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There is a problem in trying to communicate with others when one’s understanding is in a different ‘paradigm.’

The different paradigms can be described with the help of the following picture of the earth’s biosphere and comparing it with the skin of an apple;

the health of the biosphere is the health of one thing, as with the health of the apple-skin

The health of the biosphere is like the health of the skin of the apple.  In mathematical terms, the space on the surface of a sphere is a non-Euclidian space wherein everything is relative to everything else.  There are no absolute locations in this space, so that if anything moves, it can only move relative everything else in that space and since there is motion, it is continuous motion involving everything; i.e. the biosphere is continually transforming in a spatial-relational sense.

What this means is that while there are persisting forms as in ‘material forms’ such as ‘storm cells’ and ‘human organisms’, the ‘persistence’ of these forms is relative to the observer’s persisting awareness.

If we had a camera in space recording a picture of the earth’s biosphere, as above, and if we could zoom in down to the street level as in Google Earth, and if we kept recording for 50 human generations or so (e.g. 3,000 years or 1,095,000 days) and selected one frame per day and played it back at 16 frames per second, we could watch, in one day (19 hours), fifty generations of human families emerge like whorls in the flow, develop and mature and be reclaimed in the continuing transformational flow of the biosphere.

The spherical space of the biosphere, charged with solar energy, the animating source of all of this, would persist in looking much as it does today, judging by past history where 3,000 years is like the wink-of-an-eye in geologic time.

So, we have a potential problem in that our habit is to ‘re-render’ these dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ or ‘what people do’.  Nietzsche pointed out this problem, saying that the world was a continuing becoming and that treating it as if it were a collection of local ‘beings’ to whom we imputed their own doer-deed actions, was a ‘total Fiktion’.  The same point has been made by others, Heraclitus, Bohm, Shroedinger, the Vedics, Buddhists etc.

Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States’ makes the same point in a different way.   He notes that our historical narratives are in terms of what we, as a people, ‘do’ and ‘have done’, and that the historical narratives of the colonizers of the Americas and the historical narratives of the colonized, are ‘opposing realities’.  That is, the colonizers speak of their creating of a new world while the colonized speak of the destruction of the world as it was.    But they are both talking about ‘the same thing’ but seeing it in opposite ways (genesis and degeneration).

From the viewing point from out in space, we can observe the waves of emigrants leaving Europe for the Americas, leaving a ‘hole’ in terms of skills and brain drain that will have to be filled, we can observe the waves of immigrants arriving in the Americas, flooding the land with skilled and intelligent agents that spread out like ‘hammers’ in search of anything that looks like a ‘nail’ that they can hammer on.

Europe sees the departing ebb-tide of emigrants and America sees the arriving flood-tide of immigrants, but from the vantage point of space, one sees the transformation of biosphere space.  The space of the biosphere has a one-ness to it like the skin of the apple.  It is all connected and mutually dependent.   Therefore, it is not realistic to speak of the colonizing dynamic in terms of ‘a chip out of it here’ and ‘a bump on it over there’.  It is one thing, the space of the biosphere, that is undergoing [spatial-relational] transformation.

Neither of the two opposing historical narratives, the story of genesis told by the colonizers and the story of degeneration told by the colonized, are ‘real’.

What is ‘real’ is transformation of the common space that colonizer and colonized share inclusion in.

Only if one mentally splits apart the ‘figures’ [inhabitants] from the ‘ground’ [habitat] is it possible to split apart ‘genesis’ and ‘degeneration’.  If space is not empty but energy-charged medium, then the apparent opposites of genesis and degeneration are resolved within ‘spatial-transformation’.

McLuhan pointed this out in regard to what goes on when developers put a factory into an agricultural community.  All the focus of the development faction is on this new construction and what it is going to do, while the old-timer locals are witnessing the destruction of what they have, the farmer’s sons and daughters drawn out of farming into the industry, new roads and traffic trucking supplies in and product out destroying crop fields and polluting the region with fumes and noise.

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. — Marshall McLuhan,‘Understanding Media’

Again, we get two opposing historical narratives, one orienting to ‘genesis’ and the other to ‘degeneration’.

Neither are ‘reality’.  ‘Reality’ requires the view from ‘space’ that includes both factions, and in that view it becomes apparent that what is going on is ‘transformation’ of that living space and ‘transformation’ is like ‘treading water’ [rather than material forms doing stuff] that incorporates these opposites; genesis and degeneration.

These opposing perspectives are brought together in the new physics of relativity and quantum theory.  They support the view from space, the view that is in terms of ‘in-place’ spatial-relational transformation wherein material forms are ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances);

“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).  —Erwin Schrödinger

The bringing together of these opposing sub-realities (genesis and degeneration) associates with a different type of logic than we habitually use; i.e. we habitually use the logic of the excluded third where the inhabitant, A, and the habitat, not.A, mutually exclude each other; i.e. A ≠ not.A  (inhabitant ≠ habitat).  This allows us to ‘think’ in terms of the inhabitant ‘moving’ while the habitat ‘stays in place’.  It is like thinking of the hurricane moving while the atmosphere ‘stays in place’.  It is ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) or ‘maya’ (illusion), but it is our popular way of describing the world dynamic.  That is, it is the basis for the historical narratives that play out ‘over time’ that we make up such as the historical narrative of the colonizers who ‘come from the East’ and create a new world in the West.

In reality, as can be seen from an observational vantage point in space, what is ‘really going on’ is transformation of ‘place’ or ‘space’ (biosphere).

Our experience informs us that the biosphere persists while material forms gather and are regathered within it; i.e. the more comprehensive view of the world dynamic is in terms of spatial transformation rather than in terms of ‘what material beings do’.

The logic associated with relativity and quantum physics, that brings the opposing historical narratives of ‘genesis’ and ‘degeneration’ together by acknowledging the natural physical primacy of ‘space-as-energy-charged-medium’ that undergoes transformation, is ‘the logic of the included third’ wherein we acknowledge that ‘material forms’ are not ‘locally existing beings’ but are, as David Bohm and Erwin Schrödinger observe; ‘ripple structures in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’.   The logic of the included third wherein A = not.A (inhabitant = habitat) is described by Stéphane Lupasco as follows;

“To every phenomenon or element or logical event whatsoever, and accordingly to the judgment which thinks of it, the proposition which expresses it, to the sign which symbolizes it must always be associated, structurally and functionally, a logical antiphenomenon, or anti-element or anti-event and therefore a contradictory judgment, proposition or sign in such a fashion that the former can only be potentialized by the actualization of the latter, but not disappear such that either could be self-sufficient in an independent and therefore rigorous non-contradiction – as in all logic, classical or otherwise, that is based on an absoluteness of the principle of non-contradiction.”

The point half-way between actualization and potentialization is a point of maximum antagonism or ‘contradiction’ from which, in the case of complex phenomena, a T-state (T for “tiers inclus”, included third term) emerges, which is capable of resolving the contradiction (or ‘counter-action‘), at another, higher level of reality. “  - Lupasco, Stéphane., Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie, 1951.

[see also; ‘Stéphane Lupasco et le tiers inclus. De la physique quantique à l’ontologie’, by Basarab Nicolescu]

Now, here is [one of my] communications dilemmas.

A number of us are involved in an initiative that seeks to sustain the health and harmony of the islands ecosystems (including humans) in the Gulf/San Juan Islands Archipelago.

We have these three different ways of ‘looking at’ what is going on here;

1. the historical narrative of the developers who see themselves as creating a new world in a beautiful natural setting. [much like the colonizers].  This view is in terms of ‘what we should do’.

2. the historical narrative of the indigenous islanders who see the actions of developers as destructive to what is already in place and see the need to regulate new development to prevent it from destroying established ecodynamics. [much like the colonized].  This view is in terms of ‘what we should not do’.

3. the view from space in which transformation of this island space (and the biosphere which is the broader view of it) is ongoing.  This view is in terms of how relations with one another and ourselves (the spatial plenum we share inclusion in) are transforming.

There is a problem in discussing this in that everyone is on ‘different pages’.  If we were talking about putting in a Walmart with a McDonald’s in it on a back street, the first group would be focused on ‘what we should do’, the benefits of the new development.  The second group would be focused on ‘what we should not do’, how mom-and-pop businesses would be hurt, how traffic patterns would shift (the veins and arteries of the community ecodynamic) and leave shops on deserted thoroughfares etc.

There is no way to understand what will ‘really’ transpire by debate orienting to ‘what we should do’ and ‘what we should not do’; i.e. the pro aspects associated with ‘genesis’ versus the ‘con’ aspects associated with ‘degeneration’.  As McLuhan observes, what prevails is ‘transformation’ of the place which is understood in terms of how relations with one another and ourselves [the spatial plenum] are transforming.

What is wrong with the typical debate in terms of 1. and 2. is that it is a ‘rational approach’ based on what we should do and/or what we should not do.  This is the view in terms of figures split apart from ground.  It implies the ethic of ‘the land belongs to the people/biosphere’ rather than ‘the people belong to the land/biosphere’.

How do we get into an awareness of our connectedness, of being included in the continually unfolding spatial transformation of the habitat/biosphere [“the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants”- Mach’s principle] instead of starting from, and getting stuck in this ‘what we should do’ and ‘what we shouldn’t do’ mode of thinking?

LSD, ayahuasco and peyote are said to overcome this artificial split between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’, and so is the ‘Overview Effect’ of the astronaut.

For example;

Space Euphoria: Do Our Brains Change When We Travel In Outer Space?

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”.

He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe.

He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.

Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart, similar to what Mitchell experienced, describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected.

Their experiences, along with dozens of other similar experiences described by other astronauts, intrigue scientists who study the brain. This “Overview Effect”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected, sounds somewhat similar to certain religious experiences described by Buddhist monks, for example. Where does it come from and why?

As far as I can see, once we get stuck into ‘what we should do’ and ‘what we shouldn’t do’ mode, there will be endless head-butting without resolution because these opposing ‘realities’ are not realities at all, but ‘illusions’.

The solution would appear to be to ‘re-orient’ so as to achieve the ‘Overview Effect’ in which we can see things in terms of ‘spatial transformation’ in which we are all interdependently included.

In this case, we must let our behaviours be orchestrated by the cultivating and sustaining of balance and harmony in the unfolding spatial transformation we all share inclusion in.  This takes us beyond ‘what we or others should do’ or ‘what we or others should not do’.  That is, it takes us beyond the Fiktional world of ‘doer-and-deed’ and into the beyond-good-and-evil ‘greater reality’ of relational transformation [Nietzsche].

* * *

An exciting point through which the world is expressing itself

San Francisco is the name of a place that has a lot of ‘romance’ to it.   The historical narrative of its genesis is at the same time, a historical narrative of change going on around the world, the unravelling of the old ways of the old world, the threads of which were being spun into the surprising and exciting artefacts of the new world including this gem of a city on the west coast of North America.  The richness and diversity of the entire world and its deep-rooted cultural traditions is the weave that San Francisco is made of, and those ‘threads’ continue to serve as an electrical connective webbing that makes ‘San Francisco’ a bright point through which the global plenum expresses itself.

Now, it would be a futile exercise to try to capture or ‘simulate’ ‘what San Francisco is’, by basing the simulation on ‘what it does’ and ‘what its people do’ because it is a ‘burning candle’ lit by a continual influx of people from all parts of the world, who are attracted as visitors and settlers.  Its evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow. [and do things ever really ‘stop’ evolving?]

‘Simulation’ [1] is a term for trying to re-render or ‘imitate’ what a thing is by treating its dynamic as if the development of its form behaviour and organization were ‘locally originating’.  It is our cultural addiction.  Our sciences are based on it.  In fact, it is called ‘rational thought’.

San Francisco is listed by the OECD  (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) as being the 18^th city in the world on a local economy basis.  It’s city-level GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was $301 billion in 2008.

The notion of ‘economy’ is keyed to this ‘simulation’ of cities (and states) that re-renders the city or state as a local ‘machine’ or local ‘organism’ with notionally locally originating, internal-process driven development of form, behaviour and organization; i.e. when we speak of something’s production, we impute the sourcing of the production to that ‘thing’ as a simulated ‘local system’ and we generate a corresponding mental image of it, as being locally animated from its interior.

Gone is the ‘burning candle’ image wherein the entity was the place through which the global flow-plenum expresses itself, where the outside-inward influence of the ‘dynamic ground’ predominates over the inside-outward influence of its ‘dynamic figure’.  In its place sits the notional ‘simulation’, wherein the evolving form, behaviour and organization of the simulated entity are imputed to derive fully and solely from processes that operate within its own interior.

The simulation is not the organism.  The map is not the territory.

But, in science and scientific thinking, these simulations of ‘cell’ and ‘organism’ and ‘city’ and ‘state’ are used so often, because of the convenience of their simplicity [which derives from synthetically breaking them out of the dynamic plenum], that we tend to confuse them for ‘reality’.

Now, philosophers of science such as Henri Poincaré [2] have pointed out this ‘pitfall’ very clearly, where we use ‘conventions’ such as an ‘absolute space frame’ to synthetically ‘lift out’ our simulations of a flow-feature within the dynamic spatial plenum and re-render it AS IF IT WERE A ‘LOCAL SYSTEM’ or ‘thing-in-itself’, in which case we have to invent the necessary internal source of animation and processes etc. to ‘keep our notional LOCAL system’ ‘hanging together’ logically.  Poincaré observes;

From them [‘conventions’ such as the absolute space reference frame], indeed, the sciences derive their rigour ; such conventions are the result of the unrestricted activity of the mind, which in this domain recognises no obstacle. For here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws ; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.

Now, what science and its ‘simulations’ allow us to do is, …  instead of understanding ‘San Francisco’ in the context of the world dynamic wherein the people coming into San Francisco and making it what it is, are at the same time ‘unmaking’ the places they come from [a ‘quantum entanglement’ that does not vanish at the point where the old world person reaches his new world destination], San Francisco can instead be understood in local ‘doer-deed’ terms, as if the dynamic were ‘locally originating’ and ‘internal process driven’, a view which is made possible thanks to the imposing of an absolute space frame.  This absolute space frame is what enables the “unrestricted activity of the mind”.  That is, in this absolute space frame we can ‘blow off’ the quantum entanglement and conjugate global-plenum—city relation with its ‘burning candle’ view of the city and resituate the ‘ultimate animating source’ of the city dynamic inside the city, simulating the system in terms of local machinery.

How our simulations do this, how we reduce the animating source from ‘outside-inward-predominating-over-inside-outward’  to ‘inside-outward-predominating-over-outside-inward’ is by means of three ‘assumptions’ as described by Poincare [3]; i.e. the assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, the assumption of the simple elementary nature of the animating source, and the assumption of the homogeneity of space.

We do all of this thanks to a notional absolute empty space-frame which becomes the new reference for the city activity instead of the global flow-plenum in which it is a ‘burning-candle-feature’.

The animating source of the city dynamic, in this scientific simulation, is a disembodied God-like subjectivity-in-itself that matches up with the city seen as an absolute locally existing ‘thing-in-itself’.  Our ‘reality’, where this all came from, is the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial plenum of nature, a dynamic habitat that includes its dynamic inhabitants.  This scientific ‘art’ of simulation enables us to ‘lift out’ particular ‘flow-features’ from the flowing spatial plenum in which they are innately included, and re-render them ‘on their own’ within a notional absolute fixed and empty reference space, the ‘Euclidian space convention’ that Poincaré speaks of.

We are now in the habit of doing this ‘simulating’ to everything, to ourselves, to ‘cells’ and ‘organisms’ and bacteria and viruses, to corporations and sovereign states, imputing to each of them ‘their own economy’, their own ‘locally originating behaviour’, their own ‘internal process driven’ development of form, behaviour and organization.

This is ok, providing that we don’t confuse this over-simplification for ‘reality’, … but we are confusing it for reality, and this is a growing problem and it shows up in how we ‘organize’ ourselves.

In our minds, when we think of the organization within the city of San Francisco as internally sourced and coming from the activity of its people, we are thinking within an absolute space reference frame.  Otherwise, we would have to address the overall transformation of the spatial plenum that San Francisco was a feature within, in the manner that the hurricane is a feature within the transforming atmosphere flow-plenum, and acknowledge the conjugate world-San-Francisco relation [the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation].

This mental picture of the dynamics of a city or organism as a local system-in-itself, made possible by imposing the convention of absolute space, is only a ‘simulation’.  It is NOT ‘reality’, not the reality of our experience which informs us continually of the unboundedness in nature and the nonlocal sourcing of our living space dynamics [as in Nietzsche’s observation that ‘evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow.].

Once we start talking in terms of ‘national economies’ and ‘corporate production’ we are lost in this pseudo-reality of simulations wherein the flow-features within an unbounded spatial flow-plenum are broken out on their own, by the simulation, and ‘re-started’ using a notional internal animating source which is nothing other than ‘pure subjectivity’ imputed to reside within each doer-of-deed element within the system.

How does this impact our mode of organizing?

Inside-outward organization is coordinated from a single central point, a ‘centre-of-intention’ and the object is to achieve some doer-deed-based result.  The achievement of the result is the principle that unites everyone’s actions in a ‘co-labor-ative’ fashion.

This organization derives from the ‘simulation’ and since the simulation is a ‘scientific model’ and since such models are becoming more and more sophisticated, only the experts can understand them in depth, and therefore, the experts must take a leading role in directing the organization.    Of course, each city or sovereign state will have its own ‘simulator model’ of its own dynamic along with its own objectives.  This leads to a situation described by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin;

“ It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people.”  [Lewontin continues by noting;] “that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, its a political one.  It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … [while] somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power?  And if there’s a differential in power, and if you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize. “  [see [4] for longer quote]

In other words, the doer-deed worldview is a synthetic world view based on ‘simulations’ that ignores our experienced reality, that the world is a transforming spatial plenum characterized by the continual gathering and regathering of flow-features [that science simulates as local, centre-of-intention-driven systems].  Belief in this doer-deed world view is what has us organize in a top-down, centre-of-intention-driven ‘do-the-deed’ format.   And belief in this doer-deed world view is what puts the scientific experts into the authoritative headquarters of this centre-of-intention-driven organizing format since doer-deed simulations are the core interest of mainstream scientists.

But ‘politics’ was not responsible for the evolution of San Francisco.  San Francisco was not, in itself, a ‘centre-of-intention’ driven development, it developed out of peoples’ interest in it.  Interesting people came and made it interesting attracting more interested people that made it more interesting.  Here we have the difference between Nietzsche’s/Lamarck’s view of evolution in which ‘outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence’, versus Darwin’s view of evolution which coincides with scientific simulations; i.e. where inside-outward influence predominates over outside-inward influence.

In the evolution of San Francisco, people came because they were attracted to the place, in the manner that desert nomads are attracted to oases.  The mayor of San Francisco and his planning commission did not prepare a list and recruit what they felt they needed; i.e. the organization was not inside-outward driven.  It did not happen by ‘reproduction with variation’ as in Darwinism, but by outside-inward influx predominating over inside-outward production.

As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, the genius of nature [of the global habitat] not only inhabits the organism [San Francisco], it creates it.

And Nietzsche says the same in terms of ‘will-to-power’ and ‘Übermensch’ (overman); i.e. the will-to-power [immanent in the spatial-plenum] not only animates the organism, it pulls it into self-transcendence.

The imagery here, in both cases, is that the evolution of the entity is being pulled from it from the outside-inward; i.e. its apparent inside-outward driven acorn-to-oak-tree material blossoming forth, is secondary to the ‘evolutionary force’ [the inside-outward material growth is local and visible while the  outside-inward evolutionary pull is invisible and nonlocal]   Thus, to simulate material organisms as if they were pushing forth out of themselves, driven by pure internal subjectivity, as made possible in science by imposing a notional absolute space reference frame to split the entity out of its inclusion in an outside-inward evolutionary sourcing flow, is radical over-simplification that should not be confused for reality.

But WE ARE CONFUSING SIMULATIONS FOR REALITY, and this means that the experts are progressively hijacking the centres of authority that organize our behavioural dynamics, and the sense of the approach of an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ society is getting stronger.

What has been described in the above paragraphs is how we have been reducing our notion of ‘dynamics’ as in ‘physical phenomena’ from cyclical dynamics to simple unidirectional dynamics.   That is, ‘what is being done’ cannot be separated from ‘what is being undone’.  Generation and degeneration are a conjugate pair.  Gathering and regathering of form is a single dynamic with two things going on within it, the emergence of new forms and the collapse of old forms.  We are quick to define and label the new forms; e.g. ‘hurricane Katrina’ and to personify them, which means to ‘scientifically simulate’ them, notionally making them over into ‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven development of form, behaviour and organization’.   In this mental modeling which shifts the pictures into the realm of words and language, the figures are split out of the ‘ground of dynamic spatial-plenum’ in which they are ripple-structures and the overall gestalt is lost.

When one grounds one’s mental modeling in the spatial plenum, this process of gathering and regathering of form is a cyclic process rather than a ‘reproduction’ based sequential lineage as in the simulation world view.

The Missing Medium

As both Kepler [5] and Newton [6] observed, the harmony in the overall spatial-relational web of celestial dynamics transcended explanation by way of the dynamics of the planets, moons, asteroids, comets and stars.  That is, outside-inward influence predominated over inside-outward influence in sourcing the overall harmonies/resonances in the celestial dynamic.  This has been subsequently explained by the new physics in terms of ‘field’ transcending ‘matter’ in its outside-inward shaping influence on the dynamics of material bodies.   In fact, there is a ‘grammatical error’ in the last sentence because, to be consistent with the findings of the new physics, there is no such thing as ‘the dynamics of material bodies’ per se, there is only the dynamics of field in which the dynamics of matter is secondary ‘schaumkommen’ (visual appearance) as Schrödinger observed.    Our focus on material bodies and their movement is only natural since ‘what we can see’ occupies our attention while the upstream animating ‘field’ is invisible and nonlocal.  Nevertheless, it was the invisible and nonlocal ‘fields’ that Lamarck termed ‘les fluides incontenables’ [fluids that can contain but cannot themselves be contained] such as gravity, thermal, electric, magnetic that he identified as the basic evolutionary animating source.

The concept of ‘local existence’ is made possible only by the convention of imposing an absolute space reference frame which is the essence of ‘pure subjectivity’ since it declares the absolute existence of its own being.  Without this mathematical abstraction, our experience can only address movement and ‘existence’ in relative terms; e.g. in terms of forms relative to other forms [See Poincaré, ‘The Relativity of Space’].  There is no hard ground to stand on or to reference to in the real world of our experience, everything is in flux [as Heraclitus said].   Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli point out that this is the implication of ‘relativity’ in physics.  In ‘Quantum Gravity’ Rovelli observes;

“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

Ok, we would all agree that our common habit is to understand the world dynamic in terms of ‘local material beings [objects, quarks, organisms, hurricanes, sovereign states, corporations] and ‘what they do’, so;

What happens to ‘the medium’, the non-material influence immanent in the flowing energy-field?

We know what happens to it when we define and name label hurricanes.  We simply ‘forget about it’ and find it more convenient to model the world in terms of ‘what things do’.

But where does the medium go ‘in general’?

Two researchers that addressed this question and had their research [which is usually put down as ‘heresy’] ‘see the light of day’ are Dennis Gabor [‘Theory of Communications (1946)] and Marshall McLuhan [‘Understanding Media’ etc.].  McLuhan also points to T.S. Eliot whose work, he suggests, ‘came before his’.

Both of these researchers came up with a ‘four-phase cycle’ model of medium, i.e. Gabor’s ‘quadrature’ and McLuhan’s ‘tetrad’.  These models are essentially identical, though Gabor’s is in the field of ‘communications’ and closer to ‘science’ while McLuhan’s is in the field of language and psychology which one might say is ‘closer to art’.  The models are fairly simple even if they have profound and complex implications.

First, recall that both of these researchers started off trying to address the apparent conjugate relation between ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’.  In Gabor’s case, this becomes an issue with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which is almost a restatement of Heraclitus’ ‘can’t step into the river twice’; i.e. one can separately measure the position and the momentum of a material body but one can’t tie down both measurements as the same time.  In other words, ‘when matter moves, space changes at the same time’.  When the inhabitant moves, the habitat transforms.  Or as some biologists [the ‘heretics’] say, ‘the organism IS the environment’.    In terms of ‘communication theory’, ‘the content is the context’; i.e. content is to context as hurricane is to atmosphere, the figure is ‘included’ in the ground.  Ernst Mach captured this in his principle of space-matter relativity;

“The dynamics of habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

With McLuhan, it was the same problem but in the context of the social dynamic; i.e. ;

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine [of government] altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. – Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’

When we think of the machine or factory as a local system with its own absolutely subjective internal drive, we do so with the help of an IMPLICIT absolute space reference frame.  But when we actually implement the machinery, we have to enter into an ongoing spatial plenum and use whatever is there, which means that we are altering the dynamic continuum, the ‘real world’ of our experience, in the act of implementing this notion of a factory that comes to our understanding thanks to the unrestricted activity of our mind [thanks to absolute space framing].  This reality, that the only possible approach to ‘doing-our-deeds’ is via transformation of spatial relations in the spatial plenum or spacetime continuum, is what McLuhan is addressing.  The ‘inhabiting-factory IS the habitat’ or, in his words, ‘the medium is the message’.

In the case of both Gabor’s and McLuhan’s work, the task was to devise a new model in which the medium-dynamic predominated over the content-dynamic.

Both came up with a four-phased model in which what scientific simulation calls ‘real’ is now just one of four phases of a single, circular dynamic.

The third phase can be fleshed out next with the help of the point made by Howard Zinn as to how historical narrative content can be seen from two opposite points of view which he calls the ‘executioner’ viewpoint [e.g. the colonizer viewpoint] and the ‘victim’ viewpoint [the ‘colonized people’s’ viewpoint].  This brings out the point that ‘generation’ and ‘de-generation’ are two aspects of the same transformational dynamic.

So, if we ground our view of dynamics in the transformation of the spatial plenum, we can see ‘change’ not as the construction of something entirely new, but as a ‘re-arrangement’ of what is already in the ground of the spatial plenum so that the newly gathering forms cannot be split out from the forms that were already there; i.e. the situation is like the gathering and regathering of storm-cells in the atmosphere or whorls in the fluid flow of the spatial flow-plenum.

The intermediate phases in the circular dynamic correspond to the ‘pull’ that is felt but not seen.  That is, the gravity field is felt but not seen in the sense that acceleration is 90 degrees out of phase with material motion.  On a see-saw, you feel the pull most when you are at the top or bottom of the swing and are not visibly moving at all.  In Gabor’s mathematical treatment, one uses the tradition term associated with complex numbers; i.e. the accelerative phase is the ‘imaginary’ component of the dynamic.  The four phase cycle in Gabor’s communications theory corresponds to the four phases in the dynamic of the two crossed poles of a dynamic the poles at the end of the rotating, pinwheeling rotor [the ‘real’ moving object] are phases 1 and 3  while phases 2 and 4 correspond to the ‘always-orthogonal’ ‘rotating field’ that is ‘pulling’ the rotor around.

This can be compared to the hurricane; i.e. visibly, we are prone to thinking of it as a rotating pinwheel but that aspect is secondary to the ‘rotating flow’ and the rotating flow is inherently in the ground of the spatial-plenum, so they are not simple opposites but instead in a ‘conjugate ground-figure relation’ [or ‘conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation’].  The accelerative phases are not visible in themselves but can be thought of in a pre-to-visible wanting-to-do/wanting-to-undo sense.  Recall in the see-saw example one phase is like ‘loading a spring’ [converting kinetic energy to potential energy] and the opposite phase is like ‘unloading a spring’ [converting potential energy to kinetic energy].

Thus, our view of the hurricane which ‘dropped out’ the REAL animating source immanent in the [missing] ‘medium’ and which was in terms where we personified the local visible rotating pinwheel effect as a local thing-in-itself powered by its own subjectivity, is, in the four phased model, just one of the four phases.  Its opposite phase was the relatively calm ground which it transformed.  That calm ground, like the calm ground of the indigenous peoples, was not ‘nothing’ but was what was being ‘undone’ at the same time as the colonizers were ‘doing’ what they were doing [rearranging the shared living space.].

In McLuhan’s diagramming of the four phases, which re-establishes the medium as the basic animating source, we have the following phases;

Resembling the four-phased quadrature of the dynamo

Again, thinking terms of dynamics as ‘transformation of the habitat/medium’, ‘enhancing’ is what the colonizers historical narrative talks about and what is being ‘obsolesced’ is what the colonized peoples historical narrative talks about.  The ‘intermediate’ phases representing ‘acceleration’ describe the non-visible spring loading and unloading;

McLuhan brings out the four phases with the example of the radio;

Using the example of radio:

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV

The point here is not to be found in the literal examples, but in the general model of transformation in terms of ‘generation’ and ‘degeneration’ and retrieval of figure from ground and the reversal of the ground relative to the figure; i.e. the four phase model that is common to Gabor (communications theory) and McLuhan (media theory).  Both of these theories re-establishing ‘medium’ as the ultimate animating source (UAS) and removing the notion of the ultimate animating source as ‘pure subjectivity’ as in monotheism.

Conclusion:

Science has encouraged us to think in terms of ‘simulations’ that ‘lift out’ features in the spatial flow-plenum and re-render them as local machines or local systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven development of form, behaviour and organization.   This implies that pure subjectivity is the ‘ultimate animating source’ (UAS or God) as corresponds with monotheism.

These simulations are born of convenience and they fit well into our language, or perhaps our language demands that we make such reductions.  What we ‘see in them’ is not born out by our experience.   Our experiencing of a hurricane starts with our awareness of being included in the ‘ground’ of the atmosphere spatial-flow-plenum and the cyclic upwelling of convection cells as ‘figures’ within this common ‘ground’.  The emergence of new cells is at the same time, the collapse of old cells.  The new that is brought to the surface is complemented, at the same time by the old that is dropping below the surface.  It is a cyclical process that can be described in terms of one dynamic with four phases.

By confusing scientific simulations for reality, we are organizing ourselves on a top-down basis [we could use such organization in support rather than in a primary role] and increasingly giving experts a predominating hand on the helm.  As a result, the actual transformation of our habitat is like a loose sheet in the wind which, on a sailing vessel, sends it this way then that in frenetic starts and fits.

The focus on the economy signals this confusing of simulation for reality. We, as organisms, humans, cells, corporations, sovereign states, are NOT the local source of our production because we are not really ‘local machines’ but are more like ‘burning candles’ in the spatial plenum.

What scientific simulation does is to capture the ‘candle flames’ and convert them into locally sourced systems by way of simulation, hiding the UAS of the spatial plenum in the process.

There is nothing stopping us from getting out of the dilemma we are in, beyond recognizing that the world portrayed by scientific simulations is not ‘the real world’.   Thus, the science experts are not experts in real world dynamic, only in those dynamics that transpire in a notional absolute space, where dynamics are seen in terms of absolute being of material objects, absolute motion of those objects and constructions based on these.  In the real world of our experience, there is just one world, one spatial-plenum, one spacetime continuum where ‘transformation’ [of spatial relations] is the only possible dynamic, where the city of San Francisco is an emergent whorl in the world-flow that, like all whorls, manifests an evolutionary dynamic in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow.  [the acorn-to-oak-tree model where the ultimate animating source is pure subjectivity is a ‘total Fiktion’ given to us by a great man, Aristotle, who gave us other fictions such as that men have more teeth than women and that bodies fall to earth with a speed proportional to their weight].

* * *

[1] Simulation is the imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system. …Simulation can be used to show the eventual real effects of alternative conditions and courses of action. Simulation is also used when the real system cannot be engaged, because it may not be accessible, or it may be dangerous or unacceptable to engage, or it is being designed but not yet built, or it may simply not exist . … Key issues in simulation include acquisition of valid source information about the relevant selection of key characteristics and behaviours, the use of simplifying approximations and assumptions within the simulation, and fidelity and validity of the simulation outcomes.

[2] AUTHOR‘S PREFACE to Science and Hypothesis

To the superficial observer scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible ; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings ; they are imposed not only on us, but on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science. This is what they take to be the role of experiment and mathematics. And thus, too, it was understood a hundred years ago by many men of science who dreamed of constructing the world with the aid of the smallest possible amount of material borrowed from experiment.

But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen ; it was recognised that it is as necessary to the experimenter as it is to the mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superficiality. To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions ; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Instead of a summary condemnation we should examine with the utmost care the role of hypothesis ; we shall then recognise not only that it is necessary, but that in most cases it is legitimate. We shall also see that there are several kinds of hypotheses; that some are verifiable, and when once confirmed by experiment become truths of great fertility; that others may be useful to us in fixing our ideas; and finally, that others are hypotheses only in appearance, and reduce to definitions or to conventions in disguise. The latter are to be met with especially in mathematics , and in the sciences to which it is applied. From them, indeed, the sciences derive their rigour ; such conventions are the result of the unrestricted activity of the mind, which in this domain recognises no obstacle. For here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws ; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.  Are they then arbitrary? No; for if they were, they would not be fertile. Experience leaves us our freedom of choice, but it guides us by helping us to discern the most convenient path to follow. Our laws are therefore like those of an absolute monarch, who is wise and consults his council of state. Some people have been struck by this characteristic of free convention which may be recognised in certain fundamental principles of the sciences. Some have set no limits to their generalisations, and at the same time they have forgotten that there is a difference between liberty and the purely arbitrary. So that they are compelled to end in what is called nominalism; they have asked if the savant is not the dupe of his own definitions, and if the world he thinks he has discovered is not simply the creation of his own caprice. 1 Under these conditions science would retain its certainty, but would not attain its object, and would become powerless. Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable.

Such is the conclusion to which we are led; but to reach that conclusion we must pass in review the series of sciences from arithmetic and geometry to mechanics and experimental physics. What is the nature of mathematical reasoning ? Is it really deductive, as is commonly supposed ? Careful analysis shows us that it is nothing of the kind ; that it participates to some extent in the nature of inductive reasoning, and for that reason it is fruitful. But none the less does it retain its character of absolute rigour ; and this is what must first be shown.

When we know more of this instrument which is placed in the hands of the investigator by mathematics, we have then to analyse another fundamental idea, that of mathematical magnitude. Do we find it in nature, or have we ourselves introduced it ? And if the latter be the case, are we not running a risk of coming to incorrect conclusions all round ? Comparing the rough data of our senses with that extremely complex and subtle conception which mathematicians call magnitude, we are compelled to recognise a divergence. The framework into which we wish to make everything fit is one of our own construction ; but we did not construct it at random, we constructed it by measurement so to speak; and that is why we can fit the facts into it without altering their essential qualities.

Space is another framework which we impose on the world. Whence are the first principles of geometry derived ? Are they imposed on us by logic ? Lobatschewsky, by inventing non-Euclidean geometries, has shown that this is not the case.  Is space revealed to us by our senses ? No ; for the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry. Is geometry derived from experience ? Careful discussion will give the answer no ! We therefore conclude that the principles of geometry are only conventions ; but these conventions are not arbitrary, and if transported into another w ; orld (which I shall call the non-Euclidean world, and which I shall endeavour to describe), we shall find ourselves compelled to adopt more of them.

In mechanics we shall be led to analogous conclusions, and we shall see that the principles of this science, although more directly based on experience, still share the conventional character of the geometrical postulates. So far, nominalism triumphs ; but we now come to the physical sciences, properly so called, and here the scene changes. We meet with hypotheses of another kind, and we fully grasp how fruitful they are.  No doubt at the outset theories seem unsound, and the history of science show s us how ephemeral they are ; but they do not entirely perish, and of each of them some traces still remain. It is these traces which we must try to discover, because in them and in them alone is the true reality. The method of the physical sciences is based upon the induction which leads us to expect the recurrence of a phenomenon when the circumstances which give rise to it are repeated. If all the circumstances could be simultaneously reproduced, this principle could be fearlessly applied ; but this never happens; some of the circumstances will always be missing. Are we absolutely certain that they are unimportant ? Evidently not ! It may be probable, but it cannot be rigorously certain. Hence the importance of the role that is played in the physical sciences by the law of probability. The calculus of probabilities is therefore not merely a recreation, or a guide to the baccarat player; and we must thoroughly examine the principles on which it is based. In this connection I have but very incomplete results to lay before the reader, for the vague instinct which enables us to determine probability almost defies analysis. After a study of the conditions under which the work of the physicist is carried on, I have thought it best to show him at work. For this purpose I have taken instances from the history of optics and of electricity. We shall thus see how the ideas of Fresnel and Maxwell took their rise, and what unconscious hypotheses were made by Ampere and the other founders of electro-dynamics.

[3] Extract from ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics, Henri Poincare

Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.

Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space.

A few examples perhaps will make my meaning clearer. If we wished to study in all its complexity the distribution of temperature in a cooling solid, we could never do so. This is simply be cause, if we only reflect that a point in the solid can directly impart some of its heat to a neighbouring point, it will immediately impart that heat only to the nearest points, and it is but gradually that the flow of heat will reach other portions of the solid. The elementary phenomenon is the interchange of heat between two contiguous points. It is strictly localised and relatively simple if, as is natural, we admit that it is not influenced by the temperature of the molecules whose distance apart is small.

I bend a rod: it takes a very complicated form, the direct investigation of which would be impossible. But I can attack the problem, however, if I notice that its flexure is only the resultant of the deformations of the very small elements of the rod, and that the deformation of each of these elements only depends on the forces which are directly applied to it, and not in the least on those which may be acting on the other elements.

In all these examples, which may be increased without difficulty, it is admitted that there is no action at a distance or at great distances. That is an hypothesis. It is not always true, as the law of gravitation proves. It must therefore be verified. If it is confirmed, even approximately, it is valuable, for it helps us to use mathematical physics, at any rate by successive approximations. If it does not stand the test, we must seek something else that is analogous, for there are other means of arriving at the elementary phenomenon. If several bodies act simultaneously, it may happen that their actions are independent, and may be added one to the other, either as vectors or as scalar quantities. The elementary phenomenon is then the action of an isolated body. Or suppose, again, it is a question of small movements, or more generally of small variations which obey the well-known law of mutual or relative independence.  The movement observed will then be decomposed into simple movements for example, sound into its harmonics, and white light into its monochromatic components. When we have discovered in which direction to seek for the elementary phenomena, by what means may we reach it ? First, it will often happen that in order to predict it, or rather in order to predict what is useful to us, it will not be necessary to know its mechanism. The law of great numbers will suffice. Take for example the propagation of heat. Each molecule radiates to wards its neighbour we need not inquire accord ing to what law; and if we make any supposition in this respect, it will be an indifferent hypothesis,  and therefore useless and unverifiable. In fact, by the action of averages and thanks to the symmetry of the medium, all differences are levelled, and, whatever the hypothesis may be, the result is always the same.

The same feature is presented in the theory of elasticity, and in that of capillarity. The neighbouring molecules attract and repel each other, we need not inquire by what law. It is enough for us that this attraction is sensible at small distances only, and that the molecules are very numerous, that the medium is symmetrical, and we have only to let the law of great numbers come into play.

Here again the simplicity of the elementary phenomenon is hidden beneath the complexity of the observable resultant phenomenon; but in its turn this simplicity was only apparent and disguised a very complex mechanism. Evidently the best means of reaching the elementary phenomenon would be experiment. It would be necessary by experimental artifices to dissociate the complex system which nature offers for our investigations and carefully to study the elements as dissociated as possible; for example, natural white light would be decomposed into monochromatic lights by the aid of the prism, and into polarised lights by the aid of the polariser. Unfortunately, that is neither always possible nor always sufficient, and sometimes the mind must run ahead of experiment. I shall only give one example which has always struck me rather forcibly. If I decompose white light, I shall be able to isolate a portion of the spectrum, but however small it may be, it will always be a certain width. In the same way the natural lights which are called monochromatic give us a very fine array, but ray which is not, however, infinitely fine. It might be supposed that in the experimental study of the properties of these natural lights, by operating with finer and finer rays, and passing on at last to the limit, so to speak, we should eventually obtain the properties of a rigorously monochromatic light. That would not be accurate.  I assume that two rays emanate from the same source, that they are first polarised in planes at right angles, that they are then brought back again to the same plane of polarisation, and that we try to obtain interference. If the light were rigorously monochromatic, there would be interference; but with our nearly monochromatic lights, there will be no interference, and that, however narrow the ray may be. For it to be otherwise, the ray would have to be several million times finer than the finest known rays.

Here then we should be led astray by proceeding to the limit. The mind has to run ahead of the experiment, and if it has done so with success, it is because it has allowed itself to be guided by the instinct of simplicity. The knowledge of the elementary fact enables us to state the problem in the form of an equation. It only remains to deduce from it by combination the observable and verifiable complex fact. That is what we call integration, and it is the province of the mathematician. It might be asked, why in physical science generalisation so readily takes the mathematical form. The reason is now easy to see. It is not only because we have to express numerical laws; it is because the observable phenomenon is due to the superposition of a large number of elementary phenomena which are all similar to each other ; and in this way differential equations are quite naturally introduced. It not enough that each elementary phenomenon should obey simple laws: all those that we have to combine must obey the same law; then only is the intervention of mathematics of any use.  Mathematics teaches us, in fact, to combine like with like. Its object is to divine the result of a combination without having to reconstruct that combination element by element. If we have to repeat the same operation several times, mathematics enables us to avoid this repetition by telling the result beforehand by a kind of induction. This I have explained before in the chapter on mathematical reasoning. But for that purpose all these operations must be similar; in the contrary case we must evidently make up our minds to working them out in full one after the other, and mathematics will be useless. It is therefore, thanks to the approximate homogeneity of the matter studied by physicists, that mathematical physics came into existence. In the natural sciences the following conditions are no longer to be found: homogeneity, relative independence of remote parts, simplicity of the elementary fact; and that is why the student of natural science is compelled to have recourse to other modes of generalisation.

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZJWyGh1EI&feature=player_embedded#at=3153

Conversations with History: Richard C. Lewontin

Harry Kreisler: -And what is your advice to the general public, … I can hear people watching this say, “well if he can’t understand what’s being said in the NY Times science section, how can I understand it.”   So, what can people, the average person do to be informed citizens in the debates that involve science [genetics, GMO etc.] , policies that are rationalized about science, … through the uses of science.

Richard Lewontin: - Harry, you raise there … one of the most difficult social problems that exist.  And I want to put it in a broader context for a moment before I come back to the specific question that you’re asking because I don’t know the answer to the specific question.   … The founding fathers of our Republic said, essentially, that you can’t have a democratic society if you don’t have an educated electorate.  How can people make democratic decisions about what has to be done unless they have some education.  So we have a public education system.  What the founding fathers never could have imagined is the kind of knowledge that you would have to have in order to make informed decisions.  Let’s talk about the Star Wars project.  I don’t know enough about physics and engineering to decide whether it would work or not.  I have to trust somebody else to tell me. I don’t know enough about physics to make those decisions, I have to trust what Steve Weinberg tells me.  Now, that is a very serious problem.  I’m a scientist and I still have to trust what other people tell me.  So the problem for the public in general is, that in order to make democratic decisions, you have to believe something about ‘elite knowledge’ which is possessed only by a few people.  And, it’s very hard to know what to do about that.   It really… I don’t have a glib answer to that.  It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people. [yes, BUT.   the military generals and technology experts may have been the only ones to know for sure what could be done in a shock-and-awe attack on Baghdad, but the ‘technological achievement’ is a doer-deed Fiktion (an over-simplified model) that is overshadowed by the relational transformation it induces in the habitat, included the unintended induced recruiting of thousands of Jihaadists].    And the first rule, I suppose, is, if there are public disagreements, among people who are supposedly equally expert, then you better be careful.  I mean, if they all agree, well you have no choice but to take what they say, I don’t know what else you can do.  But if there’s any disagreement, then listen carefully to what those debates are about, and see if you can figure out who’s coming from where and why.  That’s true for the genome project and things like that.  That’s what killed Star Wars.  Well, I don’t know if ‘that’s’ what killed Star Wars, … that’s what made the public doubtful about it.  Whether that had any effect politically, I don’t know the answer.  Ah, but I have no answer to the question because there are no institutions promoting the public understanding of science, that are widely available to the public that do not obfuscate the issues either by funnelling them through media people who have to [compete to] try to get the space before your eyes and ears, and who are under further control of editorial exigencies and so on, or because they’re the captives of scientists who have their own agendas, … so that the head of the Whitehead Institute will tell us how wonderful everything they do is, because that’s part of the agenda.   I don’t know the answer, I don’t have an answer, I think the answer is ‘listen to me’ [smiles].

Harry Kreisler: You said something with which … this ‘ll be the last question and maybe a brief answer… philosophically, you really believe that… I think you said two things, .. i you want to comment, … you said “men make their own history but not as they choose” [ Lewontin:  I didn’t invent that ...] … yeah, I know but it tells us where you are philosophically in your view of human nature.  And you also said, “… it was a responsibility to decide what kind of world you want and make the decisions to move in that direction…”

Lewontin: … if you can.” That’s the problem because the latter one, .. yes, but the context I said them in are important.  You can’t make the world stay still.  It’s going to evolve, species are going to become extinct, the world is going to change, technology is going to change, ah, nature is going to change, nature is changing all the time and so if we’re going to concentrate on influencing things, we should not try to concentrate on holding them the way they are because that’s hopeless.  What we should do, in fact, is to try to concentrate on changing them in a direction that we find ‘better’. The only trouble is that ‘we’ is a heterogeneous collection which includes people with very different interests.  I’m a citizen of the state of Vermont and my fellow townspeople have bumper stickers on their cars that say; “Another Vermonter for Global Warming” cause if you lived in Vermont, you’d like it to be warmer. You know people who own stock in companies that make air conditioning machines might be in favour of global warming.  That’s, in a sense, trivializing the point which is that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, its a political one.  It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power?  And if there’s a differential in power, and you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize.   And I guess, my final word is ‘organize, organize, organize.’

Harry Kreisler: On that note, Professor Lewontin, thank you, very much, for taking the time out of your schedule to be here today.

Richard Lewontin: Thank you, Harry, for talking to me.

* * *

[Comment: Lewontin’s view is clearly ‘inside-outward predominates over outside-inward’.  it is the ‘powerboater view’ of self and community.  on the other hand, the view where outside-inward predominates over inside-outward, the ‘sailboater view’ [amerindian traditionalist view], the dynamics we share inclusion in are inherently greater than our own dynamic capabilities[ i.e. in our sailboater mode, our understanding is that we derive our power and steerage from the habitat-dynamic we are situationally included in], therefore the first priority is to attune to the orchestrating influence of the habitat-dynamic we are included in and put our movements PREDOMINANTLY in the service of cultivating, restoring, sustaining balance and harmony in our conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, and only secondarily orient to inside-outward driving goals, objectives, destinations.   in the Lewontin view, we start directly from ‘what things do’, from ‘what we can do’, from ‘inside-outward predominating over outside-inward.]

[5] “Now, the ‘harmony-of-the-whole of all the planets contributes more to the perfection of the world than the single harmonies by twos and the pairs of harmonies by the twos of neighbouring planets. For harmony is, so to speak, a spatial volume of unity. A deeper unity yet is presented, when all the planets form a harmony with each another, as when just two at a time harmonize in a dual manner. In the conflict of these harmonies deriving from the dual harmonic line-ups, which the pairs of planets form with each another, the one or the other must give way [nachgeben], so that the harmony-of-the-whole can prevail.”  – Johannes Kepler, ‘Harmonies of the World’

[6]  “… and the planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in orbits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained ; but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.  . . .  This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”  — Newton, Scholium in the ‘Principia’

“I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from physical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they all may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”  —Newton, Author’s Preface in the ‘Principia’.

Brigette DePape 'sends a message' during Throne Speech

Dear Brigette,

There is something I can feel that is going on in this picture of you holding the ‘Stop Harper’ sign that is not showing up in the picture.

It is ‘tension’.

‘Tension’ associates with ‘awareness’.  A baby would not necessarily feel ‘tension’ the way that adults do because the baby is not necessarily aware they are doing something that ‘they are not supposed to’.

If it were not for ‘tensions’, society would not function the way it does.   For example, the colonized indigenous peoples who do not have the same belief systems as the colonizer’s, don’t believe in the ‘secularized theological concept’ of the ‘sovereign state’ with its imaginary line boundaries (a ‘belief’ for ‘the believers’).  This is where Harper [the 'Prime' Minister] gets all his power from, … from ‘believers’ and from the sovereigntist ‘belief system’.

The indigenous people may not believe that the imaginary line boundaries are ‘really there’ but there will be a tension if one is in the presence of ‘those who do believe’ because one knows that they expect everyone else to respect their beliefs; to ‘genuflect’ at the places where the believers have put their mark where the supposed ‘boundaries’ are.

To ‘not genuflect’ is considered disrespectful and even ‘treasonous’ behaviour.

I am not ‘making anything up’ about sovereigntism, where Harper gets his power from, does indeed derive from religious beliefs.  Law historians are agreed that this is the case;

“[T]hat the ultimate moving force which inspires and controls political action is a spiritual force — a common conviction that makes for righteousness, a common conscience …. —Ahmad, Ilyas. Sovereignty: Islamic and Modern.

This suggestion is startling because we are used to the western notion of separation of church and state. Western discussion can speak of “common will,” but gets nervous with the thought that this phrase only acquires meaning in spiritual terms. As we have seen, however, western political thinking itself is grounded in theological concepts of “Christian nationalism.” The notion of “absolute, unlimited power held permanently in a single person or source, inalienable, indivisible, and original” is a definition of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. This “God died around the time of Machiavelli…. Sovereignty was … His earthly replacement.” —Walker, R. B. J. and Mendlovitz, Saul H. “Interrogating State Sovereignty.”

This ‘common will’ is a strange dude.  It can be like a horse running with the bit in its teeth.  It often begs us to make a stand and ‘stop the horse’ but few of us do [even if one is buoyed by the ‘bullet-proofness’ of youth or age].  The tensions permeate us like an invisible magnetic field.  If we are of this one polarity and we move too deeply into a region in which another polarity predominates, we may attract iron filings like a magnet and come out of it looking like a porcupine, particularly if the ‘iron filings’ are sharply pointed and backed with feathered flights.

We all need to ‘get honest’ and acknowledge that our individual and collective behaviours are shaped more by the tensional fields we share inclusion in, than by our own internally-seated authoring source.

We may insist that we have ‘free will’ and that we only do ‘what we ourselves choose to do’, … but where do ‘the choices’ come from?

The ‘respected traditions of sovereigntist democracy’ were a short while ago infusing ‘racism’, ‘genocide’ and ‘gender bias’ in their top-down fields of expectation.  We were all asked, at that time, to ‘be respectful of the democratic tradition’.  Who stepped in to help First Nations families avoid having to ship their children to residential schools as part of a democratically-elected government strategy aimed at exterminating an unwanted and deemed ‘undesirable’ culture, not to mention ‘race’.

I suppose we could in theory ‘vote’ ‘in favour of’ genocide or ‘opposed’ to genocide, but the genocide was never put to a vote.  Only the election of a ‘trusted leader’ was put to the vote, and that is a ‘democratic tradition’ that must be respected, right?  It is like one of those software agreements we sign on the internet with ten pages of legalese in it which confounds and confuses more than it informs [though such jargon feigns clarity, the proof that it is not at all clear is that it takes expensive litigation to figure out what, if anything, was violated].  ‘All in favour, tick this box, all opposed, tick that box’, and once you have done your ticking, be respectful of those who are going to unleash the processes you ‘have agreed to’.

The system is ‘not working’! That is, ‘this system does not work; neither ‘on paper’ nor ‘in practice’.  The problem with changing it out has been compared with changing the tires on your car, while you are speeding down the highway in it.

Your ‘Stop Harper’ plea makes sense, and though it would have been even more ‘sacrilegious’, you could have written ‘Stop this Runaway System’, because, as we have seen, there have been many different occupants of the cab on this locomotive and while we can argue over who the less destructive operators were, why do we continue to open ourselves to this exposure, when that locomotive has the power to bear down on everyone in the country and across the Atlantic in Libya and elsewhere?  As you point out, three out of four eligible voters did not support putting Harper into the cab of the locomotive, and, returning to the example of the internet software agreement, how many does that suggest, have carefully examined what one was agreeing to when one ‘ticked the Harper box’?

Can we expect ‘hidden agendas’ on the part of the locomotive operator?

Maybe they are not so ‘hidden’.

It has been long recognized that two of the belief systems that ‘leaders’ [or, rather, 'political-office-power-seekers'] commonly possess are finding their way into the driver’s seat.

1. Religious fundamentalism or ‘purificationism’ is a fairly widespread ‘belief system’; – The approach here is ‘to make the world a better place’ by ‘purification’, to develop a hair trigger in the identification of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and move ever more swiftly to reward/replicate what is ‘good’ and punish/eliminate what is ‘bad’.  There is a problem, of course, in that not everyone has the same definition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.  Many who the ‘elected authorities’ label as ‘bad’ or as ‘kooks’, are themselves labelled by those individuals as ‘bad’ or as ‘kooks’.

2. Neo-Darwinist ‘intellectual elitism’ is another ‘belief system’ that seeks the cab of the locomotive.  This world view is successfully ‘preached’ by evolutionary biologists, scientific atheists [or those who put science before theism] in their attempt to purify the world of religious contamination that threatens to pollute carefully calculated logical models of ‘how to make the world a better place’.  According to evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, we must trust the intellectual elite;

“ It is one of the contradictions of a democratic society in a highly advanced technological world, … to make rational political decisions, you have to have a knowledge which is accessible only to a very few people.”  [Lewontin continues by noting;] “that different people have different interests, and therefore the struggle is not a moral one, its a political one.  It’s always a political one, and that’s the most important thing you have to recognize… that you may be struggling to make the world go in one direction, … [while] somebody else is struggling to make it go in another direction, and the question is; who has power?  And if there’s a differential in power, and if you haven’t got it and they have, then you have to do something to gain power, which is to organize. “

As you point out, Brigette, there is a lot of stuff being done by the operator of the locomotive, ‘in the name of all Canadians’, that we are all supposed to go along with because we must all respect the ‘democratic tradition’.  Well, the original ‘democratic tradition’ that emerged in naturally evolving communities, had little to do with this sort of  ‘democratic process’ which opens the way to fundamentalist purification [reward/replicate ‘good’ and punish/eliminate ‘bad’, and be the definer of what's good' and what's 'bad'], and/or, as Lewontin’s neo-Darwinist world view advocates; ‘organize politically to gain the power to move things in the direction your group wants’.

While we may not have ‘all the answers in hand’, it is fair to say that we are launching runaway locomotives that are transforming the landscape that we all share inclusion in, in a manner that is nothing like the doer-deed political program results that the ‘political-office-power-seekers-aka-’leaders’ are promising. As McLuhan observed, the machinery of doer-deed programs are not where we should be looking.  We should be looking at how the habitat we are included in is being transformed; i.e. the ‘medium of our common living space is the message’;

“Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine [of government] altered our relations to one another and ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. – Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media’

Finally, I felt that your comments on the following video clip from 03:40 to 04:10 were particularly ‘on the mark’;

CTV Interviewer: Are you a member of a political party?

Brigette: No, I’m not a member of any particular political party.  I think that it’s important to get away from only thinking about politics within the realm of parties and politicians.  I think that people have a responsibility, … and people from all walks of life can become engaged in politics and social movements.

CTV Interviewer: … And you took an oath, though, when you joined the Senate [as a page], not to be partisan or whatever.  Do you feel badly about what you did though?

Brigette: I didn’t want to disrespect anybody that I was working with, or any programs.  That wasn’t my intention at all.  I wanted to really show that Harper’s agenda is extremely disrespectful.

Thank you Brigette!

Yours respectfully,

Ted Lumley

Pender Island, B.C.

(parties/celebrations and exchange of best wishes are great, but can’t we trigger them differently?  [and avoid cyclic repetition])

just in case anyone is interested, my dislike of our custom of celebrating birthdays is explained as follows.

a ‘birthday’ is a particular instance of a more general cultural practice, a practice that is driving us nuts and has people out on the streets in protest around the world, including in north america (wisconsin etc.).

the practice (and ‘science’ is the biggest culprit) is to mentally lift things out of the spatial eco-relations that they are inextricably bound up in, … think of them ‘in isolation’, as ‘things-in-themselves’.

when we do this, we pretend that the development of their form (genesis), the organization in their body, and their behaviour, all comes out of ‘themselves’ so that all we need understand their growth, their internal organization and their behaviour, is a reference grid, and a time-clock.

this, in a nutshell, is the ‘sickness’ of western culture.  as nietzsche says, the problem is not that this is ‘total fiction’, which it is, but that we confuse it for ‘reality’.  in other words, it is a ‘useful fiction’ so long as we DON’T confuse it for reality, but we are confusing it for reality and it is pervasive source of social dysfunction.

ok, it is not coincidence that amerindians did NOT celebrate birthdays and did NOT use a noun-and-verb language and did NOT name their children ‘john’ and ‘robert’.

‘running-with-wolves’ is a name that seeks to capture the particular character of child’s inner-outer spatial relations; i.e. his ‘habitat-inhabitant’ relations.

‘john’ is like a letter in our phonetic alphabet.  it is a symbol that means nothing in itself.  our practice is to describe people as ‘things-in-themselves’.  thus, john is male, six feet in height, weight 180 pounds and so on, … but these measured properties of ‘john’ don’t stay the same, so that we keep updating them ‘in time’; at age one year, john was … at age two, etc. etc.

we can ‘celebrate john’s growth and development’, year after year, as if he were a ‘thing-in-itself’.

the amerindians do not see the organism as a ‘thing-in-itself’ and they celebrate the spatial-relational ‘unfolding’; i.e. the child’s emergence, his/her first steps, as we do, and his/her reaching puberty (we don’t), his first successful ‘hunt’ or ‘fishing expedition’.

celebrating the growth and development of an organism or organization ‘over the course of TIME’,  as a ‘thing-in-itself’ diverts our attention from inner-outer relationship development.

nelson mandela was in a cage for 28 years and his growth and development as seen ‘scientifically’, by looking into the cage, year after year, looked pretty typical for a man of his age (he was 72 when he was released from prison).   the ‘tensions’ or ‘potential energy’ that were rising in an inner-outer relational sense, with the people of south africa were continually rising however.  these inner-outer relational tensions cannot be seen by looking at the thing in the cage as if it were a ‘thing-in-itself’.  those tensions, were like the tensions in the earth that engender and earthquake, and when mandela became president four years later and forgave his former captors who many saw as evil white racists, there was a huge bursting forth of harmonious flux, a ‘cause for celebration’ that is inner-outer (habitat-inhabitant) relations based.

insofar as we orient to the ‘TIME-based-growth of a thing-in-itself’, we start to think of people as ‘local things-in-themselves that grow and develop over time’ and that walk about in the world.  that is not realistic and it leads to the difference in the amerindian view that ‘man belongs to the earth’ as compared to the western scientific view that ‘the earth belongs to man’.

modern physics says that material structures are ‘ripple structures in the energy-charged spatial plenum’ while ‘science’ as it is popularly known and practiced, says that material structures are stand-alone things-in-themselves built from atoms.  quantum physicists have written books like ‘Blackfoot Physics’ (F. David Peat) to bring out the point that ‘the amerindians were right’ about ‘man belonging to the earth’, but a 2500 year belief, on the part of western culture, in putting local bits of matter [bits-in-themselves] in (unnatural) precedence over space (energy-charged field-flow plenum) is not going to be quickly over-turned.  meanwhile those crowds in the street in egypt and tunisia and wisconsin have everything to do with that ‘over-turning’ because a top-down law-regulated society stems from those same assumptions as have us believe that an ‘organism’ is a ‘thing-in-itself’.

the celebration of birthdays, is essentially a celebration of the growth of a ‘thing-in-itself’ which tends to elevate this view of the organism over the view of the organism as a ‘ripple in the spatial plenum’ where its essence is inner-outer relational (habitat-inhabitant relational) rather than stand-alone ‘thing-in-itself’ based.

* * *

example of how language bewitches our mind (Wittgenstein) so as to lift things out of their natural inner-outer relations;

1.                                                               2.                                                                 3.

1. what do you see?  while this is a ‘composite’ photo of four contemporaneous hurricanes, i think you would agree that this exemplifies the understanding of ‘things’ as ‘ripples in the energy-charged spatial plenum’ as quantum physics and relativity say applies generally to all physical/material phenomena in the universe.   you would agree that all of these ‘forms’ take form, develop, move and behave under one another’s mutual influence.   that is, it is impossible to REALISTICALLY conceive of these hurricanes as ‘locally existing things-in-themselves’ and undergoing THEIR OWN development of form, movement and behaviour.

2. what do you see?  science lifts out one of these forms and presents it as a ‘thing-in-itself’ (a ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal process-driven behaviour) and presents ITS growth, movement and behavior (intensity) in ‘TIME’ steps as if it were ‘in charge’ of ‘its own growth and development’.  this is like ‘writing its resumé’.  in its first four days of life it did such-and-such, in its next two days it did such and such, and so on, leaving us with the impression IT is a local thing-in-itself that is in charge of its own growth and development.  language bewitches, no?  as john stuart mill said; “every [language-based] definition implies an axiom [unjustified assumption], that in which we affirm the [local, thing-in-itself] existence of the object defined”.

that is, all of the spatial relations the ‘thing’ is bound up in that we see in (1.), that we swear by our intuitive experience that have to be there, are mentally cast aside by our act of defining and word-labelling (e.g. hurricane Ivan) particular ‘forms’.  these forms visibly appear to us to be ‘individual forms’ because of their implied ‘centre’, but the ‘centre’ of a whorl in the flow, is the ‘centre-of-experience’ of the dynamics of thermal and pressure fields, it is not the ‘centre-of-doing’.  the whorl, as with the human organism, is more like a sailboat (deriving its power and steerage from the spatial-flow-plenum it is included in) than a powerboat (having its own inboard power and steerage).

3. what do you see?  science presents the apple-seed to apple-tree life-cycle as a ‘system-in-itself’, as a ‘system in a cage’, the cage being the reference grid that allows us to measure the changing form, movement and behaviour, as if it were a ‘system-in-itself’; i.e. wherein the habitat does not participate.  Aristotle used this same notion, picking the ‘acorn-to-oak-tree’ example.

in this ‘scientific’ view of the ‘evolution’ of a particular species, as ‘local system-in-itself’, there goes all sight of ‘ecosystems’, coevolving (in-the-continuing-present).  that is, there goes from our mind and attention, all the webs of relationships within which the acorn-oak-tree is just one of the locally visible transforming systems.  from this we get the over-simplistic notion of Darwinism.   Darwinism depends on the notion that something ‘internal’ in the organism is responsible for determining the ‘form’ of the organism, but this notion has been refuted by stem-cell and other biological research which shows that identically-the-same DNA is implemented in different ways depending on ‘signals from the environment’; i.e. if the same stem cells are put into three different petri dishes with different solutions in them, the same DNA will be implemented into ‘muscle cells’, ‘fat cells’ and/or ‘bone cells’.  DNA (genes) are blueprints that do not ‘self-implement’, they are implemented by ‘signals from the environment’.  a growing minority of biological researchers thus saying that darwinism is an over-simplistic view that has to go, but entrenched views resist.

* * *

so, there you go, celebrating members of an ecosystem on the basis of their distinctive forms and appearance, and casting from our mind their inherent ecosystemic relations (their inclusion in a coevolving collective), comes from imputing ‘local thing-in-itself’ being to the form/organism/organization and using a sequence of time snapshots (birthdays) to capture a view of it in the fictional terms of ‘its own growth and development life-cycle’

that’s why i don’t like the ‘custom’ of ‘celebrating birthdays’,… the parties and the inner-outer relations that associate with them are great, … we just need to reorient the celebrations to inner-outer unfolding developments, rather than to the hands on the clock having gone ‘round one more time.

for a more comprehensive view into this way that our culture is distorting our views of space and matter see http://goodshare.org/wp/rant/

natural curiousity suppressed by cultural imprinting?

Preface/Introduction:

I would be happy if my grandchildren and all of the children of the rising generations, would have good access to hearing about ‘another worldview’, ‘another way of understanding’ and ‘another way of carrying oneself in the world dynamic’.   The crowd that inhabits the surface of the earth has more staying power than people it is composed of, who rise up into it, stay for a while, then decline and are regathered within nature.  This ‘crowd dynamic’ is not something each new generation is the causal producer of.  We come in as innocents in the manner that one enters into a skipping rope, if you don’t get your behaviour attuned to what is already going on, you will be ‘run over’ by a truck, not just a rope.

What I understand today is so far away from the ‘stories’ that were used to shape me in my youth, and the evolved versions that are being used to shape those growing up today, that I now  look upon anarchists, and political extremists as ‘part of the establishment’ (i.e. as being limited in their ideas in the same way as ‘the establishment’)  My eyes glaze over when I read Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent) though not so much for Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the US).   While I agree that the media feeds us propaganda, that in turn shapes whether we shall have war or peace or continue to support free-market capitalism, Zinn goes deeper than questions such as ‘Is the US justified in its action, or is Iraq justified in its action?’.  Zinn questions the legitimacy of the ‘sovereign state’ as the primary instrument of order in the world, and I too believe that our cosmology must have within it, a perspective on the wisdom of instituting sovereign states and property ownership (the foundation of the sovereign state) as our dominant mode of social organization.

Zinn says;

“What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor—inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing— permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own.  I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.  Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”  – Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States’.

As we do our thing, children around the world are being raised and educated not only without questioning the wisdom of organizing on the basis of ‘sovereign states’, but as Zinn notes, they are being inculcated with nationalistic fervor.

How old should a child be, before one can share with him philosophical awareness?  Certainly, the local brand of philosophy is being infused into her by the skipping rope technique.  If he doesn’t get in step, he is in trouble, and by getting in step, he is ‘walking the philosophical talk’ of the present day culture he is inextricably, mercilessly situationally included in (his/her situation may be that of a poor family in a rich man’s world, a black race in a white man’s world, a female in a man’s world).  He has no choice but to ‘take his place’ or ‘make his place’ in such a situation.

How does one share with a child, as he/she is going to school and ‘pledging allegiance to the flag’, one’s concern for the downside of sovereigntism as noted by Zinn and articulated by Einstein in the terms that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of the world.’?

We ‘sign off’ on giving permission to ‘the educational system’ to give our children a high pressure infusion of suspect philosophy, without having equipped him in advance to critically reflect on what he is being ‘fed’.

He knows ‘we love him’ and wouldn’t intentionally do him any harm, so he trusts what we have authorized others to infuse in him and thus to shape who he is, prior to his having developed his own powers of philosophical critique.

We do this because we want him to be able to ‘get along in the world as it is’.  Of course this is what is perpetuating ‘the world as it is’, with all its faults, and it does more than this, it sets him on a course that he is later highly likely to question the wisdom of.

Now, Noam Chomsky can argue that ‘an elite concensus has control over the mass media’ so that ‘dissidents are marginalized’ and ‘consent is manufactured by the elite’ to, for example, take the country to war in Vietnam and Iraq’.   But such a proposition, however true, passes right over Einstein’s above-cited proposition; i.e. who says it is a good idea to have countries?

We have communities and these communities can span a continent and involve a global web of relations.  We have ‘nations’ such as the Iroquois nation which had five different ‘peoples/tribes’ who, together, had developed a ‘constitution’ called ‘The Great Peace’ or ‘The Great Harmony’ and we have nations within nations as in Canada whose Parliament has declared “That this House recognizes that the Québécois form a nation [a group of people who share culture, ethnicity and language] within a united Canada.”

The ‘sovereign state’ is an 16^th century ‘secularized theological concept’ that should not be confused with ‘nation’ and ‘community’.   Law historians see it as the inevitable device born to facilitate European colonial expansion into Africa, the Americas and the world.  (See D’Errico et al at http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/nowyouseeit.html )

So, Zinn deepens the inquiry as Einstein does and as John Lennon does in ‘Imagine’ (‘Imagine there’s no countries. / It isn’t hard to do. / … You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one/)

In mentally lifting those sovereign state boundaries that were used as a colonizing device to seize and declare ownership of land, the nations and communities don’t go away, but as Zinn suggests, without thinking of the borders and the nationalism, there is more of a tendency to think of the children of the world as ‘our children’ even while we are in dispute with their parents, as may happen within the community/nation.  Why should men destroy the children of those adults we are in dispute with by bombing their cities and burning their villages?

There are some clues here as to the different foundations of the different cultures that the child within our culture never gets to see, or to receive teaching on.

White children kidnapped by the Indians were accorded the full rights of any child within their indian community, while Indian children kidnapped by Whites were often treated as slaves or as second class citizens.  By living with the Indians, the kidnapped white children overcame the stereotypes of Indians given to them by their white parents and came to see individual Indians as ‘individuals’ with distinct and complex characters.   For those of us who have lived with other cultures, even as adults, the cultural/ethnic/racial stereotypes similarly give way and we see them as richly complex individuals.  Since the public is prone to media stereotyping and since many people, including school teachers, have not lived within other cultures, the potential for cultivating (from early childhood on) mass beliefs that ‘we are better than you’  is large.

Amerindians were ‘stateless’ people who believed that ‘man belongs to the earth, the earth does not belong to man’.  They believed that we are all strands in the common web-of-life and thus they have the expression ‘Mitakuye oyasin’, meaning ‘we are all related’ or ‘all my relatives’ (including ‘grandfather’ [the whole ball of wax]).  If we are all strands in a mutually interdependent web-of-life then the contention that ‘one is better than the other’ doesn’t make a lot of sense.  This opens the door to a critical questioning of what ‘morality’ means in our culture and in others.

When should our children be allowed to reflect on the underpinnings of the notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’?  On the scale that ranges from ‘good’ to ‘evil’ where shall we plot those of the ‘civilized’ European races, and where shall we plot ‘the aboriginal savages’?

Does ‘good’ and ‘evil’ apply to people, or does it merely apply to ‘behaviour’.  Can ‘good people’ like the white colonizers who treated captured Indian children like slaves score higher on the ‘good-to-evil’ index than those ‘bad-assed Indians’ who treated captured white children as full brothers?

Morality and ethics are a complex topic.  The notion of ‘absolute good’ and ‘absolute evil’ were embraced in the western European culture but not in the Amerindian culture.  The western child may be taught that ‘stealing’ is always ‘bad’ and that those who steal must be punished, but soon he will be introduced to ‘Robin Hood’ and to ‘Jean Valjean’ who appear to be ‘good men’ in spite of their ‘bad behaviour’, a topic which would naturally lead to reflection on ‘property ownership’ (an unknown concept to Amerindians who had no words for it in their language before the colonizers arrived).  Do we open the door for our children to question ‘property ownership’?  Someone might then say they have ‘Marxists’ or ‘Communists’ for teachers, forgetting that the Amerindian cultural tradition is another way of understanding how to organize the social dynamic without dependency on ‘property ownership’.   Borrowing the land from the ‘not-yet’ (the unfolding living-space dynamic) or from the grandchildren-still waiting in the earth for their turn at life,  and committing to return it to them in good shape (by ‘treading lightly upon it’) is radically different from seeing the land as something local that can be exploited as the ‘owner’ pleases.

Returning to ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the Amerindians thought in terms of ‘evil spirits’ while our European culture would scoff at that.  But we have all seen our brothers get in a rage where the person-object of their rage is at the point of being injured or killed by them, where we have to intervene and ‘pull them off’ and impose a ‘cooling off period’ on them.  The difference between an evil person, one who we let kill another person, and a ‘good person’, the person he normally is, may be ‘us’.  Our behaviours are orchestrated by invisible tensions in our living space.  Our western culture denies the ‘reality’ of these tensions, saying that it is all ‘in our heads’.  Whatever.  The point is that these tensions orchestrate our individual and collective behaviour regardless.  They are like the spatial-relational tensions that build in a pile of sand where grains are being continually added to its crest.  The sand-grain collective will experience spatial ‘tensions’ that can build and they won’t always be able to ‘keep it all together’ and periodically, there will be a tension-relieving ‘avalanche’ or ‘revolution’ that will balance things out that were getting way out of balance.  [For a quiz on views on 'invisible tensions' see 'Humility Quiz: How Humble Are You?'.

People are like this.  We experience tensions and there are many expressions such as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ that suggest the tensions are real and that behaviour isn’t all ‘born within us’ as in our biological science model of the human organism as a ‘local system with its own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose driven behaviour that interacts with other such local systems within an absolute fixed and otherwise empty operating space.’ This view ignores our real-life experience wherein the dynamics of space we are included in orchestrate our individual and collective behaviours.  If the spring and fall began to shift, everyone would follow them as they shifted, no intellect and purpose drives are needed.  When the reindeer shift in search of the exposed lichen which the climate and the season have shifted, the Nenet people shift with the reindeer, no intellect and purpose drives are needed.

There is evidently quite an inventory of philosophical concepts that it would be wise to reflect critically on prior to embracing them, yet we authorize our children’s teachers to infuse into our childrens minds, those which have been RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY  (i.e. WiSELY OR FOOLISHLY) woven into our present day culture (e.g. nationalism/sovereigntism, the relative superiority of different races and cultures [civilized and savage], the judgement of people as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on their ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour’, the notion that the local organism has its own locally originating behaviour, and so on).

Everything I have spoken about thus far could be brought together in the question; ‘Do invisible spirits really exist?’ (is ‘field’ in a natural precedence over material objects?)

As a ‘scientist’ (science-oriented person) myself, I fully accept that ‘invisible tensions really exist’ and that they really do influence form, behaviour and organization in physical phenomena.  We can call them ‘fields’ rather than ‘spirits’ but in any case, they are invisible and nonlocal and they really do exist and they are upstream from ‘local material systems’ in the sourcing of the dynamics that are visible to us.  We can ‘feel them’; e.g. we can feel the acceleration of gravity, particularly when the trap-door opens beneath our feet, or we are at the highest point of swing on a playground swing or seesaw.  At the moment that our experiencing of acceleration is most intense, we are not even moving, but are only about to move (movement follows acceleration with a phase lag).

That is, what is ‘visible’ to us are material bodies and their movement and interactions.  When little Johnnie gets up and kicks the teacher in the testicles,  and the school authorities pronounce him to be an ‘evil child’, as a ‘scientist’, I understand that this fits the simplest model of the human organism as a ‘local system with its own locally originating, intellect-and purpose-directed behaviour’.   If we make note that little Johnnie was repeatedly humiliated by the teacher, we have the problem that ‘humiliation’ is not directly visible.  It is something invisible that we nevertheless ‘experience.’

But is it ‘real’ or ‘just in little Johnnie’s head’?

As a science-oriented person, I have learned the difference between thinking in terms of logic that governs logical objects, and understanding that our experience only ACTUALLY occurs within the spatial-relational dynamics of our living space.  We have all seen or heard of cases where men will take control of the food and money and use the power that this gives them, to extract sexual favours from starving women with starving babies.  This picture goes beyond the logical model that we teach to our children, wherein we understand people to be;

‘local systems with their own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose driven behaviour that interact with other such local systems within an absolute fixed and otherwise empty operating space.’

What is the difference?

In the logical model, the behaviour of each person derives entirely from the interior of each person, from their intellection [rational thinking] and from their ‘intention’.

In their REAL EXPERIENCE, the space is no longer ‘absolute, fixed and empty’.  The space of our real-life experience is nothing like the abstract space of this logical model.

We are back to the Amerindian belief system wherein there is this opposite way of viewing the same thing; ‘man belongs to the land’, ‘the land belongs to man’.

That is, man’s behaviour, IN ACTUALITY (in reality), is orchestrated by the dynamics of his living space, the diurnal cycles, the seasons, the season for planting and the season for harvesting.  It is insane to believe that these behaviours are ‘locally originating within man’.  They originate within the dynamics of space, the same dynamics that ‘originated man’.  As Emerson says in ‘The Method of Nature’, ‘nature not only inhabits the organism, it creates it’.

The sidewinder rattlesnake will die in about ten minutes if it stays in the hot sun.  Shall we stick with our model of the organism as a local system and say that it is the snake’s intellect and purpose that directs its behaviour so that this almost never happens?  Or would it be more realistic to assume that the snake is included in the dynamic living space of nature as the Amerindians would have it, … in the manner that the hurricane is included in the flow of the atmosphere?

Who split the snake apart from the dynamic nature-space it emerged into and re-rendered it in the notional, logical terms of a ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal process-directed behaviour?’

We  did.  It is just a model, it is not ‘reality’.  That is Nietzsche’s point and Schroedinger’s and Emerson’s and Poincaré’s.  Nietzsche calls this simple logico-scientific ‘local system’ view ‘a useful fiction’.

Are our children’s teachers teaching our children that this model of the organism is ‘reality’?  Yes (in many cases) they are.  If the teachers are Darwinist (Dawkins, Crick etc.) then they are teaching our children that organisms are ‘machines’ (‘local systems etc. as discussed above).

Am I surprised that some religious people are pissed off by this, the removal of ‘spirit’ from the scientific view that they are infusing into children?

No, I’m not surprised, the removal of ‘spirit’ doesn’t make sense, but this doesn’t mean that the only alternative is to go to ‘Creationism’ or ‘monotheism’, there is also Emerson, Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rolph, all of whom have models in which there is no need to split out the ‘organism’ from the ‘environment’ or in more general terms, the ‘inhabitant’ from the ‘habitat’ (which is ultimately invisible, nonlocal energy-field-flow based).  Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity can be stated; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

To split the organisms out of the dynamic living space is a logical operation and to present it as ‘reality’ is insanity that is sometimes termed ‘fundamentalism’.

To return to the starving mother with her starving babes who is forced to give sexual favours in exchange for access to the products of the living space (food), shall we do as we did with the rattlesnake and credit her intellect and purpose as being the full and sole driver of her behaviour?  Because that is the only place to go to explain it when we accept the logical model of the organism which, being an absolutism in itself, lives in absolute space.  That is, should we understand the mother to be;

‘a local system with its own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose driven behaviour that interacts with other such local systems within an absolute fixed and otherwise empty operating space.’

Space is NOT a participant in this logical architecture, rather, the space in this logical architecture is ABSOLUTE, FIXED and EMPTY; i.e. it is a logical space, the most simple of geometric spaces called Euclidian space.  But science will also admit that it often ‘chooses not that which is most true but that which is most easy’ (Kepler), and in fact, science provides more comprehensive views as well which make clear that SPACE IS A PARTICIPANT IN PHYSICAL PHENOMENA.  For the record;

‘Space is not Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty.”…”Relativity forces us to analyze the role played by geometry in the description of the physical world.” . . . “A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone” —Einstein.

“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . Henri Poincaré,  ’Science and Hypothesis’.”

I am not saying that we should teach our children the theory of relativity in kindergarten, what I am saying is that we should NOT teach our children that people are machines, and that is what Darwinism does, and that is what the biological sciences do, as well, and we can collect lots of quotes from Nobel scientists like Crick et al who declare the human organism is a machine made out of meat.

This not only informs our children that they, as a human organism, are split apart from the world they live in, it tells them to understand that the behaviour of any person derives fully and solely from their internal processes, from their internal intellect and purpose and/or instinct.

If we believe this, then we believe Jean Valjean’s theft of a loaf of bread is fully explained by the processes that go on inside of Jean Valjean.  It says that the judge and the prosecutor and inspector Javert are correct in their unspoken contention that they themselves, and the Royalty and the rich have nothing to do with it.

But had the teacher gone with ‘relativity’, she would have had to point out that “the dynamics of the people that inhabit the living space are conditioning the dynamics of the living space at the same time as the dynamics of the living space are conditioning the dynamics of the people that inhabit the living space.” Matter is not split apart from space, space is an energy-charged medium in which ‘matter’ is a relative concentration of energy that happens to reflect light and thus be visible to us.  Space is to matter as the flow of the atmosphere is to the storm-cell.  They are not two different things.  As Carlo Rovelli (and Lee Smolin) say in ‘Quantum Gravity’;

“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”   — Carlo Rovelli, in ‘Quantum Gravity’

All organisms, we say, ‘go looking for food’.  But it would be more accurate to say that the organism/inhabitant and environment/habitat are in ‘conjugate relation’; i.e. they are not two mutually exclusive things as the abstract logic we choose (for reasons of simplicity and convenience) to model with would imply.  As Wittgenstein says, logical absoluteness (the crystalline purity of logic) is not the result of our inquiry into nature, it is the requirement that we impose going in.

In this way of understanding our relationship with the world, space becomes the primary medium from whence things gather and into which things are regathered.  Just because this energy-charged field-flow called ‘space’ is invisible and nonlocal doesn’t mean that it is not ‘real’.  Just because the satellite photo of a hurricane shows this white-cloud pinwheel thing in a clear (invisible) atmospheric flow doesn’t meant the invisible, nonlocal flow of the atmosphere is not the ‘greater reality’.

That space is a full player in physical phenomena was the reason that I included the above comments on ‘space’ by Einstein and Poincaré (Poincaré stating that Euclidian space, the space upon which our machine model of the organism depends, is NOT real; i.e. it is nothing like the ‘space of our experience’).

If our justice system were to acknowledge that space is a participant in physical phenomena then the door would be opened to discussing what we already know, that some people manipulate the spatial-dynamics so that they can manipulate the behaviour of others such as the starving mother.  So long as the justice system stays founded on the notion that organisms are separate local machines, disconnected from the living space, whose behaviour is fully and solely driven from their local internal processes (intellect and purpose), then the starving mother is going to be judged the criminal (prostitute) and the men whom she ‘offers her services to’ are going to be judged ‘innocent’ because there is no acknowledging in the law, that ‘space is a participant in physical phenomena’ and thus there is no way for the justice system to bring out the reality that men are manipulating the dynamics of our common living space in order to manipulate the dynamics of their sisters who share inclusion in that common living space.  As far as the justice system is concerned, space is absolute, fixed and empty and inhabited by local systems that are fully and solely responsible for their own local behaviours.

So, this has been a rather long ‘Introduction’ to ‘Cosmology for Kids’ but I hope it has been able to bring out into the clear view of day, the general proposition, that we are infusing some dangerous and damaging philosophical concepts into the minds of our children when their minds and understanding are in their most malleable and impressionable phase.  We are, in effect, using our parental love (our kids trust their teachers because they love us and we ask them to listen to their teachers) for ‘imprinting’ our children with social dysfunction-breeding ‘understandings’.

All of the foundational philosophical issues discussed here tie back to this very basic notion of how we relate to the evolving universe.  Are we included in it in the manner that the storm-cell is included in the flow of the atmosphere, or are we separated from the universe because we are ‘local systems with our own locally originating behaviour that act/interact in an absolute fixed and empty operating theatre’ (Euclidian space)?

The problem is that we are confusing our logical models that split apart the habitat from the inhabitant, the subject from the object, FOR REALITY.   Our logical models are confused for reality in the case of ‘sovereigntism’, in the case of our justice system, in the case of our fundamentalist judging of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as originating in the individual etc.

Talk of the ‘spirit world’ and ‘evil spirits’ is not superstition but signals a more realistic understanding of the world than one in the logical terms of local material systems bumper-carring along in absolute fixed and empty (Euclidian) space.   (for ‘spirit world’ substitute ‘field’)

An ‘adult’ discussion of these philosophical concepts can be accessed at ‘Nietzsche vs. Darwin: Becoming vs. Being’

But what about the kids?

The first step would appear to be to back off on the psychological imprinting that they are getting.  While they can’t all be sent to live with Amerindian traditionalists (which has decreased down to less than 5% of the Amerindian population according to some Amerindian traditionalists), they could be given parallel exposure to the sorts of things the Amerindian traditionalists expose their children to.

Meanwhile, this issue (Vol I, No. 1)  of Cosmology for Kids is pretty long, already, so it will be for the later issues to explore how to give children access to parallel understanding on the topic of the world and self; i.e. to liberate them from our current practice that, for the most part, gives them access only to that worldview in which man is one of the ‘local systems’ amongst the diverse multitude that inhabit an absolute fixed and empty operating space, and allow them to sample also, the philosophy in which the universe is a dynamic Unity wherein man is a blossoming of creative potentiality in conjugate relation with an opening of spatial possibility.

* * *

My suggestion is, that if you have time and energy to continue this discussion (i hope you do), we should take it offline as we may be going places that others on the list, besides Yvonne, are not interested in going, or do not currently have time for.  Thus I have posted this same reply to you at the URL just below, and if you reply to me there, anyone on this list who is interested can participate in the continuing discussion via the forum software there.

http://goodshare.org/wp/discussions-on-the-economy-of-thought-continued-from-distribution-list/

You miss my intended meaning of ‘field’, as in your statement;

“In your ‘field’ approach which is Heideggerian, all swim in the same pool and so individual take on things dont matter. What matters is the Nation which translates to nationalism as a ‘field’.”

There can be no ‘nationalism’ without ‘common belief in the local existence of the ‘nation’.  There are no ‘local objects’ in a fluid-dynamic worldview (energy-field-flow worldview) other than those we create by superimposing word-based definitions and name-labels on the flow-features that attract the anthropocentric focus of our observational attention.   In this energy-field-flow view, the ‘nation’ does not exist (it is a idealization that depends solely on ‘common belief’ and ‘the force to back it up and ‘make believers out of others’’).  Thus, the ‘field of nationalism’ is certainly not the sort of field I am talking about.  I am with Einstein when he says; ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, it is the measles of mankind’.

In my view of ‘field’, the individual ‘x’ is unique virtue of being a whorl in the energy-field-flow that is uniquely situationally included within the energy-field-flow.  In this case, as in transfigural mathematics, there can be many different ‘x’ s arising from their unique and particular situational inclusion in the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding energy-field-flow aka ‘spacetime continuum’.

You say, in a similar fashion;

“In transfigural geometry we have different structures of space and so, let any thing be x, there are different types of the same x. And so, you have X for all types of x which are local in the X that is nonlocal. I agree that the space of physics is not as developed as I showed in transfigural geometry and so for this reason it is possible to lump all into holistic one with the result that ONE is lost in ALL. “

What I see as being a difference yet to be resolved (if it is possible) between my view and yours, is that i relate the difference between the x’s NOT to their behaviour but to their consciousness.  The ‘three body problem’ says that no individual x has a behaviour-of-its-own (when three or more x’s move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, there is no solution for the behaviour of a particular ‘x’.  But what I am saying is that each ‘x’ DOES HAVE a unique consciousness that ties to their unique situational inclusion in the dynamic world-space.

So, each ‘x’ has its own consciousness but not its own behaviour.  And our consciousness gives us direction that transcends our language based imposing of identity on APPARENTLY LOCAL entities such as ‘other x’s’.   I say ‘apparently local’ because while the visible material motion appears to be local, it is not ‘coming from the x’s; i..e. it is not locally originating, internal process driven behaviour.  As we know, as an individual ‘x’, we can let our behaviour be shaped by the dynamics of space we are uniquely situationally included in, putting our movements in the service of sustaining harmonious flow.  We will swerve for the rabbit and the lamb and the tortoise and for our brother humans so that the flow will be sustained in a harmonious fashion.  When we are swerving for one another (moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence) the notion of ‘our own behaviour’ loses all meaning, but not so our own consciousness.  Our consciousness that is at the helm as we seek to sustain harmony in the flow we are included in, keys to spatial-relations rather than to ‘local things and their movements.  Our consciousness orients to an awareness of spatial openings that represent possibility for us to move and act, and the particular identities of the objects that line the ever-transforming borders of the spatial openings are secondary.  Likewise, our consciousness informs us that the guy stuck behind the truck in the slow lane would love to have a spatial opening, open up for him so that he would have the possibility to move on and do his thing, so by letting our own movement be such as to open up a ‘bubble’ to possibilitize some action on his part, we are conscious of our facilitating harmony in the spatial relational flow we share inclusion in.

We, as one of these ‘x’s, … do not have ‘our own behaviour’ but we do have our own consciousness which derives from our unique and particular inclusion in the spatial relational energy-field-flow dynamic.

So, as you know, this question of ‘consciousness’ is what the physicists developing the ‘new physics’ (relativity, quantum wave dynamics) bumped into, and so while physics per se does not itself supply the needed richness, physics, being ‘our creation’, has balked and spoken back to us (Copenhagen non-accord [since schroedinger has never agreed]) saying to us; “Boss, i have gone as far as i can, now its time for you to speak to how you fit into the scheme of it all”.

That is, ‘physics per se’ does not inform us as to whether our consciousness should belong to the space-time continuum or to the emergent features, x’s, the gather and are regathered within it.  My view is that it makes sense to associate consciousness with the energy-field-flow or space-time continuum.

So, I am not sure how consistent this is with your view (transfigural mathematics) as I suspect the same ‘question’ of ‘consciousness’ pops up there, too.  In your following statement there is large agreement re the spatial-situational distinction between the x’s but, once again, you have missed my intended meaning of ‘field’.  In my ‘fluid-dynamic worldview’, ‘field’ is the spatial-relational motive influence immanent in spatial-relation transformation, the ‘real’ world of our experience;

“What transfigural geometry is saying about different structures of space that are different and same as a result of which figures which they include are same and different….is demonstrated clearly in cultural space. Cultural space are spaces in space and these spaces condition what is in them as what is in them condition these spaces. And so cultural spaces are spaces within spaces. In physics, we haven’t this kind of richness of space simply because the mathematics that produced the geometries are not other-inclusive in their foundations in the sense of the voice of one being important and audible in the all and the all having its stamp in every one. The concept of ‘field’ is inadequate for the spaces within spaces, figures within figures and spaces in figures and figures in spaces of space … which results in the diversity of one inside and through the ground and the ur-ground as obtains, amongst others, in transfigural geometry of TfM.”

For me, ‘figures’ are what we create using language based definitions and name-labels.  They are not ‘real’ IN THE SENSE THAT THE WORDS INSIST; I.E. THAT THEY ARE LOCAL, INDEPENDENTLY EXISTING ENTITIES WITH THEIR OWN BEHAVIOUR.  the whorl in the flow we call Katrina (a ‘hurricane’) is certainly ‘real’ as a ‘whorl-in-the-flow’ but it is not real as a ‘figure’, as a ‘local figure’ in the manner we personify it and impute to it ‘its own local behaviour’.

From whence does its behaviour derive?  In my view from the invisible nonlocal influence that is always immanent in the world dynamic, the tensional field that precedes the earthquake (we see the earthquake and the tsunami but not the invisible, nonlocal tensional fields that spawned them).  As Wittgenstein said (if not Heraclitus) “alles fliesst’ (everything is flux).and thus there is nothing ‘local’ to impute local force to.   Local force is a useful abstraction to cut into the flow and make things appear to have local beginnings, … but it is nevertheless an abstraction/idealization that should not be confused for reality.

My interest is thus in seeing whether it is possible to make a mapping between ‘figures-in-space’ as in ‘transfigural mathematics’ and ‘figures in space’ as in ‘hurricanes in the common flow’, since in my view the ‘figures’ are not ‘real’, they are artefacts of our rationalizing intellection, while the flow is real (we can feel our inclusion in it)..  in a ‘fluid-dynamic worldview’, one cannot impute persisting ‘identity’ to a local flow-feature.  the local flow-feature, insofar as it is ‘local’,  is the imposition of our mind which we concretized by our imposing of language-based definitions and name-labels.  This is not to say that ‘there is nothing there’, but it is to say that ‘there is nothing local there’; i.e. ‘there is no locally existing thing with its own behaviour’ there, what is there is a feature gathering in the energy-field-flow that attracts our anthropocentric interests (our conscious reflection ignore the flow features called viruses and it ignores the spiralling flow-features called galaxies because of our limited observational spectrum [wave-length/period]).  ‘Figures’ as in ‘the invariable solids of geometry’ are abstractions that have no FOUNDATIONAL place in an energy-field-flow or fluid-dynamic but they are useful and convenient for our modeling of the world dynamic in that we can impose them over transient flow features such as the material aspect of human organisms so that we can ‘objectify’ these flow-features and treat them as ‘real figures’ with ‘their own behaviour’ when all that they can rightly claim as ‘theirs’ is their ‘consciousness’, ‘their’ material bodies and ‘their’ behaviour’ not being ‘theirs’ but being spatial-relational flow-features within the ceaselessly innovatively unfolding fluid-dynamic world continuum.

Again, ‘field’ is a word that I use to describe the sourcing of the world understood as spatial-relational transformation that has no dependency on ‘local figures’.  I refer to that sourcing as ‘energy-field-flow’ which seems to map into the ‘new physics’.  The ‘figures’ that we observe, I agree with Schroedinger are ‘appearances’ (transient flow-forms that we objectify as locally existing and that we endow with ‘local behaviour’ for the convenience that comes from re-rendering the world dynamic in this way, as if it arose from locally existing things, their behaviours and their interactions, rather than acknowledging the deeper foundations of dynamics in terms of energy-field-flow (the fluid-dynamic worldview).  So, where you say;

The concept of ‘field’ is inadequate for the spaces within spaces, figures within figures and spaces in figures and figures in spaces of space … which results in the diversity of one inside and through the ground and the ur-ground as obtains, amongst others, in transfigural geometry of TfM.”

… You essentially ground this view in terms of the ‘reality’ of local figures, while I move the grounding back upstream to ‘consciousness’ which creates these local figures from out of the energy-field-flow continuum in which they are ‘flow-features of anthropocentric interest to us..

* * *

One additional note, on another offline thread to this discussion, there is this suggestion, as in Mach’s economy of thought, that all instruction manuals can be thrown away after we have written them, so that the understanding that produced them is ‘the keeper’ and the economy of thought that characterizes their rules and principles is a tool of convenience for us that we should not confuse for ‘understanding’ but which could be picked up as knowledge by those who have not achieved the understanding necessary to develop the rules and principles (e.g. TfM) in the first place.  This, I believe, relates to our discussion on TfM because the understanding needed to develop TfM is where the student wants to get to, and it appears to me that that understanding is what is under discussion at the moment.

regards,

ted

[email addresses removed]

Ted,

lere,

yes, i understand your critique of fuzzy logic and it takes me back to my motivation to show the picture with the four hurricanes so as to consider the dynamic relationships of multiple dynamic figures within a common ground-flow, because when we consider a single figure within a common ground, the logical contention that develops in our mind.  e.g. if we are an astronaut observing the rotation of the earth is the apparent rotation because the earth is moving or because we, the observer, are moving).  we can say that ‘both are true’ (it is a fuzzy question) since if we put ourselves in a polar orbit like the GPS satellites, the polar ice caps will be rotating around an ‘axis’ through the plane of the earth’s equator, the view being like that of a dancer doing a pirouette, a dancer that has one breast growing forward from her chest and the other breast growing backwards out of her back.

clearly it is not about ‘man’ versus ‘space’ and which of us is doing ‘most’ of the moving, as fuzzy logic would have it.

resolution comes when we expand the scope of our inquiry to acknowledge that both our ‘self’ and the earth are inextricably situationally included in some more complicated dynamic wherein many things are moving under one-another’s simultaneous mutual influence.  as far as conventional mathematics goes, this takes me into the three-body problem wherein there are no solutions that resolve the dynamic into the respective contributions of the individual participants, therefore we cannot think in terms of the influence that sources the dynamic as coming from the individuals, the influence sourcing the dynamics must be coming from ‘beyond the individuals’ and for this, in physics, we have the concept of ‘field’.

so, at this point, i am thinking that your tranfigural mathematics must provide solutions to the three body problem in some meaningful way, although my mathematical aptitudes are not developed to the point that i can yet understand your transfigural mathematics.

meanwhile my inquisitive energies don’t just stop when they hit the ‘three body problem’ since i have no problem in acknowledging ‘field’ as being a deeper source of dynamics than ‘local things’.  my life experience screams out at me that it is the tensions that develop amongst people that is the sourcing influence of behaviour, just as it is the tensions amongst sandgrains that is the sourcing influence of avalanches, and the gravitational field as in ‘relativity’ that sources the movements of many more than ‘three’ bodies that appear to move under each other’s simultaneous mutual influence, such coordinated action not coming from the material bodies themselves, but from the same source as created them, the resonant energy charged field-flow.

how shocking it would be, but only for we have have been subscribing to our western model of our ‘self’ as a local organism with its own locally originating intellect-and-intention-directed behaviour, to face up to the fact that such (absolute) motion does not exist and that our motion is shaped by the dynamics of space that we share inclusion in and that the coordination amongst things that develops naturally (e.g. ecosystems, food webs) within this common space derives NOT from the diverse multiplicity of objects/organisms, but from a deeper substrate, ‘field’, so that we would have to see ourselves as gathering of energy within the field, in the manner of the hurricane or the flow-torus which resembles the lines of force that surround a magnet, giving us a sense of something real, but something which is INVISIBLE and NONLOCAL but which we acknowledge is a real shaping influence on the form, behaviour and organization of tangible things.   relativity and quantum physics takes us farther (following faraday and maxwell’s lead in e/m field theory) and says that the apparent coordination of the planets and of material bodies in general comes from the fact that not only does ‘field’ bring material bodies together and take material bodies apart BUT IT MAKES THESE MATERIAL BODIES (they are the gathering of energy in the fields).

it wouldn't be a shock if a child were brought up with this understanding, it would make a lot more sense than these notions that we are capable of 'absolute motion', that our existence is local (absolute) and our behaviour is locally originating (absolute) from within the interior of our self, and notionally 'intellect and purpose' directed (and biochemically powered).

i must confess that i find the western model so ‘full of bullshit’ i really cannot fathom how such ‘logic’ can continue to sustain itself within our culture.   when i was a pre-school child in the family home, i fell the tensions that served as the spatial boundaries for my behaviour.  the tensions (including the persisting threat of punishment) that surrounded the cookie jar, for example.  these tensions were ‘spatial’ and they did not FULLY determine my behaviour but they put limits on my behaviour, kind of like an inverse square law in field strength (and in musical harmonies [Pythagorus]).  the force field persisted around the cookie jar even when my parents were far from the house.

it is convenient to say that my intellect was directing my behaviour, … isn’t that what one would have to say if one’s model of the self were a ‘local system with locally originating, intellect-and-intention-directed behaviour, that moved about absolutely and interacted with others in an absolute fixed and empty space?

so, no matter what my behaviour is, this trick of blaming the intellect and the intention always ‘works’, … even when it gets bloody obvious that the dynamics of space that we are situationally included in is shaping our form, behaviour and organization.  the ‘V’ flying formation of the wildgeese flock is not intellection and intention directed behaviour!  if it were, we wouldn’t even have to mention ‘air’ and ‘airflow’ and ‘turbulent airflow’ and ‘resonances that arise between/amongst the dynamics of inhabitants of the airflow and the dynamics of the airflow (habitat).  we can merely attribute the ‘V’ formation to those ‘local systems/organisms notionally equipped with their own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose-directed behaviours.  their organization is thus ‘fully theirs’, deriving from their purposeful actions.

this is bullshit.  the logic that this model is built from (A ≠ not.A ; matter ≠ space) may be fine logic indeed but propositions based on it DO NOT MAP INTO OUR REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE.  our real-life experience is one of inextricable inclusion within a spatial-relational dynamic that can burn our ass, freeze us, blow us around, submerge us etc. etc.  this we know from our experience, how the hell, then, do we sustain belief in our self as a local system with its own locally originating intellect and purpose-directed behaviour?

do we assume fuzzy logic, that our behaviour derives, at the same time, from internal sourcing (intellect and purpose) and from the spatial relational dynamics we are included in (the tornado, the tsunami, that show the superior power of the dynamic habitat over the dynamics of the inhabitants, which, while it is always there applying its innately prevailing form, behaviour and organization shaping influence, men like to forget about and pretend that it is our own locally originating form, behaviour and organization shaping influence that dominates.   the tornado, tsunami, earthquake, flood, fire etc. are wake-up calls that we who survive them are able to quickly forget about so that we can return to thinking of our form, behaviour and organization as been anthropogenically shaped.  genetic engineering is the ‘mad scientist’ extremism that is coming out of this.  that is, the genetic engineer believes that the organism is a local system so that the changes he makes are constrained to changes to the local system, but how could we even define a local system without including its relationship with the dynamics of space it is included in.

can we describe a wheat plant as a ‘ding-an-sich’, on the basis of its genetic make-up and study ‘its behaviour’?

how do we study a behaviour of the organism out of the context of the dynamic space it is included in?  what does the organism do in a vacuum? what does a man do as a ding-an-sich?  (can we put him in the lab and study him, letting him live his life without ever seeing or interacting with a woman?  since we are saying that the man is an internally-driven purposeful system, can we home in on who he is by removing all of the noise of the living space that could pollute our experiment and isolating him so that we can study ‘what he does’, how his biochemicals are produced to power his body and how his intellect (we’ll give him books to read) directs his behaviour).  is it possible to validate this model of man as a local system with his own locally originating, intellect and purpose-directed behaviour, by laboratory experiment?

when we make our engineering modifications to the wheat plant, how do we know that the change is successful?   can we determine this by examining the modified wheat plant on its own?  after all, we claim that it is its genome that makes it what it is.

or do we have to put it in a field with a lot of other plants and douse it with a chemical called ’round up’ to establish the fact that the genetic modification allowed it to live in spite of being doused with this chemical while it killed outright its pre-modified brother and friends?   this would seem to define its behaviour relative to the dynamics of space that it is included in (e.g. the stuff that it continually absorbs and effuses).

how well does the logic of ‘space ≠ matter’ apply in the case of genetically engineering wheat?   in the diagram of the genome, the blank space of the paper is clearly a non-participating space and the electron-microphotographs of the molecular configurations give a rendering of the only active agents in the picture.  over here on the left is the pre-modified gene configuration and over here on the right is the modified gene configuration.   the geneticist explains to us that the behaviour of the one on the left is such-and-such and the behaviour of the one on the right is a different such-and-such.

if we ask; ‘how do know that’?   he will say that is it from studying the behaviours of different plants and correlating them with their genetic structures.

if he shows us how he puts the seeds in soil and waters them and shines lights on them, we might well stop him and say; “wait a minute; you say that the plant is a local system with its own locally originating internal process directed behaviour’, so why are we muddying the waters by adding this soil and water and light?  how are we ever going to be able to isolate the influence of the soil, water and light; i.e. the influence of the dynamics of habitat, on the shaping of form, behaviour and eco-organization of the plant?  if the plant is a local system with its own locally originating internal process and acorn-to-oak-tree-built-in purpose [telos]. why can’t you just study the behaviour of the plant on its own without cluttering the experiment with earth, air, fire [heat] and water, so that the interference of many things could be the shaping influence on the plant’s form, behaviour and eco-participation [organizational participation]?

what kind of logic is this that takes simple correlations such as the correlation between the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the rise in average global surface temperatures and then searches for a simple CAUSAL model (i.e. ‘greenhouse gas model’) that will satisfy this prerequisite for causal relationship?  by this process we can forget about the dynamics of space within which anything ‘local’ including the earth, is a transient gathering of energy (the dynamics of space [celestial dynamics] influences the form, behaviour and organization of the earth-system.

we know what kind of logic it is.  it is the logic of A ≠ not.A (matter ≠ space) as in the diagram of the genomes of the pre-modified wheat plant and the modified wheat plant where the blank space on the drawing paper represents an absolute, non-participating space.  it is the same sort of diagram as the organization chart of a government or corporation except the ‘active agents’ in the organization chart are notional local human organisms with their own locally originating intellect and intention [boss-provided] directed behaviours. and here again we talk about this organization as if it were a thing-in-itself, a local powerboat with steerage and drive-power all inboard so that we can describe its behaviour out of the context of the dynamic space in which it (in operating mode rather than design mode) is situationally included.

how can we talk about ‘its behaviour’, the behaviour of government or corporation?  what logic is involved?  of course, it is the logic of A ≠ not.A (matter ≠ space).

but genetic engineers don’t have to study logic and neither do the bosses and cogs in these organizations because the logic is already built into the social system within which they operate.  the notion of organization in terms of a local central authority that directs the form, behaviour and organization of its parts, is already based on the logic of A ≠ not.A (matter ≠ space).

if we back off and get slightly more realistic, as in ‘realism’ drawn from our real-life experience of situational inclusion within the spatial-relational dynamics of nature, then we get to ‘fuzzy logic’ wherein the behaviour is coming from both the organization and the dynamic space in which is it situationally included.

but as you say (and i agree) this does not go far enough in the direction of ‘reality’.  in reality, it is as if we are too focused on the flow and the whorl as we were too focused on the orbiting astronaut and the rotating of the earth, and we need to increase the ‘dimensionality’ (using the word ‘dimension’ as a bookmark for meaning that transcends words) by seeing the whorls in the flow as themselves sitting in the middle between the thermal energy rich equatorial regions and the thermal energy poor polar regions so that all of this visible local motion is secondary to this ‘feeling’ immanent in space, of the need for dynamic balance (this is otherwise known as ‘field’ and it is invisible and nonlocal and ‘upstream’ of local visible dynamics).

thus the ‘fuzzy logic’ that acknowledges that the movement is due to BOTH the dynamics of the whorl and the dynamics of the flow which as you see leads eventually to one being seen as greater than the other, is not the logic we need.the ‘logic-of-field’ takes us upstream from ‘local visible things’ and the notion that their behaviour is ‘theirs’ to the invisible nonlocal field whose immanent pursuit of dynamic balance is the primary sourcing influence on form, behavour and organization.

this implies that consciousness is immanent in the dynamic resonant-energy charged field-flow space of nature.  this is the ‘one consciousness’ of schroedinger which explains his contention that local matter is ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances).    this brings us back to the shaping role of ‘field’ as is implied by the ‘lines of force’ as manifest in iron filings on a blank sheet of paper beneath which a magnet sits, the magnet being nothing other than a collection of filings whose internal behaviours have been induced by the earth’s magnetic field (the field is still upstream from the earth).  anyhow, the field is something which not only shapes the behaviour and organizing of things but ‘brings things into being/becoming’. those lines of force imply a relation between space and matter that looks like THIS.

so, the logic that relates space and matter is not the A ≠ not.A (matter ≠ space) sort of logic, not is it the fuzzy logic of A = not.A.  i freely admit this and i used it in a poor logician’s attempt to go beyond this logic.  i will say here that i do not know if transfigural mathematics provides the logic that i am ‘fills the bill’ (satisfies the demands of my experience and intuition), but it is obvious to me that that is where your work orients.  because i am someone whose habit is to NOT simply ‘accept’ the thinking of others unless i can ‘get there as well and think  it through by myself’, that is my only holdout on ‘transfigural mathematics’ (and as i say, being an intuitionist, inquiring into the origins of our social dysfunction has not, for me, been firstly by the path of understanding the implicit logic that we employ.   my inquiry has pursued an intuitive understanding as the first priority (e.g. my intuition informs me that social behaviour and organization is shaped by invisible nonlocal tensions or ‘fields’ and that what we SEE people do (local material body behaviour) is secondary to the invisible, nonlocal field.  further, my intuition informs me that a person can’t change something without, in some way, changing himself.  if men modified their genes so that they would be resistant to the harmful influence of a certain chemical and then sprayed the earth so that all women were killed and only men remained, it would appear that our definition of a man would not persist, which says that we are kiddling ourselves to think we can define a man or any organism as a ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal process and intellect and purpose directed behaviour, that moves about absolutely and interacts with other such automatons within an absolute fixed and empty space.’

meanwhile, the difference i ‘bump up against’ with many thinkers that are similarly pursuing a deeper understanding of the dynamics of nature and how our own dynamics relate, .. is that many amongst this minority (amongst walt’s ‘centereds’) head for the shift away from the ‘organism as local system’ to a bipolar definition wherein the dynamic of the inhabitant and the dynamics of the habitat are intrinsically blurred and where one periodically takes over from the other; e.g. the inhabitants pollute the earth and toss around nuclear bombs, and then the climate takes a turn and burns them up or freezes them out (or the earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes that make the atmosphere toxic to men) take over.  this notion, as you have suggested, is the shortfall in fuzzy logic.  that is why, though i use the phrase;

1. conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation

i always try to disambiguate it by stating in full Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat, the intuitive thinking tool picture for which is THIS and THIS wherein we GO BEYOND the ‘three-body problem’ so that we are forced to understand the dynamics in terms beyond the behaviour of a local entity having a ‘behaviour of its own’ (A ≠ not.A or  matter ≠ space) and also beyond the behaviour of a single inhabitant have a joint behaviour together with the habitat ( A = not.A or matter = space) though this logic provides a jumping off point, opening the door to a logic wherein the local object/organism has no behaviour of its own, not even in partnership with the space it is included in, as is implied by Mach’s principle

2, “the dynamics of multiple inhabitants condition one another’s dynamics via the mediating role of the dynamics of habitat that are at the same time conditioning the dynamics of the multiple inhabitants’

now before the reader freaks out and claims that this last logic bears no relation to his personal real-life experience wherein he feels as if he is acting out of his own free will, intellect and purpose,  i would ask him whether or not he feels his behaviour is shaped by the tensions that associate with the spatial relations amongst people which nest within tensions as arise from nature’s elements, and if so, whether these tensional fields dissipate as people dissipate (their lives end).  that is, it is our experience that these spatial relational tensions persist as generations of ‘local material bodies/organisms’ move through them (enter and leave). could it not then be that these tensions we feel inclusion in, are the primary source of our form, behaviour and organization?  in this case, these tensional field that was shaping form behaviour and organization would be a kind of ‘consciousness’ that belonged to ‘space’ or ‘nature’ and furthermore, if we are able to tap into it as we evidently do since it shapes our behaviour (though our cultural model of our ‘self’ as a stand-alone internally dirven automaton forces us to claim that it is OUR CONSCIOUSNESS), … then our consciousness is ‘of nature’ or ‘of space’ rather than being something bundled inside of us as part of the notional inboard powerboater equipment.

it is evident that our notion of ‘having our own thoughts’ portrays ourselves to ourselves as observers of nature who scan our ‘surroundings’ for information that we then use our brains to make sense of and to direct our own behaviour accordingly.  this is a picture in which we navigate ‘through’ the space we are included in.  it is not a picture in which we are made of the energy-charged space we share inclusion in (in the manner of the hurricane in the flow of the atmosphere).  it is further evident that the former (popular western view) is one in which we ascribe to ourselves ‘absolute motion’ (we are moving through a landscape that is stationary, thanks to it being included in a notional absolute space), and that if we were able to assume that we were inclusions in energy-charged field-flow-space, neither our thought not our behaviour could be ‘our own’, but our consciousness would be of the one consciousness corresponding to the dynamic One of nature.  if we were made of ‘field’ as in this toroidal spatial relation, then our consciousness would be ’situational consciousness’ (i, the One consciousness understand what is going on here in association with this relative gathering)

last, but certainly not least, how could this consciousness be tied to our material body to shape its behaviour?

given that the field-flow sourced habitat-dynamic is organizing energy into the human form and making the neural-netted christmas tree we call ‘the brain’ flicker and light up, there would be a path from situational consciousness to the dynamics of self as inhabitant in the habitat in the same manner as must go on with atmospheric flow and hurricane.  the movement of the hurricane derives from a ‘consciousness’ that is co-extensible with the atmosphere that wraps around the earth and into itself, that it expresses that consciousness through the toroidal flow that is visible and tangible yet still an inclusional flow-feature within the flow.

if we were to put a brain in the hurricane, we would put it within the eye of the storm-cell, inside of the ‘skull-like eye-wall’.  of course the direction would not come from inside of the eye-wall, it would come from the consciousness that is co-extensible with the space that hurricane is included in.

in the case of the hurricane, is its behaviour ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ in any way?

yes,  its behaviour satisfies the provisions in walt’s chart; e.g.  ”Each [flow-feature] takes responsibility for the well-being of the world, enabling high levels of decentralization and freedom at the local level, and a sustainable harmony at the global level”.

ok, you may think you see a logical contradiction here in that ‘each flow-feature takes responsibility’ … since i have gone beyond the ‘three body problem’ and accepted that the local flow-feature does not have a behaviour of its own, … but there is no logical contradiction here since ‘responsibility’ does not translate into ‘behaviour’.  the hurricane is born for the purpose of healing imbalance in the spatial relational thermal field.  its behaviour emerges from many flow-features moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence so it does not have its own behaviour, but it has its own responsibility, as all flow-features in nature do, and that is to put itself in the service of restoring and sustaining balance and harmony within a ceaselessly innovatively unfolding evolutionary dynamic.   emerson describes this nicely in The Method of Nature’.

insofar as it has its own ‘situational inclusion’ in the manner of the toroidal flow, it has its own responsibility to put itself in the service of cultivating harmonious flow.

we experience this when we drive in the flow of the busy freeway.  everyone is moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, we are beyond the three-body problem and we no longer have a behaviour of our own (our behaviour orients to the unfolding spatial relational dynamcs we share inclusion in).  our behaviour is relative rather than absolute and it is orchestrated by the transforming spatial relations we are situationally included in.

do we feel that we have ‘responsibilty’?  yes, we do.  we feel that we should put our movements in the service of sustaining harmonious flow in spite of the clumsy or even malicious moves those silly bastards all around us.  of course when we swerve to avoid hitting a mother whose child has escaped from the car seat and is covering her eyes as she tries to climb over into the front seat from the back, we become one of those silly bastards to the next guy over and what with all the swerving and dodging, it soon becomes impossible to isolate the good drivers from the evil drivers; i.e. they have no behaviour of their own simply because they put their ’responsibility’ into precedence over their ‘behaviour’.

the dysfunction that derives from the popular logic of our western culture (  A ≠ not.A (matter ≠ space) ), comes from putting ‘behaviour’ into precedence over ‘responsibility’ [for the well-being of the world] which starts with assuming that our behaviour i; … ‘locally originating, intellect and intention-directed behaviour’.

if ‘transfigural mathematics’ is the missing logic that does what language cannot do; i.e. is a logic whose symbols take us beyond the symbols and their symbolic meaning to understanding in terms of invisible nonlocal influence (‘field-flow’), then that is great in that it can provide a form of ‘proof’ to validate what comes to us, intuitively, from our real-life experience.

regards,

ted

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Are we really living our lives by playing ‘roles’ that we develop by intellectual mastery?

[[As you consider this question and try it on for size re your own life situation, there is something important that you may miss taking into account in this process.   You can 'check yourself out' for whether you missed it or not at the bottom of this essay.]]

Surely, animals don’t acquire their ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘protector’, ‘lover’ roles by intellectual mastery, so why should we think that we do?

Well, animals don’t slap one another with their glove to signal that their honour has been demeaned and that a duel must follow to settle the injury, the time and place, choice of ‘seconds’ and weapons being part of this very mechanistic ‘protocol’.

A ‘protocol’ is a ‘code of correct conduct’ that is agreed upon within a human social collective. It is one of those logical ‘if/then’ structures.  In the animal kingdom (ever wonder why we call it a ‘kingdom’ when it is in more realistically understood as an interdependent ‘ecosystem’?), the non-human organisms would just ‘do what comes naturally’, and we humans have that in us, as well, and it often associated with Americans (who mocked the British protocols) and who, according to some anthropologists, have picked up this ‘doing what comes naturally’ from the Amerindians; e.g;

“There is one scene that stands out above all others, a scene that powerfully conveys a message about modern civilization, and which always gets a laugh, no matter how many times the audience has seen it.  It appears in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”    Legend has it that Harrison Ford was sick that day, and wanted a short take.   Spielberg suggested this scene as the shortest one possible.   I would like to believe that the legend is true.  Across a large, open bazaar, Indiana Jones confronts his latest challenger, who is dressed entirely in black.   He holds a sword.  You know the scene.  This master of oriental weaponry whirls his sword round and round, in a performance of razor-sharp dexterity.   The performance says it clearly:  “There is no escape, Western Imperialist.”  You’re smiling already.Why are you smiling?   Maybe because you remember your reaction to the scene the first time you saw it.   But it’s more than this.   That scene conveys a clear, unmistakable, unforgettable message regarding the clash of two civilizations, East and West.Jones reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cheap revolver, and plugs him. He crumples, sword and all.The audience roars.”

But the narrator is wrong, the clash is between the followers of protocol (in this case the Eastern version of ‘chivalry’ as what is shaping up is a challenge to a duel) and those who ‘do what comes naturally’ (in this case with some technological amplification).

The action of Indiana Jones re the challenger to the duel, is like that of the grizzly bear to the fencer (“aha, at last we meet face-to-face and now we shall see who shall vanquish whom”), there is nothing personal, the challenger is like a pesky fly, an irritant that has become annoying to the point of having to be dealt with.

But that brings us back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Hamlet was living in a ‘Kingdom’, not in an ecosystemic tribal community.  Kingdoms are full of political intrigues hidden behind protocols.  Everyone has to role-play and follow the protocols or be banished from the kingdom and live in nature.  Underneath the role-plays and protocols are smoldering political ambitions and jealousies.  The quest for more power, to bed the beautiful queen, … but wait, that would not be protocol unless one first accedes to the throne, a prospect that would be facilitated by the early demise of the present King.

Insofar as western civilization organizes itself hierarchically (Presidents, CEOs, superintendants, supervisors, ministers, policemen, judges, captains and commanders)  and develops corresponding ‘protocols’ and ‘role plays’, Hamlet’s remarks apply.   This form of organization is a cultural choice; e.g;

“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women. “ — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders

What is it about western authoritarian hierarchal organization that is ‘missing’ from Amerindian organization?

William Blake provided the answer to this in his ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.  In the early days of the western culture, poets used the metaphor of the Gods of nature to impute to local things, a river or a city, the source of their power, and then the priesthood came along with ‘religion’ that TOOK LITERALLY this putting God’s power inside of everything; e.g. the human individual, the sovereign state, the ‘living organism’ etc., a notion that converted the organism/organization-as-sailboat (deriving its power and steerage from the flow it is included in) to organism/organization-as-power-boat (equipped with its own inboard power and steerage).  Total rubbish, of course, but rubbish that has become foundational to modern western-culture dominated society; e.g;

” The notion of “absolute, unlimited power held permanently in a single person or source, inalienable, indivisible, and original” is a definition of the Judeo- Christian-Islamic God. This “God died around the time of Machiavelli…. Sovereignty was … His earthly replacement.” (Walker, R. B. J. and Mendlovitz, Saul H. “Interrogating State Sovereignty.”

Of course, as Blake noted, this is the same model as the priesthood was using for the ‘self’ and that Nietzsche observed, western science would adopt as their model for ‘forms of life’.  Each cell and organism in the western science of biology is ‘its own local sovereign state’ with its own inboard power and steerage, like the Aristotelian ‘acorn’, a powerboating sovereign state that has its own inboard power and steerage.  In science, it is a ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal-process-directed behaviour’.

This ‘absolutist’ model of ‘living entities’ has no need of ‘organizing influence’ coming from the dynamic habitat in which it is included.  it exists locally and independently as a ‘living thing-in-itself’.  That model is basic to how we who are raised (psychologically imprinted/brainwashed) in the western culture, demonstrating at the very least, that the dynamics of the society we are situationally included in, orchestrates the organization of our thoughts.

That model is bogus.  Nothing exists independently except in such ‘secularized theological concepts’ as ‘the sovereign state’ which is self-similar to the western model of ‘self’.

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.” – Bartelson, Jens  ‘ A Genealogy of Sovereignty’
“State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith.” – Lombardi, Mark Owen,  ‘Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty’

The same model is, in the western worldview, is proposed for any and all ‘life-forms’; i.e. they are imputed to be ‘local systems with their own locally-originating, internal-process directed behaviours’.  Not only is this the model of choice in western religions, but it is also the model of choice in western science.

Make no mistake, western science assumes that the universe is dead and that this ‘dead universe’ is  locally infected with life.

Furthermore western science, not those who developed relativity and quantum theory, but the mainstream of western science which has not changed its common way of modeling since the new physics transpired at the beginning of the twentieth century, assumes that ‘life’ is a process that occurs within local systems (cells, organisms) which was not present on earth for the first 700 million years of the earth’s ‘existence’ (one of those ‘local object’ views again, this time of the earth which ‘came into existence’ at ‘a particular point in time’); i.e. science says the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that life-on-earth commenced about 3.8 billion years ago.

Now, as Poincare tried to make clear, the earth is the result of organization within the spatial dynamics of the universe.  It is like the hurricane or convection cell.  It never ‘leaves’ the flow since it is a feature within the flow, however, these foreground features attract our visual awareness more than the invisible nonlocal flow-fields which are continually parenting and regathering them.

What he said was; “To say that ‘the earth rotates’ is nonsense’.  According to his own personal letters, few people understood what he was going on about.  Only a handful of his scientific colleagues ‘got it’.  What he was intending is more easily seen in the case of the hurricane; “To say that ‘the hurricane rotates’ is nonsense.  As he elaborates, the hurricane is a word that we define, and by the way that words impart a local existence and local behaviour to something which is inextricably included in a dynamic unity, we start to regard the named entity as capable of its own behaviour, which is a radically flawed over-simplification that depends on our imposing absolute space as a reference frame to synthetically lend ‘localness’ and ‘locally originating behaviour’ to what is intrinsically a flow-feature within the common flow-medium.

Poincare could have carried that further and noted that this is the same radically-flawed over-simplification that we habitually apply to the ‘human self’ and to the ‘cell’ and the ‘organism’.

What’s the point?

ORGANIZATION COMES FROM THE OUTSIDE.

And before ‘language’ starts getting me in trouble here, I would like to clarify that I am NOT assuming euclidian space wherein the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ of any imaginary line/surface bounded form is mutually exclusive of the ‘outside’.   As Poincare further says, Euclidian space is nothing like the space of our experience; i.e. the space of our experience is ‘relative’.    If we take a circular loop of string and hold it in the palm of our hand, we would say it is ‘outside’ of us.   But if we cut the loop, swallowed one end of it and injested enough so that we could gather it as it exited from our anus and then re-tied the loop.  Would that loop be ‘outside of us’ or ‘inside of us’?  Fuzzy logic (both/and) would be needed here.  The ‘inside-outside’, ‘self-other’ split does not appear to be a hard and fast either/or (logic of the excluded middle) separation.

Now, if that string can be both inside and outside at the same time then so could a circular flow of nutrients, as in the case of fish in a small pond where there is circular flow of nutrients (energy in different forms), the nutrients being dissolved or in suspension in the water, entering through the fish’s mouth and after being modified in passage, exiting into the all-included body of water where it similarly enters into other organisms and after being modified in passage rejoins the common body of watery flow.    Once we let go of the Aristotelian logic and Euclidian space notions of mutual exclusion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the door is open to think of the ‘organism’ (in this case, ‘fish’ or ‘human’) as a kind of torus that forms in the flow, as some ancients conceived of man; e.g;

is the 'fish' the biofilm that gathers in the toroidal flow?

If we suspend our habit of imposing the abstract conventions of logic of the excluded middle and the imposing of absolute Euclidian space on this view of the organism, then there are no longer any ‘reasoned arguments’ for splitting apart the hourglass-shaped material being from the circulating flow it gathers within.

In fact, this would make even more sense if we included in the picture, many small toruses as models for algae and big toruses for fish.  The water would contain within it particles in suspension of two different colours, red and blue and in passing through the fish, the balance of red and blue would be shifted in the direction of increasing blue-to-red ratio, but in the case of the algae, the balance of red and blue would be shifted in the direction of increasing the red-to-blue ratio.  We would then have an ecosystem of the Mach’s principle type; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

This model could also be used for ‘the economy’ and in fact, studies of ‘exceptionally performing teams’, discussed elsewhere, suggest teams (enterprise initiatives) if they conceive of themselves in this conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational manner, as being sustained by letting their behaviours be orchestrated by the community dynamic they are included in, are likely to thrive.

Let’s not forget that this  NON-culturally approved view, wherein the dynamic of space and matter are ‘one dynamic’ (one spatial-relational dynamic), which is consistent with the physics of relativity, is made possible by our suspending our acculturated habit of imposing absolutist logic of the excluded middle and the notion of ‘absolute space’.

But we don’t like to have to think of the loop of string being, at the same time, both inside and outside of our body.  It confuses the logic of inside and outside that we like to use, which is the logic of the excluded middle.

Whatever our preferences, our choice of logic conventions and space conventions makes a radical difference to our worldview.

If we stick with our view in which organisms are local God-like entities (‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal-process driven behaviours’), then we are going to have to model ‘order’ and ‘organization’ in a very different way than if we opened the door to ‘inclusive [both/and] logic’ and ‘non-euclidian [relative] space’ wherein dynamics imply a conjugate extrinsic-intrinsic [habitat-inhabitant] relation, as in the above animated torus graphic.

In this case, if I say ORGANIZATION COMES FROM THE OUTSIDE, there is no need to interpret this in the sense that ORGANIZATION DOES _NOT_ COME FROM THE INSIDE, since outside and inside are in conjugate relation (flip sides of the same coinage).

In our western culture worldview, each organism is a God-like local system, so how, then, are we to understand the organization in nature?  One way would be according to the notion of a ‘food chain’ (today, we more often speak of food-webs to capture the ecosystem aspect).  If we define things in terms of what injests what, then it is clear that man can eat most things but the reverse is not generally true (men do get eaten by boas, alligators, bears, these are exceptions).  Man’s G0d-like power allows him to consume or make use of the others so that man is at the head of the greater-lesser ranking of organisms.  This is consistent with religious views of where man ranks such as that of St. Augustine who based his on the relative likeness to God.  His hierarchy is; ‘God, angels, man, animals, plants, minerals’.

In any case, by not allowing the concept of ecosystemic interdependence to contribute to our model of organization (we disallow it by assuming the  ‘independence’ and ‘local existence’ of organisms and states), we are forced to use a hierarchical source of organization.  Our ‘simulation’ of organization in nature, constrained by our choice of conventions, the logic of the excluded middle and absolute Euclidian space-framing, then constrains our view of organization across the species to  ‘competition’ amongst the diverse multiplicity of ‘independent’ organisms.  That is, we can’t use this flow-based mutually supportive scenario to explain organization in nature since that would require us to suspend our imposing of ‘either/or’ logic convention and its partner in crime, absolute Euclidian space, which endows its inhabitants with ‘localness’ and ‘locally originating behaviour’.

This standard western schema for portraying ‘organization’ as arising from local force leaves no choice for organizations composed entirely of God-like humans, to impose some kind of empowerment hierarchy on the humans so that a mechanical drive train can be established wherein one part drives those below it and is driven by those above it.    That people ‘go along with this’ derives from their knowledge of the huge amplification of power that comes from it (e.g. the might of a massive army that follows the direction of its ‘chain of command’).  Thomas Mann speaks to this ‘organizational ethic’ in ‘Mario and the Magician’ written in 1929 as an observation of the rise of fascism in Europe;

“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command.  Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

The solution, then, when one thinks of oneself in God-like terms, as a ‘local system with its own local behaviour’, is to accept a role-play in the family of Gods.  This then gives us the ‘Kingdom’ game based on familiar role-plays, the King and Queen and the ‘nobility’ etc. all the way down to the simple peasant.

It is not to be overlooked that Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ occurs in the Kingdom of Denmark and he is deeply caught up in the role-plays and the Machiavellian intrigues that associate with this authoritarian hierarchy form of organization.  Being captive inside of this organization is the source of Hamlet’s anxiety expressed;

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Such a nihilist statement would never be heard amongst those embracing the Amerindian mode of organization which understands relations between things as ‘interdependent’ and ‘mutually supportive’ as in an ecosystem.  To the Amerindian, there are no ‘states’ and there is no superior-inferior hierarchy of rank.

Of course western analysts who see the Amerindian organization with Chiefs-and-Indians are free to interpret this relationship as a hierarchy of authority, but they will do the same in a marine ecosystem, portraying the big fish as being higher up the ‘food chain’ than the littler fish, the algae and plankton and phytoplankton etc.  as lower in the food chain.

In presenting the ‘exceptionally-performing team’, to the eye of the western analytical mind of the manager, the ‘successful performance’ will immediately be broken down in terms of ‘who are the major contributors’; i.e. who are the big fish and who are the minnows.  Seeing the team’s performance in terms of resonances in their conjugate habitat-inhabitant relations is not an option in analytical inquiry.  Analytical inquiry starts off by seeng the system as a local, independent system with its own locally originating, internal-process-directed behaviour’, thus questions about performance are formulated in terms of which internal components and processes are ‘most responsible’ for the strong performance.

This is the wrong question, but it will always lead to an answer; i.e. one can always make assessments and allocate proportionate causal responsibility to each participant.  But this fails to recognize that the community dynamic the system is included in, will accommodate some intrusions (inhabitant-dynamics) more receptively than others, just as water will accommodate some boat-intrusions more receptively than others, and if the ‘intruder’ (the dynamics of the inhabitant) is sensitive to this, the intrusion can be ‘tuned’ so that it is provoking the most receptive accommodating on the part of the dynamic medium in which the inhabitant is included.   This is akin to  ‘impedance-matching’ and it is the cultivating of resonances in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.   Wildgeese employ it to move through the turbulence of the air, cultivating and sustaining resonance in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation so that they go farther and faster for less expenditure of energy than they could ever achieve in solo model.   We spontaneously use it in crowd dynamics (interpermeating people dynamics).    It does not lend itself to analytical inquiry because the performance of the individual is not explainable in terms of the performance being attributable to the individual, seen as a local system with its own locally originating behaviour.   The performance derives from the resonance in the conjugate relation.  This constitutes a ‘nonlinear system’ and nonlinear systems must be solve ‘in toto’ (over the full habitat-inhabitant [suprasystem-system]  dynamic complex) rather than by part.

Conclusion:

Our worldview changes substantially if we suspend our western habit of imposing the conventions of either/or logic and absolute Euclidian space.  We can then see beyond the notion of our ‘self’ as a local system with its own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose-directed behaviour’.   We can then stop infusing God-like powers into cells and organisms and sovereign states and give the habitat its due credit for influencing form behaviour and organization (that is, we can continue to do it [over-simplification can have practical utility if we don't let the tool run away with the workman] but this time without confusing it for reality).   As in the animated gif of the torus, we can acknowledge that outside and inside rather than being two mutually exclusive absolute regions, are in conjugate relation; i.e. flow can imply inside and outside, as when convection cells form in heated water and the dynamics of the  ‘cell’ attracts our attention while we at the same time lose our mental grip on the dynamics of the medium which is parenting the cell.  Thus our habit is to define and name-label the cell and to PERSONIFY it (in the same ‘local system with its own local behaviour’ as is our western view of our ‘self’.  The natural primacy of the dynamic medium is lost in this process and the sourcing of the dynamic is fully invested in the reified, personified local feature in the flow, as if it was a Ding-an-sich (thing in itself).

[[Now, here's where you get a chance to 'check yourself out' as discussed at the beginning, to see whether you missed taking something into account as you contemplated Hamlet's plight and his notion of life being 'a role-play' that  signified nothing.]]

Did you put yourself in Hamlet’s shoes and wonder about whether life is really like that  WITHOUT acknowledging that Hamlet’s troubles associated with the politics that characterize the pinnacles of power; i.e. this stuff was going on close to the King in a Kingdom, in a state where social organization is by authoritarian power hierarchy, wherein, it is often been said that ‘power corrupts’?   Or did your thought process leave out the authoritarian hierarchy as a background ‘given’ even though Hamlet’s reflection was on the grand topic of ‘life’?

In other words, is one’s ‘life’ like a role-play, a character in a stage play where one postures with other role-players and things get all heated up and some players get shot and others die for their beliefs and the curtain draws and the next set of role-players come on stage.  Or, IS LIFE IN AN AUTHORITARIAN CONTROL HIERARCHY like a role-play?

Had Hamlet been an ‘anarchist’, he might have said, all this authoritarian control system breeds is corruption.   Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and is it ‘the state’, … this  ‘statism’, this authoritarian hierarchy with its artificial pecking order and class divisions.  Statism has to go.  Authoritarian hierarchy has to go.  We must come together and organize in a new way, without imputing a God-like power to exist in every life-form so that we can ignore the interdependence that our experience informs us is inherent in nature’s ceaselessly innovative influencing of form, behaviour and organization.  This ‘other way’ can be something more along the lines of;

“Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women. “ – Friedrich Engels, speaking of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois five nations).

Whose culture is screwed up?

Should we accept our western culture as a given when we reflect on life and thus assume that life (in any/all cultures) is like that of;

“… a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

Or should we, when we contemplate this, at least open up our inquiry to give some attention to the role of our culture as the provocateur of these role-plays.  Is a ‘kingdom’  (statism) a natural form of organization?  No, because it follows from our habit of imputing God-like power to features in the flow, as in our Aristotelian convention of seeing our ‘self’ and all ‘life-forms’ as ‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal process-driven behaviours’ (ultimate or absolute ‘first cause’ sourcing of behaviour).

If it turns out that you bypassed the (a) option in the mental branching (described roughly as follows), then you would have ‘jumped right over’ something important on the way to your inquiry.  That is, you might have gone directly to either (a) or to (b) but chances are (loyal stalwart of authoritarian control systems) you went directly to (b);

(a) Captive of a dysfunctional culture that imposes behavioural protocols (role-playing)

“Wait a minute, Hamlet is talking about his life as if it were anyone’s life; i.e. he does not stop to dwell on his living in the craziness at the top of a power hierarchy where the climbers on all the ladders leading to the top (including his uncle),  are held up by one and the same thing, the guy at the top (his father).  The authoritarian hierarchy, its pecking orders and class divisions, its assessments of who is superior and who is inferior, that everyone is held captive to, are clearly a driving source of the social dysfunction that he finds himself caught up in.  This dysfunctional system asks everyone to sing praise when the Kingdom’s flag is raised.  They ask everyone to go to war and give one’s life if ‘your King’ thinks that war is a good idea.  They ask everyone to play the role of the faithful servant, to publicly profess loyalty to God and the King and by so doing,  swear an oath of allegiance to this corrupting system and commit to paying taxes to the King however excessive and unfair they are.”  It’s enough to spawn tales of anti-culture heros like Robin Hood.

(b) Captive of life itself which is innately hollow and empty

” Hamlet is talking about me and you and everyone.  Our behaviours are not free. Whether we are a farmer or a husband, our fortune makes us captive to roles and behavioural protocols which come to each of us via God’s roll of the dice.   Once fate pigeonholes us in a category,  it becomes difficult if not impossible to escape.  How easy is it to escape from being a serf to rise to knighthood or to becoming one of the King’s courtiers?   How easy is it to become King even if one is within arm’s reach of it.

If we go directly to (b) we ignore inquiry into whether the problem stems from culture rather than from ‘life itself’.  This indicates that the  ‘western cultural imprint’ has ‘done a job on us’ since it is the authoritarian power hierarchy that is the source of the role-plays.  The role-plays correspond to cogs in the machine since that is the organizing principle of an authoritarian social system.   When organization is by control from the top, it must cascade down through layers that range from big wheels to little cogs.

That is not the only cultural option.  The land (the natural habitat) can be seen as the opening of spatial possibility that orchestrates the behaviour of those included in it in the manner that the oasis and the fertile valley draw people in from out of the desert.  The inductive opening of spatial possibility is the extrinsic influence that invites the emergence of (human) community and as the community dynamic takes shape, the opening of spatial possibility orchestrates the participation of others who become part and parcel of the continuously evolving and complexifying community, which continues to open new spatial possibilities which continue to bring in and bring to blossom, creative/productive potentialities of others.  It is the opening of spatial possibility that not only orchestrates the behaviour of the incoming participants, but creates community.   There are no role-plays here, there is healthy situational learning,  development arising from the coniunctio of the opening of spatial possibility and the blossoming of creative/productive potentialities (those who evolve in this manner are entirely unlike those who move up and down through the ‘snakes-and-ladders’ game of role-play that characterize authoritarian organization).

But wait a couple of generations as things activity patterns begin to ‘stabilize’.  Then the way is clear to apply our analytical skills to what is already in place (Recall how Newton said that his laws of mechanics only described things (orbits, dynamics in general) once they were already in place but were not capable of informing on how things gathered together in the way they did.)  Those people who believe that community is deterministically constructed by the assertive actions of the participants seen as local systems with their own locally originating, intellect-and-purpose directed behaviour will soon have things ‘running backwards’, and crediting the rich and powerful in the community for having brought this all about. (Who else?  That is, if one models community as a structure that is determined by the actions of its citizens (leaving out its extrinsically influenced origins), then the standard analytical process will be to assess the relative contributions of the participants, and the notion of a causally responsible hierarchy, implicit or otherwise, will be the inevitable fallout of this analytical process).   If you became a plumber because your community needed a plumber (because of the opening of spatial-possibility) and because you wanted to participate in the co-evolution of community, then when the city manager is hired and he sees you one of the lackeys or commodity skills  the founding fathers directed as they built the community, then you are likely to feel ‘betrayed’ and rightly so.  You were much more than a machine part, as you will appear to be in a purely analytical inquiry that looks at community as a ‘local system with its own locally originating internal-process driven behaviour’, and breaks it down into components to explain its functioning (as a Ding-an-sich).

Having to live one’s life in a role-play is characteristic of an authoritarian hierarchy, but it does not arise within a culture where individuals understand their behaviour as being orchestrated by the dynamics of space they share inclusion in.  Hamlet, at least in the play by the same name, takes for granted the Kingdom’ (authoritarian power hierarchy) and its characteristic behaviour corrupting tensions.   What he is really saying, then, is;

“Within this accursed cultural contrivance, this authoritarian control hierarchy with its power to induce class divisions and bestow on everyone imputations of superiority and inferiority, its cultivating of a lust for power that corrupts the most innocent into Dark Princes of Machiavellian deviousness, which asks us to believe in the bullshit notion that it is God’s roll of the dice that slots us into the hierarchy of pigeon-hole within it, … within this Godforsaken role-play-rat-hole, Life [i.e. the life of the poor unfortunates trapped within such a bullshit culture] is but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

* * *

footnote: The ‘Kingdom’ is like the ‘sovereign state’ and like science’s ‘local system with its own locally originating behaviour’ in that it assumes a local point from whence there is absolute first-cause sourcing of behaviour.   This notion is a theological notion.  There is nothing in our experience that supports local first-cause sourcing of behaviour.  One has to impute that the ‘local things’ is ‘inhabited by a God’ to make this idea ‘work’.  In an energy-flow continuum, as is how the new physics portrays the universe, the notion of a local source is non-sensical.  There are ‘singularities, the ‘sinks’ and ‘sources’ where contours close, but these apply to surfaces such as where water disappears as it ‘inwells’ down into a vortex or where water appears as it ‘outwells’ up out of a boil in the flow.    One can think of energy-flow in this manner; e.g. from visible kinetic energy associated with matter to invisible potential energy associated with space.    When we consider the social organization we call the Kingdom, whether or not the sourcing of behaviour is alleged to derive from the local system known as ‘the King’ or whether the King is seen as the local point through which the people are expressing themselves, we are still not taking account of the space in which the King and the people share inclusion.  The ‘Kingdom’, then, is an anthropocentric organizational concept and it implies an intellect-directed behavioural dynamic.   The Sovereign State is the same thing, but it goes farther and bundles within it the notion of ‘land ownership’.   If you can steal enough land and hold on to it, you can make yourself King.  In Chuang Tzu’s words

Teaching love and duty

provides a fitting language

with which to prove that robbery

is really for the general good.

A poor man must swing,

for stealing a belt buckle,

But if a rich man steals a whole state

He is acclaimed as statesman of the year.

Hence, if you want to hear the very best speeches

on love, duty, justice, etc.,

listen to statesmen…

Localness is an abstract quality.  The existence of a Kingdom SETS THE STAGE for a lot of tomfoolery.   The ‘stage’ allows local sourcing of dynamic behaviour and organization (ignores extrinsic influence).  Stealing land and installing a King not only allows for local sourcing of behaviour but sets up a top-to-bottom gradient for the development of a system of role-plays.  The whole organizational dynamic can be thus reversed from what is natural; i.e. what is natural is the emergence of form, behaviour and organization derives from the dynamics of habitat.  As Chuang Tzu’s remarks testify, authoritarian control based social organization was not confined to the west, but the use of land-grabs for setting up new ‘colonial Kingdoms’ was the tactic of the western European Kings that continues to prevail today, in a thinly veiled way.

The ‘bottom line’ is that Shakespeare’s reference to a life of meaningless role-play is an attack on authoritarian control based social organization.  What is rotten in the state of Denmark is the ‘state’, the ‘statist’ system of social organizing.

* * *

It mostly goes back to a disagreement between Plato and Aristotle.  Plato believed that nature’s dynamics are characterized by ‘extrinsic final cause’ while Aristotle believed that nature’s dynamics are characterized by ‘intrinsic final cause’.

‘Extrinsic final cause’ corresponds with the gods shaping the development of things from space (the outside).  Geometrically, this elicits terms like ‘intelligent design’.  ‘Intrinsic final cause’ corresponds with the gods shaping the development of things from the inside.  Geometrically, this elicits terms like ‘purposive systems’.  An example is the ‘acorn’.  Aristotle believed that the development of the acorn into an oak tree was directed from the inside of the acorn.  That is, he believed that the organism or local system has ‘purpose’ within it that ‘directs’ its development.  Aristotle won out over Plato in the popularizing of this concept so that is what is entrenched in our western culture to this day (Of course Aristotle was wrong about a lot of stuff; e.g. that men have more teeth than women and that bodies fall to earth at a rate proportional to their weight.  Aristotle had such a powerful influence on popular understanding that these two things, that could have been easily dismissed by inspection, persisted, the latter for a thousand years until Galileo disproved it).

Intrinsic final cause (the acorn purposively pushing itself out into an oak tree) is even slower to fall, having been thoroughly woven into the cognitive fabric of western society.

Extrinsic final cause implies that the spatial receptacle is actively shaping the unfolding form of things and that its not simply what’s inside the system pushing from the inside out.  For example, the growth of a convection cell or hurricane is not simply ‘pushed out from the inside-outwards’, the spatial medium of the atmosphere is opening up for it (more receptively here and more resistively there) as it ‘seemingly’ pushes outward to its final form.  Relativity informs us that ‘extrinsic final cause’ (habitat-shaping-influence) and ‘intrinsic final cause’ (inhabitant-shaping-influence) are in a conjugate relation as given by Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of habitat condition the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’.

Of course, western mental modeling likes to use absolute euclidian state which reduces the extrinsic-shaping-influence of space to no influence at all, synthetically forcing us to think in terms that intrinsic-shaping-influence is ‘all she wrote’.

The plot thickens here, as Nietzsche has pointed out, with his charge that western science is ‘anthropomorphism’..  His point is that our ego is tied up in this and that physics terms such as ‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ derive from our human feelings and do not exist as pure mechanical forces.  That is ‘attraction’ is something we ‘feel’ that comes with our ‘intention’ to embrace and pull it in, and ‘repulsion’ is something we ‘feel’ that comes our ‘intention’ to ‘push something out and away’.

Since we western humans feel like what we do is ‘pushes out from our purpose’, we see ourselves as purposive systems, but it doesn’t stop there.  We impose this image of ourselves on every other ‘organism’ as well, so that all of the developing systems in nature, we conceive of as purposive systems if they are ‘living/animate’ and ‘causal systems’ if they are non-living/inanimate’.

So, ‘relativity’ would support Plato’s view that there is extrinsic final cause (the habitat side of things) influencing the shape of the developing system, as in the strand-in-the-web-of-life view of Amerindians and other cultures; i.e. Mach’s principle applies (‘The dynamics of the web condition the dynamics of the strands at the same time as the dynamics of the dynamics of the strands are conditioning the dynamics of the web).  That is, the extrinsic shaping influence is in conjugate relation with the intrinsic shaping influence.  This situation has been confirmed in experiments with the cultivation of multi-species microbial communities and it is called ‘bidirectional innovation’ (Douglas E. Caldwell et al).

Ok, here’s where the problems start.  Pure extrinsic final cause (shaping by an outside hand) corresponds to ‘Intelligent Design’ (God did it).  But a conjugate relation between extrinsic shaping force and intrinsic shaping force is a description of a ‘relative’ or ‘fluid dynamic system’  Fluid dynamics work like a ‘French kiss’ the tongue with its probing purpose and the receiving mouth that opens spatial receptive possibilities are conjugate aspects of one dynamic.  In Caldwell’s multispecies community evolution, the community dynamic opens up shaped spatial possibility AT THE SAME TIME AS IT elicits the blossoming of assertive potentialities.   If we live in a community and a job for a dishwasher opens up, if we have two hands on the end of two arms (i.e. if we are ‘genetically equipped’), our development into a dishwasher may be induced.  Becoming a dishwasher was not a ‘purpose’ (intrinsic final cause) within us that directed our development.  ‘Stem cells’ are genetically equipped to be many things, depending on how the environmental dynamics they are included in turns on or off the assertive potentialities that reside there (when genes express themselves as combinations, in response to the environmental dynamic, it is call ‘epigenetics’).

In any case, Aristotle’s one-sided choice of ‘intrinsic final cause’ or ‘organisms as purposive systems’ is so deeply infused into western science (by ‘anthropomorphism’) that it is not going to be easy to move on with concepts such as ‘bidirectional innovation’ (although the experiments confirm this and the results are published in peer-reviewed microbiology  journals).   Nevertheless, those scientists such as Caldwell, if they don’t get tainted with ‘Intelligent Design’ get accused of the ‘heresy’ of denying ‘natural selection’.

Natural selection is what one has to invoke to explain the persisting of a purposive system (a system that already has inbuilt intrinsic final cause; i.e. it knows from infancy what it wants to develop into) in a passive space (a space without any extrinsic-shaping-influence).  Of course, if the shape of the developing organism is elicited by the co-evolving spatial niche that is opening up for it, then ‘natural selection’ is an  ‘idea’ or ‘device’ that is no longer needed to keep the ‘purposive system model of Aristotle ‘hanging together’.

Can you imagine a plethora of diverse organisms hanging about, all with intrinsic-shaping-influence sufficient to direct their ultimate final form ‘built in’, without any codevelopmental assistance from extrinsic shaping influence.  They won’t be answering any calls to take their place in the natural scheme of things.  They will instead be competing with one another for sustainable employment in a purely positivist sense (extrinsic-shaping-influence-free sense).   ‘Natural selection’ is a kind of Deus ex Machina’ (God out of a box) ‘fix’ to explain why certain forms persist.   There is no thought here that the community dynamic (extrinsic-shaping-influence) is continuously opening up spatial niche possibilities the codevelop the incumbent by eliciting the blossoming of its assertive potentialities.

On the other hand, consider the ‘stem cell’ and its role in regenerative organs.  When cells die within a regenerative organ, or when the organ suffers an injury, there may be a particular piece missing or a particularly shaped ‘hole’ that needs ‘filling in’.  This requires ‘extrinsic shaping influence’ and not just ‘intrinsic shaping influence’ on the part of a cell is internally programmed to develop into something specifc..  These cells spring forth where and when they are needed in the right quantities; i.e. this development involves extrinsic shaping influence.

100% extrinsic shaping influence = ‘intelligent design’ aka ‘creationism’.

100% intrinsic shaping influence = purposive systems  in the organic realm, causal systems in the mechanical realm.

‘Bidirectional innovation’ involves a conjugate relation between extrinsic shaping influence and intrinsic shaping influence.

But LOOK OUT! … because if you go with this you will be accused of two ‘scientific heresies’ at the same time; ‘intelligent design/creationism and denial of natural selection.  That is what is going in today that is stirring the social scene that Kevin Miller, Ben Stein and Walt Rulof were trying to dig out and present.

But they were missing the Nietzsche connection and the were not informed on ‘bidirectional innovation’ wherein it is no longer an either/or choice between ‘intelligent design’ (100% extrinsic shaping influence) and ‘purposive systems’ (100% intrinsic shaping influence), but rather a conjugate relation between the two (bidirectional innovation).

In the case of Nietzsche’s contention that western science is infused with anthropomorphism; i.e. it starts from how we see ourselves either as having within us the wherewithal to determine our unfolding development, or whether our unfolding development will be determined (at least partly) by the opening of spatial possibility associated with our situational inclusion in the world dynamic.  These two different ‘self-images’ are usually associated with ‘East’ and ‘West’.

East: (as captured by John Lennon)

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” — extrinsic shaping influence conjugate with intrinsic shaping influence

West: (as in ‘the American Dream’)

“You can create the future of your dreams. This may seem far fetched for most people, but what they do not seem to realize is that their present is the future they created by their past actions or inaction. You are where you are today because of the decisions and actions you took yesterday.” — intrinsic shaping influence as in ‘purposive system’

That the Aristotelian preference for the ‘intrinsic final cause’ or ‘purposive system’ model  is a distinguishing feature of the western culture is illustrated in the following example, comparing the western view with the Amerindian view;

When the tide ebbs and the water recedes from the intertidal flats, people follow the tide out to pick clams and as as the tide floods and the water encroaches, the people withdraw to the shore.  If there are both ‘westerners’ and ‘Amerindians’ amongst the clam-diggers, if they are interviewed and asked why that are at this place at this time, the westerners will say that it is a good time to pick clams.  If asked why so many others gathered here at the same place at the same time, they will answer that it is because everyone has reasoned in the same way, that ‘great minds think alike’.  That is, they will couch their answers purely in intrinsic-behaviour-shaping-influence terms.   The Amerindians, when asked the same question, will say that their individual behaviour and the collective behaviour, are orchestrated by the dynamics of the habitat they are included in.  That is, they will couch their responses in terms of extrinsic-behaviour-shaping influence.

That this human image of self as a ‘purposive system’ has been infused into our model of organisms of all types in science can be seen in debate that periodically crops up in western medical research.  For example, Nobel laureate for medicine (1937), Albert Szent-Györgyi observed that streptococcus pneumonia bacteria, crowds of them, showed up at the same place and time inside of him.  He didn’t interview them as in the clam-digger (human) example, but he did question whether they were driven there by their own purpose (intrinsic behaviour-shaping influence).  His notion was that their congregating was the result of his illness rather than the cause of it; i.e. he reasoned that extrinsic behaviour-shaping influences were dominant, … that the conditions were fertile for the proliferation of streptococcus pneumoniae.  In his lab, he had been studying animals with scurvy which also got pneumonia.  He treated his pneumonia with large does of vitamin C and recovered very quickly.  His research on vitamin C won him the Nobel prize.

Szent-Györgyi’s contention that extrinsic behaviour-shaping influences dominated over intrinsic behaviour-shaping influences was basically a repeat of Pasteur’s deathbed concession to the contention of Antoine Béchamp that ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the intrinsic behaviour-shaping influence is nothing, the extrinsic behaviour-shaping influence is everything.  None of this has been able to dislodge the prevailing western science modeling in terms of ‘Aristotle’s choice’ of intrinsic final cause (purposive systems) as the preferred model.

This resistance to dislodgement stems not from the particulars of scientific arguments (one can argue that bacteria cause illness and one can argue, as well, that illness is the body falling out of balance and so creating the conditions for bacteria to flourish).

The resistance to dislodgement hinges on the fact that a great many of us in the western culture, and particularly those currently in positions of power, embrace a self-image wherein we believe that “You can create the future of your dreams” while only a far smaller number believe that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

So long as the political machinery of western-style sovereign states convinces us that we should opt for the former self-image, and since we have implemented the corporation as a ‘purposive system’ that also encourages the former self-image, it is going to be very difficult to climb down off the Aristotelian ‘intrinsic final cause’ bandwagon and its created cohorts ‘natural selection’ and ‘corporate organisation’..

My hope is that Miller, Stein and Rulof will make the needed adjustments (acknowledge ‘bidirectional innovation’ rather than putting the spotlight on ‘extrinsic final cause’ as a substitute for intrinsic final cause, and point out how Nietzsche’s charge of science as anthropomorphism anchors in place the notion of ‘natural selection’ and ‘competition’) and come back for ‘another try’.

* * *

outside-in influence is conjugate with inside-out influence; bee cells, bubbles, convection cells (i.e. pressure field dynamic conditions cell-dynamics at same time as cell-dynamics condition pressure field)

This blog was composed as a comment to a discussion ‘More on thinking backwards’ at http://healthvsmedicine.blogspot.com/2006/06/more-on-thinking-backwards.html  but the comment exceeds the limit of 4096 characters, so I am posting the comment here and will put in a short comment with a link back to this post at the above URL.

Jump to ‘start of comment’ to bypass the following observation which is expressed in ‘philosophy of science’ terms.

Analytical thinking assumes that understanding can be reduced to a few basic principles by capturing the ‘most significant’ causal agencies and eliminating the ‘least significant’.   Relational thinking assumes interdependency where ‘everything counts’ so that understanding emerges from ‘coherency’ when many different things are brought into connective confluence; i.e. articulating a relational understanding requires ‘more words’ than the presentation of analytical understanding.

The figure above is ‘extra’ and intends to ‘underscore’ the point that, as Mach’s principle suggests, an ambient field of influence (thermal/pressure field) that seems to act outside-inwards and the inside-outward push of apparently ‘locally originating assertive behaviour’ of ‘cells’ within the field, are in a conjugate relation, in the same manner as the ‘storm-cell’ in the ‘flow-field’ of the atmosphere.  If we associate ‘cell-dynamics’ with ‘people-dynamics’, the suggestion is that people can ‘pressure up’ the ambiance they are included in so that it reflects back; i.e.  ‘they put the squeeze on themselves’.  An example of this occurs in crowd situations where closely spaced people start pushing away from one another (i.e. they try to enlarge the space they occupy).  The space acts like a spring that is being loaded (compressed) by this inside-outward action and it will try to ‘unload’ (decompress) in an outside-inward fashion (as in a fluid dynamic or pressure-field).

This view in which ‘field’ is primary and the visible material dynamics are secondary or ‘relative’ (in accordance with the principle of relativity of motion) dissolves the apparent paradox of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ wherein it is assumed that ‘what transpires’, transpires partly (in an ‘either/or’ sense)  by the inside-outward influence of internal processes and partly by the outside-inward shaping influence of externally applied forces.  That is, if one accepts that ‘field’ is primary, Mach’s principle follows wherein the ‘dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’.  If one mentally explores what goes on with a storm-cell in the ambient pressure/thermal field-flow of the atmosphere, one can easily validate Mach’s principle.  It holds for all fluid-dynamics and the dynamics of ‘field’ are intrinsically ‘fluid’ dynamics.  Conceiving dynamics in terms of the actions/interactions of local material objects as if transpiring in absolute fixed and empty space, does not ‘over-ride’ the reality of the natural primacy of ‘field’ over notional ‘local, independently-existing material objects/organisms/systems, notionally equipped with their own locally originating agency’.

* * * start of comment on ‘more on thinking backwards’ as it was originally intended/attempted * * *

‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ thinking, may be the primary choices for our manner of ‘thinking’ but understanding (intuition) is not constrained to the ‘either/or’ of linear opposites.  (i.e. ‘backward thinking’ may better connote what is being contended here)

Life is ‘bigger than’ the phenomena we observe ‘out there in front of us’.  We are included in a spatial-relational unfolding that transcends ‘time-and-materials’.  We can observe ‘bubbles’ ‘out there in front of us’ as they emerge on the surface of a pond and notice their coalescing into clusters.  We can watch the shape of the individual bubbles transform from spheres to hexagons and recall how we felt when we were sardined in a crowd of demonstrators.  The reductionist method starts off by assuming the local independent existence of local material objects/organisms/ and further assumes that ‘their’ transformation is caused by a combination of externally-applied forces and internal process driven forces.   The scientific observer may come up with the ‘answer’ that the internal influence of the expansion of air in the bubble responsible for the growth of the bubbles while the growth is, at the same time, externally constrained by  inertial forces as the bubbles coalesce and ‘pack themselves together’.

If we compare the individual bubbles to the community of bubbles, we find that the community dynamic is capable of a shaping influence that is not available to the individual.  The individual cannot, using internal processes, create the hexagonal shape.(neither can an individual honeybee do this).  Internal influences can be associated with ‘genetics’ or ‘nature’ in the ‘nature-versus-nurture’ paradox while external influences are like ‘environment’.  In the case of the bubbles (and in general?) there is one dynamic, otherwise known as ‘field’, that is more comprehensive than the visible patterns in terms of ‘what visible things do’.   The observer, if he is scientific, observes like a ‘voyeur’, as if he is not included in the dynamic he is observing.  He will not admit, therefore, that the sun that is warming his back as he observes the transforming community/individuals, is the first-cause source of the dynamics he is observing.

When pressures build up in the community, they reflect back to transform the individuals and in the clustering, there are always a few whose situation within the spatial relations is like that of the pregnant woman next to the balcony railing in the soccer stadium when the riot breaks out; i.e. she becomes the ‘casualty’ (the runt in the litter, the scapegoat etc.) and one cannot identity a ‘causal agency’ in either a top-down or bottom up sense, because the first cause source of these dynamics is not ‘in the picture’, it was the alleged ‘dirty play’ of the Highland Bone-Crushers that led to their winning goal over the Lowland Widow-Makers that ‘heated things up’.

The scientific inquiry of the psychiatrist is constrained by the evidence he observes in front of him (not the evolving weirdo dynamics of the society he too is included in) so he orients to changing what he is able to change; i.e. internal biochemical driving processes.  The psychologist is likely to work on the spatial relationships aspect so that the ‘client’ becomes more aware of the dysfunction in his relations with external others and may get out of a relationship or change jobs or move to a new community.  None of this acknowledges the innate primacy of ‘field’ in the shaping of the ‘local material system’.  Thermal fields, the gravity field, acoustic fields are ‘everywhere at the same time’.  They include the observer (the battlefield psychiatrist) who has the behind-the-front-lines job of ‘diagnosing the individual’ and ‘treating the individual’ who is ‘having a break-down’. Is the ‘cause’ of the problem ‘a weakness’ in the individual (genetics) or is the ‘cause’ coming from externally applied force/influence?

The pregnant woman who was squeezed over the balcony in the crush of the crowd may testify from her hospital bed, that everyone immediately around her was trying desperately to protect her, but the uniqueness of her spatial situation (next to the railing) was key to what transpired.  Therefore, it was neither her ‘weakness’ nor externally-applied force that constituted the ‘first cause’ of the ‘result’ (her near fatal injuries), and our inquiry into ‘cause’ fizzles out in ‘the sky’ in the same manner as the fizzling out of inquiry into clustering and hexagonalizing of bubbles; i.e. the causal source is neither to be found inside of the individual nor does it derive from the community dynamic, but instead from the energy field that is everywhere at the same time.

Our life experience affirms to us every minute of every day that we are included in ‘energy fields’ that orchestrate our individual and collective behaviours, that have us ‘hibernating’ in winter and rioting in urban ghettoes in hot ‘spells’ in the summer.  Lamarck called them ‘les fluides incontenables’, dynamics-influencing fluids ‘that contain but which cannot themselves be contained’ (like the flow of the atmosphere relative to the flow-feature we call a ‘storm-cell’).  Darwin substituted instead, ‘internal process drives’, complemented by ‘random variation’ and that’s our current popular ‘scientific model’.  Lamarck’s model invokes ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum theory’ and was ‘ahead of its time’.

The dynamics of the energy field we are included in, according to Mach’s principle, conditions our dynamics at the same time as our dynamics condition the dynamics of the energy field.  Understanding things in a ‘field’ context transcends understanding that limits itself to ‘what things do’.

Like the family of the woman who was squeezed out over the railing and like the family of the depressed person who ‘defenestrates’, we transfer the pressures of society to one another like bubbles in the cluster and there is going to be some of us who are more exposed by virtue of our unique situational inclusion in the unfolding pressure-driven dynamic.  The family of the woman who was pushed over the railing (or who defenestrated) will be primary suspects as ‘causal agents’ in the case, and if the only choices are ‘nature’ (internal weakness) or ‘nurture’ (external influence), the family will insist that it was ‘the temporary infirmity’ that their daughter was suffering from that was the ‘cause’ of the tragedy.  Was it the crowd of bubbles that caused the transformation of spheres to hexagons and produced some misshapen ‘runts’ in the litter, or was this transformation attributable to what was going on in the interior of the individual ‘cells’?   This ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ choice is too constraining and it obscures our more comprehensive understanding.

The bubbles observer is going to have to acknowledge that the sun that is warming his back (les fluides incontenables) is at the same time animating what he is observing ‘out there in front of him’, and so it is too for the psychiatrist and the family of the defenestrant. If they constrain their interpretation of ’cause’ to either (a) external forces and/or (b) internal processes, they, the observers and judges, remove themselves and their own experience from the inquiry and thus deny that they may be part of the problem; i.e. their behaviours condition the behaviour of the dynamic social space they are included in, at the same time as the dynamic of the social space is conditioning the behaviour of those included in it.  They may have yelled out; ‘You effing Lowland Widow-Makers’ and helped to cultivate the ambiance (‘field’) that induced turbulence in the crowd which in turn squeezed them so that they squeezed their pregnant daughter who was least able to ‘hold her own’, over the railing.  Of course, for those occurences that don’t fit such simplistic ‘what things do’ based scientific theory, science-believers call them ‘random chance’ (Darwinism) while religious believers call them ‘Acts of God’.

Nature can have a chuckle at these inventions of man that he uses to deny his own limitations in trying to explain ‘the way the world works’ (as if the world-dynamic were something out there in front of him revealing itself to his thinking powers without implying that both himself and those things he was observing are included in something more comprehensive still, that connects him to that which is ‘out there in front of him’, the target of his voyeur observations and scientific inquiry.).

Insofar as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ inquiry may fall into and spin their wheels in the same ‘ruts’ of inquiry as ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, they too, will miss the point that ‘field’ is in a natural primacy over ‘things’ and ‘what they do’.  ‘Backwards thinking’ is perhaps a less ambiguous term since by backwards thinking we do not have to find ‘material cause’ as popular science does, and we could then acknowledge that our individual and collective behaviour is shaped by ‘ambient social pressure’ (felt-pressure to do in Rome what the Romans do).  That is clearly ‘what we feel’ even though it is ‘invisible’ and we know that we respond to ‘what we feel’ even if it is ‘invisible’ and thus that ‘invisible social pressure’ orchestrates our individual and collective behaviour (we can say that it is ‘just in our heads’ but it is nevertheless a feeling that is like a thermal field that orchestrates  huddling and dispersing in warm-blooded animals whose dynamics are orchestrated to serve the sustaining of balance of inside-outward and outside-inward thermal energy flow.).  But if our scientific inquiry only accepts visible material cause that appears to be due to ‘local material causal agency’ (also known as ‘what things do’ that derives from our observation of [secondary] dynamic phenomena), then we have to explain our behaviour in terms of internal processes and/or externally applied forces, neither of which are sufficiently comprehensive to comprehend ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time’ ‘fields’ that permeate the space we share inclusion in.

Backwards thinking would rightly (realistically according to our real-life experience) have us accept, as ‘reality’, ‘social pressure fields’ that orchestrate our individual and collective behaviour, even though scientific inquiry that starts from visual observation of the secondary phenomena of ‘local material agents’  (objects, organisms, systems) and ‘what they do’ constrains itself so that it can never get to such understanding.  The psychiatrist, psychologist and family who themselves are complying with ambient dysfunction-infusing social pressures see themselves as ‘the support team’ for the individual that ‘defenestrates.  In their ‘eyes’, they surrounded the defenestrant so as to protect him from the dangerous mob while they encourage him to ‘accept being normal like them’.  Of course, all the while this is going on, they are all in a game-playing ambiance, cheering their Highland Bone-Crushers on to annihilate and humiliate those m-f’ing Lowland Widow-Makers in the good old Darwinian (field-denying) tradition that claims to be the scheme by which ‘nature works’ thus the reference for ‘the normal’ (local-independent-self-interest-driven-causal-agents-interacting-in-empty-space) way of behaving.   The ‘normal’ way of behaving that induces rising ambient social pressures that reflect back on everyone included in that social space, as with the bubble-cluster, produces more and more ‘runts’ that are labelled as ‘defectives’ as it intensifies, ‘runts’ or ‘defectives’ who are spatially situated in the wrong place at the wrong time who are  surrounded by supportive and protective ‘normals’.

Who amongst us CANNOT differentiate between an oppressive and a liberating social ambiance?  Who amongst us ‘really’ believes that a  ‘normality’ that complies with and nourishes an insane social dynamic is something for the non-compliant individual termed ‘deranged’, to aspire to?   Why then should we understand things ‘scientifically’ in terms of our visual observations of ‘what things do’ which is necessarily secondary to the primary sourcing ambient field?  Backwards thinking would have us accept the natural primacy of a spatial pressure field that orchestrates our individual and collective behaviour, ‘les fluides incontenables’ of Lamarckism that was sidelined by Darwinism, the latter erroneously promoting local material organisms allegedly equipped with their own ‘absolute first cause originating of behaviour/development’ to a false primacy (‘false’ as used here meaning ‘in contradiction to our natural life experience wherein our individual and collective dynamics are orchestrated by the spatial dynamic (‘field-dynamic’) we are included in.   Our experience is that we disperse when we are in an intense thermal field and we huddle when in a weak thermal field, we rise and retire with the rising and the setting of the sun (i.e. the flooding and ebbing of a spatial luminance field).  Descriptions of these dynamics that start off in terms of ‘what we humans do’ denies the ‘first cause’ role of the spatial dynamics that we are included in.  The popular scientific  interpretation of dynamic phenomena in terms of ‘what things do’ is invented by the observer by imposing an absolute space frame over the visual objects of his interest that he selects out of the field-dynamic so that he can impute to those visual objects (e.g. ‘hurricane Katrina’) ‘their own behaviour’ even though they are the products of the spatial fields they are included in.   When we do this we erroneously promote ‘secondary cause’ (the spatial field dynamics are first cause) to ‘first cause’ (locally originating behaviour’) which is convenient for science since it makes terse and explicit use of our noun and verb language architecture, but it is, as Kepler observed, nothing other than a case of science “choosing not that which is most true but that which is most easy.”

ted

Assertive action is conjugate to spatial accommodation

I suspect that there are many others like myself, that ‘get tired’ with living in a society or ‘culture’ that seems so dysfunctional yet so unable to get off the rails it is riding on.

It is clear to me that some of those others can vent by pointing their fingers at those who they judge to be ‘principally responsible’ for the dysfunction, but I don’t even have that for a ‘release’ since ‘finger-pointing’ or ‘attributing causal agency’ seems to me to go with the dysfunctional culture.

What is the matter with our ‘Western Culture’ that makes ‘WC’ a fitting abbreviation? It seems simple to me.  You don’t have to write volumes to describe what’s going on.

Ok, I wrote a book to describe it, ‘A Fluid-Dynamical World View’ – www.goodshare.org/fluiddynamicview.pdf

But the basics are as follows;

1. For every assertive action, there is a conjugate spatial-relational accommodating.

If the world is flow or field based, this must be so.  Mach’s principle of relativity claims that it must be so.

Howard Zinn, in ‘A People’s History of the United States’ at http://www.historyisaweapon/zinnapeopleshistory.html notes that ‘history’ as we Westerners write it, is equivalent to the memory of the sovereign state (or ‘sovereign being’), … a memory which discards the spatial-relational accommodating aspect

The sovereign-state is based on nothing other than ‘common belief’.  The ‘sovereign state’ of the United States is a glimmer in the eyes of the colonizers prior to the completion of its seizing of the land, the material counterpart of the ‘sovereign state’.

The ‘sovereigntists’ understand ‘colonization’ as if it were an assertive act marked by a time-line of assertive achievements, arrival, establishment of initial colonies, expansion, development, growth, etc. etc.

In Zinn’s terms, this is the ‘executioner’s view’ or the ‘memory of the executioner’.  The memory of the ‘victims’ starts from before the invaders arrived and it is only the latter chapter of their history that gets into their efforts to try defend their land from take-over by the invaders, with accounts of the successive collapse of the strongholds, their retreat and accommodations conjugate to the assertive advance, the genocide launched against their race and against aboriginal culture and language.

History as the ‘memory of the executor’ who understands himself to be the causal agency responsible for the settlement of new lands, does not tell the story of ‘the accommodation’; e.g. it does not tell the story of ‘wolf’ whose breeding grounds are encrouched upon by the advancing spatial front of newly-built settlements, and how accommodation of one sort or another is forced by the assertive intrusion.

If the wolves ‘become mean’, or if the aboriginals ‘become mean’ or if the black slaves ‘become mean’, if we stick by our manner of modeling dynamics in the one-sided terms of assertive action (as in Newtonian physics), then we would have to say that ‘mean behaviour’ was a locally originating (internal process-driven and internal purpose directed) behaviour on the part of the wolf and/or aboriginal.

In the ‘real world’; i.e. in a ‘flowing’ or ‘fluid-dynamical world’, all assertive actions are conjugate to spatial accommodation; i.e. space is not ‘empty’ as in the simplified ‘Newtonian’ model where we assume that we can describe the world dynamic in terms of ‘what material things do’ as the act/interact in an absolute fixed and empty space..

In space that is understood to be a resonant energy charged spatial medium, space is ‘spring-loaded’ and when one pushes into it, one compresses the springs and loads space with potential energy that can fuel contrary reverberations.

Colonization is like ‘rape’ in that it focuses on what it achieves.  History is the written account of the memory of the rapist.   If the rapist is lucky, the victim will forget and forgive how she was forced to accommodate the asserting colonizer (the contrary spring loading may dissipate), on the other hand, she may bide her time and rise up and stab him while he sleeps.

Our Western culture is in the habit of ‘modeling dynamics’ from the point of view of the ‘executor’ (winner) as if there were no spatial-relational ‘accommodation’ in conjugate relation with the actions of the executor.   We picture the arrival of the colonizers in their ships and the construction of their settlements and the growth and development of their social dynamic, without including in that picture, how ecosystemic dynamics of the inhabitants of the habitat they are asserting into shall accommodate their assertive action.

This is not only true of the sovereign state and the sovereign being (individual human or organism), but it is true of western organizational structures that include ‘the corporation’.   When Walmart colonizes the business firmament, there is, at the same time, a conjugate spatial accommodating.  Walmart may inflict genocide on mom-and-pop businesses in the shared dynamic space of the community.

To tell the story of ‘change’ in the one-sided terms of assertive actions, to give voice one-sidedly, to the memory of the sovereign states, sovereign beings, executive actors, fails to include the story of accommodation conjugate to the assertive aspect of the dynamic.

Accommodation is the parenting aspect of nature’s dynamic while assertive action is the child.  The blossoming storm-cell is the visible aspect of the accommodating aspect of the persisting flow; i.e. the expanding storm-cell is the RESULT of the accommodating aspect of the flow rather than it being the cause of the flow.

In other words, the ongoing flow of the atmosphere is the accommodating medium that first opens up for the new ‘flow-feature’.  The new flow-feature is not the product of ‘its own internally driven processes’ (the only reason that a hurricane forms is to transport thermal energy from thermally-energy-rich to thermal-energy-poor regions).

The ‘memory’ of the colonizers orients to the pattern of assertive action that they are deliberately making as they push forward into their new lands (‘new’ to them, but not new to the current occupants).  There must be ‘an accommodating’ for them to push on in; e.g. wolves do not live in the city.

Who does the ‘accommodating’?   The wolf would never ‘agree’ to the assertive intrusion of the colonizers (the notion of ‘agreement’ or ‘choice’ makes no sense here), so he resists to the point that some new ‘dynamic balance’ emerges.  The dynamic of space ‘does the accommodating’.  Space is an ‘accommodating medium’.   As Mach’s principle says, ‘the dynamic of the habitat conditions the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’.   That’s how fluid-dynamic spaces ‘work’; ‘the dynamic of flow condition the dynamics of the flow-features (storm-cells) at the same time as the dynamics of the flow-features are conditioning the dynamics of the flow’.

The colonizer is not the author of the ‘accommodating’, yet ‘history’ in its conventional (Western cultural) sense,  the ‘memory’ of the colonizer, the executor, is an account of ‘what the executor does, his marching forward in time based achievement.

There is a bigger story to tell.  It orients to the dynamics of space which prevailed prior to executor commencing his assertive action and which continue to prevail long after the ‘incoming inhabitant’ becomes part of the common ground or ‘habitat’.  These before-and-after spatial relational dynamics that live in the continuously unfolding present undergo transformation, accommodating newly emergent flow features and accommodating the assimilation of those that have emerged, blossomed, faded.

The dynamics of space do not ‘gather together features and later on disperse them.  The dynamics of space are continually gathering and re-gathering an endless diverse multiplicity of flow-features.   Gathering naturally prevails (death is feeding life, not vice versa), ‘dispersing’ is a term that is not basic to the dynamics of nature; it arises from our own RESTRICTED focus on local visible features (local material objects/organisms/systems).  If we open up our view so that it comprehends the ceaselessly accommodating dynamics of space (which transpires in the continuing present), there is no ‘dispersing’, only ceaselessly innovative regathering.

We know all about the conjugate assertive-spatial accommodating dynamic on a personal level.  As assertive individuals (male and female in ‘male mode’), we poke around in search of spatial accommodation, finding less resistance here, more accommodation there, as the tongues of flood waters search for spatial accommodation in an earthen barrier.  So it is, as well, with the beasts of the forest in their manner of relating to one another via the spatial dynamic they share inclusion in and what prevails is a certain ‘dynamic balance’ or ‘standing wave’ ordering.

When three or more assertive agents seek accommodation with one another at the same time, as mathematical physicists have determined, there is no solution to this problem in terms of the contribution of individual behaviour to these dynamics.  The spatial-relational dynamics are in a natural precedence over the dynamics of the ‘local material objects/organisms/systems’.

This is the ‘general case’ in nature.  To single out one assertive agent and to visualize his actions relative to an absolute space frame is an observer-contrived special case that does not exist in nature.  To notionally invent a win/lose competition between two opposing assertive agents (implying that they live in an absolute space frame) is an observer-contrived special case that does not exist in nature.  Darwinism is founded on an observer-contrived special case that does not exist in nature.

In nature, spatial accommodation is in a natural precedence over assertive achievement, just as it is in a fluid dynamic, which modern physics suggests is fundamental in Nature.

What is going wrong then?

On a personal level, even the beasts of the forest are seeking spatial accommodation, so how does the primacy of spatial accommodating give way to ‘assertive achievement’ in-its-own-right?

The opposing generals that both want to assertively seize a strategic stronghold abandon this notion of seeking spatial accommodation and make plans that are purely ‘assertive achievement’ oriented.   There is no probing around to discover where the spatial accommodation is most giving and least resistant.  The approach of the generals is to butt heads at a particular point so as to prevail at all costs.   The troops in the front lines of the assault (don’t fire until you can see the whites of their eyes) may be crushed by the force of the opposition.  This is not the approach of the wolf-pack, which would seek avenues of spatial accommodation, passing through them to outflank the quarry and close in from all sides.

The memory of generals is in terms of assertive achievement (positive and negative), not in terms of spatial accommodation.  The occupation of the Americas backed by military generals records things like ‘the battle of the Plains of Abraham’ and merely footnotes, if it even mentions, the spatial accommodating that was experienced by the French within the space that was now controlled by the British.

When we go from the personal level to the collective level, IN THE WESTERN CULTURE, our behaviour becomes like that of the generals.  We employ technology to back up an assertive plan of attack and to persist in that plan of attack in order to achieve it.  It is a full frontal assault that seeks to prevail absolutely, to seize and occupy a strategic position.  Assertive achievement is measured in terms of ‘sales’ or ‘take’ (akin to ‘kill’ as in taking in buffalo hides).

These military terms ‘plan of attack’, or simply ‘plan’ as relate to ‘assertive achievement’ are very unlike the notion of ‘seeking spatial accommodation’ or ‘taking our place in the natural scheme of things’ as is the ethic of the aboriginal.   We are talking about absolute control over the space we seize and occupy.  We are talking about ‘taking the place’ lock, stock and barrel rather than ‘taking our place in the natural scheme of things’.  We are talking about ‘the earth belongs to man’ rather than ‘man belongs to the earth’.

Military backed colonization is ‘rape’.  It is not ‘seeking spatial accommodation’ as individuals within a personal collective tend to do, and as the Amerindians proposed to the first waves of European settlers.

The history we write, as Zinn observes, is the memory of the sovereign state.  It is the memory of the generals without whom there would be no sovereign state, only a world without countries, as John Lennon suggests in ‘Imagine’ where the inhabitants of earth seek spatial accommodation.

The history we individuals write, that we record in our ‘resumés’, is the memory of the sovereign being, the ego-memory, which is in terms of ‘our own assertive achievements’, merely footnoting the spatial accommodations experienced by those whom we share inclusion in a common living space.

What Zinn gives a portrait of, is the ‘ego’ of the sovereign state.   The memory of the assertive achievements of the sovereign state, the memory of the ‘executioners’, as he calls it, is the ego of the sovereign state.  It merely footnotes the spatial accommodating that is experienced by those with whom we share inclusion in our common living space.

The resumé or ‘history’ we write of our individual selves, is the memory of our sovereign being, of our assertive accomplishments, the memory of the ‘executive’ aspect of our dynamic engaging; i.e. the memory of the ego of our sovereign being.  It merely footnotes the spatial accommodating that is experienced by those with whom we share inclusion in our common living space.

There is thus a ‘problem’ with ‘who we believe ourselves to be’, not only at the level of the sovereign state, but at the level of the sovereign being and at the level of the sovereign agency known as the corporation.

The problem derives from our ‘selective memory’, the sort of memory that recalls our ‘assertive achievements’ but merely footnotes the spatial accommodating that is experienced by all who share inclusion in our common living space.

To close the loop on this blog, as I suggested at the start;

The basics are as follows;

1. For every assertive action, there is a conjugate spatial-relational accommodating.

If the world is flow or field based, this must be so.  Mach’s principle of relativity claims that it must be so.

The assertive actions of European colonizers is highlighted in the ‘history’ of ‘the colonies’.  It records the memory of the executors of assertive achievement, the makers of progress, the importers of civilization.  But the colonizers imposed themselves into a spatial relational dynamic that had been cultivating its own dynamic balancing, and thus there was necessarily a spatial-relational accommodating associated with the assertive intrusion, into this same space, of the colonizers.  The history of this ‘spatial accommodating’ is, in Zinn’s terms, the history of the victims, those targeted by the ‘executors’ of assertive achievement for genocide and enslavement.

The Western culture confuses idealisation, dynamics in the one-sided terms of assertive achievement, for reality.  This reality is nothing other than the memory of the ego that merely footnotes ‘spatial accommodation’, the dynamics of the overall parenting medium of Nature in which we all share inclusion.

Our education system continues to imprint youth with a culturally stamped approval of the pursuit of assertive achievement, out of the context of spatial accommodation.  It is the legacy of our colonizing phase wherein genocide and slavery were mere footnotes to the glorious achievements of our sovereign state in which we ‘have every right to be proud of’, … or so says the memory of our generals.

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