Aboriginal Physics Newsletter

expression unencumbered by word-based language

My feeling is that a ‘true rant’ should spontaneously emerge, like the howling of coyotes orchestrated by the rising of a full moon.

But I have lost my coyote voice and coyote ways so I feel as if I am stuck with language.

Language is a poor vehicle for my rant because it divides everything up into subject and object and then has to set everything in motion using verbs.  My experience of the world is nothing like the way it is served up in language.  The world of my experience is an innovatively unfolding spatial-relational continuum, a ‘flow of becoming’ that includes me. Read the rest of this entry »

they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.

Musings on the globally pervasive quest for ‘more personal’ community: . . .- It seems that many people have grown tired of living within a system that is ‘constantly bickering with itself’ and seems, in many ways, to be growing more ‘internally intolerant’.  The discomfort is not coming simply from differences in views and their associated debates, since these have always been accepted as part of normal living and the normal social dynamic. It seems instead to be coming from the growing un-civility of it all.  We may applaud the significant extension to our ability to communicate furnished by cell phones and internet technologies, but these technologies open the door, as well, to an extreme impersonality [e.g. ‘bullying’ that exposes the private life details of an individual to a voyeur crowd that can easily exceed the capacity of the Coliseum] and to the infusing of discordant notes that continually accumulate and never seem to get resolved, engendering a lingering ambiance that is sort of graffiti like.  In the new media, many speak in abusive and derogatory tones that ‘would not be tolerated in a physical space’.  At the same time, the boundarylessness opens the way for new connections that have the potential to bring people together in a ‘more personal’ community.

What kind of change is in its birthing process? Read the rest of this entry »

Viewing a life-cycle removes the ecological (conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational) dimensionality

‘Theory’ is a way of understanding how the world works which in turn shapes our behaviour and how we relate to and engage with one another and with our shared living space.

‘Theory’ can be either religious or scientific and the theories of our culture are infused into us early on in our lives.  As B. F. Skinner observes; “Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.”.  That is why children who grow up in a culture that embraces particular religious theories (God created nature in the form of a collection of local material beings) and scientific theories (the earth occupies the centre of the universe) tend to believe in the same theories, and to infuse into their children at an early age, these same theories.   As in the examples in parentheses, there tends to be overlap in these religious and scientific theories; e.g. the ‘absolute being’ of ‘local material bodies’.   Since the world is evidently ‘evolving’, there have been different religious and scientific theories that try to reconcile a world undergoing continual ‘becoming’ and a world portrayed in terms of a ‘collection of material beings’. Read the rest of this entry »

This essay is for sharing with those who may have interest in the intuition that rational thought is screwing up our understanding by ‘going with vision, thought and language’ rather than with our ‘feeling experience’ of situational inclusion in the unfolding spatial plenum.

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escher's 'print gallery' / including the observer in the observed

Rational thought turns us into judges that accept, LITERALLY,  the forms we see ‘out there in front us’ and ‘their actions’ as if we were ‘not included’ in what we are looking at ‘out there in front of us’.  Thus an oppressive regime that allows extreme wealthy and poor classes to form (protects the continuing disparate wealth shift by ‘right to own and possess’ laws, sees ‘theft’, the inevitable ‘short circuits’ that develop between such extremes, as actions in-their-own-local-right perpetrated by forms or ‘beings’ that exist in their own local right. This notion that ‘local forms’ and their actions are ‘real’ is something that we gather from our visual sensing and that we further affirm in thought and language by defining and word-labeling these forms.  As John Stuart Mill observed; “Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the local existence of the object [form] defined.” Read the rest of this entry »

friedrich wilhelm nietzsche (ca. 1875)

Many people are discontented with modern society and some are very angry.   The discontent and anger seeks to point the finger somewhere, … at ‘big oil’, at capitalism, at the corporation, at the state, and at ‘authority’ in general.   

It is not going to go away without being dealt with.  The discontent and anger is going to continue to deepen until some sort of resolving insight is forthcoming.   

The discontent is in me and I often speak the language of anti-authoritarianism or anarchism in trying to address it.    

My views are better-described, though,  in terms of ‘decolonizing’ as in Amerindian ‘decolonizing’ initiatives.  They are about restoring more natural relations with one another and our living space.  This, I do not see simply as a ‘good thing to do’.  I see it as an imperative in the sense that we are suffering from a malady that is only going to get worse, if it is not attended to.   The result will be deepening tensions and conflict between those who are the supporters and defenders of our ‘current way of life’ and the growing number of people who emotionally and intellectually reject it and who try to actively, physically reject it, a task that is extremely frustrating since one is included in it like a fish in water.   

My intention is not to ‘change the world’ so as to bring about some Utopian society.  It is to cultivate collective inquiry into the psycho-social foundations of our society so that we can all see through to the bottom of this; so that we can expose, for ourselves, the malady that is not going to go away unless we acknowledge that it is there, and which is going to get a lot worse if left unattended.  Read the rest of this entry »

A small plane runs out of fuel and attempts a landing on a busy freeway, the drivers in the freeway flow see the plane descending and open up a space for it to land.  As the wind shifts, shifting the plane’s imminent point of ground contact, the organizing of the opening in the vehicle collective shifts, leaving an impression akin to that of an eagle herding cats, a phenomenon ‘half seen’ and ‘half felt’ as the ‘cat’s paw’ is to the sailor, an approaching ‘dark patch’ on the water that warns of imminent engaging with an invisible gyre of air turbulence.

We live in a dynamic space and our actions/behaviours in the unfolding present are naturally orchestrated by the continually transforming spatial relations we are uniquely, situationally included in.  We experience the world as a ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial-relational dynamic.  Everything is in flux, and within the evolving flux, certain forms gather, persist for some time (we call this a ‘life-cycle’) and are re-gathered into the flux.

An observer who sees the plane land safely will report that; …  “the drivers on the freeway moved aside so as to ‘clear a path’ for the plane to land”, … making the driver’s action sound very ‘rational’ and ‘deliberate’ as if the organization immanent in their collective behaviour had been calculated and executed by them, rather than being a manifestation of their; … “putting their behaviour in the service of sustaining spatial-relational harmony in the continually unfolding now”.    

If one wishes to understand ‘organization’ in the social dynamic and/or in nature in general, one must acknowledge two different interpretations of the ‘source of organization’ in this unfolding where the freeway drivers opened up a clear space for the plane to land; Read the rest of this entry »

Theuth, the chameleon-God, is the ‘/’ between death/life, light/dark, logos/mythos

[N.B.  For reading either before or after reading this essay, see the broader context-giving introduction. ]

The source of global social dysfunction, that is pointed to by all of my investigations, lies in our interpretation of this ‘/’, this ‘back-stretched connexion’ wherein we give meaning to conjugate relations such as habitat/inhabitant.   That is, we can understand the ‘/’ in two different ways (a) simple something/nothing binary opposites, and/or, (b) spatially nested inclusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

Since the era of Heraclitus and Parmenides (ca. 500 BCE) there has been contention over whether to seek to understand the world starting from the ‘One’ of ‘flow’ or from the ‘many’ of ‘material forms’ and ‘their’ behaviours, visualizing ‘them’ as ‘local entities in themselves’ that move, interact and change ‘their’ form in an absolute fixed and empty operating theatre (Euclidian space).

In the case of ‘flow’ where the universe is seen as a dynamic One-ness that is continually unfolding and infolding from and into itself, ‘local entities’ are inevitably ‘conjugate extrinsic-intrinsic dynamic relations undergoing a continual ‘becoming’ as in the relation between a whorl or convection cell in the flow (e.g. the hurricane in the flow of the atmosphere).  The notion of ‘local being’ in this case is what Nietzsche would call a ‘useful fiction’, but the natural ‘physics’ of the situation is that these visible ‘flow-features’ are taking on form from their simultaneous mutual influence.  This situation, which arises in celestial dynamics (gravitation), is mathematically insoluble in such a manner as would resolve the overall observed behaviour into individual local behaviours belonging to each of the participants. Read the rest of this entry »

belousov-zhabotinski reaction (simulated) where chaos and order meet

Our society, in answering the question ‘What is Life?’ has chosen to see ‘human being’ as a biological machine; a ‘local system with its own locally-originating, internal-process-driven behaviour’ that interacts with other such biological machines.   We have been steadily building this bogus view of ‘What Life is’ into our systems of governance, justice, education and very man other things.

This is crazy.  But, as my fellow inquirers who have come to the same or very similar conclusions note, the problem is not in defining ‘what is wrong’ with how we, as a social collective, have been answering the question ‘What is Life?’, but in getting others to consider it, since the path back to sanity (to a sane brotherhood) is through everyone coming to a common understanding on this.  And here we have the problem that is often compared to the need to change the tires on a car while your driving it at 80 mph in the flow of the freeway. Read the rest of this entry »

the emperor's magic-shoe-powered projecting crown

There once was an Emperor who ruled the land and all that were in it with an iron fist.  He was what you might call an ‘absolutist’.   In his circle of courtiers was a wizard by the name of Notwen whose teachings, or at least the Emperor’s interpretations thereof,  had had great influence on the Emperor’s social and political policies.  There is a story that circulates within the land, that explains how it was that the Emperor came to think and rule in the absolutist manner that he did.  It is a story that the people call ‘the Emperor’s new shoes’ and it tells the tale of how Notwen infused magic into these shoes, magic that gave the Emperor special powers and at the same time made it clear to him why authoritarian force was the ideal approach to organizing the activities of the people in his Empire. Read the rest of this entry »