(((Knowledge Ecology)))

It has been a good week for finishing up writing projects. I just completed a new essay entitled “Matter, Media, and Mind: A Threefold Approach To Ecologies.” I’m attaching the full pdf HERE. Many of the ideas presented in this paper will be the focus of a talk I am giving at the California Institute of Integral Studies this Friday, as part of their annual founder’s symposium. In the spirit of Whitehead’s return via various ecological philosophies, I hope that this essay can go some ways to re-visioning what ecology means for us in the twenty-first century. Here’s an excerpt from the portion on “Knowledge Ecologies” (from which this blog gets its name):

Knowledge ecologies have important implications for how we think about ideas. In the world of human knowledge, the idea acts as a cosmogram; an actor that is part of its surrounding terrain, an abstraction that is part of the territory it describes, exerting a pull on the world it tries to map. Ideas are things that, once generated by the thinker, immediately gain their own autonomy and ability to re-arrange other ideas. Plainly stated, ideas exist in the world in the same way as any other ecological actor; ideas are a part of the actuality of experience and are therefore amenable to an ecological interpretation. When mediated through the appropriate media ecologies, ideas can then impact the physical form of any other entity within their reach. As an abstraction, the idea is also a cryptogram, concealing certain features of the terrain it helps to enact. The contrast between the revealing and concealing character of the idea speaks to the fact that no single mode of thought has a monopoly on the real; rather, every idea is partial and relative to its ecology, capable only of exposing certain features of a more complex landscape. In this way knowledge ecology has a complex relationship to media ecology since both are actively foregrounding and backgrounding differed aspects of a more complex reality.