A push on the button — and straight off we find ourselves somewhere else. Brand new spaces open up. We click a certain word and immediately enter immeasurable collections of knowledge, libraries holding answers to never asked questions. Suddenly there is music in the air; a movie starts playing; or someone sends a message, we talk together.
Those buttons, icons, hyperlinks, they are everywhere around us — simple things popping up into a whole universe the moment they are touched.
This is a metaphor for the new world of knowledge and, furthermore, a method that has become indispensable. It is the way in which our knowledge is organized today — rather than in more or less clearly arranged shelves and cases containing books devided into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters — which, assembled to words, form meaningful phrases and express step by step more and more comprehensive knowledge.
The new method demands and constitutes a new theory. A theory of push buttons, based on a pop-up-logic.
The X-Logic may be understood as a generalization of the hyperlink concept: every thing is linked to a space. Every thing is the door to a whole space of its own, it can be activated — and then pops up, so to speak.
The thing marks the passage between two spaces. The passage is activity. All activity, every action, is ultimately a passage between spaces, nothing else.
The thing, however, is the unification of potential passages, so to speak. Every thing is an activity-node, it is target and source of various actions.
Now we have (at least) two different definitions of activity: first it was said to be the transition from one (static) state to another, then it was defined as the passage between spaces.
So then, is space a kind of state, is it static, after all? — Exactly!
If we were able to define the basic terms of logic in a simple and unambiguous way — then the terms used in that definition would be the true basic terms.
The meaning of terms can only be learned — by doing. If these doings are clear and elementary, the terms may potentially be called logical.
Whether doings are clear and elementary depends crucially on where they take place, on the environs. On the available means. In the case of logic these are, above all, the means of expression and representation, now named the media.
These have definitely undergone — possibly crucial — changes.
Mechanical devices are, in the main, constructed linearly. The force is transmitted from one component part to the next, wherefore an appropriate connection has to exist.
With computers, things are fundamentally different: the activity is allowed to make almost unlimited jumps. It is conducted and controlled by the program, to be sure, but the program itself can pick from an embarrassment of riches. For that very reason it is capable of being so exact, of reacting on even the finest nuances, of searching its way past all obstacles.
Each particular way may pretty well be called “linear” — its base, however, is not linear, but rather spatial.
It definitely makes sense to introduce space here as a fundamental notion. And it has far reaching implications.
“Space” refers to a principal indetermination and openness: Much more is possible than appears at first sight. And things change, through permanent (inter-)activity. Linear representations of this activity soon reach their limits, since everything gets much too complex.
In this situation the notion of space may simplify a lot. It comprises, it comprehends the whole.
But it is also logically simpler, coming before any linearity — if we understand space as the embodiment of activity as such.
Particular linear (inter-)actions are manifestations of this potentiality, tracks rutted through continual repetition, dug into space, structuring it, channelling the activity.
Sometimes a distinction is made between the reality — and all that we know or perceive of it, the (mental) representation of reality. But such a distinction, though sometimes making perfect sense, is far from being considered absolute.
On the one hand, every representation of reality is real by itself; on the other hand, all that we regard as real at some time, eventually turns out to be just a representation.
So this distinction plays an important role specifically in the advance of knowledge (which is always paired with practical changes, changed habits or so). In effect it is the distinction between good or bad representations, between those matching and forwarding reality — and those missing and blocking it.