Flemming Funch has a very interesting post exploring the core concepts in Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi – The Glass Bead Game.
I’ll be interested to see if, and how, the conditions we now experience – information overload and a constant flow of information anyway, that we can’t really control – will lead to fundamental shifts in our cognitive processing.
We can, of course, put boundaries on and limit the information to which we pay attention – but how do we know when we’ll maybe miss, then, the next essential piece that belongs with – or extends- the mental models that we have already constructed ?
From homo sapiens sapiens to homo sapiens zappiens ?
I’m intuiting here, but I think we have all been taught to interpret information in composed arguments, arguments that are built by putting pieces of information together in a logical and linear structure. This of course leads to our approach of also seeking to understand in a linear and static fashion.
It is necessary, I think, to construct these sequential and logical arguments … but maybe it’s not the whole picture of how to seek better understanding. Pattern recognition consists of noticing, of joining together small pieces and watching how they function in the ensemble.
We’re all reading and watching and talking all the time now – functioning in the flow. I sense that we must learn to adapt to these continuous flows, cultivating our attention and relying on informed, mindful intuition.
Maybe blogs, and search, and RSS/Atom feeds, and visible linkages such as those afforded us by technorati, for example, are all the early elements necessary to begin watching the formations of human consciousness fractals ?
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