired by Mark Burgin); _chemical information_
(chaired by Michel Petitjean), and _social information science_
(chaired by Xueshan Yan). So we will be busy for quite months ahead
--and of course, further suggestions for topics will be very welcome,
please send them to me, better off line. Hopefully in next weeks there
will be good news on the poignant problem that Joseph was kindly
pointing at: the necessity of a properly organized repository for our
conversations.
best wishes
---Pedro
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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