Knowledge and Material Culture : How much knowledge can we afford?

Kracht, Marcus (2020) Knowledge and Material Culture : How much knowledge can we afford? Károli könyvek. Monográfia . Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary; L'Harmattan Kiadó; Éditions L'Harmattan, Budapest, Paris. ISBN 9789636465469; 9782343206554

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Abstract

Our society has created a gigantic amount of knowledge in the form of data, papers, books, speeches, images, and more – everything stored in that entity that we call the “cloud,” appropriately, because clouds tend to evaporate and disappear. This book goes to the core of such fundamental questions as what knowledge is and how do we acquire, verify and pass it on. It examines the material basis of what allows us to maintain knowledge in a vital form. Knowledge is subjected to the laws of the universe, entropy first of all. If entropy is not balanced by a flow of free energy from outside the system, it tends to increase. Knowledge is a low-entropy entity. It cannot survive the loss of free energy that created it. What’s going to happen to the mass of knowledge laboriously accumulated by our civilization over the past few centuries? “This book is incredibly rich of ideas and concepts, absolutely worth reading even in the current situation in which none of us seems to have time for anything more than tweeting irrelevant information.“ Ugo Bardi

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