We remember many stories related to successful people and achievements that formed a turning point in a person’s life and allowed him to move from a station of stillness to a station of progress and development.
What is striking in such stories is not their presence in themselves, but rather who they relate to specifically, especially when they are associated with people who have limited options and few capabilities, such as lack of financial resources, limited moral support, and scarcity of “luck” in the world, which can be measured by material and moral standards.. As is the case in the success stories associated with orphans, the poor, and residents of remote villages and shantytowns. Although every time has its share of these heroes, I believe that in our current time there is the greatest luck and the largest percentage of deprivation, despite the difference in its type, manner, and nature, as in this time we are accustomed to encountering the strange in everything, until after a while it becomes within the circle of the familiar and natural. . To clarify this further, the multiplicity of means of knowledge and ease of access to search engines that people have enjoyed in our current societies, thanks to the abundance of the Internet and the societal glut of electronic devices, and the contentment of all family members with that, from the child to the young to the elderly, has come to represent the greatest means of deprivation and luxury. at the same time. The ability to easily communicate and accomplish work on electronic devices and to eliminate borders between one country and another and one continent and another… was marred by many mixed meanings, which, in their noticeable repercussions, led to the exacerbation of this use until it became a pathological condition that specialists treat and express with the term “electronic addiction.” And there is much in it. There are problems that each need to be addressed separately.
With regard to deprivation, these tools have been a cause of deprivation in its various forms, including the emotional deprivation of children with their parents being busy with these devices most of the time, and the deprivation of the family members themselves from sharing and interacting in the social context that used to have a lot of luck in love, harmony, cooperation, and learning, which has become an orphan. Nowadays, every family member is busy with his device and the imaginary digital world in which he swims, coming and going day and night. Add to that one of the harshest types of deprivation, after that emotional deprivation, which is cognitive deprivation, where the abundance of cognitive tools, tools, and search engines has killed the cognitive passion in humans. So we wonder: Where is the passion of science students for increasing knowledge and their insistence on researching the depths of the seas of science, when they are surrounded from all directions by an interwoven, dispersed, and disorganized exchange of knowledge and information in digital cyberspace?
All of this expresses an urgent need for a cognitive, scientific, cultural and philosophical response in harmony with the experience of specialists in digital and artificial intelligence fields, based on our belief in the inability to separate the real and virtual realities, and the necessity of harmonizing digital hoarding with the organized methodology in acquiring the knowledge and information that a person needs in all his educational, cultural and intellectual stages of achievement. It is the correct and ideal way to move a person from cognitive limitation and restriction and the rigidity of the purely “indoctrination” process, to cognitive breadth through which more than one cognitive method and tool can be combined in a balanced, standardized and systematic harmonious manner, which means the ability to develop the meaning of “development” itself, as it is elevated from merely advancing in the number of years of academic study, to bringing about effective and actual change in the method, ability and skill, or in other words “making a mind” and not being satisfied with “making a vacancy” with a limited goal and means.
*Secretary General of the World Council of Muslim Communities
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