 Hello and welcome back. This is the second introductory lecture to the Beyond Network course while the first one was trying to sort of introduce me very quickly and sort of The topics that were covered and the motivation for this course This is going to be a very brief sort of commentary on what I understand by teaching and learning What we want to achieve here. So what is the point of giving this course? What is the point of the university? What is the point of getting an education? I Hope you have asked yourself this question. The point, of course, is to be successful in society Blah-dee-blah-dee-blah, but what is the point for yourself? What does learning mean for yourself? You should ask yourself this question And I should ask myself the question. What is it that I can achieve with such a lecture? How am I gonna leave some sort of impact? I could cram your head with some facts, okay? That are important now The way our field of biology is moving probably not so important in the future Many of those facts would not be relevant for you and most of them you would forget after having learned them by heart for the exam Where you recite them. That's not what we're gonna do here. I Could give you practical tools. Okay, let's say I was a modeler I used to model gene networks. I could teach you how to model Mathematical tools computational tools we could practice make some simple simulations analyze them and I could hope that you would understand At least a little bit with modeling is about okay, what it can do what it can't do But again, most of the people here would not use this and that's also not the point I Am trying what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to give you a new perspective Okay, a new perspective not just on the biological topics and what an organism is an evolution What evolution is but also a new perspective on your approach to these topics? How do you do science? Okay, and I want you to reflect and question the way you do science I want to you to change the way you think maybe in the best case and I would would would like you I would like to give you the tools that you need the thinking tools to make this change Okay, so after taking this course, I hope you see the world with slightly different eyes That you're a bit transformed. This is called transformative learning and I think this is the only lasting and true learning That we experience. I want you to be a slightly different person maybe just in the way In which you ask different question And this is very important. Okay, if I succeed with this course just a few of you Will see the world with slightly different eyes or ask slightly different questions Will be a slightly different person And this is what gets us out of this meaning crisis out of this breakdown of our models of the world Okay, that is the cultivation of wisdom Which used to be The point of the ancient academy, but we've lost it a bit. Okay, so what modern academia is is more a factory of Facts, okay, you get into it You get fed all these facts you need to learn and then you have a qualified job You can do something you have some skills, you know a few facts You do something that we've been doing for a while and you're very productive you produce a lot of stuff Okay, and that's how success in academia is measured now It's but that's not the point the point of academia is not to produce facts Okay, in my opinion It is to cultivate wisdom in the students So this sounds a little old-fashioned. It's 2000 years old, but we'll try it. Okay We'll give it a truck Let me explain a little bit more what I mean by wisdom. Okay, so the absence Let me demonstrate it with a negative the absence of knowledge is ignorance. Okay The things you don't know it's very important to understand ignorance. I use it in my creativity courses Okay, because it's very important to understand what you don't know because that shapes the way you ask questions But the absence of wisdom Is not ignorance. It's foolishness And as I already told you in the last lecture the modern world is full of it Increasingly more and more fools more and more foolishness even inside to come back to this topic during the lecture series So you could look at wisdom in two different ways One goes back to play to a lot of things go back to play to and he says wisdom is sort of an internal justice of your psyche So What does that mean, okay, he says by cultivating wisdom you're sort of minimizing internal conflicts And therefore the self deception and foolishness within you Okay, he has this word anagogy Which is sort of the process of stepping out of his cave Into the sun and see instead of just the shadow on the wall of the cave The real life for the first time in your life Okay, and this is what you get When you cultivate wisdom not just knowledge Another aspect of wisdom is it's sort of situated knowledge. It's it's appropriate knowledge So if you're wise you not only know Stuff you not only know that but you know how to act to do the right thing So your knowledge is integrated with your context social historical, but also With your moral values It is an integrated coherence sort of picture. So it relates to the first meaning But here the focus is more on sort of knowing the right things in the right place Okay, so it's about facts, but also their relevance called situated knowledge And importantly, it's also about prioritizing. It's knowing what to care about Plato again calls this ta erotica, which is an exciting word but has nothing to do With eroticism unfortunately, it's just it's what to care about the knowledge of what we care about Harry Frankfurt has written a lot about this the guy who has written on bullshit. I really recommend his book Which is called the importance of what we care about Okay, so Knowledge is knowing facts it's knowing that and wisdom Is much more knowing how to act in our world Okay, so it's it's more practical It's embodied. It's appropriate to the situation. It's not just in your head. It's sort of a whole body experience And that is what learning should be it should be the cultivation of wisdom your personal cultivation of wisdom Not just filling your head with stuff. You can go on Wikipedia for facts. Okay, it works pretty well Unless it doesn't But you don't Get any wiser from reading the Wikipedia from a to z. Okay So the meaning crisis that we are in can only be overcome By stepping out of our current perspectives those that are fragile poor based on on machines and mechanisms and control Uh and manipulation This is a self deception and we want to lift The veil of this self deception. We want to re-embed ourselves into What charles taylor calls the continuous cosmos. So we want to gain wisdom not just knowledge So what i'm trying to do here. This sounds very grand Oh, yeah, okay, and a bit woolly right. We don't do this anymore And also we can't all sit in a classroom and sort of Uh do group hug. We don't have to do that. That's not the point. The point is that you For yourself get a different perspective. There's nothing mystical. There's nothing woolly Um, there is nothing touchy-feely about this. Okay, it's a different qualitatively different kind of learning That is very sort of the aim is very specific Okay, and again, so we'll start off with a philosophical lecture Next week which starts Uh is about perspectivism. Okay, so by giving you a new perspective I don't mean that you have to forget everything that you knew before But basically a new perspective Gives you a new angle. It enriches your view of the world It does not have to compete with what you knew before But it often highlights different aspects or maybe weaknesses in your thinking It highlights new problems or questions that you could ask And if I manage To get you to ask those new questions Then that's exactly what I wanted to do Okay, and just a last word on this All of this is particularly important when we're dealing with massively complex systems And processes such as organisms and their evolution Because as I said in the first lecture complexity can be defined By the number of different perspectives you can have on a system And the point is that all of those perspectives even though they do not necessarily add up in a straightforward way All of these perspectives are valid and enrich your understanding Of the complex world So in this spirit, we'll start our discussion and we'll move on to the philosophical foundation Of studying organisms And their evolution beyond the metaphor Of the network See you next week. Have a nice weekend