Conscious Choice: The Quest for Knowledge in an Information Age

September 1995

The Quest for Knowledge in an Information Age

by Robert K. Koehler

The Information Age is here and no one knows nothin.’ Okay, I take it back. We all know something: We know from experience that information strikes us from every direction, all the time, and at a tremendous rate. It doesn’t settle in like a favorite uncle with a story that will take 90 minutes to unfold and fifteen years to understand, but more like a character in a fantasy who takes off her hat and coat, settles in a chair, and removes her hair, eyes, and head to reveal a glistening antenna.

We know by observation if not by reason that this information is caught up in the evolution of the computer. And we know that whatever we’ve got here, we’ve got to learn from it; we’ve got to improve our lives by knowing what we can and can’t do with its help. As we look outward upon the high-tech horizon we need to remember the value of the inward glance, as well.

We need to remember that the knowledge we seek neither rests with the tools that are available, nor denies their value. This is not a new idea; and in fact, it finds an apt expression in John Vernon’s classic The Garden and the Map. As its title suggests, Vernon’s book examines two kinds of awareness: garden consciousness and map consciousness. Garden consciousness is "integrative," or holistic. It is the frame of mind in which one can find the infinite in a grain of sand, as William Blake did. Map consciousness, on the other hand, is "segregative." It prefers to think in discrete, atomistic parts. In map consciousness, the whole is merely the sum of its parts.

In a conventional framework, education aligns with garden consciousness and training aligns with map consciousness. Educational experiences are broad and deep, unified environmental changes that can eventually result in an adept performance of a specialized act but that are primarily a change of world. Training is specialized at the outset. It is task oriented: it aims at objectives and accomplishes them.

For convenience, you might accept this alignment and find some truth in it. But change is having a field day with the foundations of national and world culture, and the distant and exclusive traditional relationship between education and training has not been exempt. Now, the relationship between education and training looks something like the relationship between water and a well. Education, like water, serves many life-supporting needs, but only if it can be acquired in a usable form. Training, like a well, is direct and useful — as long as it does not run dry.

In the past, education was derided for its dreamy quality, for turning out people who could not build or even describe what they dreamed. Training, on the other hand, was faulted for losing sight of its goals while redoubling its efforts to achieve them. Trainees could build a better conveyor belt, but they didn’t or couldn’t care whose bodies were on it or why.

Training and education are linked, however, in that they both serve our quest for knowledge. They are linked in dynamic conflict like the light and darkness of the yin and yang. And like the Chinese representations of that relationship, each contains an element of the other. Neither is adequate alone; we need both knowledge and skill to grow.

Schools and businesses today are attempting various forms of partnership in an attempt to grow beyond the limitations of their traditional formats. Colleges have focused increasingly on application and tool use; businesses have been examining the socio-intellectual climate within which learning occurs. In their attempts to reach peak performance, both sets of organizations have invested in a tool born of maps and circuits and dualistic logic. The computer has appeared on the scene like a new savior in the light of a frightening dawn. The dawn of an age that might drown us all.

Many folks in the information processing and communications industry have commented that computers are transforming the world from a shattered, chaotic jumble into a global village. Clearly they span distances with mythic power. Computers let people from all over the world share music, words, pictures, and software. Science fiction daydreams of the 1950s and 1960s seem like nearly prophetic images of the changes affecting our workplaces and homes. Some feel this opening of new avenues of communication has greater implications for cultural evolution than the printing press. With the likes of the Internet, World Wide Web, and multimedia, we have a replacement for snail mail and paper-filled trash cans, immediate contact between politicians and their constituents, entertainers and their audiences, teachers and students, buyers and sellers.

Are there limits? No one knows them yet. So far, you can download mind blasting 3D visuals; symphonies or the newest fringe sound; text as text classics, or interactive versions complete with audio and a menu driven lists of professional interpreters. The specialists who build these opportunities for you are working on virtual football games in which users may play any role they want — from lineman to coach to sportscaster to fan. You will even be able to order a virtual dog and beer, and check the option to have an actual dog and beer delivered to you ASAP in the real world. They are even promising virtual battlefields from history so you can bayonet or bandage your way to higher learning. And the bottom line of access has been drawn with the sometime promise that when the software and hardware finally "arrive," we will all have it free — subsidized by advertisers and marketers and megasellers, free even to the economically lowest among us. Democracy, liberty, brotherhood — interactive and on TV.

We could be climbing the trail of separation since the Fall, finding our way back to the Garden. The dearest child of a highly specific and reductive map is taking us there. The trail is nonetheless long and difficult. World events show themselves to us like the temptations of Buddha. Bombings of innocent people, executions, kidnappings, fires, war. Not only can we not ignore them, we can choose how we see them and even print copies of text and images that snag our imaginations or souls. How can we not? Part of being on this trail is learning to be human. Learning compassion, joy, and the depth and breadth of human experience before we go. But with so much coming at us, so much calling on all of our facilities for learning and expressing, it is natural that we might forget which is the garden and which is the map. We might even forget how we know when we know, as the form of our culture takes new and fascinating shapes.

How do we know what is important?
According to the Sufi Book of Certainty, there are three degrees of certainty. These degrees are called the Lore of Certainty, the Eye of Certainty, and the Truth of Certainty. The lowest degree is that of the Lore of Certainty, in which knowledge comes merely from a description — as when one knows fire by hearing someone tell about it. The next degree of certainty comes when one sees the light of the fire, sees the flame, and knows it: this is the Eye of Certainty. The highest degree is direct experience — one who knows by being warmed, or even burned.

In professional multimedia development for education and training, there is deep concern for involving all the senses to enhance retention, using timely and intelligent interaction and sound instructional objectives to keep the learner focused and involved. There is a strong effort to improve the experience delivered through simulated experiences, to intensify what comes through virtual realities. The separating wall between life and learning is being examined with a desire to make it transparent. As a beginning, some automated training tools run inside the production tools they support, and come into play without interrupting the flow of daily business.

While the virtue of education has always been in its careful approach to reality, that approach takes time, and time is money. Of course, new and aspiring surgeons do not simply cut patient after patient until they get it right and one survives. They start at some distance from the real thing. And computers can add a margin of safety while letting doctors — or astronauts — explore a simulated reality. They practice exactly what they need to do before they try it in actual practice. The specific focus on the act has always been the virtue of training. If you follow the dictum of the martial arts, you make practice like reality so reality will be like practice. Computers can help in that effort, providing a feast for the senses that stimulates the learner to high achievement. Built from a detailed study of the world they simulate, aimed at specific performance parameters, computers span the gap between education and training, between map and garden consciousness. It seems like a wonder is being born before our eyes. In a way, that is true.

There is the risk, in this time of ascension and return, that we will forget the feel of the fire. Not what it was like: not the word for heat, the color of the flame, the image of sap crackling in bright orange coals. But the fire itself. Simulations are always less than what they simulate. They are subject to the limitations of the designers and the desires of the people or groups who fund them. Thus computer-based learning mechanisms facilitate a great deal of learning, save costs of travel and classroom expenses, and make job performance more exact and successful. But we must ask whom or what will they serve? Corporate ownership? Profit? Wisdom? Fame? The secrets and limitations we uncover can turn the highest achievement into something else entirely.

In our mastery of virtual achievement — of working in a created world, we risk losing the world we have. The Information Age may be spectacular, but it is also stressful and tiring. Of necessity, facing an onslaught of "information," people forget. The mind deadens itself to protect itself, to stay healthy. But in the effort to support our families and live the destiny we seek after, we may forget the difference between the word, or image, and the thing itself. The road is long and dry. We may wander into a virtual nirvana and not care to find our way out. And in some dark moment of need, we may be lead to words rather than water and be told to drink.

What can protect us? Or who?
The dynamic interplay of education and training can give us broad knowledge and keen skill. A dysfunctional interplay of the same forces can render us vague and interfering. Attending to simple, key questions can balance this interaction for the better. Remember to ask yourself, What am I learning and how does it help? From the standpoint of my life, what is true? How can I be certain? These questions are crucial to knowing one’s link to events. Neil Postman and Charles Weingarten, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, said that educated people know more than answers, they know how to ask questions. Questions may be part of what protects us, questions and a willingness to get beyond pat answers. It is critical to keep questions clear.

But there’s more. It is also essential to feel the fullness of your emotions, the stippling of your skin, the raising of the hair on your neck, the quickening of your pulse, and answering of your heart and breath. These, too, are equal senders of key knowledge; they go beyond the verbal and visual to access deeper resources.

It is critical to know that answers can be had by way of senses that may not use a mouse — senses beyond your eyes or hands or ears — or tongue, for that matter. The linear powers of mind and map are awesome, but they are not the peak. Most of the mountain of human potential is hidden from view, and to know it we must explore the clouds.

Elie Weisel opens The Gates of the Forest with a story about a Rabbi who forgets the structures of worship that have saved his people for years from great troubles. Sitting in his arm chair, his head in his hands, he says to God, "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient." It is sufficient, as the story goes, and the Rabbi’s people are saved. In this vein, some professionals who work in advanced computer research and development — notably Northwestern’s Roger Shank — have recognized the power of stories. But the redemption to which Weisel refers does not rest on the story at all. It centers, instead, upon the soul in action — a man who prays, vulnerable and sincere, with all the strength he can muster.

In a world of information, we must learn to protect ourselves from landslides of words and surface learning. This does not mean ignoring computers or technological devices. Pat answers and reactionary advice won’t serve. We need to learn new ways to learn in order to find peace, and the ways to learn are being given to us in unique forms. Frightening and strange though these forms might be, we need to be able to use them fully, knowing what they are and are not. We must be there, heart and soul, if we are to learn. We need to know the feel of the fire itself, as well as that fire which is ourselves. Perhaps this means learning the very tools that presently confuse us, reading more than we’d like to, listening to people who offend us. It can also mean stepping back from the tide; drying off; advising ourselves without the technological appendages we’ve learned to take for granted. For all the weight and promise of information in varying forms, for all the glamour and excitement of what delivers it, it cannot and will not displace us — unless we let it.

Robert K. Koehler is a multimedia developer and writer.

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