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Hi Ken and Terry, The image of me lobbing a beer bottle is wonderful! But I doubt that you would have a bump on the head. My aim is terrible. And you would certainly not be drenched. I would NEVER throw a bottle before making sure I had emptied it. But you do have a point. So, I will give a brief account of some black holes that I see on the philosophical event horizon albeit looking through my own telescope, which is focused on the wavelengths that interest me. In that telescope I see a constellation of black holes. Bear in mind that a constellation is a construct in which it is the human eye that joins the dots, not the objects that make up the constellation, but the connections are compelling and easily shared (though alas invisible to the naked eye). Terry, it seems to me, teeters on the edge of the biggest black hole which was most beautifully described by Bishop Berkeley (BB). Like Terry, BB came to the view that we could not base our understanding of the universe on what we could see with our limited human eyes, because we could be mistaken and confused by illusions. BB escaped the pull of the black hole by the use of a wonderful literary and theological device—the deus ex machina. God would not let it be so. Now I suspect that Terry is a non-believer, so alas, there is no hope for Terry. He will be crushed by the weight of his own argument. Except… As in the study of the universe, philosophy abounds in paradoxes. For example, if Terry is right, is he not subject to the same illusions? How come he can see what the rest of us cannot? Also, how can Terry call something an illusion without knowing that something else is real? Without reality there can be no illusions, unless…um…Terry is the god that will save us all. Just the thought of it is enough to make one want to give up and fall into the black hole, or perhaps go and play poker with Hume down the pub and forget philosophy. Undaunted, Terry skips a few light years and starts getting into the orbit of another black hole, paradoxically (or perhaps oxymoronically) the black hole of colour. Colour, Terry tells us is---yes, you guessed it---an illusion. Wavelength and firing neurones is the reality. My problem with that is that when I'm in the supermarket looking for red fruit, and I haven't got my spectroscope or electroencephalograph handy, I resort to using my illusion-filled eyes. Surprisingly, I have made quite a few judgements in this flawed way and they have worked out OK. How can this be so? It gets even stranger, because my wife always asks me to get green bananas, and most of the time I get it right, even though I have a slight weakness in my green/red receptor neurones. I once pleaded with her that because of my weakness, I needed to know how her neurones fired in response to certain wavelengths, because I couldn't work out what was going on her mind when she used the word 'green'. She told me not to be smart-arse, and to do the best I can. When I get home she compliments me on my choices, we make fruit salad with all the red fruit and leave the green bananas to ripen. Terry at this stage is still setting up his spectroscope and is concerned that the wavelengths of the florescent lights in the supermarket might not match the spectrum of daylight, thus altering the reflected wavelengths off the fruit. As to the electroencephalograph, it's just a tangle of wires on the floor. The black hole beckons! Ken, by contrast, is a more careful star trekker, and boldly goes where many have gone before him, ending up in the black hole of knowledge. Once again we have a paradox, but a different and much scarier one, in which knowledge and life become ignorance and death. Let me begin with what animals know. My dog knows his name, he knows what to do when I say 'sit' (though he sometimes pretends he hasn't heard me), and he knows he hates the cat next door. None of these claims about what my dog knows are contentious in the context of me having conversations with my neighbours, each of us exchanging views about what each of our dogs know. In the same vein, the snail in my garden knows where the lettuce are. Does my dog have to have a representation of his name or the command 'sit' or the hated cat? No, he responds directly to the sounds I make or the smell of the cat. Similarly the snail has no representation of a lettuce, it responds to the lettuce and starts eating when it gets near enough. So, here we have knowing without representation. Now I'm going to perform a trick, a bit of sleight of hand magic. Can we share what we know? Well, Wikileaks certainly thinks so and so do the many people who both support and object to what Wikileaks does. Ken tells us we cannot share knowledge except through representation, so how come I can talk about sharing knowledge with Wikileaks without talking about representation? Am I deluded? I don't think so. It makes perfect sense to talk about shared knowledge in this way. So what is it about 'knowledge' that has so confused and energised our best minds? It's all in the sleight of hand that lures the seeker of knowledge into the black hole of ignorance and death. I started with a statement about what my dog and snails know, and then went on to talk about sharing what we know, but in a very different context. In their respective contexts there is nothing odd or strange going on here. But when I ask about 'knowledge' out of any particular context, the problems begin and they get worse the more I try to justify any particular definition of knowledge. It's the reification, the abstraction, the taking out of context that causes the problems. It's like taking a bird out of the world and into a vacuum, to free it of the constraint of the air around it, and work out how it flies. All you end up with is a dead bird, sucked dry and lifeless. Words are like that. They don't travel well from one context to another, and invariably change in their usage from one context to the next; only the spelling and grammar remain the same, giving the illusion that they live in one environment in much the same way as they live in another. They don't, and we don't expect them to. But once we remove them from any specific context, they die. In the Museum of Dead Things (the well-known MDT) they can be endlessly classified, catalogued and commented on, but the danger is that they cannot then be taken out of the museum and given new life in a new context. Like Frankenstein's monster, they may not adapt to their new world. They falter and fail (and blame their maker), and crushed into nothing, fall into a black hole. I shall go back to life and lurking. David -- blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog web: http://www.communication.org.au Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA CEO • Communication Research Institute • • helping people communicate with people • Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795 Phone: +61 (0)3 9489 8640 Skype: davidsless 60 Park Street • Fitzroy North • Melbourne • Australia • 3068 ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------