Introduction
Forget This: Cut Down the Trees of Knowledge; Create Rhizomes of Knowledge
In the culture in which I was born, in Europe, and worked in, in the USA, it has become habitual to break knowledge into certain disciplines (art, science, engineering, art, humanities, etc.), the silos of which Leonardo da Vinci is glorified for ignoring.
Leonardo Book Series author Ken Goldberg recently expounded on this on US national public radio [8].
His book was The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (2000), and it predicted early the cultural breakdowns the Internet would enable.
Today, my local university is obsessed with data analytics and AI. But Daniel Boorstin, in The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (1978), discusses how accelerating technological innovation leads to an overload of facts—an environment in which “the fog of information can drive out knowledge.” This is sometimes summarized to the effect that “We have gone from a world that was meaning rich and data poor to one that is data rich but meaning poor.” Boorstin called for an epistemological revolution as deep as figuring out the sun did not go around the Earth.
ChatGPT claims: Historically, Aristarchus of Samos (third century BCE) was the first known to suggest a heliocentric model, but Nicolaus Copernicus (sixteenth century) developed it into a formal theory. Later, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei provided observational and mathematical evidence. This revolution took hundreds of years, the Internet/ digital and AI age has taken only decades. We need to learn to change quicker.
Many cultures don’t divide knowledge into the same categories, and there is no mathematical proof that the Euro-American tree of knowledge still makes sense. AI doesn’t follow the western tree of knowledge.
Maybe we structure new universities, but not around “academic disciplines.” Large structures do need substructures, but as Maturana and Varela explained, autopoiesis is not top down but rather often off-center. This is why our new research center is called the Off-Center for Emerging Studies [9] and it has AI in its underwear.
Leonardo da Vinci never went to school. “While some Renaissance figures studied at universities (e.g., to learn Latin, law, or medicine), Leonardo’s path was different.” “His formidable intellect and skills were largely the result of hands-on apprenticeship and self-study rather than a structured, formalized education.”
Ingenuity is often more helpful than pure innovation, and low old tech better than high new tech. But art-science-technology integration is now normal again.
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