HOLISTIC WISDOM

We live in a fragmented world of information and knowledge. The increasing knowledge fragmentation results from the irreconcilable conflict between the complexity of real-world problems and the cognitive limits of the human brain. “No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition” (Sir William Osler). We see the world through a lens of reduced approximations, and different individuals may accept different approximations. In addition to our cognitive limits is an innate complacency that may keep us from expanding our approximations to a synthesized and complete version; our neurobiological tendency is to think of our own approximations as superior to those of others. 

Since the “World Brain” scheme was coined by H.G. Wells in 1937, many organizations (e.g., Google, Wikipedia, Microsoft, and Facebook) have made valuable progress toward more democratic access to information. Yet, without solving the problem of knowledge fragmentation, information democracy per se does not lead to growth in intelligence or wisdom. Without a shared processor to synthesize information into timely, widely accessible, and actionable wisdom, information overloads may cause analytic paralysis, leading to unintended biases and misguided decisions.

GoPeaks values unbridled access to holistic wisdom, independent of any parochial interests. By connecting the fragmented knowledge and expert communities together into decision solutions, GoPeaks aims to broaden perspectives, neutralize biases, and prevent misguided decisions. Ultimately, GoPeaks strives to build a globally connected and shared "brain and nervous" system in our planetary and sociological ecosystem for people to access the whole of truth and make sense of the world.

A SHARED BRAIN FOR PEOPLE AND SOCIETY

The overarching goal of GoPeaks is to enable large-scale, broad-scope collaborations among natural and artificial intelligence, through which fragmented knowledge accumulates and evolves into timely, widely accessible, and actionable wisdom concerning people and societal well-being.

CONNECTING THE SENSING, PROCESSING, AND REASONING SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE

Distinct from formal organizations, GoPeaks seeks to build an open digital community consisting of globally coordinated efforts among academia, industry, government, and the general public in order to consolidate fragmented knowledge into timely, widely accessible, and actionable wisdom concerning people and societal well-being. 

Achieving this goal requires the development and integration of three knowledge systems: 

The first is a sensing system. Knowledge is highly fragmented among expert domains and users. Access to such knowledge is distributed (or not) across granular communities. A new virtual community is needed to connect distributed communities into a global user interface and to automatically assemble complementary expertise among experts and users.

The second is a processing system. The discovery of knowledge requires constant testing and retesting of hypotheses about the world as well as continued aggregation of evidence. Such knowledge discovery is currently local, limited by the boundaries of data. A new system is needed to engage a novel human-machine collaboration to accelerate and scale the process of discovering and integrating evidence from distributed data silos.

The third is a reasoning system. Reasoning involves a “what if” understanding of causes and effects, and thus offers guidelines on “what one should do.” A unified knowledge graph is required to consolidate knowledge about causalities among concepts. This knowledge graph will continually organize and update variables, their causal relations, the logic of the underlying mechanisms, and models into meta-frameworks for holistic reasoning.

More fundamentally, we need radical innovations to change how humans collaborate and learn. To enable our ability to study grand, complex problems, we must shift our paradigm from small, closed teams in a specific domain to massive, open, and interdisciplinary collaboration.