This presentation summarizes the contents and includes some of the illustrations from a hypertext book that is nearing completion that hopefully will be ready for publication before the end of 2012. In the mean time, the author would like to invite some readers to test what has been written so far in aid of substantially improving the finished project. The hypertext book explores the nature of knowledge and its evolution in simple organisms, multicellular organisms, people, biological species and socio-technical organizations. A major focus is to elucidate and explain the linkages between revolutions in human and organizational cognition and revolutionary technologies for managing persistent human and organizational knowledge forming the contents of books, libraries, computer memories, etc. I lead readers across many disciplinary fields ranging from epistemology, thermal physics, history and evolutionary biology to theories of organizations and societies and some practical considerations as to how they can be managed. This expedition explores revolutions in technologies, cognition and even concepts of what it means to be living. Because I have mapped the terrain, I can highlight and explain pitfalls that would otherwise impede understanding as we travel through historical time and across disciplinary borders. Pitfalls exist because each discipline crossed along the path has its own worldview and theory-laden language. Thomas Kuhn called these domain-specific thinking patterns paradigms. His (1970) book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides some clues as to how to develop a metalanguage allowing us to consider the different worldviews without becoming metaphysical or irrational. In our exploration, I try to minimize paradigmatic confusions by using a fugal development, starting with simple and relatively mundane themes and then elaborating them through a series of variations and episodes crossing different disciplinary domains to reach what I hope will be a climax of understanding. The narrative of the expedition is at least partially autobiographical. By describing my own path to develop the insights presented here, I hope readers will find it easier to follow in my footsteps than they would when confronted with what might seem to be a chaotic landscape of incommensurable paradigmatic worlds. For example, knowledge workers using different productivity tools often become so heatedly involved in irrational arguments about which tools are best, that bystanders call such discussions "holy wars"1. This is symptomatic of historically unprecedented cognitive and technological revolutions that fundamentally change the nature of humanity. Such revolutions profoundly affect everyone. To explain what is behind these holy wars and their existence, I weave together a number of disparate themes I have encountered in my own life and experience, from observing revolutions in text processing technology, evolutionary biology and genetics, history and philosophy of science, military affairs, and technical writing and knowledge management in large organizations. Given that these revolutions collectively amount to a new Renaissance, I think it is appropriate to base the development of my ideas on one of the greatest cognitive artifacts of the last Renaissance - the fugue. My SUBJECT explores theoretical foundations of knowledge and its growth: based on Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology, best expressed for our purposes here in his books "Objective Knowledge" (1972) and “Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem” (1994), and the nature of scientific revolutions as described by Thomas Kuhn together with some concepts of evolutionary adaptation to elucidate some fundamental ideas about when evolutionary change becomes revolution. Eleven critical revolutions in human history are reviewed, each of which triggered major grade shifts in the human species' ecological role in nature. Five revolutions are based on the invention of new kinds of technology. The other six are cognitive – involving roles of technology in fundamental changes in the way information is processed into knowledge. My COUNTER SUBJECT deals with concepts originating in the disparate arenas of evolutionary biology, military affairs and information theory to explore categories of information along independent dimensions of quantity and epistemic quality as iterated evolutionary processes cybernetically transform data into power. The late Col. John Boyd's (1996) (O)bserve, (O)rient, (D)ecide and (A)ct adaptive feedback concept (the "OODA loop") is presented as a generic cybernetic process for generating evolutionary and revolutionary change in complex adaptive systems, ranging from individual organisms to competing corporations and warring states. Such adaptive changes are a form of knowledge in their own right. EPISODE 1 reviews some ideas on how the invention of writing, books and the printing press enhanced and enabled the major conceptual revolutions of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. EPISODE 2 follows the invention of and revolutionary growth of computer technology in my lifetime, to consider the magnitude and unprecedented speed of the microelectronics revolution and some of what this implies for processing, data, information and knowledge. EPISODE 3 considers the inventions and revolutions in computer-based "productivity" applications for individual use and their roles in on-going cognitive revolutions in the way people generate and use knowledge. Word processing, spreadsheets and relational databases quantitatively extend human cognition and represent evolutionary changes in human capabilities. Structured authoring, indexing and retrieval systems, the World Wide Web and knowledge management applications revolutionize, automate and add epistemic quality to cognitive processes that were purely human activities until the last couple of decades. Over the last half of my lifetime since the growth of the “personal” computer three decades ago, these tools have given people “post-human” cognitive abilities - orders of magnitude beyond anything conceivable to previous generations outside science fiction. INTERLUDE. However, before we can fully understand the impacts of the revolutions in cognitive technolgies on human society and organizations, we need to consider the fundamental interactions of life and knowledge. The concept of autopoiesis (from the Greek “self” “production”) as a formal definition as to what it means to be living, developed initially by Humberto Maturana and Franscisco Varela in the 1970’s, summarized in their 1980 book, is introduced at this point. I argue that knowledge and autopoiesis are intertwined to the extent that one cannot exist without the other and show that autopoietic organization can emerge at several levels of complexity. These levels minimally include individual living cells, autopoietic organisms comprised of interacting cells, and autopoietic social organizations such as companies and other human enterprises comprised of interacting organisms such as people. EPISODE 4 explores the early impacts of social and cloud computing technologies that have come to prominence since around 2008 to fuel the emergence of what may be called socio-technical organizations. The spread of these newest technologies and the profound ways in which they extend the cognitive abilities of humans and their organizations again changes the nature of people and their organized social interactions. EPISODE 5 explores the impact of technological revolutions on the acquisition and management of organizational knowledge. Extending concepts of knowledge to organizations requires a deeper theory of knowledge and organization as developed in the Interlude. Development of the themes in this episode owes much to the deep philosophy and science underlying Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge, Boyd’s OODA loop, autopoiesis, evolutionary economics, and hierarchically complex dynamic systems, as developed in the Interlude. It follows from these discussions that many businesses and organizations are living entities in their own rights and have cognitive capabilities that transcend the sum of their individual human members. Biology offers much more than just a metaphor for understanding how organizations work and compete
