Colligo is a Latin word meaning “collecting, gathering together.” I’m using it here to describe an open-ended investigation into the problems, limits, and foibles of our modern data-driven world. Problems? Limits? Foibles? Yes. Many feel the world is off today, even a little crazy. There’s anxiety and fear and a palpable malaise even as the web has connected us all through social media, email, smartphones, and all else. What’s the problem, then? One problem is that we have the wrong worldview. Philosophers once called the dominant worldview today mechanism. Mechanistic totalism was often allied with the view that only science can answer life’s questions, and equally dubious view known as scientism. These words are less common today, but their core metaphysical and epistemological allegiances remain the same, now under the rubric of technoscience, or more specifically data science, “data-driven AI” or what I like to call “Big Data AI.”
Colligo seeks an antidote to these views and a path to a new and richer humanism. How we get there will, of necessity given the scope of the challenge, be more akin to the intellectual forays of the inimitable Montaigne than something like an exposition or a demonstration we might have found in Spinoza or the early Wittgenstein (or Euclid, for that matter). We must collect the clues and evidence, where ever it takes us. That’s Colligo. This project grew out of my 2021 book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. I hope you enjoy.
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