For the past eight years, since 2000, I have been working with a small but growing number of others on problems associated with our standard mode of inquiry that bottoms out in our ‘object-based’ manner of representing the complex dynamics of everyday phenomena.   Co-investigators include people from all walks of life; e.g. musicians, dentists, psychologists, housewives, biologists, mathematicians, systems scientists, theologians, physicists and more.   The common understanding is that our standard ‘rational’ models are letting us down because they are founded on the notional existence of ‘local, independently existing objects/organisms/systems’, though our real-life experiencing of the world informs us that we live in an inherently interdependent world, and that this ‘interdependence’ starts prior to our ‘object’ oriented ‘representations’.

The downsides of the understanding-shortfalls in ‘local object-based representation’ crop up everywhere in science and society, since they lie in our way of ‘seeing things’.

Many essays and several books have been written on this topic by the small but growing circle of ‘investigators’, and this ‘Aboriginal Physics Newletter’ is another in the list of initiatives’ to get this topic more into public awareness where the power of open dialogue can contribute to the deepening of understanding and to improvements in articulating and realizing the enormous potential gains (e.g. in resolving chronic socio-environmental dysfunction) that attach to it.

While blogging has tended to be a free-flowing dialogue that allows us to share and discuss our unfolding experiences and issues, which implicitly accepts the adequacy of of our ‘viewing lenses’ as we do so.  In this case, the sharing of observations and experiences starts by questioning the reliability of what we say we are observing and experiencing.

The findings to date suggest that our resistant-to-resolution problems are not resistant because of the nature of the problem, but because of the manner in which we give representation to our observations and experiences.

Ted Lumley

Pender Island

November 2, 2009