Thoughts on Glick's "The Information" but which is really a digression about knowledge and the internet

On Heisenberg uncertainty principle and information
Is information like an atom: you can't really determine what it means because once its said its meaning has changed?

It's fascinating that when we first started organizing information, Plato argued that the average person couldn't categorize because it was too abstract and thus they also couldn't philosophize (his notion of form were an essentialist categorization or maybe not--now that I'm reading this "Justified True Belief" essay see reference below, I think the Platonic form might be a belief supported by logos. . . but that doesn't seem right either. I think Plato thought there were "truths" not just beliefs. Need to read the Republic or some of his dialogues again!). So we had categorizing as a higher order of thought but categorizing is reductionist and can easily be misleading because it allows for very sloppy thinking.

(Eric?)Havelock believed you convert a prose of narrative to a prose of ideas and he called this thinking. Isn't this what reading is? Isn't this what I'm trying to teach: how do you read a narrative (or a text) and convert it into an idea?  And is this conversion process "thinking"? If so, then is teaching reading also and simultaneously teaching thinking?

(These ideas come from Havelock's Preface to Plato, available online as a pdf, http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/w/images/e/ed/Havelock-1963-Preface-to-Plato-excerpt.pdf)

In the Preface to Plato, Havelock argues that the Homeric state of mind gave way to the Platonic. Is there a similar process that must take place in the reader? Which, if I understand Havelock correctly, is a change from a "memorized" set of cultural/social precepts ("His not to reason why", p. 199) to an active engagement with.

Homeric state of mind seems to be how we educate people today: here is a quote:  "His mental condition, though not his character, was one of passivity, of surrender, and a surrender accomplished through the lavish employment of the emotions and ofthe motor reflexes, p. 199". To be a part of the whole not a critic of it. Havelock puts it:


 "The Greek tongue therefore, as long as it is the speech of men who have remained in
the Greek sense 'musical' and have surrendered themselves to the spell of the tradition, cannot frame words to expressthe conviction that 'I' am one thing and the tradition is another; that 'I' can stand apart from the tradition and examine it; that 'I' can and should break the spell of its hypnotic force; and that 'I' should
divert some at least ofmy mental powers away from memorisation and direct them instead into channels of critical inquiry and analysis."

And, isn't this exactly what we do in school--be part of the structure, accept it, memorize it and regurgitate it. Havelock says this is a lack of recognition of an "I" or in Plato and his era's terms a "soul". But I'm not sure if this is the analogous issue in education. Our students seem to have a sense of an "I" but not as a thinking "I" but an "I" of something else (a consuming I?). Havelock argues that there becomes a differentiation between the subject (I) and the object, which he calls "datum" (p. 201). Which raises the issue today whether such a differentiation is possible, particularly with the internet. How separate are we? And to what extent do our critical faculties depend on separation?  I just read an essay that argues that we are becoming, in some ways, "meta selves" because of the internet (and, according to the author, this is a good thing).
Somehow we have to recognize the interaction or what might be called "entanglement" in modern day information theory (our inherent and un-measurable (unknowable?) weaving with the world) but also maintaining, to the extent possible, a separation that allows us to view, think and criticize that which is "us". This has always been problematic (again back to the categorization--if we can put things in discrete categories we, in essence, have control over them and "limit" them and their boundedness) but what happens if the boundaries are fuzzy, the categories fluid and not discrete (analog and not digital?)? How do you teach students to make sense of "text" in this environment?  Are we returning to a Homeric tradition where there is less or no separation between that which thinks and knows and that of which is thought or known? (Back to Glick here--he discusses Walter Ong's work on language and the conclusion that primitive people's with out a written language lack categories for thinking, arguing that in the process of learning the written word the words become separate from the person (p. 39)).

Need to teach students the difference between imitation and thinking. Imitation leads to a summary as its final product. Thinking leads to evaluation and then personal reflection as its highest product. First, we summarize which is really simply imitating the author's argument in our own words.

Havelock asks, so what caused the Greeks to wake up, what moved them from imitation to thinking? His answer? The changes in technology (p. 208). Could the same be happening in reverse now? If everything has already been said and we have access to everything (through the internet) is there any need (compelling) to think anymore?

I wanted to see what Plato and the Internet brought up and side tracked here to http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/256519/1/plato_and_the_internet.pdf
In this book, the author states that for Plato, knowledge was "true belief" and logos, which is ultimately some sort of support for the belief. Beliefs only become knowledge if they have that support. (interestingly, Plato's resistance to writing comes partially from the fact that you cannot communicate with writing, you can't argue with it, you can't change it--but that is no longer true with the internet. . . so in some ways the internet is more like a dialogue, a construction of knowledge in process (he is also resistant because idiots can read the writing without anyone to show them the error of their ways!).

Of course, this is also related to the notion that Spinoza holds that truth and knowing come simultaneously not first the one then the other. See post on "What is a Belief".  Timothy Williamson's book, "Knowledge and its Limits" seems related (2002).