Epistemology: Connectionism: Connectivism

Connectivism

• Overview:  Artificial Life (employing a synthetic approach to the study of life-as-it-could-be) views life as a property of the organization of matter, rather than as a property of the matter which is organized. 
  
  The description of this bottom-up, distributed, local determination of behavior is also a description of connectivism, of creative human beings in the post-biological age, of art in the telematic culture. 
  
  Not least of these is the technology of digital telecommunications whose impact upon both social behavior and individual consciousness is such as to warrant recognition of the emergence of the telematic culture.
  
  Artists as well as scientists have been engaged in numerous strategies throughout this century in the search for useful models of the world and of themselves, and they have found that that old Nature is effectively dead, just as the old self, isolated, unconnected, alienated, is no longer a satisfactory model of our being. 
  
  But the death of this artifice also signals the birth of new understanding of life. Artificial Life by contrast is the attempt to collaborate with life, interact with it, to see ourselves as part of an infinite network of connectivity, in which neither nature nor ourselves are separate or independent.
  
  More...............................  Connectivism