I was strongly influenced in my formative years by a science fiction novel that featured a synergist. This individual had (through technically enhanced learning) achieved degree level education in all the major sciences. As a result this person was in a unique position to solve any problem as he could apply the concepts from anything from medicine to chemistry to philosophy, etc. This struck me forcibly as a highly desirable position for anyone. I wanted to know how different the world looked to someone like this and what he or she would say about our problems. Essentially I wanted to be a synergist, and although I don't have enhanced learning I am trying to learn something about everything. The detail can come later, for now the interest for me lies in the breadth of knowledge.

More recently, I have become very interested by connections and links. I have always enjoyed learning over a wide area and drawing connections and conclusions from that experience.

This approach has lead me to wondering about the nature of the connections themselves. The concepts that are linked may have some sort of existence or seeming reality, but often the connection seems overlooked, as if it is just a property of its destination and source.

Obviously the connection between two concepts is irrelevant if one of them disappears, but his doesn't happen with concepts. They can become modified or be shown incorrect, but then very often the connection will mutate with the concepts.

This leads me to the hypothesis that connections have an 'existence' in their own right. They can have their own properties and change independently of the concepts that they link. Connections can also, of course, link more than one thing to one other thing.

This is akin to attaching equal importance to the journey as the departure point and destination, or to the synapse as to the neuron.

Imagine an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia attempts to record a large amount of knowledge. Each of the articles provides you with some knowledge or concept. Many of the articles are linked in some way (e.g. under Queen Victoria, it says "See also: Prince Albert"). This however does not allow you to place the concept of Queen Victoria within the context of knowledge or what is known. It is like telling you about a place, but not pointing it out on a map, or describing a thing in isolation without describing it's surroundings. Imagine your own data processing unit, your brain. Each neuron can make many connections to its fellows, but the brain as a whole only works because the neurons are linked.

This does not mean that the encyclopedia is of no use. It serves a specific purpose. However if our purpose is to expand our knowledge then surely we must look not just at the individual articles, but at the links between them as well.

As we create this knowledge map, we will see that the knowledge landscape is at least as complex as the physical one, and that as in the physical landscape connections and roads take on personalities of their own just like the towns and cities do.

So what is a concept? It is an idea held in your mind and manipulated as an entity in abstraction to the real thing. For example I don't have to see a table in front of me in order to conceptualise one. Indeed my concept of table is unrelated to a specific table, but is rather of all tables.

The concept will consist of other concepts e.g. my table concept might consist of my concepts of a plane, supports, the ground to rest it on, and so on in an infinite network of linked concepts. Dealing with this level of complexity would require immense processing ability, so the mind allows a sufficient level of abstraction from reality that the concept can be manipulated within the mind without the need for the concept to be defined in terms of other concepts.

So imagine I wish to connect my concepts of government and people. I could think of government by the people, which is a further concept, democracy. The concept of democracy might also contain other concepts, so how (according to the definitions here), is there any difference between a concept that is a group of other concepts and a connection that is a link between two or more concepts?

The answer, I believe, is that there is no real difference between connections and concepts. Any boundary is artificially create by us and is not reflected in reality. Think of a new idea or concept that was introduced to you recently. In order for you to have understood it, it must have been presented as a connection between some concepts that you already understand.

Therefore, new concepts form new links between existing concepts and also become concepts in their own right. The greater the number of concepts the greater the number of nodes and connections between them in the network that is your total knowledge.

Thus, in order to maximise knowledge you must constantly seek new concepts and find the connections between them. The greater the number of concepts the greater the likelihood of connection and the more diverse the concepts the more likely the connection is to be novel, creative and profitable.

Once we have achieved a critical mass of concepts and cross-linking in our network then the network will beget itself at such a rate as to be self-propagating. The network will discover concepts without the need for the external world. Thus not only will the network rush towards connecting all concepts, but the mind will transcend - existing above and beyond the limits of material experience.

For those of you of a business bent, you might think that this is all well and good, but that it is not relevant to knowledge management in your company. The key point from this article for you is that the concepts and connections are no use if held in an ICT system. They must be in your staff and you must support that for knowledge management to work.