expand_less Learning a World
Main idea is how an agent enters a world (throwness) and then gains knowledge of the world in experience. From cognitive sciences, we know that other animals come into the world with a lot more instnctual knowledge than human beings. We need many years to mature and be ready to take on the world as an adult within the social spheres available. Now we talk of disruptive change because the number and kinds of social spheres available to more and more communities on our planet is staggering. I don't like the language that describes our current moment as a singularity. In too many cases it is a reason to hype an idea and attract viewers or funding. If you take a longer view this apocolypse has been brewing for a long time. The lense of this book is focussed on the history and evolution of all of the ways that human beings have structured our world with symbolic languages. 
A difficulty encountered immediately is just how much this world has evolved even in recent times when we have much better records. That's part of the long term trend, the further back you go, the less data is available. We only stated calling some kinds of historical records data very recently. The word relates to current methods and conventions in information systems. At the beginning, there was no symbolic language. Anthropologists study and search for artifacts of early human and use the term homonids for our species and the closely related species in the record.
(Intro use of signs as generality always implying triadic signs in this book)
Modern science is amazing in how they can use extremely subtle signs and find corelations to find meaning in even very limited examples. If you don't trust in their methods you would not believe them. Along the long path, our ancestors emerged as the only surviving species. We were not the first to make and use stone tools and the anatomical structures of speach also evolved early, long before the founders of the branch that became homo sapiens. Current work in data sciences working with large new data sets from a wide variety of DNA sources is being used to show how we still carry bits of the DNA of our Neandertal cousins.
The history of ideas starts with language and we have just shown how the origins of language are lost in a history that was not recorded. The historic period is defined by the start of a data source. It doesn't mean there were historians, that starts much more recently. If I was a historian and not a systems scientist, I would know the history of history going back to antiquity. I only know a little of this from what historians say and write. In the beginning there were no fields like history, it had not yet been invented. The point is to notice how disruptive change is a long term human phenomena, it has been growing an accellerating all along and what makes in so noticable is how much change happens in a given person's lifetime. My age cohort got calculators in middle school and later. A four function calculator was a hundred dollars. Fortran was taught in my high school using a slow speed modem that read the program from cards and sent it to a centralized system downtown that also did much of the data processing for the entire Chicago school system.
I experienced the hobby and kit computer age which quickly transformed into the personal computer with the IBM PC. Now, some sociologists note the emergence of GenZ with the cohort who got smart phones in middle school.
Radical Failure
Signs, Signals and Systems