The Mental Machinery of Holiteracy

"I don't want to look further than as far as I can see." - Boxer Frank Bruno

In a previous essay, I wrote about holiteracy as a superpower with two components: an innate ability to be comfortable with the ambiguity and uncertainty that arise from multiple conflicting versions of a story, and the cultivated skill of synthesis, e.g., the capacity to connect parts and wholes from other disciplines and recognize the new possibilities created by the interconnections between elements of different stories.

One of the central activities of holiteracy is the collection, curation, and accrual of knowledge. These tasks lend themselves to using technology to support the knowledge management function. Indeed, knowledge graphs are essential tools for assembling disparate facts and ideas and then identifying and defining the links between them.

But there are other tools - cognitive tools - that we acquire during our educational development that have an under-appreciated role in how effectively we use the technology for knowledge management, whether it is knowledge graphs, the Google search engine, or LLMs.

The nature of these cognitive tools and how we acquire and use them over a lifetime are intricately explored in a book by Kieran Egan. I stumbled on The Educated Mind - How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding, while researching the potential for LLMs to accelerate innovation. I came away with a deeper understanding of the unique and irreplaceable value of the human intellect in the evolving relationship with artificial intelligence.

Cognitive Tools of Holiteracy

Egan categorizes five kinds of understanding, which, for our purposes, I will label as Metaphor, Wonder, Theory, Skepticism, and Instinct. This is a wonderful book and well worth the effort, particularly if you are a parent (or grandparent) and want to understand the marvelous transformations that occur as children develop and interact with the world.

There are also important insights to guide the search for innovation that can address the challenges in global health.

Egan makes the point that these kinds of understanding develop over time as we pass through different stages of development. The emergence of holiteracy depends upon retaining even the earliest kinds of childhood understanding as we move on to what is often considered the more "serious" kinds of understanding.

For this essay, I want to start with the most "serious" of the kinds of understanding, namely theory, which is the theoretical understanding we recognize as an essential tool for scientists.

 Theoretical understanding entails the systematic thinking and belief that Reality can be expressed in a theory. These theories encompass the complex causal chains and networks that connect our observations and ideas. We use theories to delineate the problems and identify solutions that arise from the complex processes and systems that make up the world.

Skepticism recognizes that a theory reduces the world's complexity and offers a somewhat simplistic view of a situation. While our desire to make sense of the world pushes us to capture as much complexity as possible within some coherent scheme, our skepticism keeps the inadequacy of our theories at the forefront. It forces us to pay attention to the anomalies that don't fit the theory and urges us to strive to refine and improve our theories.

Metaphor involves talking about something in terms derived from something quite different. It establishes a new relation between heterogeneous ideas in a way that adds something to, or throws new light on, the thing talked about. The generative power of metaphor is particularly crucial in the pursuit of innovation.

Wonder is the excitement that follows the transition from learning new facts to the first realization of the importance of their unexplored relationships.

Instinct refers to the understanding of the world that comes from our unique, individual consciousness. Often called a “gut feeling,” it provides a novel take on the world and makes us feel uneasy about something others might take for granted.

Without wonder, it is hard to see how more systematic inquiry gets underway. Without skepticism, theory becomes an ideology that constrains rather than enables. Without instinct, we might miss the signals that something is amiss in our theory. Without metaphor, we lose the ability to make sense of something that, in the moment, doesn't lend itself to an easy explanation.

These different kinds of understanding can be vivid and clear or faint and suppressed. As Egan puts it:

It is a lucky student who makes this intellectual journey buoyed constantly by the excitement of discovery and not dragged down by the distresses and emotional turmoil attending the recognition of inadequacy in the schemes used to make sense of the world.

On Becoming a Scientist

Some people know they want to be a scientist at an early age. Others take longer, and the spark doesn't hit until they see the wonder behind a problem or challenge that intrigues them. Some scientists focus on a specific topic or technique and become a recognized expert. Others prefer to engage across a wide range of topics and tolerate being overwhelmed by complexity and realizing that we know only a fraction of what can be known.

If we want to address complex challenges, we must recognize that the characteristics and motivations of the expert and the dabbler are strengths that emerge as a complicated function of the path of developmental understanding, training, ego, and one's preferred community of peers.

As Egan describes it:

Educational development, I am suggesting, is a process whose focus of interest and intellectual engagement begins with a myth-like construction of the world, then "romantically" establishes the boundaries and extent of reality, and then "philosophically" maps the major features of the world with organizing grids. In this "philosophic" activity, students recognize themselves as parts of complex process; they set about establishing the truth concerning them with some psychological urgency because in doing so they will discover the truth about themselves.

In our uniqueness, we tend to emphasize one or more of these kinds of understanding. We would do well to recognize that these all contribute to holiteracy - the vital superpower behind the search for innovation.

Conclusion

Holiteracy entails striving to learn as much as possible about context and act constructively in the light of this evolving understanding. It recognizes contributions from different disciplines while seeking out gaps in knowledge and irregularities.  Holiteracy recognizes that successful solutions to complex problems involve science, technology, politics, economics, business, law, culture, and psychology, and it encourages acknowledging these linkages.

The knowledge embedded in these fields of study and the potential connections between ideas that are salient to a given challenge are astonishing, as is the effort required to acknowledge the value of all kinds of understanding we have access to as holistic humans.

Finding ways to cultivate all kinds of understanding in individuals and society while also ensuring that the different perspectives from these understandings are heard is crucial to addressing the critical issues of our time.