The presentation introduces and summarizes a nearly completed hypertext book project on the co-evolution of and revolutions in tools humans use and human cognition. It explores and combines threads of knowledge including: the archeology and history of technological revolutions, epistemology (the theory of information and knowledge), the emergence and nature of life, the evolution of record-keeping through the automation of information and knowledge processing from ancient Greece to the future. In other words, the evolution of and revolutions in human cognition is traced from our primate ancestors through to the emergence of posthuman cyborgs as cognitive technologies progressively become part of our cognitive processes. There is also a parallel story of the emergence of human social and economic organizations as living systems at a higher level of organization, with their own cognitive processes partially comprised of but different from the cognitions of individual humans belonging to the organizations. Because of the complexity of the story, it recursive develops a few core themes that become increasingly elaborated as new lines of evidence are woven into the picture. The author, Dr William (Bill) Hall, bases the book on threads in his own personal evolution from a child born in 1939 and immersed in the world of marine biology; through physics, computers, neurophysiology, ecology and zoology, PhD in Evolutionary biology from Harvard, postdoctoral studies of the theory of knowledge and the history of evolutionary biology, personal computer journalism, technical authoring and documentation management for a software house and bank; to the last 17-1/2 years of his career prior to his retirement in mid 2007 as an engineering documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer for what was the Australia’s largest defense contractor. Around 2000 he returned to academia part time (full-time after “retirement”) as an honorary fellow to research the material covered in this hypertext book. The research is also represented in a number of publications covering the theories of knowledge and organization and the practice of managing knowledge in large organizations that can be found on Bill’s web site, The Evolutionary Biology of Species and Organizations. On completion of the writing and editorial work finalize the book, it will be published via Kororoit Institute (http://kororoit.org). Crowd funding will be sought to complete the editorial and publishing work (more on this later). The book will be a multimedia hypertext in the Web. The text is a fugally structured sequential argument crossing many disciplinary paradigms. Direct Web links from the text mostly define and discuss the linked terms or expand on them. Hyperlinked notes in the document offer more information, explanations, arguments and web links. Text citations link to the extensive bibliography where most items link directly to the complete work being cited.

1. APPLICATION HOLY WARS OR A NEW
REFORMATION?
A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge
William P. Hall
An attractor Senior Fellow
Engineering Learning Unit
University of Melbourne School of Engineering
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Revision 2 – 11/11/2012
Download full presentation from
http://tinyurl.com/6wma9yh
A unique area in
Access my research papers supporting the book
the state space of the definition from
Mandlebrot set Google Citations

2. P-1
Note
The full slide set contains 100 slides
– abstracts the main ideas of the book
– it is intended to be read (~ 2 hrs)
In the spoken presentation I will discuss only
key slides to try to persuade you to download
and read the full presentation.
Download from http://tinyurl.com/6wma9yh
I hope that will convince you to ask to
download the draft book (for free), read it,
and give me some feedback on how it works
2

3. P-2
Presentation summarizes part of my hypertext book
Title: Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation - A fugue on the theory of
knowledge
– “Application”
computer-based system designed to solve a class of problems
– “Holy war” (~ “flame war”)
conflict over competing knowledge paradigms or technologies that becomes heatedly emotional
when protagonists of different paradigms do not consciously understand implicit aspects of world
views associated with them; often related to scientific or technological revolution
– “Reformation”
improvement or transformation of existing institutions or practices etc; intended to make a
revolutionary change for the better.
the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was enabled by the revolutionary invention of the
printing press to replicate and disseminate knowledge
– “Fugue” (illustrated by J. S. Bach's "Little" fugue in G minor, BWV578)
a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) and possibly a counter
subject (secondary theme) that are introduced at the beginning and recur frequently in the
course of the composition
the logical development in the book is modelled after a fugue
– “Knowledge”
solutions to problems of life
what the book is all about
– “Theory of knowledge”
branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge, addressing
the questions: What is knowledge? How is it constructed? How well does knowledge reflect
external reality?
Scope: explores the co-evolution of and revolutions in human cognition and
knowledge-based tools to extend cognition
3

4. P-3
“Application Holy Wars” is a hypertext:
a revolutionary format for sharing knowledge
Text displayed on a screen including clickable hyperlinks to
other text or other objects that can be instantly accessed by
a pointing action (mouse click)
– besides texts, hyperlinks may access tables, images, audio, video,
and other presentational formats
– links may be other parts of the same document, or
– may be located anywhere in the World Wide Web
Hypertext is the underlying concept defining the structure of
the World Wide Web.
The book is constructed as a hypertext living in the Web
– top layer of text is a fugally structured sequential argument
providing a guided tour through many disciplinary paradigms
– direct links from the text to the Web mostly define and discuss
the linked terms
– hyperlinked notes in the document offer additional information,
explanations, arguments and web links
– text citations link to extensive bibliography where most
references then link directly to the complete work being cited
The result is knowledge built on and directly connected to
4 knowledge and wisdom held in the World Wide Web

5. P-4
Hypertextually navigating the landscape of the
web of knowledge
Paradigms are attractor basins in the topography of the global web of
knowledge
Links to the web access knowledge objects that help us cross
paradigm boundaries towards unification
5

6. P-5
Background for the book
Combines polydisciplinary threads in my background
– studied physics for 2½ years from 1957 (failed because of maths dyslexia)
– hands on first & second generation computers
– neurophysiology research assistant for 3 years
– ··············
– vertebrate & invertebrate biology, cytogenetics, genetics
– sophisticated user of the products of library science
– evolutionary biology (PhD Harvard, 1973), research & teaching to 1980
– theory of knowledge and history and philosophy of science (UoM 1977-79)
··············
– technical communication and computer literacy training from 1981 (UoM)
– analysis and design of computerized authoring and content management
systems from 1990 to 2007
structured authoring (SGML, XML, HTML)
analysis and design of maintenance content authoring, management and delivery
for $7 BN ANZAC Ship Project
ANZAC Ship maintenance doco problems solved by 2000
Holiday break 2000-2001
– time on my hands to think about difficulties in organizational knowledge
management
Result: started writing a hypertext book on co-evolution and
6 revolutions in human cognition and cognitive tools humans use

7. P-6
History of the writing
Started serious work at Tenix Defence ~ Jan. 2001
– stimulated by a holy war in the technical writing community over the use of
conventional paper-based word processing applications versus the newer
semantically structured authoring environments based on SGML and XML
Working in industry I had no library access
– A structure of Subject, Counter Subject and 4 Episodes established early
– Concept was to link and distill freely available knowledge on the Web
– Worked very well for first three Episodes
– Took extended leave 2001-2002 for heavy-duty writing
First three episodes flowed easily
In the last episode I ould not reconcile my understanding of Tenix with web-
accessible literature on knowledge management or organization theory
I had to access to academic thinking and research libraries
Hon fellowships
– Research to develop a unified theory of organizational knowledge
– Monash 2002-2005 (1 day/week at Monash in 2003 on Tenix time)
– UoM 2005- (helped establish TOMOK, Melbourne Emergence, KIPSA)
– Retired Tenix mid 2007
– Many publications as I explored the theory and practice of organizational
knowledge
By 2009 I understood the theory well enough to return to working on
7 the book directly

8. P-7
Book organization
Fugal development around knowledge growth (learning) cycles
– SUBJECT: epistemology, learning cycles construct new knowledge,
and revolutionary cycles of technology and knowledge growth
– COUNTER SUBJECT: knowledge and its value
– EPISODE 1: (historical) counting, writing, books, printing
– EPISODE 2: (historical) automating cognitive processes
– EPISODE 3: (historical) cognitive tools for individuals
– INTERLUDE (theory): systems, theory of living knowledge,
hierarchically complex autopoietic systems/organizations
– EPISODE 4: (history and theory informed observation) social
computing: moving posthumans into the cloud
– EPISODE 5: (history and theory informed observation) individuals
forming societies and socio-technical organizations
– CADENZA: liberating knowledge, knowledge explosion and the “global
brain”, organizational knowledge management
– CODA: is the singularity a spike or a point of inflection?
8

9. SUBJECT
knowledge, revolutions
and knowledge growth
cycles

10. S-1
Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper help understand evolution, and
the evolution of knowledge & technology
Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions
– Normal science & revolutionary science
– Also applies to technology
– Revolutions imply conflict
Karl Popper’s 1972 Objective Knowledge
– major work on the topic of evolutionary theory of knowledge
– “general theory of evolution”
– cyclic emergence/construction of knowledge:
problem situation
raise tentative theories
test to eliminate errors
back to left-over/changed problems not resolved with situation in hand
Grade shifts in evolving & other chaotic systems
– an initial small change may open a new attractor basin
– adaptation to the new attractor may result in large change
(revolution) over short period of time (in an evolutionary sense)
– grade shift in the evolution of a species is a revolutionary shift
in the species’ ecological paradigm
10

11. S-2
Popper’s greatest idea
Popper's "general theory of evolution"
– (From Hall 2005, after Popper 1972: pp. 243)
– If you don’t eliminate your maladaptive errors via critical thinking,
natural selection will eliminate you for expressing them
TS1
TS2
Pn • EE Pn +1
•
•
•
•
TSm
P = problem of life; TS = tentative solution; EE = eliminate erroneous solutions;
Pn+1 = changed problem situation after Pn has been solved
Cycle iterates to solve Pn+1 etc.
11

12. S-3
Revolutions in material technology cause grade
shifts in the nature of the human species
M = millions, K = thousands, C = centuries,
D = decades, Y = years, (BP = before present)
Accelerating change in our material technologies:
– ~ 2.5 M BP - Tool Making: stones, levers, and fire extend
human reach and digestion
– ~ 12 K BP - Agricultural Revolution: Ropes and digging
implements used to control and manage non–human organic
metabolism
– ~ 3.5 C BP - Industrial Revolution: extends human and
animal muscle power with mechanical power
– ~ 5 D BP - Microelectronics Revolution: extends human
cognitive capabilities with computers
– > 10 Y BP - Cyborg Revolution: merges human and machine
cognition with smartphones and neural prosthetics
12

13. S-4
Grade shifting revolutions reinvent the nature of
human cognition
Accelerating change in human cognition
– ~ 500 M BP - Evolutionary origin of individual memory and
learning (genetic heredity)
– ~ 150 K BP - Evolution of speech to transfer knowledge
between individuals (genetic heredity)
– ~ 11 K BP – Invention of physical counters (11 K), writing and
reading (5 K) to record and transmit knowledge external to
human memory (cultural use of technology)
– ~ 5.6 C BP - Printing and universal literacy transmit
knowledge to the masses (cultural use of technology)
– ~ 3.2 D BP - Personal computing tools manage knowledge
externally to the human brain (3.2 D) and the World Wide
Web (1.8 D) (individual use of technology)
– ~ 10 Y BP - Smartphones merge human and technological
cognition (human & technological convergence)
– ~ Now: Emergence of human-machine cyborgs (embedded
13 technology is part of the human body)

14. COUNTER SUBJECT
understanding and
valuing the roles of
knowledge in adaptation

15. CS-1
Evaluating and valuing different types of
knowledge
Ian Coombe's Karl Popper's
Information (1972; 1978,
Definitions and 1994) three
Transformations. worlds of
(Based on the knowledge.
diagram ©1995 by World 2 is an
Ian Coombe, as emergent
published in The property based
Australian Army in World 1.
Information World 3 is an
Management emergent
Manual, Version 2) property based
in World 2
John
Boyd's
OODA
Loop:
Observe,
Orient,
Decide, Act....
Observe
results of
action.
Determines
success in
competition
15
and evolution

16. EPISODE 1
tools to assist human
cognition:
counting, writing,
books, printing
for representing and
exchanging explicit
content
(paper paradigm)

17. E1-1
Counting and writing for trade and administration
Counting (tokens) Cuneiform (records) Accounting (counting table/tablet) Roman abacus (adding machine
Teachers/leaders instructing students/staff from wax/computerized tablets
17

18. E1-2
Printing technologies for universal literacy and the
distribution of knowledge
18

19. E1-3
Books, journals, and libraries – systems for
organizing and accessing recorded knowledge
Accumulating and retrieving knowledge:
– library architecture and catalogs
– Bibliotheka & Mouseion
the ancient universal library of Alexandria & associated university
accumulated the world’s knowledge
Knowledge lost for lack of replication
Book construction – tablet, scroll, codex, incunabula
Evolving book technologies facilitate knowledge access
– woodcuts for illustration, page numbers, title pages and prefaces,
publication details, metal engraving for detailed charts and
diagrams, folded plates (i.e., oversize pages for high quality
illustrations), cross referencing, indexing, and table of contents.
Papermaking replaces papyrus and vellum
Book and journal printing – mass replication & distribution of
content ensures against loss
Scientific journals and the construction of reliable knowledge
Library cataloging systems
Stand on the shoulders of giants – don’t reinvent what is
already known
19

20. EPISODE 2
several “generations” of
material tools for
automating cognitive
processes

21. E2-1
The material revolutions in a nutshell
Left – Caius Julius Caesar (1486), Les commentaires de iules cesar: publisher:
Antoine Caillaut ? pour Antoine Vérard. Accessed from the Internet Archive
Right - HP Compaq 630 Core i3-2310M 6GB 15.6 inch Laptop LV426PA-6GB for just
A$499 (RRP $869). Specifications: 15.6" display. Hard drive. Intel core processor
i3-2310M. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Memory 6GB DDR3 SDRAM. HDMI.
Bluetooth wireless. Integrated HP VGA Webcam and more..).
In its day, A4 sized book would have cost more than laptop in current
value.
– The book contains one work by Julius Cesar
– The laptop accesses Julius Caesar’s surviving works and most human
21 knowledge ever published

22. E2-2
Ancient generations of automation and computing –
mostly lost with the Bibliotheka and the Mouseion
22

23. E2-3
Zeroth generation: material technologies for
analog and digital calculation
23

24. E2-4
First generation: electronic computers
(1943-1955)
UNIVAC I at Franklin Life Insurance Company, Springfield, Ill. Franklin operated a second
UNIVAC I as a service bureau. Staff for the two systems included 3 supervisors, 32 technical
staff (analyst, programmers, operators and service technicians) and 50 clerks (presumably key-
punch operators)! The price for a basic UNIVAC-I system was $950,000, including the central
computer with power supply, supervisory control desk, and 10 Uniservos tape drives - where a
1,500 foot magnetic tape could store up to 1.4 MB of data. UNIVACs had a clock speed of 2.2
MHz and a memory (mercury acoustic delay lines) of 1000 x 12 digit words (i.e., ~12 KB). It could
complete 8,333 additions of approximately 100 bit words (11 decimal digits plus sign) in 1 second
(8,300 Hz or 8.3 KHz). The smaller but newer Burroughs machine I learned to program on in
1958-59 had about the same power. Today (August 2010), I am writing this document on a $1000
notebook computer that has around 7.4x1013 times more raw processing power than was available
from a million dollar room full of electronics to one of the nation's largest life insurance
24 companies 50 years ago! And yet, it was apparently cost-effective for the insurance company to
make that investment. [Picture and quote from Weik (1961a).

25. E2-5
Second generation: magnetic core computers
(1955 - 1964)
A 256 bit (32 byte) ferrite core random IBM's 350 magnetic storage unit that
access memory from around 1955. The was the heart of the 305 RAMAC from
donut shaped objects at the intersections 1956 (Random Access Memory
of the wire are the ferrite rings Accounting) system. 50 disks with 100
recording surfaces provided 3.75 MB
storage at a lease cost of
25 3,200/month.

26. E2-6
Third generation: integrated circuit computers
(1964 - 1971)
Shrinking circuit elements
– Gen 1 – vacuum tubes
– Gen 2 – shrinking transistors
– Gen 3 – integrated circuits
Shrinking logic circuits
– Gen 1 – hand wired
vacuum tubes
– Gen 2 – printed
circuit boards and
shrinking transistors
– Gen 3 – shrinking
26 integrated circuits

27. E2-7
Large scale integration and Moore’s Law
Moore's Law as applied to the evolution of
microprocessors. Recent studies show the rate of
increase is actually hyper-exponential. Magnetic storage
density doubles even faster, as does total processing
power. Chips are 4004 (2300 transistors, 1971), 8008
(3500 transistors - 1972), and Dual-Core Intel® Itanium®
27 Processor (1.3 BN transistors - 2006)

28. E2-8
Fourth generation personal computers and beyond
Revolutions in fabrication: hand assembly to automated printing
and assembly
– The modern chip fabricator plant is a printing press on steroids
– The mass production of hand-held devices makes them as
cheap as books
Revolutions in the application of control: from manipulating
switches to casting spells
– The first generation language is object code (or machine code)
directly understandable by the computer's processor
– Second generation languages are processor specific assembly
languages, with 1:1 relationship between mnemonics code and
object code
– Third generation languages are generic symbolic programming
languages where instructions can be written in words and symbols
– Fourth generation languages (or high-level languages) are used for
macros and similar with application oriented syntaxes normally
associated with word processing and database systems
– Vernacular language Siri on an iPhone more-or-less understands
human language as it is spoken
Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
28 from magic”

29. EPISODE 3
tools for extending
individual cognition
(virtual paradigm)

30. E3-1
Tools to store, manage and retrieve preserved
knowledge
Before printing
– scholar had to walk/ride horse 100’s of kms between
‘libraries’ to see rare/single copies of key works
– could only take away what he could remember or write
With printing
– individual could afford to own most important books
– a good research library could aspire to be universal
Information science: disseminating, indexing and
retrieving scholarly, scientific and technical
knowledge
– History of scientific journals
– 20th century library technology
– The major knowledge indexing systems
With the Web a scholar can now work from home
– Computerizing and moving indexes on line
– Indexing and semantic retrieval
30 – The universal library is now on-line

31. E3-2
Killer applications make knowledge explicit and
process it virtually in world 3
Word processing
– extending the paradigm of paper
Spreadsheets
– extending the paradigm of a paper spreadsheet
Databases
– extending the tabular paradigm to more than two
dimensions
Growing conceptual revolution from 1986
– obsolescent paper paradigms and Microsoft’s waning
dominance of personal computing
– Structured authoring adds computer readable syntax and
semantics to content
– Computers can understand content as well as collect and
31 deliver it (why ANZAC Ship Project was so successful)

32. E3-3
Are research libraries (and associated universities)
terminally ill?
The increasing cost of
publishing paper and the
physical limitations of libraries
The research library is dead –
long live the universal library
Compared to the library–related
bibliographic cataloging and indexing
technologies for paper, which have been
developed over more than a century and a
half, cognitive retrieval and linking tools
for personal desk–top use have evolved
from essentially nothing in less than 15
years, with the most pervasive one being
the World Wide Web. Beginning with the
launch of Mosaic in 1994, the Web
exploded in less than two decades from an
idea into a system used by a significant
fraction of humanity in the world's
developed countries to access a reasonable
sample of humanity's total knowledge.
Is the university dying too?
32

33. E3-4
The World Wide Web
Origins and history
– Vanevar Bush’s Memex
– Tim Berners-Lee 1989, released 1991
– Internet connectivity growth
– Basic web tools
The Web explodes
How much information does
the web hold?
– could be tracked for a while
– now lost in the cloud
Retrieving value from the
web semantically
– Cataloging
– Indexing
– Portals
– Multimedia
Demonstrating semantic retrieval with Google Scholar
33

34. INTERLUDE
theoretical framework
for remainder of book

35. I0-1
Three major sections
Physics of systems
– Background to other Interlude sections
– Physical systems, complexity, the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
entropy, dissipation, equilibrium and the thermodynamics of
systems far from equilibrium (Prigogine, Simon, Kauffman)
– Physical nature of time as a framework for “decisions” in
evolutionary processes
What is Life?
– Autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980)
– Autopoiesis and knowledge are inseparable
– Theory of knowledge-based autopoietic systems as developed in
my research papers 2003-2011
Theory of hierarchically complex dynamic systems and higher
orders of autopoiesis
– Hierarchy theory (Simon, Salthe, etc.)
– Emergence of higher order knowledge-based autopoietic systems
(organizations)
35

36. I1-1
Physical dynamics
Time, change and causation: particle motion through
Vector fields and attractors space and time (George Ellis) determines Stuart
Kauffman’s adjacent possible. Natural selection
prunes the possible to produce evolution.
Second Law of Thermodynamics is the driving force of evolution
– Energy flow drives life to solve problems and become more complex
36 – Knowledge is built through solving problems (i.e., decisions)

37. I2-1
Complex dynamic systems and life
Kauffman in Brockman (1995) re complex dynamic systems:
– An infinitesimal change in initial conditions [may lead] to divergent
pathways in the evolution of the system. Those pathways are
called trajectories. The enormous puzzle is the following: in order
for life to have evolved, it can't possibly be the case that
trajectories are always diverging. Biological systems can't work if
divergence is all that's going on. You have to ask what kinds of
complex systems can accumulate useful variation.
– We've discovered the fact that in the evolution of life very
complex systems can have convergent flow and not divergent flow.
Divergent flow is sensitivity to initial conditions. Convergent flow
means that even different starting places that are far apart
come closer together. That's the fundamental principle of
homeostasis, or stability to perturbation, and it's a natural
feature of many complex systems.
37

38. I2-2
Visualizing convergence & divergence
Divergent and convergent futures (extending George Ellis
particle motion)
– Errors prune divergent futures (faulty systems dis-integrate)
38 – Selection & correct decisions converge.

39. I2-3
What is life?
Autopoiesis
– An autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity [i.e., an entity]) as a network of processes of
production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (1)
through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of
processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine [i.e., the entity]) as a
concrete [i.e., definable] unity in the space in which they [the components] exist by specifying the
topological domain of its realization as such a network.
– Fundamentally cyclical, continuation depends on the structure of the state
in the previous instant to produce autopoiesis in the next instant
– Survival builds knowledge into the system one problem solution at a time
Self producing entity in Conway’s Game of Life
cellular automaton
39

40. I2-4
Autopoiesis
Autopoiesis
– [The autopoietic system is] …a molecular system open to the flow of
molecules through it as molecules could enter it and become
participants of its closed dynamics of molecular productions, and
molecules could stop participating in such molecular dynamics leaving
it to become part of the molecular medium in which it existed….
[Maturana 2002: p. 7]
– …autopoietic systems in the physical space must satisfy the
thermodynamic legality of physical processes that demands of them
that they should operate as materially and energetically open
systems in continuous material and energetic interchange with their
medium… [where] ...the physical boundaries of a living system... are
realized by its components through their preferential interactions
within the autopoietic network... as surfaces of thermodynamic
cleavage [Maturana 2002: p. 30].
40

41. I2-5
Spontaneous co-emergence of autopoiesis and
knowledge
The dynamic vectors of the present instant result from causal
events in past instants as reflected in the adjacent possibles
of the immediately prior instant. These historical connections
(heritage) determine the vectors in state space of the present
instant.
Convergent paths may become coherently autopoietic, such
that the ensemble structure of a convergent state in one
instant generates an ensemble structure that remains
convergent n the next instant.
Divergent paths leading to incoherent non-autopoietic
structures that disintegrate lose the historical thread of
successful autopoiesis
Ensembles that remain convergent through the selective
elimination of divergent outcomes retain structural knowledge
41 that solved a problem of survival

42. I2-6
What is knowledge in life?
Popper’s three worlds in an autopoietic system
42

43. I2-7
How does living knowledge evolve
Stages in the emergence of knowledge-based autopoiesis
43

44. I2-8
Forms of living knowledge & knowledge exchange
Cognition, structural/dispositional knowledge,
codified knowledge and systems of heredity
– autopoietic reproduction and natural selection builds W2
knowledge into structural organization
– codified knowledge (RNA/DNA) emerges at the
macromolecular level to form W3
– knowledge in W3 shared at the macromolecular level across
time and space via NA exchanges
transformation
transduction
conjugation
eukaryotic meiosis, random assortment, gametogenesis, and
fertilization
– Culture: the social sharing knowledge at a higher level of
organization
tacit transfer (copying; speaking & listening)
44 explicit transfer (writing, printing, electronic comms)

45. I3-1
Hierarchically complex dynamic systems
higher orders of autopoiesis
Hierarchy theory
– Herbert Simon – Nobel laureate (nearly decomposable systems)
– Arthur Koestler (holonics) HIGHER LEVEL SYSTEM / ENVIRONMENT
– Stanley Salthe (systems triad) boundary
Levels of organization conditions,
constraints,
Hierarchical structure of regulations,
living systems actualities
Spontaneous emergence of "HOLON" SYSTEM SYSTEM
FOCAL LEVEL
new levels of organization in
living systems Possibilities
Orders of autopoietic systems initiating
conditions
SUBSYSTEMS
– cell universal
laws
– multicellular "material -
causes"
– social/economic organizations
– cities & nations
45

46. I3-2
Autopoietic organizations
46

47. I3-3
Emergence of autopoiesis
47

48. I3-4
Mature autopoiesis
48

49. EPISODE 4
social computing:
posthumans are moving
into the cloud

50. E4-1
Development of “sociotechnical systems”
Technology increasingly used in social contexts or to
mediate social networking
People and their systems form sociotechnical systems
Each individual person is becoming a sociotechnical
system in his/her own right
– surrounded by the increasingly personal technologies used in
interacting with other people and the world
– people interacting with other people via personal technologies
– personal technologies interacting directly with personal
technologies
Case 1: Convergence of personal capabilities with
technological capabilities redefines what it means to
be posthuman
Case 2: Technology involved in the social development
50 of knowledge

51. E4-2
Technological convergence
People evolved with narrow-band networking
– people are social and organize via communication
– before the telephone only means involved speech in close
proximity (tacit) or asynchronously via writing (explicit)
– telephone allowed synchronicity over distances but still 1:1
– radio/TV – synchronously influence thousands to millions,
but only 1:many
Moore’s Law still at work: clouds, pipes, devices, apps
– hyperexponential growth continues in
storage density and capacity (local/in the cloud)
bandwidth
device processing speed/power (local/in the cloud)
battery power/weight
– technological convergence (devices/apps)
was one device per function
51 now apps provide limitless functions per device

52. E4-3
Shrinking devices lead to convergence
(Left) Motorola MicroTAC 9800x, launched April 1989 – the smallest and lightest
phone available at the time. (Right) Apple iPhone 4S released in October 2011.
1989 state of the art was a pocket-sized mobile personal
phone able to remember a few phone numbers. It weighed 349
gm, sold for US$2,495-3,495 (Motorola’s MicroTAC 9800x)
2011 personal “smartphone” is a multipurpose cognitive
prosthesis connecting its user’s mind to the full resources of
the Web from anywhere in the world. An example is Apple’s
140 gm 64 GB iPhone 4S308 selling for US $399, whose
functions are listed on the next slide.
52

53. E4-4
Cognitive functions converging into the personal smartphone
(iPhone 4S308)
Normal phone functions plus teleconferencing (Skype, etc.)
SMS and Twitter
Still & video cameras (including flash)
Media access and playback
Web access (full browser functions, send, receive)
Display & edit document contents (including MS Office)
Default applications (Safari, Mail, Photos, Video, YouTube,
Music, iTunes, App Store, Maps, Notes, Calendar, Game Center,
Photo Booth, and Contacts)
Free & paid downloadable apps (~500,000)
Extra-corporeal cognition embodied in the smartphone
– sense organs!
conventional senses - hearing, vision, touch screen, ambient light
senses no organic system has – geopositioning, proximity
– Siri – multilingual speech recognition, control & reminder system
– Dictionary - anticipatory text, auto correct
– Google Translate - good enough for me to understand a Japanese
web site
53

54. E4-5
What killer apps can run on a personal
smartphone?
Email (1971), SMS (2002)
Wireless voice 1946, 1956, 1973
– VoIP 1973
– Skype 2003
Media (players 1991/stores 2001)
Photography (still & video)
– Picassa/iPhoto 2002 (Smartphone
releases 2012)
– Panoramio with geolocation 2005
– YouTube 2005
Cloud storage/file sharing
– Napster 1999
Kids texting instead of talking (H+)
– Dropbox 2008
Office tools via cloud Social
– Google Docs 2007 – Chat (~1980), listserve 1992, groups
– Smartphone Docs2Go 2008 1998,
GPS etc. (navigation & finding) – Meetup 2001
App stores – Myspace 2003/Facebook 2004
– 500,000 available for iPhone – Twitter 2006
– ???,??? for Android WIKI 1994/Wikipedia 2002
54 Life recording/lifeblogging now Blogs ~1998/WordPress 2003

55. E4-6
Medical bionics and Moore’s Law — again
Organic/tool interfacing is the key to making happy cyborgs
Wallace et al. 2012. Nanobionics: the impact of nanotechnology
on implantable medical bionic devices. Nanoscale - DOI:
10.1039/c2nr30758h (Uni Wollongong) reviews existing and
developing technologies
– Electrodes
nanostructured metal films
carbon microelectrodes (direct growth, nanotubes)
– nanotube paper
– layer by layer assembly
– printing
– spinning
Organic conducting polymer
– electrodeposition
– nanodispersion
– printing
– Electrode/cellular interaction
– Even more technologies
55

56. E4-7
Implant convergence – becoming cyborgs with personal
smartphone interfaces to the nervous system
Sensors
– Bionic ears (cochlear implants)
first implant by Melbourne’s
Graeme Clark in 1978
by 2010 ~220,000 implants world
wide
– Bionic eyes (retinal implants)
being done but still experimental
Effectors
– Implanted cerebral or peripheral
nerve control of artificial limbs &
wheelchairs
56

57. E4-8
Social construction of knowledge
Production and formalization of KNOWLEDGE
SOCIETY EDITORIAL
knowledge involves social (and REVIEW
technological) processes at 4 levels EXPLICIT
of dynamic organization
SUBMIT
BoFK
O EE
Creation (“I” the single person)
O
– Pn “I”TTs “WE” “THEM” PEER
REVIEW
Collaboration (“We” the work group)
EE
–
O
– Review and publication (“Them”)
– Assimilation (by the “Knowledge REWORK
FORMAL PUBLISH
EDITORIAL
Society” into the Body of Formal DECISION &COMMENT
Knowledge or “Noosphere”)
Each cycle involves Observation (of problems), Orientation (concept
development), Decision (casting of tentative theories) and Action
(elimination of errors)
Involves both tacit and explicit processes to eliminate errors
What is left is reliable knowledge
Are existing academic journals good value?
Sociotechnical systems can greatly speed the process
57

58. E4-9
What does it mean to be Human?
Autopoietic boundaries
– What are the components of the knowledge based
autopoietic system?
– How is one autopoietic system distinguished from the next?
Human evolution in four dimensions
– Jablonka and Lamb book
– Genetic knowledge determines what is physiologically
possible
– Epigenetic knowledge may provide some Lamarkian learning
– Cultural (tacit and explicit) response in less than a
generation
– Personal learning in decades or even hours
Moore’s Law is not finished yet!
Humanity’s adaptive scope/ecological footprint has
evolved more in the last century than since the
origin of mammals and the rate of change is still
58 increasing

59. E4-10
Social constitution of the Global Brain
“Old” idea of Principia Cybernetica
– first activities 1991, live on Web 1993
– aims to develop a complete philosophy or "world-view",
based on the principles of evolutionary cybernetics, and
supported by collaborative computer technologies
– ancient Greek idea that the whole of human society can be
viewed as a single organism – the Web is its brain
Wikipedia might be considered to be the Global
Brain’s common knowledge
What does it mean when human brains directly
interface with/become part of the Global Brain via
bionic cybernetic implants?
59

60. E4-11
Where are we going? What does it mean?
Sociotechnically political
– Arab Spring
– Occupy movements
– Getting out the vote
Sociotechnically pathological
– Flash mobs
– Addiction
– Cyber Bullying, depression & suicide
Sociotechnical constructive
– Community & environmental monitoring
– Knowledge, decision and action
– Some significant applications
Landcare and NatureShare
Smart Cities
60

61. EPISODE 5
Individuals forming
societies and socio-
technical organizations

62. What’s the fuss
In less than 20,000 years humans have evolved from being
apex carnivores in Africa and Eurasia to affecting every living
thing on the entire planet
– How has this been possible?
Genetically, humans descend from bipedal ape-men that
learned to survive on the African savanna 5-6 mya, developed a
taste for meat, and transformed themselves from cat food
into apex carnivores
Virtuous evolutionary spiral
– Dangerous and variable Pleistocene environments (Pn )
– Varying natural selection (Ts & EE) finds local solutions
Natural selection continues from changed problem situations (Pn+1 )
Natural selection at genetic level is normative not cumulative (i.e.,
shifts niche by biasing tails of normal distribution
– Social accumulation of knowledge to solve problems of life
Niche expansion & reconstruction broadens normal distribution
Social groups become increasingly organized as the
consequence of the social accumulation of knowledge
– heritable knowledge belongs to the group not the individual
62 – This has many implications

63. E5-1
Key ideas
Premise
– Humans are fundamentally social organisms
– Sustenance, information, knowledge and status are all shared and
exchanged via social interactions
– All social interactions depend on communication
– Evolving social systems increased human control over “nature”
– Technological revolutions enabled grade-shifting cognitive and
ecological changes in the nature of humans
Scenarios of increasing (self) regulation and control
– hunter-gatherer tribes tacitly build/maintain tribal knowledge
– add counting & recording to enable agrarian state tax administration
– add literacy to enable commercial trading companies
– add printing & universal literacy to enable science and industry
– add computing to enable national & global enterprises
– add social technology to re-enable groups & organizations to
compete?
63

64. Practice makes perfect
—
rise of the hominin
toolmakers

65. Apes & monkeys tell us our common ancestors made and used
tools and transmitted knowledge culturally
Chimps using probes to collect ants. Probe Child watching mother crack otherwise inedible
is inserted almost to full length into earth. palm nuts using hammer & anvil.
(Note: click pictures for videos)
Tool using cultures are not limited to apes.
Capuchin monkey nut processing industry in
Brazil deals with much more difficult nuts than
chimpanzees work with. Process involves
Picking, husking, several days’ drying, testing,
transporting, and finally – cracking. They also
make & use probes and shovels. Capuchins may
be better models for early hominins than apes.
65

66. Hominin grades and their adaptive plateaus
White et al’s (2009) depiction of the adaptive plateaus achieved by the different species
grade shifts in the Pliocene radiation of hominins as our ancestors became more adapted
to more open and arid environments. CLCA = chimpanzee-human last common ancestor.
Increasing brain capacity in Pleistocene: Homo habilis (Acheulian finely
flaked tools) H. erectus H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis +
Denisovans + H. sapiens. Successive waves out of Africa
Late Pleistocene Neanderthals & modern humans had large brains, made
complex tools of many components, and had the genetic markers a language
capability (fine coordination & language use same brain areas).
Genomics shows that Neanderthals, Denisovans, & H. sapiens were distinct
66 species but cohabited long enough for minor hybridization.

67. Brains, diets and guts
Tradeoff between brain size and digestive apparatus (Aiello & Wheeler 1995)
Maximum energetic capacity of metabolism is anatomically limited
Big brains are metabolically very expensive
– human brains use 20% of total energy consumed
– also depend on essential amino and fatty acids not provided by plant matter
– gut tissue is as expensive as brain tissue
Meat & fat easy to digest & have essentials needed for brains
67 Cooking improves meat, root, and vegetable caloric & nutritional quality

68. Tools, cognition, niche widening
How ape-men on savanna used simple tools to get meat,
take revenge on big cats, and dominate the world
(speculation)
a. b.
Hominins using haak en steek branches as tools (Guthrie 2007): a. for driving big cats away from
their prey. b. for hunting - given the simple conversion of a thorn branch into a "megathorn" lance.
Haak en steek = Acacia tortillis in arid zones from Syria &
Arabian Penninsula through arid & savanna to South Africa
– protected by two types of spines: long sharp woody spikes
(“steek”) and sharp tearing hooks (“haak”) like cat claws
– easy to pick up, poke, and wave at cats, leaving no fossil record
68
– cats risk blindness if run into/hit by thorny branch & they know it

69. Making a stone knife is also within an ape-man’s
cognitive capacity
Kanzi (a bonobo) knaps flint knife to cut rope to gain access to a banana
– near Oldowan quality
– socially facilitated learning from watching a human flint knapper
Vulcan (a capuchin) makes flint knife to cut heavy plastic skin and makes a
honey dipper from a branch to get honey
– said to be self-taught (socially facilitated?)
Tools extend access to different niches: more kinds of tools = broader
niche = better diet = opportunity for smaller guts & more brains =
69 capacity to make & use more different tools

70. With stone butchering tools, hominins became top
carnivores on the savanna
Oldowan tools made & used from 2.6 to 1.7 mya
– Hominin teeth not strong enough to tear skin and flesh of game animals.
– Flaked rocks sharp enough to help dismember large prey before cats arrive
More sophisticated Acheulean hand choppers & other tools made & used from
1.7 mya to 0.1 mya but required more knowledge & dexterity to make
Note exceedingly slow rate of technological change
– Suggests limited neural/social capacity to accumulate knowledge of complex
technologies
70

71. Possible dietary change and the evolution of
hominin cranial capacity (Babbitt et al. 2011)
Niche expansion
Niche shifts
71

72. Cognitive skills needed to accumulate knowledge for niche
expansion (Vaesen 2012; Rolland 2004; Twomey 2011)
Hand-eye coordination
– fine motor control needs more neurons
Causal reasoning
– time-binding
– understand goals, actions, and consequences
Function representation - fit particular tools for particular jobs
Natural history intelligence - conscious attention to understanding the
behaviors of predators, prey, fire, other changing aspects of environment
Executive control – anticipating, deciding & planning; not just reacting
Social intelligence
– Extended childhood
– Social learning (imitation not emulation)
– Understanding of intentions of others
– Teaching
Intragroup coordination
Intergroup collaboration
Language
72

73. Increasingly complex fabrication process
Action hierarchies for making Lower
73 Paleolithic stone tools (Stout 2011)

74. Increasing tool complexity
Development of increasingly complex
stone tools (after Stout 2011),
correlates with increasing brain
capacity (and more social
intelligence?).
74

75. Cognitively controlled processes to kill prey with a
stone-tipped spear
Understanding cognitive demands of technologies
Thinking a stone-tipped spear
– sequence of steps to make a spear used to bring down
prey (chains of operation/cognigram)
– making a bow and arrow set is at least 3x more difficult
(Lombart 2012; Lombard & Haidle 2012)
75

76. Homo incendius
―
fire users and fire
makers

77. Fire demands increasing cognitive capacity and
greatly expands hominin niche width
77 Possible use and maintenance of natural fire by early hominins (Clark & Harris 1985)

78. Fire users, keepers, & makers
Accumulating cognitive demands of a new technology
Opportunistic users > 5 mya ?
– savanna burns naturally every 2-5 years
– Knowing that burnt savanna is a good source of high cuisine
roast meat much more digestible than raw
inedible/indigestible nuts, roots & tubers made edible
Fire keepers > 1 mya
– Requires high degree of social coordination
– Knowing how to feed and keep a fire (process knowledge)
– Keepers much better off than those without
– Loss of fire potentially catastrophic to group
– Keeping the fire is a driver to increase cognitive capacity
Fire makers ~ 0.5 – 0.4 mya
– Knowing how to start a fire without a natural source
Striking a spark (what rocks, what tinder?)
Using a fire stick to create friction embers
78

79. Keeping fire is not far beyond ape-men’s mental
capacities
Kanzi the bonobo can’t start a fire without a lighter, learned what fire
is good for and how to keep it burning (Savage-Rumbaugh)
– Cultural knowledge learned from his human “family”
– Lighting the fire with stone-age technology is another matter
a bonobo’s may have the neuro-muscular dexterity to light a fire using a hand-
drill, fire-board and tinder – but even that is debatable
it probably is not within a bonobo’s cognitive capacity to plan the fire, collect the
necessary components, and use them in the appropriate sequence to light the
79 fire

80. Selective conditions from the maintenance of fire
80

81. Cognitive requirements for maintaining a fire
(Twomey 2011)
81

82. Early fire users & makers
Wonderwerk Cave ~1.5 mya?, 1.0 mya certain (fire keepers? – Berna et al. 2012)
– South Africa
– Acheulian tool kit (H. erectus?)
Gesher Benot Ya‫י‬aqov – 780 kya sporadic for 100 kya span (fire makers? – Goren-Inbar 2011)
– Jordan River, Israel, boggy lake margin
– Acheulian tool kit (H. erectus, ergaster, early sapiens all possible)
– Processed elephant, rhino, bovids, gazelles, fish, crustacea, seeds, nuts, leafy vegetables & made stone
tools around “virtual” hearths
Schöningen ~ 400 - 380 kya – an autumn hunting camp (Thieme 2005)
– Saxony, eastern Germany, peaty lake margin (extraordinary preservation)
– First compound wooden tool (worked branch grooved to hold cutting flakes)
– Acheulian stone tools, 8 sophisticated wooden throwing javelins, 4 outdoor hearths,
– Fossil evidence for the slaughtering, spit roasting and possible smokin of an entire herd of horses at
these hearths (20 complete skulls from all ages)
– Intact javelins may represent ritual offering
Bilzingsleben 370 kya (single occupation period for an open-air hunting camp – Mania & Mania
2005)
– Thuringia, eastern Germany, karstic lake margin (extraordinary preservation)
– Acheulian tool kit (skull fragments suggest late H. erectus, late heidelbergensis, pre Neanderthal, early
sapiens)
– Three “settlement structures” (huts) with internal hearths, four separate “activity areas” identified by
different tool kits & other artefacts (tool making, stone paved area for spit roasting, skin and bone
processing area, paved area with a single hearth & suggestion of ritual alter)
– Fossil remains of elephants, rhinoceros, horses, bison, red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, pigs, cave lions,
cave bears, grey wolves, spotted hyenas, red foxes, badgers, and martens
82

83. Becoming the
Jack-of-All-Trades
—
virtuous evolutionary
spiral of niche
construction

84. Hominid sociality, knowledge accumulation, niche
expansion
niche
expansion
Evolutionary diversification of social structures in hominoid primates from the Miocene to the
84 present (after Malone et al. 2012)

85. Niche construction theory
Theory development by (Laland et al. 2001; Laland & O’Brien
2012; etc.)
Continuing dynamic feedback between species’ populations and
their physical and competitive environments
– species’ trophic and competitive interactions and impacts on physical
resources unavoidably alters the environment for itself and for
other species
– those environmental alterations shape the selective environment
influencing the inheritance of knowledge and cognitive capabilities
– consequential phenotypic changes further impact environment...
– the niche occupied/made by a population represents the current
dynamic state of niche-expansion pressures resulting from selection
on the species to increase its populations, versus niche-narriowing
pressures from all other species’ activities to widen their niches
Malone et al. (2012), Iriki &Taoka (2012) and others present
niche construction models for the evolution of social systems in
early hominids that set the stage for the substantial expansion
of social complexity and behavioral plasticity in the hominin line
85

86. Social systems as mechanisms for preserving and
transmitting adaptive knowledge
Species, individual, and group cultural knowledge
– Species’ knowledge is embodied in the shifting contents of the
species’ gene pool
Learning takes place through the action of natural selection on the
reproduction of whole genomes
Addition and complexification only possible with the duplication and
subsequent divergences of whole or partial genomes
– Individual’s knowledge is embodied in the shifting contents of the
living individual’s cognitive processes and memories
Problem solutions are learned through iterated knowledge building
cycles of observation, orientation, decision and action
The individual’s knowledge vanishes with death
– Group’s cultural knowledge is that which can be successfully
transferred from the cognition and memories of one individual to
other individuals during the first individual’s lifetime.
Pre-linguistic hominins could only share knowledge via attention,
observation, emulation/imitation, practice, and criticism
Cultural accumulation critically depends on fidelity of transmission &
duration of transferred knowledge
Facilitated by
– structured social systems
genetically determined behavioral predispositions
86 –

87. Cognition, culture, complex social systems and the
means for evolutionary adaptation
Most feedback is normalizing.
Positive feedback in evolutionary
learning cycles (Carbonell 2010)
1. technological development,
2. socialization (i.e., generalization
of new technologies in the group),
3. social reorganization & genetic
adaptation (i.e., dynamic processes
that involves change in
capabilities, behaviour, social skills
and subsistence strategies),
4. niche expansion and
demographic growth enabled by
improvements,
5. geographic expansion by niche
expansion and population increase
6. more opportunities for
technological development
87

88. Homo sapiens and the development of complex tool
kits and cultures – platform for language development
Recent (3 years) integration of genomics & fossil record
African genesis – a competitive pressure cooker
– Ape cultures making and using tools
– Homo, the carnivorous savannah ape was a collaborative big game hunter
– Success limited by brain capacity for complex thinking/expression/action
Several Pleistocene colonizations of Eurasia
– Primitive H. erectus entered Eurasia (Dmanisi) 1.8 mya or earlier & spread
to Flores Island, Indonesia, survived in E. Asia/Indonesia until ~30 kya
Acheulean toolkit (simple flaked stones, probably included wooden spears & clubs)
– H. heidelbergensis (Denisovan ancestor?)/neanderthalensis entered Eurasia
~400 kya, replacing H. erectus in Europe & western Asia, Neanderthals
survived until ~14 kya
Complex tools (multistep fabrication), symbolic language ~200-100 kya?
– H. sapiens entered Levant where they met & ~60 kya hybridized with
Neanderthals (all non-African H. sapiens populations carry ~3% Neanderthal
genes) first wave of migrants to east meet & hybridize with Denisovans in
central Asia (Australian & New Guinea natives carry ~ 6% Denisovan genes)
Mechanically projected weapons, i.e., bows & arrows (Churchill & Rhodes 2009;
88 Lombard & Haidle 2012)

89. Babble & Babel
—
Speech as a tool for
social coordination and
transmitting cultural
knowledge

90. Coevolutionary cycles for niche construction: tools,
language & culture
Pleistocene coevolutionary cycle
– Increasingly complex technologies for hunting & gathering
require better cognition, culture & language skills to
support technologies
– Domestication of dogs & other animals
Grade shift: agriculture
– Permanent habitations
– Complex tools and industries
– Food storage
– Long range / centralized planning & control
– Technologies for counting, recording, writing and teaching
– Hierarchical social organization and differentiation: kings,
priests, clerks, soldiers/police, artisans, peons/slaves
– Increasing linguistic complexity: abstraction, time & space,
quantitative, sophistication re actors and actions, shading
90 of qualities and qualifications

91. What is language?
Pre-literate language is not what we speak today
– Speech vanishes in the instant it is articulated (Walter Ong 1982)
Before writing language was not symbolic as we would understand it today
Words as discrete objects of thought did not exist before writing
Language communicated states of mind
– Language only has meaning in the social context
Tylén et al. 2010 defining “language”
– extends the ‘interaction space’ in space and time
– tool for aligning attention to share experience (structure, guide and constrain joint
attention and perspective-taking in an already existing, shared meaning space)
– enables collaborative development & sharing of higher-order situation models and
action plans (management of complementary & contingent
– attunes people to certain aspects of visual, auditory and spatial perception at a
cultural level
Words as proxies for objects and actions
Language is a complex adaptive system (Beckner et al. 2009)
– Consists of multiple agents interacting with one another
– Adaptive - speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and
past interactions together feed forward into future behavior
– Speaker’s behavior consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual
constraints to social motivations
– speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past
interactions together feed forward into future behavior
– The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social
interaction, and cognitive mechanisms
91

92. When did hominins learn to speak?
Language doesn’t fossilize until it is written
Paleoarcheological proxies for symbolic behavior
– “masterpieces” (specially worked complex tools)
– body and artifact painting (ochres & other pigments)
– shell beads jewelry
– ritual burials and “grave goods”
– representational painting
– musical instruments (i.e., bone flutes)
Emergence of dateable genetic & fossilizable
morphological/neurological prerequisites
– FOXP2 etc (common to H. sapiens & neanderthalensis)
– Larynx & hyoid bone (ditto)
– Neuromuscular control of breathing (lack in ergaster & erectus
– Broca’s & Wernicke’s areas of the cerebral cortex
Last 200,000 years
– Social coordination of cooperative hunthing
– Last common ancestor H. neanderthalensis & sapiens was on the way (H.
heidelbergensis)
– Co-evolved with the development of complex technologies & social systems
– Only fully developed with the emergence of domestication
92

93. Working with pigments
a: fragments of variously colored
porcellanite found in the Early
Mousterian levels of Beçov,
Czech Republic (200-240 kya); b:
experimental production of
pigment by grinding using a
variety of raw material found at
Beçov; c: grinding stone from the
lower Sangoan levels of Sai
Island, Northern Sudan; d: lumps
of yellow pigment from the same
levels. Scale bars = 1 cm (d’Errico
et al. 2009)
93 Applying pigment to the skin

94. Paleoarcheological evidence for symbolic thinking
A. B. C.
Symbolic artifacts? A. Different pigments & ochred artifacts from various times and locations.
B. Engraved ochre slab, C. shell beads, both from Still Bay layers of Blombos Cave, S.A. ~75 kya
(d’Errico et al. 2009)
The oldest securely dated, purposely made engravings (two ochre slabs
engraved with geometric patterns) come from Blombos Cave ~75 kya.
Both are variants of the same pattern suggesting they are not
accidental
The use of ochre becomes widespread in Europe after 36 ka during the
Aurignacian, widely accepted as representing the first H. sapiens in
94 Europe

95. Neanderthals also had well-developed symbolic
culture ~ 48-40 kya
Grotte du Renne (France), Chatelperronian symbolic artifacts. Personal ornaments made of
perforated and grooved teeth (1–6, 11), bones (7–8, 10) and a fossil (9); red (12–14) and black
95 (15–16) colorants bearing facets produced by grinding; bone awls (17–23). [Caron et al. 2011]

96. Walter Ong and the subjective nature of pre-
literate speech in group cognition
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. Routledge, London (1982)
– download book free http://tinyurl.com/ahl9oj9
Before technologies for counting and writing, human
knowledge existed only in living memory and could
only be shared via speech and imitation
– speech is ephemeral, instantly disappearing as it is uttered
– speech’s only effect on the world is the altered mental
states of those hearing it
– coordinates immediate social responses in living societies
– transfers knowledge independently of time and place
process knowledge
situational knowledge
cultural norms
96

97. What knowledge can be recalled, how can it be
transmitted, how can it be committed? (more Ong)
In a purely oral culture, restriction of thoughts to
sound determines not only what you can say, but what
you think & remember
– You only know what you can recall
We don’t record what we hear, we only remember what we think
How do you remember the solution to a complex problem that
takes several hundred words to describe? (no notes, no
jottings....!)
How would you know what you recalled was even correct?
Think memorable thoughts!
– Think in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral expression
– Think heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or
antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in formulary
expressions
– Set your thinking in standardized scenes, themes & stories
– Use common expressions and clichés, known to all
97

98. How to communicate orally (Ong)
Additive rather than subordinative (ensure a progressive flow)
Aggregative rather than analytic (reliance on mnemonic formulas and
traditional expressions)
Redundant or ‘copious’ (speech vanishes in the instant of its creation,
need repeated cues to stay on track for it to sink in)
Conservative or traditionalist
– conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes
– oral societies must invest great energy to say over and over again what has been
learned
Close to the human lifeworld (knowledge is preserved in the doing)
Situate knowledge in a context of struggle (When verbal
communication can only be by direct word of mouth, interpersonal relations are
kept high—both attractions and, even more, antagonisms.)
Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively
distanced (fit the speech into the hearer’s life)
Homeostatic (The meaning of each word is controlled by the real-life
situations in which the word is used here and now – no dictionaries = no past)
Situational rather than abstract (objective rather than conceptual)
98

99. Cultural evolution in overdrive
Transmission of industrial knowledge for the making
of compound/complex tools
– tacit apprenticeships
– memorable rules of thumb
Mythical tales as repositories of knowledge
Tribal cultures
Trading
Herding
Farming & settled villages
Power elites
Only with writing does knowledge become
objective
99

100. E5-3
Revolutionary technologies lead to grade shifts in
organizational cognition
Tallies for taxation and trading in the Neolithic
agrarian world enable temples, city states and
theocracies
Counting, recording and accounting: computation,
archives & filing systems enable bureaucratic
empires
Documents as organizational memory systems makes
process knowledge explicit enables process and
production industries (Industrial Revolution)
Automated cognition extends organizational
cognition facilitating the police state and
transnational organizations
100

101. Cultural evolution
in hyperdrive
—
Niche construction
and subdivision
Scientific and
Industrial
Revolutions

102. Counting, accounting, record keeping
Trading, valuing and the development of eco-nomics
– Most knowledge still transmitted tacitly and orally
resistance to innovation & cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing
– Little/no general literacy prior to the printing revolution
Economic niches
– Emergence of knowledge-based crafts, trades and guilds
– Scribes and clerks facilitated emergence of economically
based organization
Rise of formal state and economic organizations
– Intergenerational storage & transmission of objective
knowledge
– Enabled contracts & treaties
– proliferating bureaucracy
102

103. Books, libraries, printing & the rise of modern
organizations as entities in their own rights
Scientific and industrial revolutions fuelled
by accumulated knowledge in books as grade
shifts on steroids
Science, industry and the rise of knowledge-
based organizations
Knowledge-based technology/innovation
cycles within the organization
103

104. Printing and the Industrial Revoluton
Printing of books and journals made general literacy,
science and engineering possible
Printing facilitated creation of a continuously
accumulating body of increasingly objective
knowledge accessible to all seekers
– published claims to knowledge subject to multiple cycles of
intersubjective criticism and testing against reality
– accumulation of increasingly complex process and
mechanical design knowledge (emergence of engineering as
a discipline)
– accumulation of increasingly detailed natural & historical
knowledge (emergence of natural philosophy/science as a
discipline)
– continual cross-fertilization and innovation possible
Difficult to understand what the world was like
104 only 200 years ago

105. Concepts from the Industrial Revoluton (Webster’s 1828
Dictionary)
scribe: 6. A writer and a doctor of the law; a man of learning; one skilled in the law; one
who read and explained the law to the people.
clerk: 4. A writer; one who is employed in the use of the pen…, for keeping records, and
accounts
trade: 2. The business which a person has learned and which he carries on for procuring
subsistence or for profit; occupation; particularly, mechanical employment;… craft
shop: 2. a building in which mechanics work, and where they keep their manufactures for
sale
factory: 1. A house or place where factors reside, to transact business for their
employers; 3. Contracted from manufactory, a building or collection of buildings,
appropriated to the manufacture of goods; the place where workmen are employed in
fabricating goods, wares or utensils.
guild: a society, fraternity or company, associated for some purpose, particularly for
carrying on commerce. The merchant-guilds of our ancestors [led] to our modern
corporations - licensed by the king, and governed by laws and orders of their own.
Company: 6. A number of persons united for the same purpose, or in a joint concern; as a
company of merchants or mechanics; a company of players. Applicable to private
partnerships or to incorporated bodies of men.
Machine: n. An artificial work, simple or complicated, that serves to apply or regulate
moving power, or to produce motion, so as to save time or force. The simple machines are
the six mechanical powers, viz.; the lever, the pulley, the axis and wheel, the wedge, the
screw, and the inclined plane. Complicated machines are such as combine two or more of
these powers for the production of motion or force.
Machine: v. t. (Merriam-Webster) to process by or as if by machine; especially : to reduce
or finish by or as if by turning, shaping, planing, or milling by machine-operated tools
105

106. The rise of energetics, mechanics and electrics
(1800-1900)
Harnessing thermodynamic power
– machine tools
– engineering fabrication
– transport
– chemical processing
Machine processing & assembly
Rotary printing
Scientific disciplines developing tested theory
– Newtonian mechanics (statics and dynamics)
– Thermodynamics: Carnot, Kelvin, Boltzman, Gibbs, etc.
– Electromagnetics: Gauss, Faraday, Maxwell
– Chemistry, atomic theory, and the periodic table
Scientifically based technologies
– Metallurgy
– Chemical synthesis, dyes & photography
– Electricity generation and transmission
– Electrical communication (telegraph, telephone, radio)
106

107. Automated data
processing
—
rise of the modern
corporation

108. Reprise on the OODA Loop and organizational
adaptation
OODA (Col. John Boyd)
– Observation
Situational awareness
– Orientation
Fitting situation with what you know
Sense making
Anticipating scenarios
Strategizing
– Decision
Evaluating alternatives
Choosing
– Action
Deploying decision(s)
Importance of shared knowledge, communication and
coordination
Tempo
– Time is of the essence
– Stay inside the decision loops of competitors
Shape the environment for your own benefit
108

109. Group knowledge & group coordination
Selection drives all living entities to seek strategic power over
resources necessary for their survival
Group survival and niche occupation depends on the group’s knowledge of
technologies and nature
The group phenotype is determined by
– The basically similar (i.e., very slowly evolving) genetic heritage that defines
individual capabilities
– The highly plastic cultural heritage that is shared among the group’s
individuals and passed down from one generation to the next
For cultural heritage, groups become the living units of natural selection
and evolution
– Shared attention, language, cooperation and collaboration in the creation, use
and transmission of cultural knowledge
– Purely oral groups share knowledge visually or orally within eyesight or
earshot
Writing and intercommunication over distance stabilizes knowledge
across guilds, extended companies, city-states, religions
Individual can belong to more than one group at same time
– Works best where group niches do not overlap
– Intersecting or nested
109

110. IBM and the punch-card revolution extended
sensory capacity
Data communication and management
– enables centralized control
Dependence on electricity
The value of volumes of data
– small returns multiplied thousands of times over
– knowledge is power & profit (i.e., the corporate nervous
system)
control information
feedback regulation
– supports hierarchical control
– Implements Observation
Multiplier
– extended enterprise
– multi-national
110 – trans-national

111. Punch card data processing technology
Herman Hollerith punch card tabulator (left) tabulator, (right) punch card.
1880 census enumeration completed in less than a year
Grade shift in data management
Mechanical data processing offered
semi-automated sorting, counting &
tabulating
Machines did it much faster than
clerical scribes
Little change in technical capabilities
prior to 1950s
111 Punch card sorter (1958)

112. Status of corporate knowledge
Internal knowledge
– Subjective
Organizational structure
Social networks
Personal knowledge of organizational activities
Skills
– Objective
Articles of incorporation & contracts
Personnel list, job descriptions & delegations
Order book & accounts payable
General ledger
Patents, documented processes & procedures
Property and inventory records
External knowledge
112

113. Cultural evolution at
warp speed
—
Electronic data
communication and the
rise of the socio-
technical organization
Transcending the human
individual

114. E5-2
Social and economic organizations are transcendent
entities
Define “organization”
– collective vs transcendent properties of organizations: self-regulation and
autopoiesis
– organizational cognition (observation, orientation, decision, action, and
iterate)
– organismic physiology and heredity
energy & material fluxes
boundaries
self production
knowledge-based
heredity – tacit and explicit
Understand organizational knowledge management
– understand organization’s imperatives for survival
– understand & manage relationships between personal and organizational
knowledge
– understand the increasing role of technologies in the collection,
assessment, testing, retrieval and application of knowledge at the
organizational level
114 – explicitly manage growth and adaptive usage of organizational knowledge

115. Rise of the knowledge-based organization
Clerical & bookkeeping systems and the rise
of the bureaucratic state and
entrepreneurial trading companies
Punchcards, IBM and the command and the
rise of the clerically-based command and
control organization
Personal computing and the rise of the socio-
technical organization
115

116. E5-6
Moore’s Law — yet again, and technologies underlying the
emergence of the transhuman organization
Punch card tabulation and the US Census of 1890
Punch card data processing for accounting systems
and the Nazi holocaust
Computer modeling & forecasting
Data and information management systems
Industrial robotics and physical process management
Content authoring & management systems
Intelligence retrieval and alerting
– Total monitoring: where you are, what you buy and spend,
who you work for, who you talk to, what you said, what you
wrote, etc. …
Integrating organizations and posthuman individuals
116

117. Information processing revolution
Electronic data processing & communication
– Initiated Moore’s Law and the power of
cumulative data processing and management to
produce information
– Relational databases facilitated use of
information for organizational control purposes
– Alerting and awareness of changing trends
Closer to real time
– Implements coordination
117

118. Knowledge processing revolution
Building virtual memory and automated
processing for the accumulation of cultural
knowledge
– Word processing
– Mass storage
– Keyword, concept, and citation indexing
– Transmission & retrieval at light speed
Exploring the foundations of organizational
knowledge
118

119. Autopoietic
cultures, groups and
their niches

120. Review concepts
120

121. Emergence of the socio-technical organization
121

122. Structure &
operations of
modern knowledge-
based autopoietic
organizations

123. E5-4
OODA system of systems in the socio-technical
knowledge-based organization
CULTURE &
GENETIC HERITAGE
PARADIGMS
PEOPLE
PEOPLE
PEOPLE
ANALYSIS
SYNTHESIS
OBSERVE INPUT PROCESS DECIDE, ACT
INFRASTRUCTURE
DOCS RECORDS LINKS ANNOTA-
DATA CONTENT
RELATIONS TIONS
“CORPORATE MEMORY”
123

124. E5-5
Building and maintaining an adaptive KM
architecture to meet organizational imperatives
… ITERATION …
OBSERVATION ENACTED
ORIENTATION & DECISION
OF CONTEXT & RESULTS STRATEGY
STRATEGIC ENABLERS & PEOPLE STRATEGY
DRIVERS
REQUIREMENTS IMPEDIMENTS PROCESS DEVELOPMENT
In competition • Operational • Knowledge audit • Internal / • Strategic
• Win more Excellence • Knowledge external management
contracts • Customer mapping communication • Architectural
• Perform better satisfaction • Business • Taxonomies role
on contracts won • Stakeholder disciplines • Searching & • Communities of
• Minimise losses intimacy • Technology & retrieval Practice
to risks and • Service delivery systems • Business process • Corporate
liabilities • Growth • Information analysis & communications
• Meet statutory • Sustainability disciplines reengineering • HR practices
and regulatory • Profitability • Incentives & • Tracking and • Competitive
requirements • Risk mitigation disincentives monitoring intelligence
• Etc. • Intelligence • IT strategy
gathering • Etc.
• QA / QC
124

125. E5-7
Some case studies based on personal experience
An Australian nexus: storing, structuring, indexing and
retrieving knowledge from huge content bases
– UoM & RMIT joint research led the world: Zobel, Moffat,
Sacks-Davis, etc. from 1991-2
– personal experiences in implementing the technology
– basis for Google’s content base?
Knowledge management tools for building and managing
organizational knowledge through full OODA loops – Tenix’s
ANZAC Ship Project
Tools have sufficient capacity to manage all content in the
world – US National Security Agency’s TeraText application
Modern warships as high-order autopoietic organisms in their
own right
Understanding how autopoietic organizations work – the
engineering project management organization
125

126. E5-8
Case study 1: Tenix’s ANZAC Ship support
engineering knowledge management - background
Australia’s largest defense project (1990-2007 - $A 7 BN)
Contract: 10 high tech frigates (8 for Australia, 2 for NZ)
– fixed price, major financial penalties for contract deviation
schedule slippage: client must accept each ship before delivery
Tenix must do whatever it takes to ensure ships meet in-service
operational availability targets
– no 2 ships identical due to different navies and eng. change
– ~ 2000 individual maintenance routines per ship
– computerized maintenance management system (“AMPS” CMM)
scheduling maintenance
delivering printed instructions to maintainers
Tenix responsible for support engineering planning, data and doco
all content must be delivered electronically in usable form to AMPS
– critical issue – AMPS is a relational DB requiring key data to be
coherent across 20,000+ individual maintenance routines
126

127. E5-9
Case study 1: three generations of content
management & delivery technologies
original standard: typewritten/word processed paper cards in shoeboxes
– contract didn’t have an agreed delivery format
– cost neutral contract amendment said they had to be delivered electronically!
“semi-structured “: word processed merge/macro authoring
– master document for each equipment + “data” records for variable information
– 2000+ individual “flat” data records/ship filled with key data that must parse
– 1998 crisis
Client won’t accept ship 5 unless data delivery for first 4 ships parses in AMPS
multi-million dollar penalty clause & loss of reputation if delivery schedule missed
“structured authoring system”: SGML into TeraText content management system
– TeraText content management system
developed in Melbourne by RMIT Uni from joint University of Melbourne/RMIT research
still world-wide state of the art
write once, use many times: key data & common texts exist only once, system tracks logical
hierarchy
– SGML (Structured Generalized Markup Language – HTML and XML are variants)
author only enters text into fields determining data type
on display or delivery all formats applied electronically to each type of data in a standardized way
Key data selected from master database
can’t save record unless data parses (write once, use many times)
– Eng. changes to data items entered only once, all affected docs change simultaneously
127