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Culture & Society

Knowledge as an Ecology
Susantha Goonatilake
Theory Culture Society 2006 23: 170
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300227
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170 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

Knowledge as an Ecology
Susantha Goonatilake
Keywords biotechnology, Buddhism, coevolution, epistemology, knowledge and information lineages, ontology, process, South Asia

nowledge and, in its lesser form, information, can be considered as an ecology, a

many-splendoured jungle brought about by
evolution. Such knowledge can decode or read
reality as in science. It can create new reality(ies)
through technology, that is, through the application of science. Or it can create reality(ies) as in
stories, art, etc. Or it can transform reality(ies) as
in some mind, body and non-human technologies.
Knowledge, and in its lesser form, information,
is historically delivered to us in the present with
knowledge and information lineages stretching
back millennia or centuries or shorter periods
depending on the nature of the knowledge/information transmission lines, whether they be oral,
the hand-written word, the printed word or the
digital form. These knowledge/information transmission lines change, responding to their physical
and cultural environments, creating new knowledge/information and excising old knowledge/
information. Each such lineage possesses built-in
ontologies, epistemologies as well as the resultant
concrete knowledge/information. Ontologies and
epistemologies could often be implicit and not
formally expressed in the knowledge/information.
But in regions where there have been formal
discussions and proper organizations for such
discussions formal ontologies and epistemologies
have emerged. They have emerged for instance in
Greece and South Asia. One sees a wider variety
of formal thinking on ontologies and epistemologies in South Asian thought. The core civilizations
of the world with their formal apparatuses for
discussion and onward transmission in the form of
the written word allowed different regional
lineages of knowledge/information to emerge.
There was cross influences across regions, yet
there was a distinct regional flavour to the different knowledge trees that emerged.
One of the civilizations that influenced the
making of Europe, through Greece, was Sumer, a
civilization with close connections to the Indus
culture that was contemporary with it. Archaeological finds indicate that close trading connections
and other contacts were maintained between the
two regions. The language of both the Greeks and

the Aryan invaders of the northwest Indian

subcontinent, as well as the intervening Persian
Empire, had a common source. There are thus
interesting similarities between the gods of the
ancient Greeks and the Vedic gods, as well as similarities between the societies depicted in the epic
poems of the Homeric and Vedic traditions. Greek
historian Herodotus wrote that Darius 1 (521486
BC) would frequently call Greeks and Indians
together for counsel and discussion. Later, Aristoxenes (350300 BC) mentions a dialogue on human
life between Socrates and an Indian philosopher
(Chowdhury, 1988). Possibly because of these
links, some of the ideas prevalent on the subcontinent from 700 to 500 BC which are found in
the later Vedic hymns, the Upanishads, and in the
philosophies of the Buddhists and the Jains
appear in later Greek thought. For example, the
search for one reality in the Upanishads is echoed
by Xenophanes, Parmenides and Zeno, the
founders of Greek mathematics who sought the
One Reality. Pythagoras, one of the founders of
Orphism, is alleged to have travelled widely and
been influenced by the Egyptians, Assyrians and
Indians. Almost all of the religious, philosophical
and mathematical theories taught by the
Pythagoreans were known in India in the sixth
century BC (Rawlinson in Goonatilake, 1998).
Thus, Pythagoreans, like the Jains and Buddhists,
refrained from destroying life and eating meat.
The concept of karma, representing the cycles
of necessity, was also central to the philosophy of
Plato, for whom rebirth is due to the hand of
necessity, men being reborn as animals or again as
men, a belief common to all major South Asian
religious systems. Vitsaxis (1977) has shown that
in structure and method, general approach, and
the growth of parallel lines of thought on
specific points, the two traditions show common
features.
Empedocles (490430 BC), a disciple of
Pythagoras, propounded the four-element theory of
matter, consisting of earth, water, air and fire, and
the four-humour theory of disease, later followed
by Hippocrates. This has parallels with the earlier
pancha bhuta concept of prthvi, ap, tejas, vayu and
akasa earth, water, heat, air and emptiness (ether)
and with the tridhatu of the earlier Rig Veda and
the tridosha of Ayurveda. One could note that the
pneumatic system in the Hippocratic treatise On
Breath is theorized in the same manner in the
Indian concept of Vayu or Prana.

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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 171

Similarly, atomic theories occur in the two
systems, appearing earlier in South Asia than in
Democritus, taught by Katyayana, an older
contemporary of the Buddha. And Heraclituss
belief that everything is in a state of flux is
preceded in more sophisticated language by the
anicca and anatta discussions of the Buddhists.
The influence of South Asia on Greek thought is
firmly expressed by Clement of Alexandria in the
second century AD when he says that the Greeks
stole their philosophy from the barbarians
(Halbfass in Goonatilake, 1998: 30).
From the end of the 16th and beginning of the
17th centuries, with the exponential growth of
science in Europe and its spread across the world,
one sees a tendency for regional civilizations to
come under one hegemonic whole, a process accelerated through the present globalization. But the
present is also characterized by a shift to Asia
whereby regional elements can enter the dominant
knowledge system aided by Asians working in
science and technology pursuits in both the West
and Asia.
But the knowledge/information field is not
limited to that of human culture. There are
historically derived lineages in biology (3.5-billionyear-old genetic system) and extra-somatic
computer-based knowledge/information trees
(say, 60 years old) with, respectively, their own
knowledge/information trees. These three systems
the cultural, the genetic and the artefactual are
in the expanding world of biotechnology and
advanced information technology beginning to
merge and exchange information across the three
lineages and their respective knowledge/information jungles. With massive computer storage
and processing of cultural information through
information technology (IT), and the bringing in of
biological processes into IT as well as new biological developments which transform our very human
modes of apprehending the world, the merging of
cultural, biological and IT knowledge/information
has profound implications.
If in the future we will be constructed and
reconstructed from biology, culture and artefact
what should be our epistemological, philosophical, ethical, and subjectively felt guiding principles? If we would then be cyborgs and hybrids,
what should the interiority of robots, of
constructed hybrids be as they navigate reality and
tunnel through time in our lineages?
The person is not a what but a process, a
thought in line with Buddhisms view that the
universes components are in a state of impermanence, of ceaseless movement; nothing is durable
or static. Being is only a snapshot in the process of
becoming, lasting only the length of one thought.
There is no stable substratum of the self; the self

is just a stream of physical and psychological

phenomena that is always perishing. One analyses
oneself, knows oneself only to realize that there is
no self in the first place. In Buddhism, this elimination of the sense of self sets one free. The realization that the self is a process means that the
future becomes open-ended. In the Buddhist
analysis, unsatisfactoriness and anxiety become
essential to the I because these are the Is
response to its own groundlessness.
This is the phenomenology of flow for human
thought, and we could extrapolate this perspective
to the other two lineages. The Buddhist analysis
also suggests a moral compass for the future of
merged knowledge streams; such a perspective
includes a profound moral code of altruism, and it
is not entirely farfetched to think that these principles could also apply to future scenarios.
A study which evokes some of the same philosophical approaches in charting the future technology is Varela et al.s (1993) The Embodied
Mind. They propose a bridge between the mind as
conceptualized in science and the mind of
everyday experience, through a dialogue between
Buddhist meditative practice and cognitive
science. The approach was applied to a variety of
themes in neuroscience and cognitive psychology,
artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology. In
doing so, they approach what we considered as the
three lineages, namely the internal flow of our
thoughts (the culture within the minds), the flow
of genes (evolutionary biology) and the flow of
artificial thoughts (artificial intelligence). Varela
and his colleagues evoke the flow patterns that one
observes internally through Buddhist meditation
and find here the key to tackling the other two
realms. They tackle the problems of non-self and
of everflowing streams, and describe the dynamics
of the three lineages. Their discussions are located
in specific debates with the research communities
in these three areas. They reject the subjectobject
dichotomy that arises in different forms in all the
three lineages.
They consider that the inside and outside of
the lineages jointly move forth, enacted by the
subject and the external object. A process of coevolution results because the environment is not
given but is enacted and brought into being though
a process of coupling. The world is not taken as a
given, with the organism representing or adapting
to it. Their Buddhist approach transcends this
duality, the outcome being co-determined by both
the inside and the outside. This position would be
the same, whether ones perspective is humancultural or that based on artificial intelligence. One
would act as the environment for the other, and
together they would enact an unfolding future.
Tackling the problems of the future requires

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172 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

radical reorientations, sometimes returning to very
old observations.
Encyclopaedias are universal compendia of
available information. Any new encyclopaedia
must recognize the new non-Diderot world. This
is the re-emergence of non-European civilizations
and the merging of biological and digital information with the cultural. The new encyclopaedia
must reflect this as well as the ontological and
epistemological bases on which the different
turning points of the knowledge tree/jungle have
occurred. This would imply that ontology and
epistemology should be made overt in the encyclopaedia and not implied as universal. Such ontological and epistemological concerns would also be
germane to the biological and digital aspects when
viewed from the point of view of evolutionary
epistemology.
Moving around in this hybrid information
jungle evokes a comparison with exploring the
jungle by the forest dwellers. The latter are
immersed in a tangle of information extruded by
thousands of plant and animal organisms that
surround them. They would sniff around and
explore only one or two, ignoring the bulk. So it
is in the emerging new jungle of information. The
new encyclopaedia would help us hunt for new
information that their histories suggest are inter-

esting, while ignoring other information carriers

and their contents.

References
Chowdhury, Amiya Kumar Roy (1988) Man,
Malady and Medicine History of Indian
Medicine. Calcutta: Das Gupta & Co, Ltd.
Goonatilake, Susantha (1998) Toward Global
Science. Mining Civilizational Knowledge.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor
Rosch (1993) The Embodied Mind. Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Vitsaxis, Vissilis (1977) Plato and the
Upanishads. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann.
Susantha Goonatilake is Fellow of the World
Academy of Arts and Sciences and Senior Consultant for the United Nations on science and
technology, and faculty member of the Vidyartha
Center for Science and Society. Among his books
are Toward a Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge (Indiana University Press, 1998)
and Merged Evolution: Long-Term Implications
of Biotechnology and Information Technology
(Gordon and Breach, 1998).

Science, Technology and Society

Michael M.J. Fischer
Keywords actually practiced technoscience;
collaborative ethnography; deliberative democracy, power and accountability; epistemes and
infrastructures; harmonization and local regulation; reflective arts

TS (Science, Technology and Society) has

become an increasingly vital emergent field
in the last quarter of the 20th century along
with the transformations of the technoscientific
infrastructures of the modern world. Unlike the
older fields of history and philosophy of science
which took as their interlocutors the idealized
philosophical versions of how the universal truth
of science was claimed to be established, STS has
taken scientists and engineers as active collaborators in understanding how the specialized
components of actually practiced science and engineering knowledge in their localized contexts can

be configured into broader, yet informed,

approaches to living in a complex world. Unlike
so-called policy studies which also take for granted
the local political cultures in which they operate,
STS places such political cultures into comparative
perspective to make assumptions more accountable, especially in the disjunctions and differences
that inevitably arise in attempts at global harmonizations (of clinical trials, of patent protection
and intellectual property rights, of precautionary
versus riskbenefit approaches to regulatory
sciences).
While the intellectual lineages of STS are
varied, key are (1) the early 20th-century debates
about the cultural constructions of rationalities
(Max Webers notions of rationalizations of different cultural spheres, based on their own logics and
differences between value- and instrumental
rationalities; Ludwik Flecks Durkheimean
account of thought collectives and what would be
later called by Thomas Kuhn (1962) paradigm

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