Jonathan, I so appreciate your work and your words here. And find in them a wise orientation in the face of the disorientation we currently face. Thank you
Great to see you bringing McGilchrist in. ‘Attention is a moral act’ can be developed into full epistemology (as he does). Thanks fir your posts. I read them all as fresh air gift.
Thank you for rooting the article in Pariser's work. As a HS ELA teacher, I started using it mid 2010's, and not just the Filter Bubble Ted Talk but the book, and then his work now at New Public - as a floor for social epistemology, it's been interesting and a bit of a salve to the constant attempts at information disruption aimed at 15 - 18 year olds in the US public school.
What is agentic AI, or an LLM chatbot, or Alexa in the house, but an outgrowth in the for-profit information world from web personalization in 2010?
Same with smart glasses, neurotech, smart city platforms with a singularity type integration into citizens biometrics...all around data collection set by particular conditions.
Thank you for your work - will be reviewing it for use in the AI and Ethics class next fall to build student understanding of social epistemology. "The conditions of Understanding" is already a good phrase to get that line of reasoning started.
I appreciate your comment. I am about to retire from HS English teaching but remain active in this space: how schools can preserve a human dignity and community from for-profit algorithms.
My first Substack is also about what you are framing. I called it " What is reality? The elephant in the room. I've been simpler and always play with triads, so they can scale in a fractal way for more complexity. The main triad of my article started with one of the most famous quotes by the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset
‘I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I cannot save myself.’
What I didn't know was the 'context' of this aphorism. It seems to belong to his essay "Meditations on Don Quixote".
If the quote has the explorer and the map, I found that the next sentence in Ortega y Gasset's books shows us the compass.
"I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I do not save myself. Benefac loco illi quo natus es, we read in the Bible. And in the Platonic school, we are given this as the task of all culture: ‘to save appearances’, the phenomena. That is to say, to seek the meaning of what surrounds us.”
"Benefac loco illi quo natus es", which means “Do good to the place where you were born”, is perhaps the most significant element of that part of the paragraph. ‘Do good to the place where you were born’ expands the individual and their circumstances with a third element: a direction or compass.
Thank you for the post. It is really interesting to consider one's own experience within the framework you set out. Experiencing disruption in one component part is usually tolerable, and indeed sometimes (but not always) might be seen in a positive light. I'm always suspicious of people stating that the time we currently live in is more challenging, or more disruptive than previous eras. I think of the change my late father experienced in his 88 years being born into poverty in a rural English village in the 1930's and question how anyone could experience more 'change' than he. Your article helps explain the feeling of disorientation currently being experienced by so many (myself, included) but by creating this new mental model is a great step in the right direction.
First: Sort of amazed at the range of your competent reference here, and at your pace of publication.
Second: Wondering if the definition of "world" in your lead sentence needs some clarity. That is, is it conditions (social, material, biological, spiritual...) independent of an individual's perception? Or does it include that perception, as many of these thinkers, and not just Merleau-Ponty, suggest? In other words, what purchase do we-who-type-on-keys have on the Real? And what guiding light will help policy and practice see the way to preserve and skill up that purchase for the sake of community and its future? I'm aiming to answer these questions in a Christopher Alexander way. More later via LinkedIn.
Jonathan, I so appreciate your work and your words here. And find in them a wise orientation in the face of the disorientation we currently face. Thank you
Great to see you bringing McGilchrist in. ‘Attention is a moral act’ can be developed into full epistemology (as he does). Thanks fir your posts. I read them all as fresh air gift.
Thank you for rooting the article in Pariser's work. As a HS ELA teacher, I started using it mid 2010's, and not just the Filter Bubble Ted Talk but the book, and then his work now at New Public - as a floor for social epistemology, it's been interesting and a bit of a salve to the constant attempts at information disruption aimed at 15 - 18 year olds in the US public school.
What is agentic AI, or an LLM chatbot, or Alexa in the house, but an outgrowth in the for-profit information world from web personalization in 2010?
Same with smart glasses, neurotech, smart city platforms with a singularity type integration into citizens biometrics...all around data collection set by particular conditions.
Thank you for your work - will be reviewing it for use in the AI and Ethics class next fall to build student understanding of social epistemology. "The conditions of Understanding" is already a good phrase to get that line of reasoning started.
I appreciate your comment. I am about to retire from HS English teaching but remain active in this space: how schools can preserve a human dignity and community from for-profit algorithms.
Thank you Jonathan. Another welcome and highly insightful post, I will be processing all of this in depth.
I loved the six components you were mapping.
My first Substack is also about what you are framing. I called it " What is reality? The elephant in the room. I've been simpler and always play with triads, so they can scale in a fractal way for more complexity. The main triad of my article started with one of the most famous quotes by the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset
‘I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I cannot save myself.’
What I didn't know was the 'context' of this aphorism. It seems to belong to his essay "Meditations on Don Quixote".
If the quote has the explorer and the map, I found that the next sentence in Ortega y Gasset's books shows us the compass.
"I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I do not save myself. Benefac loco illi quo natus es, we read in the Bible. And in the Platonic school, we are given this as the task of all culture: ‘to save appearances’, the phenomena. That is to say, to seek the meaning of what surrounds us.”
"Benefac loco illi quo natus es", which means “Do good to the place where you were born”, is perhaps the most significant element of that part of the paragraph. ‘Do good to the place where you were born’ expands the individual and their circumstances with a third element: a direction or compass.
https://theexplorerisnottheexpedition.substack.com/p/what-is-reality
agree, super and important - thank you
Thank you for the post. It is really interesting to consider one's own experience within the framework you set out. Experiencing disruption in one component part is usually tolerable, and indeed sometimes (but not always) might be seen in a positive light. I'm always suspicious of people stating that the time we currently live in is more challenging, or more disruptive than previous eras. I think of the change my late father experienced in his 88 years being born into poverty in a rural English village in the 1930's and question how anyone could experience more 'change' than he. Your article helps explain the feeling of disorientation currently being experienced by so many (myself, included) but by creating this new mental model is a great step in the right direction.
First: Sort of amazed at the range of your competent reference here, and at your pace of publication.
Second: Wondering if the definition of "world" in your lead sentence needs some clarity. That is, is it conditions (social, material, biological, spiritual...) independent of an individual's perception? Or does it include that perception, as many of these thinkers, and not just Merleau-Ponty, suggest? In other words, what purchase do we-who-type-on-keys have on the Real? And what guiding light will help policy and practice see the way to preserve and skill up that purchase for the sake of community and its future? I'm aiming to answer these questions in a Christopher Alexander way. More later via LinkedIn.
--Paul Erb