Humanism and Education Beyond Big Data
Can we reimagine a humanistic approach to knowledge and education that builds on our collective reliance on big data?
by Domenico Napoletani and Daniele C. Struppa
We are shaped by the data that we use, that we interrogate daily on our devices. They readily return knowledge to us, and we assume this knowledge is always there, available for browsing and quoting.
We could argue that such unintentional access, and the superficial stimulation it provides, diminishes us, since knowledge, by being always near, is never truly in us. But this would be an empty, self-defeating point, and an insincere one as well, since we all depend to a great extent on the web for access to information.
Rather, we would like to point out another possibility: that the pleasure of discovery can be increased by the telescopic vision of layers upon layers of knowledge, that are simultaneously revealing themselves to us through the web, if only we choose to allow this pleasure, and only if we can recognize knowledge for what it is.
We suggest therefore that our educational system should adapt itself to the reality that today no knowledge seems to be truly necessary, because it is perceived to be always accessible. Because of our reliance on data, all of us must be aware of the true potential and limitations of the tools we use and trust. These computational, data driven tools go under suggestive names such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, or, frequently, but somewhat improperly, big data. Our awareness of the structure of these tools needs to be general and at the same time conceptually exact, so that it can effectively inform our decisions and choices.
But the most significant consequence of the pervasive reliance on big data is that, by removing the primacy and to some extent even the awareness of expertise, it has the potential to give us back the freshness of being always beginners, ever in need of starting again, of remembering again, for everything we learn and do.
It is as if big data, by crushing our worth as depositaries of knowledge, allow us to see afresh the ever-changing patterns of reality. It is as if a reliance on data and computing forces us to see ideas in their splendor, as separate from their technical development, since the latter can (or will eventually) be passed on to the care of machines.
Ideas…how to recognize their worth? And how to unfold their potential? We need first to realize that, as much as logical, analytically rigorous thinking is crucial to the actual development of an idea, its richness is more appropriately assessed by the analogical web of connections that it gives rise to. And the key to see the analogical unfolding of ideas is found in the very integration of our faculties, that creates a fertile background for analogies to arise.
This integration includes our whole being, our emotions, our manifold sensorial ways to appreciate beauty, as well as to aesthetically relish novelty and patterns. In other words, to regain full integration for the purpose of intellectual richness, means at the same time to preserve our humanity, not despite, but in a way thanks to our reliance on big data. We need to turn our weakness (in retaining knowledge) into our strength and find a way to build a humanism for our times on this level ground.
All of this implies that if a specialized result is incapable of illuminating the intricate web of ideas that are wound up in our subjective experience, it does not fit into a curriculum that aspires to an integrated view of our knowledge. Indeed, if a result cannot be quickly and aptly turned into a flow of profound interconnected derivations within and without its own field, it is merely a technique, and as such, it is void of pedagogical value, not for our own choice, but because it will eventually belong to the machines.
In the ideal scenario in which we are able to convey this approach to knowledge to students, we would expect them to access their most profound mode of relating to knowledge itself, what the fifteenth century scholar Nicholas of Cusa called our power of conjecturing. This power is not interpreted as an inclination to educated guesses, but as a truth-bearing, insightful reaching forth to the heart of the problems we are confronted with, an ability to manifest a richness of derivations and conjecturing that, by analogy, is capable of penetrating deeply into both knowledge and the lack of it, and guide our explorations.
In light of this objective, our educational system is called to a twofold duty:
- Teaching a critical and effective use of data, fully disclosing the mediating AI algorithms that filter reality and knowledge for us, and that perform for us the heavy load of computing and of finding possible causal relations and correlations.
- Teaching an openness to insight and conjecturing, that unlocks the unfolding of interpretative structures, starting from any given content, by fully integrating all faculties of our humanity.
The first task requires an encompassing perspective on big data, a philosophy of big data, that can recognize without prejudices the potential of this field, while acknowledging that there is no intrinsic optimality in the solutions that big data provides to our queries. The development of such philosophy of big data is a work in progress, nevertheless teaching effectively about big data is a well defined task.
Instead the second task is burdened by the realization that in practice no specific way of teaching insight seems available. However, the ability to develop integrated, analogical thinking relies in an essential way on seeing and sensing directly the intricacies of connections among perspectives. They should not be perceived as consecutive steps, as inter-disciplinary explorations, but as coexisting potentials, fully manifested and implied by a single object, a single work that allows the immediacy of perceptual integration of knowledge.
Because of this demand of perceptual unity, it seems necessary to conform the content and style of teaching to actual, concrete models of integrated unfolding of knowledge, by focusing on individual works, a curriculum of “integrated readings” that forcefully embody this unfolding.
This approach changes the role of the instructor, from a depositary of knowledge to pass on to students, to a mediator that allows the students to constantly see what is implied in the text, or what could be extrapolated while being consistent to its intent.
While this view of teaching may seem to call for a canonical (and, in the eyes of some, arbitrary) selection of texts, it does not need to be so. Richness and fully integrated unfolding of derivations are to some extent objective, and we propose the following criterion to recognize texts suitable for integrated readings:
• Virtually every page should allow, concurrently, a dense web of derivations pertaining to logic, science and arts.
Here we refer to logic in the broad sense of deductive systems that include mathematical structures, science could be, if necessary, historically qualified, and the texts themselves could fulfill, in their own mode of expression and with their literary quality, the demand of being about art. What is crucial is the coexistence of all these modes of knowledge at once.
Ideally, the works selected for integrated readings should generate a vertigo borne of the dazzling and exact intersection of perspectives. This is a high standard to be satisfied by a text, but one that is nevertheless fulfilled by several works: the rich treatises and dialogues of Nicholas of Cusa himself are such intricate web of implications and conjectures; we can sense the same richness in the Meccan Revelations of the Muslim scholar and mystic Ibn’ Arabi, with their overflow of theology, Platonic philosophy and poetry; and we can see this dense concentration of meanings in the gnomic poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
From our own times, we single out as models of integration the writings of Simone Weil. In them, Pythagorean fragments, mathematics and meditations on the gospels reflect and illuminate one another in the unswerving belief that the desire of knowledge, given a sufficient degree of intensity, is identical with knowledge itself.
Many more texts suitable for integrated readings can be identified, but to think that an integrated, analogical approach to knowledge could be taught just by relying on texts would be inconsistent with the fullness of the unfolding of knowledge and of conjecturing. The immediacy of this experience requires those of us tasked with teaching to manifest it, even with our failings and shortcomings. We are called to enact it together with the students, with the genuine expectation that new insight will manifest itself in the classroom, every time the right intensity of desire of knowledge is aroused.
But how can we sincerely bear witness to the richness of the unfolding of knowledge, when we ourselves have often become technicians of fragments of expertise, willingly cutting ourselves off from the very flow of ideas that we should encourage students to aspire to?
We specialize and we contribute with earnest and worthy effort and rigor to some facet of our collective knowledge, but in this process we become all too often wary of the totality of the analogies that may arise in us, as if rigor and scholarship were incompatible with the perception of the living quality of ideas.
Therefore, if we want to see the shape that education will take in the age of big data, we need to think first about the type of scholarship we wish to partake of. Is it possible to imagine a scholarship that does not renounce to the most objective, rigorous perspective on the world and yet that can soar to (and descend from) the most subjective relishing of its beauty?
Only then knowledge will be a living, throbbing unity of outward and inner unfolding, only then it will continue to be relevant, and only then we will find a way for learning and teaching to continue to be crucial endeavors.
We can face this challenge with a gladdened heart, without fear, knowing that the data and the machines that we depend on, by humbling the computational and mnemonic power of our intellect and by making us all into beginners, are giving us anew the chance to be fully human.
