[...]The ‘Experiential Reality’ Beneath the ‘Language Game Illusion’ | Aboriginal Physics Newsletter[...]…

[...]The ‘Experiential Reality’ Beneath the ‘Language Game Illusion’ | Aboriginal Physics Newsletter[...]…

i am open to another word/phrase besides ‘mediocre truth’ (nietzsche’s) but ‘it worked for me’ because it was used to point out that discussions concerning dynamic behaviour are typically based on ‘subjects’ that fail to hide the transformation of spatial relations associated with the dynamic. nietzsche originally used it in the context of ‘mediocre thinkers’, naming darwin, spencer and mill, englishmen, and he was not attacking just englishmen, but an entire ‘cultural trend’ coming from england and already doing damage in europe, in his view. its clear to me what this ‘mediocre thinking’ is, that applies to the english culture and has become globally dominant; i.e. it is the accepting of subject animated dynamics as ‘reality’. my former expression for this was ‘confusing idealization for reality’, but the reason i ‘switched’ to ‘mediocre truth’ because the confusing thing is that on the basis of standard science experiments, we can prove our hypotheses based on ‘idealized subjects’ and ‘subject animated dynamics’ to be ‘true’. that is, i can show you a succession of satellite photographs of hurricane katrina that confirm ‘her growth’ and her ‘strengthening’ (using instruments to measure the pressure in her ‘eye’).

ok, practically speaking, that might not backfire on me in that case, but it teaches me that i can ‘get away’ with taking ‘subject animated dynamics’ as reality when they are only ‘idealization’. that is, solar irradiation infused thermal energy differentially into the atmosphere and ocean and land, and the imbalance in thermal energy concentration ‘brings part of the ocean/atmosphere ‘toward the boil’ (induces convection currents) and because these ‘ripples in the flow’ get our attention, we impose that step on them that nietzsche notes that turns things into Fiktion; i.e. we reduce a ‘Ding an sich selbst betrachtet’ (thing considered in itself) to a ‘Ding an sich’ (thing in itself). and it is on this foundation of Fiktion that we proceed to render ‘what is going on’ in terms of ‘subject animated behaviour’; e.g. Katrina is growing etc. etc.

this is the sort of mediocre thinking (confusing of idealization for reality) that leads to the fictional notions of the ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘anthropogenic global warming’. this has attained a kind of ‘religious following’ that the global collective will pay a big price for due to the diversion of resources associated with it.

on the surface of it, it looks like any other case in science where our earlier theories were supplanted by better ones later on, but the difference here is that the scientific method and scientific experimentation as it is typically done, cannot disprove ‘mediocre truth’ because it is built into the foundations of science, and also into the foundations of ‘scientific thinking’. i have touched on this in my latest essay i put up. therefore, all of our improvements in scientific theories and understandings are heading for a ‘ceiling’ that they cannot get beyond without changing the foundations of science, or the explanations are reaching a depth that they cannot get beyond. there are arguments about this at the leading edge of science (e.g. see Footnote 1. at the end of my essay http://goodshare.org/wp/civilization-the-hijacking-of-sentience-by-reason/ ).

the issue is one that you and i and anyone can get into, and it is about whether the objects we see ‘exist in themselves’ or whether they are artefacts of our psychological activity. as i have said before, i didn’t approach this by going directly to the philosophical argument but rather by way of the things i have studied such as seismic waves and exceptionally performing teams etc.

i agree that we need to get rid of the finger pointing to the moon, but that finger is ‘familiar words and concepts’ so it is not always easy to ‘get lift off’.

i also agree that we can go for the simple space first as it is useful but it is also the space wherein we see things in terms of ‘cause-and-effect’ and when things happen that are not explainable in terms of cause and effect, yet we insist in ‘smoking out’ the causal agent when there is none. that is where i see global society being today. we have anti-civilization groups, anti-technology groups, anti-capitalist groups, we are attacking synthetic realities that we have given a name to; i.e. ‘civilization’, ‘technology’, ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ to which we impute ‘subject animated dynamics’; ‘the commies did this’ or ‘the capitalists did that’ etc. we are bogging down because of our belief in ‘mediocre truths’; i.e. relational patterns that we subjectify and concretize with language.

ted

(……my claim is that the ‘truth’ in the understanding that comes from a perspective/worldview based in ‘subject animated dynamics’ [absolute space] is a ‘mediocre truth’ as compared to the ‘truth’ in the understanding that comes from a perspective/worldview based in ‘situation animated dynamics’ [relational space]…..) If only you could drop this ‘mediocre truth’ expression, maybe it could help. Once more,….move from Europe to north America…. Has equal value and status to ….the inhabitants of the space undergo…..

(“Whoever speaks of absolute space uses a word devoid of meaning. This is a truth that has been long proclaimed by all who have reflected on the question, but one which we are too often inclined to forget”)….. I agree that we should be more vigilant when thinking about space, but what if we do as if space was an absolute? I often tell people that we do as if ‘as if I am a Quebecois, as if living in Montreal, as if now is January, 07, 2012, as if 4:29am. As if time and space are absolutes is very useful in sending man to the moon, building computer and bridges, etc. I do think that we tend to ‘judge’ other viewpoint/view because we see ours as being absolute, in the sense of what really is, this can show the way to statement such as ‘mediocre truth’.

(…..Have we any right, therefore, to say that we know the distance between two points? No?…) Yes we do, I do not see any problem with this statement, I know for example the distance from floor to ceiling to be of 96 inches, in my mind, truth has nothing at all to do with this, it is something functional, useful, a tool like a hand saw, which has validity and value according to a specific context, I do not say ‘ my hand saw is truth, is an absolute’ . In the very same way that when someone in ordinary life ask me ‘where do you come from’ I would answer, I am from Montreal, Canada. If I was ask the very same question by a Zen teacher for example, I would start laughing and say: ‘in coming and going, I never leave home’. Or ‘what is your face before your parents were born?’ and I would answer ‘the maple tree in the garden’.

I do like a lot this ‘space as participant /local participant’

(….are we not, when we are looking at the ‘green balloon guy’, ‘looking at the finger pointing to the moon’ (or, rather, ‘sun’)?…) I agree, but we must go one step further, and cut away the finger also. We are like a fisherman trying to catch the moon refection in a pond, forgetting that it is the finger that is pointing to a moon reflection. There is no right or wrong direction to point the finger toward to, just cut the finger away.

(…..what if we had based our ‘L’ in WYLA-i-WYLF on our outside-inward – inside-outward muscular sensing and made this foundational to our scientific reasoning? we could have radically amplified the complex capability of our ‘Looking’; i.e. as poincaré notes; “Motor space varies according to whatever muscle is registering it and hence has “as many dimensions as we have muscles.” ….) I agree again, but ‘we’ ‘historically, dt etc.’went for the most simple, toward non complex simplicity (exclusive one), you seem to tend toward non composed simplicity (inclusive one). Being pragmatic, I tend to go to One/(exclusive one/inclusive one).
…..and thus extremely superficial…yes, but extremely useful!
alain

[alain] –“No doubt language profiles a view of the ‘world’; what we look from is what we look at, and vice versa, what we look at is what we look from. What we look from is what we call our subjectivity, and what we look at being our objectivity. The whole thing is simply a question of emphasis, on whether we emphasize on what we look from or at. But there are no subjectivity or objectivity for what you look from is what you look at and what you look at is what you look from as process. What we look at always gathers with what we look from and vice versa, what we look from always gathers with what we look at. Aristotle logic pushes us to make a choice, a choice between what we look from or what we look at, but that choice is language base; language makes us think that there are ‘things in themselves’, structures, substances. And so whatever we think implicitly contains the seed of an impossibility; the impossibility of an irreconcilable duality as substances in the midst of unity as process or dynamism. The basic or fundamental knot, is one of a pure impossibility; Unity as process/dynamism, and a duality as structures/substances.”

the ‘fly in the ointment’ in your view is that where you remove the binary (Aristotelian logic) either/or choice between subjectivity and objectivity seen as absolute opposites and replace it with ‘emphasis’ (subjective), i speak of the ‘mediocre truth’ of the ‘subjective viewpoint’ (or of subject animated dynamics). meanwhile, my subject animated dynamics is not relative to ‘objective dynamics’ but to ‘situation animated dynamics’ or ‘transformation of spatial relations’. i cannot describe ‘situation animated dynamics’ in conventional euclidian space framing because euclidian space constrains the view to the absolutes of (a) the existence of local things, and (b) their absolute movement within the absolute reference frame (x,y,z,t); i.e. i need to invoke the notion of a space such as on the surface of a sphere. a sphere has no corners or centre or any fixed reference point to anchor a euclidian space frame to, so that the only reference is the arrangement of ‘things’ within that space. i am not saying that those ‘things’ have to be material things; i.e. they could be warm and cold patches within a uniform fluid which show up on sonar sensing as ‘lenses’. meanwhile we could use people or animals or trees or whatever as a go-by, remembering that relational space does not allow ‘bottom out’ in the absolute being of local things, nor in their absolute motion. so, instead of saying that ‘the colonizer moves from europe to north america’, we have to say that ‘the inhabitants of the space undergo a rearranging of their spatial relations’. this is kind of like ‘shaking up the global cocktail’ and it avoids the more common notion of ‘subject animated dynamics’.

my claim is that the ‘truth’ in the understanding that comes from a perspective/worldview based in ‘subject animated dynamics’ [absolute space] is a ‘mediocre truth’ as compared to the ‘truth’ in the understanding that comes from a perspective/worldview based in ‘situation animated dynamics’ [relational space]

notice how we use fixed reference points as ‘subjects’ to define locations absolutely and how absolute locations totally ‘subjectize’ the referencing of our view. what i am trying to get to is how our focus on objects in the foreground tends to make us forget about [no longer take into account] the ‘cocktail’ of dynamic spatial relations we are situationally included in. poincaré comments on this in ‘The Relativity of Space’.

“Whoever speaks of absolute space uses a word devoid of meaning. This is a truth that has been long proclaimed by all who have reflected on the question, but one which we are too often inclined to forget.

If I am at a definite point in Paris, at the Place du Panthéon, for instance, and I say, “I will come back ‘here’ tomorrow;” if I am asked, “Do you mean that you will come back to the same point in space?” I should be tempted to answer yes. Yet I should be wrong, since between now and tomorrow the earth will have moved, carrying with it the Place du Panthéon, which will have travelled more than a million miles. And if I wished to speak more accurately, I should gain nothing, since this million of miles has been covered by our globe in its motion in relation to the sun, and the sun in its turn moves in relation to the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself is no doubt in motion without our being able to recognise its velocity. So that we are, and shall always be, completely ignorant how far the Place du Panthéon moves in a day. In fact, what I meant to say was,

“Tomorrow I shall see once more the dome and pediment of the Panthéon,”
and if there was no Panthéon my sentence would have no meaning and space would disappear.”

This is one of the most commonplace forms of the principle of the relativity of space, but there is another on which Delbeuf has laid particular stress. Suppose that in one night all the dimensions of the universe became a thousand times larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of Euclid. Only, what was formerly a metre long will now measure a kilometre, and what was a millimetre long will become a metre. The bed in which I went to sleep and my body itself will have grown in the same proportion. When I awake in the morning what will be my feeling in face of such an astonishing transformation? Well, I shall not notice anything at all. The most exact measures will be incapable of revealing anything of this tremendous change, since the yard-measures I shall use will have varied in exactly the same proportions as the objects I shall attempt to measure. In reality the change only exists for those who argue as if space were absolute. If I have argued for a moment as they do, it was only in order to make it clearer that their view implies a contradiction. In reality it would be better to say that as space is relative, nothing at all has happened, and that it is for that reason that we have noticed nothing.

Have we any right, therefore, to say that we know the distance between two points? No, since that distance could undergo enormous variations without our being able to perceive it, provided other distances varied in the same proportions. We saw just now that when I say I shall be here tomorrow, that does not mean that tomorrow I shall be at the point in space where I am today, but that tomorrow I shall be at the same distance from the Panthéon as I am today. And already this statement is not sufficient, and I ought to say that tomorrow and today my distance from the Panthéon will be equal to the same number of times the length of my body.

ok, let’s take a break from ‘the above line of thinking’, apart from noting that if we ‘fix’ the locations of material objects first, ‘space’ is left flapping in the breeze; i.e. space is nothing and ‘being’ (the local material things that ‘be’) is everything, which runs entirely counter to the notion that space is an energy-charged medium [spatial-plenum] that precipitates matter; i.e. where material bodies are like vortices in the energy-based field.

instead, we’ll resume our thinking, starting from the WYLA-I-WYLF relation (what you look at is what you look from). this is where the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’ keeps being evoked in me.

i have written about this difference a lot, but the example i used in my last post, of the ‘green balloon’ in the coloured spatial-relational ‘cocktail’ of balloons brings out the apparent dilemma; i.e. the green balloon VISIBLY has its own behaviour but if we ‘are the green balloon’ then we also have feelings of situational inclusion coming from the conjugate relation of outside-inward accommodating influx and inside-outward asserting outflux.

if we are caught in the overwhelming forces in the flow of a crowd, we still seem to have our ‘green balloon behaviour’ but the ‘inside-outward asserting influence’ partner in the conjugate relation is being topsided by the ‘outside inward accommodating influence’. yet that is not entirely true since the forces in the crowd would seem to have to originate from ‘inside-outward asserting influence’ though not necessarily ‘MY inside-outward asserting influence’. caught within the crowd dynamic, one feels periodic ‘pulses’ of outside-inward pressing or opening [accommodating or disaccommodating] influence where the forces are coming in waves that ‘add constructively’, as when a group of people concentrates their force by counting out; one, two, three, PUSH! these ‘wave dynamics’ seem to transcend the particles or people or ‘coloured balloons’ that are moved about by them, in spite of the former ‘local participants’ being ‘seen’ as the source of the movement.

now, this notion that the predominating influence in the crowd waves transcends the movements sourced by the motion of the things situated within the waves would be understandable if everyone was on surf boards and deriving their power-drive and direction from the fluid-dynamics they were situationally included in, but on dry land with only air separating the people, it seems very convincing that the overall movement; i.e. the ‘crowd dynamic’ derives from the people in the crowd, from the coloured balloons themselves; i.e. our view of the crowd dynamic is that it is a ‘subject animated dynamic’.

in the last post, i made the case that the movement of the green balloon did not originate from out of the green balloon even though the green balloon had its own VISUAL movement. that is, the movement was coming from the heat lamp (the sun) differentially warming and expanding the balloons.

is this not also true of ‘people’ in general? e.g. sunbeams are converted to organic material by plants and/or phyto-plankton and these captured sunbeams are ingested by people and they inflate like balloons, so maybe it is not precise to say that the behaviour of the guy in the green jacket derives from his interior because if the sun ‘went out’ he would ‘deflate’.

are we not, when we are looking at the ‘green balloon guy’, ‘looking at the finger pointing to the moon’ (or, rather, ‘sun’)?

ok, here’s an insight that is coming to me from our dialogue, … actually, from the augmenting of many dialogues that contribute to the evolution of a web of relations that bring into connective confluence a diverse multiplicity of observations/experiences, … and that is that our visual sensing ‘takes a derivative’ in the mathematical sense of the change of ‘form’ over ‘time’; df/dt = dxf/dt + dyf/dt + dzf/dt; i.e. the changes of the three dimensional shape of the form over time. by this sort of sensing, we reduce ‘the evolution of form’ to ‘mechanical change’ wherein ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’. for example as we check out the naked form of the 80 year old woman each day for a year, we see her wrinkled breasts go from flat/sagging to flatter but we don’t see her when she had smooth skin and full, pointed breasts. but if we were blind and ‘constrained’ to acoustic space sensing, we might listen to her voice and hear the twinkle of a teenager in it; i.e. we might ‘sense’ a developmental story that lies deeper than what our visual sensing is able to inform us of. here, i am reminded of the point raised by henri poincaré in his discussion of ‘the origin of mathematical physics’ and i am wondering whether we might not say that ‘mathematical physics’ [and the bulk of science that has followed its lead] foundationally constrains itself to the visual and superficial by its use of the ‘derivative’? [i explore this in from various angles in Is Calculus Taking Science (And Us) on a Mad Joyride? ]

poincare speaks of our abandonment of the full development of the thing, by our constraint wherein we perceive of the present as depending only on the immediate past, as we do with the green balloon when we focus on ‘ITS’ ‘visible behaviour’. who says that the behaviour of the green balloon is ‘its behaviour’. we get that by subjectizing its form and by imposing the constraint that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’ [we switch our basis of understanding over to the proxy of the ‘time derivative’]. what if the gnarls in the tree on the windswept coast are triggered by storms brewed by periodic volcanic eruptions on the other side of the world? or what if babies born at the same time as a nuclear explosion experienced genetic modification that shaped their continuing development? when we look at the annular [annual] growth rings in a tree, we see the outside-inward nurturing/accommodating influence of the habitat imposing on its inside-outward asserting genetics. is this not what scientists are calling ‘epigenetics’? and doesn’t ‘epigenetics’ ‘trump’ ‘genetics’? no, this only takes us back to aristotelian either/or logic based on the notion of ‘being’; i.e. where ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ are both seen as ‘beings’ or ‘subjects’ or ‘things-in-themselves’. and ‘emphasis’ is merely an invention to avoid having to use aristotelian logic which intuitively feels wrong. the alternative is to review our concept of ‘space’ because the notion of ‘being’; i.e. of local absolute ‘identity’ of what our experience is screaming out to us is inhabitant-form that cannot be unbundled from the dynamics of habitat. it is, of course, ‘absolute space’ that enables the mental ‘unbundling’ of inhabitant-dynamics from habitat-dynamics.

that is, since it is ‘visual sensing’ that uses the ‘differential’ [df/dt = dfx/dt + dfy/dt + dfz/dt] to compare the ‘form’ in the present with ‘itself’ in the immediate past, a process that occludes the ‘whole succession of the developmental phenomena’, we may conclude that mathematical physics conceals this reduction of developmental process to current change, in its basic operative schemata; i.e. ‘science’ and ‘scientific thinking’, as we popularly know it and practice it, is visual sensing based;

“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 that 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.” – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

what i am suggesting is that ‘differential equations’ is what we are using in our visual sensing, which, as in ‘film footage’, examines each frame relative to the immediately preceding one, searching for ‘changes’. in this frame jean valjean is looking into the bakery window, in the next frame jean valjean is running down the street with a baguette under his arm leaving the bakery, whose window is now smashed, in the distance behind him. the judge, using the standard scientific thinking where “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. [“without studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”] needs only these two frames to apply the law as he is paid to do. [note that both secular and moral law is applied to scientific thinking based on conceiving of dynamics in these doer-deed terms based on the assumption that the present depends only on the immediate past and that we do not have to study the whole succession of phenomena].

if we did bother to let our inquiry extend beyond the visual frame differentials and acknowledge our experience of being included in a dynamic spatial-relational continuum, we would see jean night after night agonizing over starving children crying as they were being put to bed hungry, and we would see the growth of power and wealth in the ‘kingdom of france’ and how, during pulses of deficit, those with nothing to buffer them, were victims of the pulses.

[like the people of the ninth ward in New Orleans, repetitively ‘victims’ of living in low lands (cheapest lands) which are relatively unbuffered from the elements of wind and water, being devastated by flooding in 1915 [‘The New Orleans Hurricane’], 1956 [hurricane ‘Flossy’], 1965 [hurricane ‘Betsy’] and radically so in 2005 (hurricane ‘Katrina’).]

these pulses of deficit condition the dynamics of habitat/community in a manner that is felt strongly by those who are, by their situation, without buffering, setting up conditions of starvation for some even while they are in the midst of ‘plenty’ that continues to be enjoyed by those whose ‘buffering’ kept them above the rising zero/negative threshold that some were caught in. because moral and secular law is based on the doer-deed concept of dynamical behaviour as is visually sensed in frame-to-frame differentials [space/time derivatives], it blinds itself [in its literal application] to the ‘whole succession of phenomena’; i.e. “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. [“without studying directly the whole succession of phenomena”]

where does all this ‘geometry and mathematics’ come from that we rely on so much? is it possible that we ‘picked the wrong sense; i.e. ‘vision’ as being foundational to our ‘reasoning’? … since it excludes from our reasoning ‘the whole succession of phenomena’? what if we had chosen as foundational to our reasoning, our ability to sense outside-inward accommodating [resisting/recepting] relative to inside-outward asserting [intruding/withdrawing]?

this thread of inquiry takes us deeper into the underbelly of the WYLA-i-WYLF relation, with a particular focus on what we mean by the ‘L’ for ‘Look’. such inquiry was rampant at the ‘fin de siecle’ as is reviewed in Stephen Kern’s ‘The Culture of Time & Space 1880 – 1918’, an excerpt from which follows herewith;

“If the spaces of non-Euclidian geometry were not bewildering enough, there were other new spaces that could not be accounted for by any other geometry. In 1901 Henri Poincaré identified visual, tactile, and motor spaces, each defined by different parts of the sensory apparatus. While geometrical space is three-dimensional, homogeneous, and infinite, visual space is two-dimensional, heterogeneous, and limited to the visual field. Objects in geometrical space can be moved without deformation, but objects in visual space seem to expand and contract in size when moved different distances from the viewer. Motor space varies according to whatever muscle is registering it and hence has “as many dimensions as we have muscles.” [- Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, 1901 and ‘On the Foundations of Geometry’ in ‘The Monist’, 1898 ] In a similar manner Mach defined visual, auditory, and tactile spaces that varied according to the sensitivity and reaction times of different parts of the sensory system. These spaces constituted the physiological foundation for the “natural” development of geometrical space. Symmetry has a bodily source, and the positive and negative coordinates of Cartesian geometry derive from the right and left orientation of our body. Our notion of surface comes from the experience of our own skin. “The space of the skin,” Mach wrote, “is the analog of a two-dimensional, finite, unbounded and closed Riemannian space.” Terms for basic units of measurement such as “foot” and “pace” reveal anatomical origins, and thus “notions of space are rooted in our physiological organisms.

Speculation that there are two- and three-dimensional spaces other than the one described by Euclid and that our experience of space is subjective and a function of our unique physiology was disturbing to the popular mind. Perhaps the most famous critic of these notions was V. I. Lenin, who in ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’ of 1908 cried “enough” to the proliferation of spaces, to the “Kantian” notion that space is a form of understanding and not an objective reality, and to “reactionary” philosophies such as those of Mach and Poincaré. Like a man trying to hold down a tent in a wind, Lenin raced about defending the objective material world in absolute space and time that he believed to be the foundation of Marxism and which, he feared, was threatened by recent developments in mathematics and physics. It is an embarrassing performance by a man straining in a field beyond his expertise, but it gives a sense of the concrete implications and political overtones of this seemingly abstract thought.

Lenin began the chapter on “Space and Time” with a statement of the materialist position: there is an objective reality in which matter moves in space and time independently of the human mind. This is in contrast with the Kantian view that time and space are not objective realities but forms of understanding. He conceded that human conceptions of space and time are “relative” but this relativity moves toward the “absolute truth” of objective reality. Mach’s statement that space and time are “systems of series of sensations” was “palpable idealist nonsense.” He labeled “absurd” Mach’s speculation that physicists might seek an explanation for electricity in a space which is not three-dimensional, and he reaffirmed the orthodox position: “Science does not doubt that the substance it is investigating exists in three-dimensional space.” He tossed off Poincaré’s famous anticipation of the relativity of time and space and then criticized that “scrupulous foe of materialism” Karl Pearson, who had written that time and space are “modes under which we perceive things apart.” The kind of thinking that denies the objective reality of time and space is “rotten” and “hypocritical.”

Lenin engaged in this polemic because he believed that the repudiation and political effectiveness of the Bolshevik party were at stake. When an article appeared in ‘Die Neue Zeit’ (1907) about certain Bolsheviks who had embraced a Machist philosophy and compromised orthodox Marxism, Lenin decided to attack publicly to define the Bolshevik position and show that Machism was simply an aberration of certain individuals in his party, one manifestation of a general disease of doubting material reality that was infecting modern society as a whole and the could break out in any political party. In the concluding paragraphs Lenin singled out the prominent Bolshevik philosopher A. Bogdanov, who had argued for the social relativity of all categories of experience in ‘Empirio-monism’ (1904-1906). Bogdanov had written that time, like space, is “a form of social coordination of the experiences of different people.” Such relativistic idealism undermined materialism and the belief that there is one and one real framework of time and space in which the events of all cultures takes place. According to Bogdanov, Lenin charged, “various forms of space and time adapt themselves to man’s experience and his perceptive faculty..” This formulation contradicted Lenin’s materialism in two respects. The reference to a plurality of spaces challenged the universality of a single space, and the suggestion that these various forms of space and time “adapt” to man’s experience identified Bogdanov with the genetic epistemology of both Mach and Poincaré.” [-The Culture of Time and Space 1880 -1918, Stephen Kern, 1983]

here we are in 2012 but ‘what happened to our inquiry into ‘time and space’ and its influence on social and political approaches to understanding?

we continue to be hung up on ‘visual sense based’ reasoning or ‘subject animated dynamics’ where we mistake the behaviour of the green balloon to be ‘its own behaviour’. in other words, we mistake the behaviour of the individual to be its own behaviour because we are putting visual sensing that is based on ‘taking the time-based spatial derivative’ that, in the process, destroys spatial-relational continuity.

what if we had based our ‘L’ in WYLA-i-WYLF on our outside-inward – inside-outward muscular sensing and made this foundational to our scientific reasoning? we could have radically amplified the complex capability of our ‘Looking’; i.e. as poincaré notes; “Motor space varies according to whatever muscle is registering it and hence has “as many dimensions as we have muscles.”

of course our ‘i’ is tied up in our ‘L’ since we can conceive of ourselves as any combination of cold/unfeeling, judgmental/intolerant vision based observer, or as a blind, warm, non-judgmental/tolerant spatial-relational sensing experient.

but it’s not like our experience is not delivering all these different signallings to us in any case, since our experience is not broken down into five sensing systems; i.e. experiencing is one thing and it is only our tool of analysis that imposes a breakdown on our experience into the various senses. these senses are not ‘really’ ‘things-in-themselves’ [‘systems in themselves’]. as schroedinger says;

“The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as part of it. … Their multiplicity [many minds] is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind. … consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.”

in conclusion, i think that our culture has used ‘visual sensing’ to invent its concept of space hence the little ‘i’ of the observer whereas our experience, as through muscular sensing (our sense of being included as in a crowd [or in an atmosphere, ocean or hot tub]) doesn’t stop informing us of our situational inclusion in a relational space. the problem is that we have ‘bolted’ our ‘reasoning’ to the space of our visual sensing which is ‘time-derivative based’ and thus extremely superficial. this sets up an internal conflict between world views in absolute space terms [subject animated dynamics] and world views in relational space terms [situation animated dynamics], the latter being of a dimensionality equal to the number of muscles in our body and the former being ‘two dimensional’ or ‘flatspace’ based.

ted

p.s. i do not believe in the ‘reality’ of ‘mathematical dimensionality’ but accept it as ‘our framework’ that ‘we impose’ on a reality that defies description, but that we nevertheless can attempt to describe using idealizations based on ‘symmetries’ derived from our own body-space relations (left or right, conjugate outside-inward – inside outward relating etc.), symmetries that are foundational to logic, mathematics, topology. clearly such modeling frameworks can be more or less comprehensive, bringing to our understanding more or less ‘mediocre’ truths.

i think you have captured ‘the problem’ as well as it can be captured where you say;

‘i’, I see as the root ‘problem’, take it away and a whole ‘new’ world opens up, but one must go for the root without killing the flower.

together with the sufi text, which to me is at the same time very ‘nietzschean’, i feel like we are on the same page.

in the way i think about these things [i realize that you may not get the same thing out of the words i use] there is no periphery to a point on a flat surface, but if the surface curves, then there is a periphery. imagine if the moon were a cube then the sun would either shine on one of its surfaces or not [aristotle’s logic of the excluded third]. but being that the moon’s surface is curved, we can say that the sun ‘does and does not’ shine on it (heraclitus-speak). this is the logic of stéphane lupasco, the logic of the included third and if you put ‘lupasco’ into the ‘search’ field on my website, you will find a choice phrase or two from him.

imagine that we attach enough inflated balloons of various colours to the surface of a sphere to completely cover it; i.e. so that the balloons press against one another. let’s say that we are shining a heat lamp randomly on these balloons (e.g. to simulate cloud cover in the atmosphere). as they warm, they inflate and as they cool they deflate. [this is like the effect of a thermal field on a fluid-dynamic]

there is no way to extract from this, the behaviour of an individual balloon. it is mathematically impossible and this impossibility is known as ‘the three body problem’; i.e. when three or more things move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, it is impossible to isolate the behaviour of a particular/individual thing. as one balloon expands, if all the others were ‘doing nothing’ (ceteris paribus) then they would all deflate in reciprocal complementarity to the expansion of the one balloon. but of course there are many balloons in this experiment and some are expanding, tending to compress the others where some others are already deflating so as to amplify the expanding of others and so on and so forth. Mach’s principle applies here; “ the dynamic of the habitat is conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat”. that is, the overall balloon-filled space on the surface of the sphere is like a mediating medium which launder out the identity of the participating ‘inhabitants’ yet reflects back their influence; i.e. the outside-inward accommodating influence and the inside-outward asserting influence are in ‘conjugate relation’.

meanwhile, in the experiment the balloons are of different colours so that we can observe the movement of an individual balloon, a green balloon amongst red, black and purple balloons, and watch it go through some complex pattern of oscillating expansions and contractions. so, we could say that the individual does indeed have a behaviour of its own. but that is a ‘Fiktion’; i.e. it is only ‘appearances’.

now, if we take all those same balloons (we could make them all different shapes and sizes and put names on each of them if we wished) and this time put them pressing together on a flat surface, there is no ‘periphery’. the periphery in the flat plane is where ‘is’ gives way to ‘is not’. the ‘periphery’ in the space on the surface of the sphere was where ‘inside-outward asserting’ (pushing out, drawing back) engaged with ‘outside-inward accommodating’ (receptive/resistive). in the flat plane, each balloon has ‘its own behaviour’ since the slack is taken up by fact that rectangular space is infinite so that the ‘reciprocal compression’ as in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation is not present. the green balloon will have ‘its own behaviour’ when it is in the rectangular space on the flat plane; … it will not participate in the conditioning of the habitat behaviour which is at the same time conditioning its behaviour.

now, the curious thing is that relativity and quantum theory say that space is like the spherical space i have described where the green balloon seems to have its own behaviour; i.e. visually, it actually does have its own visual behaviour, but that behaviour is not really ‘its behaviour’. the dynamic of the space it is included in is the deeper ‘root’ source of its behaviour. we can see that this is the case for convection cells within a flow; i.e. they are conditioning the turbulence of the flow at the same time as the turbulence of the flow is conditioning the behaviour of the convection cells or vortices. like the green balloon, they seem to have ‘their own behaviour’, and using language, we impute to them their own behaviour by ‘subjectizing them’.

well, we subjectize ourselves in the same way, so that it is like saying; ‘i am the green balloon and my behaviour is my own’. and of course, mainstream science assumes that an ‘organism’ is an independent system with its own locally originating, internally driven behaviour (and darwin’s theory further says it has its own internally driven development/evolution) as if space were a non-participant.

this ‘visual truth’ which we subjectize with language gives us our ‘i’ where we are the centre of the circle and our actions are inside-outward asserting, one-to-many actions as in ‘a source’. but our ‘feeling experience’ informs us that we are spatially-relationally included in something bigger than ourselves, an outside-inward many-to-one accommodating influence as in a ‘sink’, something that the ‘convection cell’ would be well aware of; i.e. our roots are the flow that we gather in and our ‘flower’ is our visible aspect, our green balloon aspect which our visual sense ‘sees itself as coming from’. our visual sense not only sees our own green balloon but it sees the other balloons that seem to have their own behaviours too.

the feeling of being included in something bigger than ourselves goes beyond our visual perception of other things and ‘their behaviours’. this ‘bigger thing’ that we are included in is ‘evolving’ in an unpredictable way. what we experience is inclusion in a transforming relational space. what we are looking out at is something within which our lives unfold. as ronald laing says (Politics of Experience) “the life that ‘i’ am trying to grasp is the ‘me’[‘ii’] that is reaching out to grasp it”.

I have created perception in you only so that I may be the object of my perception

this is not how our mainstream culture ‘sees it’. our mainstream culture would have it that the view in which the behaviours of the individual balloons are ‘their own behaviours’ and that we can regard the subject animated dynamics as ‘reality’, other cultures would have it that instead of being ‘reality’, it is ‘maya’, illusion, as schroedinger explicitly states this in his writings. e.g. in an essay ‘The I That is God’ where schroedinger discusses the philosophical implications of quantum physics, he cites the Upanishads in support of this insight that ‘the I is god’;

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATMAN=BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal (self) was in Indian thought considered far from being blasphemous [as he suggested that it might be taken to be in the Christian viewpoint], to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. … How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? … The only possible alternative [to a plurality of ‘souls’] is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there ‘is’ only one thing and that, what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt. Everest turned out to be the same peak, seen from different valleys.”

like you say;

‘i’, I see as the root ‘problem’, take it away and a whole ‘new’ world opens up, but one must go for the root without killing the flower.

!…..because i can see how certain ‘errors’ tie to conflict, war, incoherence. meanwhile, there is always yet another, deeper layer of inquiry that presents itself, kind of like the patterns in fractal geometry that go on forever [e.g. mandelbrot set] but at some point, it seems to me, some of the identified ‘fictions’ that generate incoherency such as the INCOMPLETENESS [mediocrity of truth] in the common mode of understanding that i am calling ‘subject animated dynamics’, needs to be brought out and acknowledged…. Kind of fractal like pattern is what I mean by conflict (incoherence) having depth or layers, we usually interpret conflict as within situations, some are, but most have layers, and as one goes deeper and deeper within those layers (fractal), one will encounter conflict or incoherence in kind of pre-lingual aspect without any form. This to me is the root of conflict. I feel that one has to go into this pre-lingual incoherence in order to transcend it, then, conflict and incoherence becomes creative tension.

2. …..incoherence and tragedy is often the result of ‘what you look at is what you look from’…..Yes, and there are at least two kinds of ways by which we experience these conflict; without and within. The example you gave, is a without conflict, conflict between two set, two divergent way of looking from and at the world. WYLFIWYLA is coherent ‘internally’ but is ‘incorent externally to another wylfiwyla. The second way is a within conflict or incoherence; wylfiswyla being incoherent internally, and this is a complete impossibility.

…… i do not see the world as being mathematical,… But most mathematicians think it is, furthermore they also think that logic is within mathematics, for me logic ‘encadre’ mathematical thinking, furthermore this logic is mostly Aristote logic.

….acknowledging space as a participant or not , I do acknowledge space as both participant and observer; periphery is as much observer/participant as is the center. For they are one.

… i claim that the two are related in that one is a more comprehensive and the other a less comprehensive way of understanding the same physical phenomena, in the manner that ‘ii’ [the thinking and feeling observer/experient] is understanding more comprehensively than ‘i’ [the thinking observer]….. That is why I appreciate this dialogue, you push me in re-visiting my own prejudice.

……..the ‘V’ is a ‘resonance pattern’ that emerges in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant engaging. if one leaves space as a non-participant and describe this phenomenon in terms of ‘parts’ and ‘whole’ (content and context), one comes up with fine words that assume ‘subject animated dynamics’ like ‘cooperation’, and this, to me, is a classic case of ‘what you at is what you look from’ of our dysfunctional culture….. I think I am starting at getting a better understanding of what you are talking about, it is still not fully articulated in my mind, but feel it is coming. ‘ii’ if I understand you correctly would be ‘space as participant’, and ‘I’ ‘subject animated dynamics’. ‘ii’ is in this instance would be what I mean by ‘me’. This reminds me of a Sufi text that my wife gave me yesterday afternoon as I was coming home from work.
Listen,
O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the centre of the periphery,
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only so that I may be the object of my perception

If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself.
It is through my eyes that you see me and see your self, (ii/me)
Through your eyes you cannot see me. (i)

……would you claim that both ‘subject animated dynamics’ [space is a non-participant] and ‘situation animated dynamics’ [space is a participant] “have validity within their own respective context/perspective/way of seeing, beyond which they mean absolutely nothing at all”, … because i am claiming that the two are related in that one is a more comprehensive and the other a less comprehensive way of understanding physical phenomena….. This way of seeing might be more appropriate in many instances, and may be ‘less’ appropriate in other. I feel you do have something of great value, which I have not fully integrated yet, by this, I mean that I have to integrate it within my own mythology or maybe not, I do not know yet; when one really ‘catch’ the idea, it simply flows, gathering what we look from with what we look at, there is a ongoingness, a whole new vista opening up, I have not ‘catch’ it yet in this sense. One of the thing which I do not remember having written, is that …..beyond which they mean absolutely nothing at all… in that beyond is the unbound meaningful. One of the important point you make concern ‘I’, ‘I’, this sense of self whose sole purpose is its own self, self (or subject) animated dynamics it seems to me is seen as an absolute because of this sense of self ‘I’. ‘i’, I see as the root ‘problem’, take it away and a whole ‘new’ world opens up, but one must go for the root without killing the flower.

alain

it seems as if i have more time for writing than you, …so, sorry about loading you up with stuff. i will try to be ‘briefer’ [it is a major challenge for me, though].

you say; For me, the ‘world’ isn’t mathematical. It is ‘presence’.

1. to me mathematics is a symmetry-based language useful in modeling physical phenomena that can help us to gain insights about ourselves and the world that are necessarily ‘incomplete’. i am not trying to discover the total meaning of the universe, i have been investigating the source of incoherence in the social dynamic, in my self and others, and in so doing, i affirm the findings of nietzsche and others and am trying to share this in ‘some different ways’ and different words, because i can see how certain ‘errors’ tie to conflict, war, incoherence. meanwhile, there is always yet another, deeper layer of inquiry that presents itself, kind of like the patterns in fractal geometry that go on forever [e.g. mandelbrot set] but at some point, it seems to me, some of the identified ‘fictions’ that generate incoherency such as the INCOMPLETENESS [mediocrity of truth] in the common mode of understanding that i am calling ‘subject animated dynamics’, needs to be brought out and acknowledged.

2. the fact that we are using ‘subject animated dynamics’, a superficial re-rendering of the dynamics of our experience, to ground our world view and behaviour is just one of the ways of expressing how incoherence is arising in our social dynamic. mcluhan has homed in on this same source of incoherency and describes it in terms that we have unnaturally elevated visual space above acoustic space, and poincaré would say that we are using theory to correct our experience [which is close to your... ‘what you look at is what you look from']; i.e. we hold relational patterns in our mind whereby, if we find a couple of the components, we can fill in the rest; e.g. the wife combines her husband’s late nights at the office and the smell of perfume on his white shirt, or othello finds desdemona’s handkerchief that was special to the two of them, in the possession of another man, … the raunchiest images come quickly flowing to mind to fill in the rest of the pattern, even if the smell of perfume came when the husband was sampling perfumes to buy one for his wife, and even when desdemona’s handkerchief had been stolen and planted on the other man by othello’s trusted, but jealous/ambitious friend. incoherence and tragedy is often the result of ‘what you look at is what you look from’.

3. underlying everything i have said in 1. and 2. above is ‘relational patterns’ and ‘symmetries’ as surely as one sees ‘bilaterally mirrored symmetry’ in the human form. there are symmetries such as earth-sky, male-female and their are dynamic symmetries as well as static; e.g. the linear ‘in-and-out’ of sexual relations can at the same time be seen as a voluminous ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’ of the anti-symmetric plug and socket. symmetry is getting ‘pretty basic’ to our thought based understanding;

‘Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.’… “Symmetry itself is one of the most fundamental and fruitful concepts of human thought [Hermann Weyl]… By symmetry we mean an invariance against change: something stays the same, in spite of some potentially consequential alternation. Mirror symmetry, that is invariance against ‘flipping sides,’ is perhaps the most widely noticed symmetry. Nature built many of her organisms in nearly symmetrical ways, and most fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s law of gravitation, have an exact mirror symmetry: there is no difference between left and right in the attraction of heavenly (and most earthbound) bodies. However, the nonconservation of parity in radioactive decay— that is, the violation of point symmetry in the ‘weak’ interactions— has finally taught even the physicists to take the distinction between right and left seriously. Another important symmetry is invariance with respect to geometric translation. Our trust in invariance under transposition in space and time, is, in fact, so unlimited that we believe that the laws of nature are the same all over the cosmos— and that they have been, and will remain so, for all time. An even more astounding symmetry is the exact identity of like elementary particles. There is simply no difference between an electron here and an electron there— on a distant star, for example. [Manfred Schroeder].

as previously mentioned, ‘mathematicians’ and evidently people in general, divide into two different ‘beliefs’ as to whether the invariance of symmetry is ‘real’ or ‘idealization’. poincaré refers to the former as ‘Cantorian realists’ and the latter [which includes himself and myself] as ‘pragmatist idealists’; i.e. the latter considers symmetries to be idealizations that are very useful. symmetries are foundational to mathematics, and having declared myself as ‘pragmatist idealist’, i in effect confirm that, like you, i do not see the world as being mathematical, however, thought and language certainly are, and therein lies an ‘idealization barrier’ that it is difficult to get beyond. as wittgenstein says, ‘the crystal purity of our logic is not the result of our investigation but the requirement we impose in going into investigative mode’; i.e. it puts us into ‘what we look at is what we look from’ mode.

our dialogue, it seems to me, seeks to find words that allude to understanding that requires going beyond the ‘idealization barrier’. this need to go beyond the invariant symmetry of opposites is ubiquitous. i have tried to ‘trap it’ inside of what might be called the ‘relational evolutionary archetype’; e.g. in the opposing notions of ‘the one and the many’ which has troubled philosophers forever, and which nietzsche explains by way of the ‘will to power’ and the übermensch. the relational archetype is beyond particular instances, but we need something tangible to ‘talk about it’ and so lets examine ‘context’ and ‘content’ and/or ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, and what we are talking about here and all the time are ‘symmetries’. the apparent dilemma crops up when we ask; ‘does context determine content or does content determine context?’, … or, … ‘does habitat determine inhabitants or do inhabitants determine habitat?’ one is only stymied if one regards content and context, habitat and inhabitant as ‘things-that-be’ [circular reasoning since the action is already built into the things and the we add it in again to make it appear as if the subject is the source of the action, as in ‘lightning flashes’]

but there is another way to understand this symmetry and it is in the presence of continuing evolution. i often use the example of the convection cells in the flow because ‘storms’ and ‘hurricanes’ and ‘tornadoes’ are familiar phenomena that we have all, in one form or another, been EXPERIENTIALLY INCLUDED IN, and this makes us aware of something ‘beyond’ the two subjects of ‘flow-habitat’ as ‘context’ and ‘convecting-cell-inhabitants’ as content, because we are aware of how hot and humid it usually is, when the ‘contents’ or ‘inhabitants’ are out and about; i.e. we are not just talking about the relational symmetry between ‘context’ and ‘content’, we are talking about something in the background that is an invisible but deeper source of the measurable dynamics of flow-and-cell, an ‘invisible energizing spatial medium’ that fuels the evolution of the context-content relation. if ‘i’ is the ‘thinker’ that is looking at the flow and the flow-cells, we get the following;

‘context –i– content’,….. context is content, content is context.

and in our ‘thinking mode’ we may ask the question as to whether context defines content or content defines context. but we are capable of more than ‘thinking’ about the symmetry of this relationship; i.e;

‘/c/o/n/t/e/x/t/ /–/ii/–/ /c/o/n/t/e/n/t/’

in this case, the background is not ‘empty space’ but is instead ‘energized’ (the flow is enriched with thermal energy) and the ‘i’ is not just a ‘judging i’, but a ‘feeling i’, so let’s symbolize him as ‘ii’.

this observer-experient, ‘ii’ understands that the ‘real question’ is not about the relationship between two types of ‘beings’; a ‘static context’ and a ‘static content’ but includes an influence beyond both, an influence that Lamarck termed ‘les fluides incontenables’, the ‘fields’ which could contain the context and the content [the flow and the flow-cells] but which could not themselves be contained.

both ‘flow’ and ‘flow-cell’, ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ are physical, visible, and material and therefore ‘locally measurable’ but ‘les fluides incontenables’ are ‘non-local, non-visible and non-material’, but which nevertheless impress/inform/condition our feeling experience.

note that this example is ‘spatial-relational’ i.e. the background space is a participant in these dynamics, along with the ‘context’ and ‘content’.

with this example in hand, wherein we can questions with or without comprehending the participation of space, let’s go back to my opening statement about ‘subject animated dynamics’ and ‘situation animated dynamics’ and my proposition that dynamics understood in terms of relational space ‘transformation’ [situation-animated-dynamics] predominate over dynamics understood in terms of absolute space ‘mechanics’ [subject-animated-dynamics] in the manner that a polynomial of degree two is less simple than a polynomial of degree one [poincaré], … and to your ‘opening remark’ which i agree with but which i find to be ‘incomplete’ in an important way that involves ‘symmetry’. you seemed to suggest that my choice of one over the other was by way of Aristotelian logic and i am saying that that is not the case. aristotelian logic concerns ‘things that be’ as in ‘context’ and ‘content’ but my ‘either/or’ was between acknowledging space as a participant or not (whether to simply ‘observe’ in the sense of ‘judging’ as ‘i’ did, or to both ‘observe’ in the sense of ‘judging’ and ‘experience’ in the sense of ‘feeling’ as ‘ii’ did; i.e. you said;

“Aristotle logic is the logic of either this or that, either it is subject/object animated or it is situation/relation animated. In our ‘mind’ and because of Aristotle logic, it is either one or the other. What I am suggesting is that both have equal value and validity within their own respective context/perspective/way of seeing, beyond which they mean absolutely nothing at all. Somehow, there are no situations outside of language, in the very same way that there are no objects outside of language. The shift you are ‘asking for’, is a shift in emphasis, it is not a matter of either this or that, but of emphasis of one over the other one. What I feel is require is to go beyond both. To ‘awaken’ the ‘mind’ in such a way as it rest upon nothing at all, no parts/subject (as object with will)/objects, no relations or situations.”

my objection is;

(a) while you are setting up a ‘strawman’ that implies that i am using Aristotelian logic and then you demolish this strawman, my claim of the one predominating over the other was not based on Aristotelian logic. … and,

(b) while you claim that both ‘subject animated dynamics’ and ‘situation animated dynamics’ “have validity within their own respective context/perspective/way of seeing, beyond which they mean absolutely nothing at all”, … i claim that the two are related in that one is a more comprehensive and the other a less comprehensive way of understanding the same physical phenomena, in the manner that ‘ii’ [the thinking and feeling observer/experient] is understanding more comprehensively than ‘i’ [the thinking observer].

i have shared the example of the ‘V’ formation of wildgeese and/or a group of bikers speeding down the freeway and my experience has been that people in general have difficulty in suspending the notion that ‘the participants’ are determining the ‘V’ shape [subject animated dynamics], whether it is the ‘ideal geometry’ of the ‘V’ that organizes the participants or the participants constructing the ‘V’. that is, they have difficulty in understanding this phenomenon in terms wherein space is a participant and where the ‘V’ is a ‘resonance pattern’ that emerges in the conjugate habitat-inhabitant engaging. if one leaves space as a non-participant and describe this phenomenon in terms of ‘parts’ and ‘whole’ (content and context), one comes up with fine words that assume ‘subject animated dynamics’ like ‘cooperation’, and this, to me, is a classic case of ‘what you at is what you look from’ of our dysfunctional culture.

my inquiry into ‘exceptionally performing teams’ exposed that these teams were using the ‘ii’ approach like the wildgeese, rather than ‘i’ approach which is the standard for teams and the standard team is dysfunctional in that by being internally directed as in subject animated dynamics, it generates turbulence or ‘reciprocal compression’ along its interface with the environment. meanwhile the standard team sees the turbulence as a ‘challenge’ that it has to overcome, so it seeks to improve internal ‘cooperation’ as a means of increasing the horsepower to overcome the turbulence. the exceptional teams, on the other hand, let the environmental dynamic serve as an outside-inward orchestrating influence to put their inside-outward asserting dynamics together with, in resonant relational engaging.

in trying to share this understanding with management, the managers would inevitably, in my [limited] experience, misinterpret the team dynamics by describing the work the team did in terms of ‘who did what’ [subject animated dynamics] and asking me [like the judge asked jean valjean]; ‘is this true or not’,… and i would answer, ‘yes, but…’ but they were not interested in hearing out the ‘but’ which sounded to them like smoke and mirrors, and i chose not to say; ‘it is true what you say, but it is a mediocre truth’. so they promoted those who they saw as ‘the strongest contributing team members’ and the exceptionally-performing teams, which were rare items that had evolved on their own, were all broken up, and while the members of these exceptional teams understood, intuitively, the approach that had worked so well and been so enjoyable, it was impossible to rekindle it within a team that had a conventional ‘supervisor’ whose approach was to ‘encourage internal cooperation and solidarity’ and construct a strong team effort in an inside-outward asserting sense.

so, in this anecdote on ‘team behaviour’, would you claim that both ‘subject animated dynamics’ [space is a non-participant] and ‘situation animated dynamics’ [space is a participant] “have validity within their own respective context/perspective/way of seeing, beyond which they mean absolutely nothing at all”, … because i am claiming that the two are related in that one is a more comprehensive and the other a less comprehensive way of understanding physical phenomena, in the manner that ‘ii’ [the thinking and feeling observer/experient] is understanding more comprehensively than ‘i’ [the thinking observer].

ted

For me, the ‘world’ isn’t mathematical. It is ‘presence’.

Me looks from ‘me’, and me looks at ‘I’. Me is first, but you cannot say anything about ‘me’.

………f. david peat cites piaget [who is great at observing and lousy at interpreting, in my view] in noting that children start off understanding things firstly in ‘implicit’ relational space terms (e.g. ‘topologically’) and as they develop [in our culture] they regress to the simpler ‘explicit’ absolute space geometries…. Yes, that is the way I think ‘it’ works, but the explicit is not a regression, it is not a question of either this one or that one. It is Bohm who said in one of his books ‘ I think we have it upside down when we say that the ‘real’ is un-ambiguous. For Bohm, ‘reality’ is ambiguous. One could say that there is an ambi-determination to ‘it. It goes even further then this, for one of the faces of this ambiguity affirm there are no ambiguities, but the face that says there is no-ambiguity is itself ambiguous.

To look for a context is to look for to look from, which is another way of saying that we look for to look at. Can you see the ambiguity of this statement?

…..but it was only our focus on one aspect (that is what I have been saying right from the start; we over emphasize on what we look at) of a purely relative dynamic that allowed us to formulate a ‘subject-animated dynamic’ or ‘doer-deed dynamic’ [‘this zone here is expanding/growing] impression of the purely spatial-relational dynamic. the ‘zone’ that is ‘expanding’ does not have a ‘real persisting identity’, but that is the ‘power of the word/language’ that gives us the impression that something is growing when nothing is growing, there is simply a transformation of spatial relations (you are still within a world of words; ‘transformation of spatial relations’ is an abstraction, show me is concrete, I am not saying that it does not have validity, on the contrary, as a viewpoint/view, I find this ‘great’ as it may soften this sense of absolute)….. . this is the mental error we make that nietzsche …. It is not a mental error, it is a different way of experiencing.

. ‘context –i– content’,….. context is content, content is context!

……now, i have left the word ‘self’ in this phraseology, but this thing in the middle is not ‘explicit’; i.e. it is not ‘material’, it is the ‘evolutionary force’, both in the realm of ideas and in the realm of physical phenomena; i.e. we could say ‘the will to transcendence is us’, rather than speak of ‘the will to self-transcendence’ which leaves us ‘on the outside looking in’…. I think you are right here, I will have to think about this a little more, let it sink in.

I am going to order the book by Vygotsky, as it sounds very interesting. For me Ideas are not concepts, ideas sound more similar to Vygotsky ‘spontaneous concepts’ in a realtion web, and concept as ‘scientific concept’. …. Though fundamentally different in nature, the development of concept and spontaneous ideas represent two sides of the same… Quite similar to my own way of seeing things. But I am not sure they grow downward, maybe, I just do not know! Have you ever heard of ‘default network/task positive network’ in neurological research?
Time to go again, but be sure I will read the rest, this is very interesting!
alain

if i am not mistaken, the basic relational essences or ‘relational archetype’ in our understanding of ‘world views’ and how they form are in common.

i will try to do some ‘reconciling’ here, to see if it resonates with you, or not.

because i ‘think in ‘spatial’ geometric/symmetry terms’ i will approach the reconciling ‘in that medium’ though i sense you are more comfortable with ‘logical currency’ since i don’t hear about the various ‘structures of space’ in your formulations; i.e. you use ‘width’ and ‘depth’ where i would go to ‘euclidian’ and ‘non-euclidian’.

if i start with the WYLA-I-WYLF [what you look at –is- what you look for] structure, i ‘visualize’ it in terms of a ‘conjugate pair’. the world view as an ‘idea’ that is continually evolving is ‘the is’. the ‘i’ in the middle is the source of evolution of the conjugate pair; i.e. early on, what i look for is limited and therefore what i look at is limited and i don’t see the rest of the world dynamic i am included in. maybe my mother’s face, her breasts and my bottle is what i look at because that is what i look for, but as my ‘i’ develops, the spectrum of what i look at/for grows. the ‘i’ in this case seems to correspond to ‘width’ rather than ‘depth’ in your comment; i.e. the developing ‘i’ is a developing ‘knowing’ of things.

development could be seen as ‘becoming more knowledgeable’. there is more to it, to be sure, but at least on one level, we can describe this evolution of ‘i’ in terms of knowledge. as you point out, we can use WYLA-I-WYLF in two modes; (a) to inform us as to what is going on out there, and (b) to evolve our ‘idea’ or ‘understanding’ in terms of a growing collection of things ‘we can look for’. ideology is when we become a ‘know-it-all’ and everything we see we interpret by using our fixed ideas; i.e. we become like the workman who has only one tool in his toolbox, a hammer, so that everything looks at looks like a nail since WYLA-I-WYLF.
meanwhile, as an infant, before ‘left lobe language’ takes over, one sees the world in all its complexity and nuances. f. david peat cites piaget [who is great at observing and lousy at interpreting, in my view] in noting that children start off understanding things firstly in ‘implicit’ relational space terms (e.g. ‘topologically’) and as they develop [in our culture] they regress to the simpler ‘explicit’ absolute space geometries;

“The history of geometry demonstrates the discovery of deeper and more general levels, Euclidian geometry gives way to non-Euclidian, beneath geometry is topology, and topology itself is founded on even more general and beautiful mathematics. The longer a particular topic has been studied, the deeper mathematicians are able to move towards its foundations. But Piaget, pointed out, this historical evolution is a direct reversal of the actual development of concepts of space in the infant. To the young child, the distinction between intersecting and non-intersecting figures is more immediate than between, say, a triangle, square and circle. To the infant’s developing mind, topology comes before geometry. In general, deeper and more fundamental logical operations are developed earlier than more specific rules and applications. The history of mathematics, which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy.”

don’t take my words literally here [just take them ‘relationally’ or ‘comparatively’], but i am trying to share some topological/geometric based views our cultural evolution.

the way i see the relational evolutionary archetype of WYLA-I-WYLF is the way i see gabor’s transmitter-receiver relation in his ‘quantum physics compliant’ communications theory and the way i see Mach’s principle and the way i see nietzsche’s (lamarck’s) theory of evolution as a ‘process of flow in which outside-inward orchestrating influence and inside-outward asserting declaration are simultaneous and reciprocally complementary. i would label this ‘in conjugate relation’.

in our learning process as a developing child, we can use this conjugate relation in the ‘asserting flow mode’, to ‘declare’ what something is. in actual physical dynamics, we can use it to construct something; i.e. this ‘relational evolutionary archetype’ (REA) can be used to help conceive of evolution in both the physical world and in the world of ideas.

alternatively, we can use the REA inversely to orchestrate the augmentation of the web of relations that gives meaning to a specific item. on first glance this is a ‘two-way street’; ‘context –i– content’ or ‘habitat –i– inhabitant’ or ‘WYLA –i– WYLF’. if the ‘flat plane’ (logically) it looks like a ‘two-way street’ however since it is continually evolving, the apparently ‘empty space’ that it is included in is ‘NOT EMPTY SPACE’ but the evolutionary source.

this begs a stretching of the imagination, as in realistic but subtle ‘thought experiment’; i.e. can you think of each point in space, instead of being a source of ‘being’ or ‘not being’ (‘is’ or ‘is not’), think of it as a ‘circular hole’ that opens up to another world. ok, how about if we have a load of people distributed over the surface of the sphere of the earth (for simplicity, a continuous smooth surface like on a billiard ball). imagine they are all pushing and shoving so that waves of compression and expansion characterize the overall spherical space dynamic. then, if we focus on some circular zone where there is mostly expansion [growing], we can say that that zone is expanding relative to the region outside the zone which is, relatively, compressing (this happens all the time in the atmosphere’s fluid dynamics).

but it was only our focus on one aspect of a purely relative dynamic that allowed us to formulate a ‘subject-animated dynamic’ or ‘doer-deed dynamic’ [‘this zone here is expanding/growing] impression of the purely spatial-relational dynamic. the ‘zone’ that is ‘expanding’ does not have a ‘real persisting identity’, but that is the ‘power of the word/language’ that gives us the impression that something is growing when nothing is growing, there is simply a transformation of spatial relations. this is the mental error we make that nietzsche talks about when we first give a name to something which is ‘made of movement’ as in ‘lightning’ and then use is as the subject that is the cause of its own movement, ‘lightning flashes’. this is the ‘mediocre truth’ that he speaks of. there is no ‘growth’ in the world, there is only transformation of what is already ‘in place’ or ‘in space’.

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

now, for myself and perhaps you as well, the ‘will-to-self-transcendence’ would serve the purpose here better than ‘the will to power’. that is, in the relational evolutionary archetype, in whichever form we want to ‘express it’ [‘explicitize’ it, since it is purely relational/implicit and its implicitness transcends any particular explicit representation]; e.g. ‘context –i– content’, we can feel within us the desire to grow the web of relations called ‘context’ which will at the same time, give new meaning to every item of ‘content’. we may ‘know what a girl is’ in our virgin youth but such ‘knowing’ is transcended by carnal knowledge of a girl. there is a will to self-transcendence on the part of the –i– in the relational evolutionary archetype instance ‘context –i– content’.

now, i have left the word ‘self’ in this phraseology, but this thing in the middle is not ‘explicit’; i.e. it is not ‘material’, it is the ‘evolutionary force’, both in the realm of ideas and in the realm of physical phenomena; i.e. we could say ‘the will to transcendence is us’, rather than speak of ‘the will to self-transcendence’ which leaves us ‘on the outside looking in’.

now, to make the point that piaget ‘got it wrong’ in his interpretation on concept formation, i want to insert here (for my own record if nothing else) what the russian psychologist lev vygotsky had to say about ‘piaget’s error’ in his explanation of ‘concept formation’ or ‘idea formation’. [ N.B. vygotsky uses the terms ‘spontaneous concept’ for a relational web [context] that gives meaning to a particular element, and ‘nonspontaneous concept’ or ‘scientific concept’ for an explicit item of content]. Vygotsky says;

“These are correct observations [Piaget’s] … At the same time … We shall focus on three of his major errors which are intricately connected. … Piaget attempts to present spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts as firmly divided and self-contained entities whose interaction is impossible. He fails to see the interaction between these two types of concepts and the bonds uniting them into a total system. … Though fundamentally different in nature, the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts represent two sides of the same concept formation: … Though scientific and spontaneous concepts develop in reverse directions, the two processes are closely connected. … In working its slow way upward, an everyday concept clears a path for the scientific concept and its downward development. It creates a series of structures necessary for the evolution of a concept’s more primitive, elementary aspects, which gives it body and vitality. Scientific concepts, in turn, supply structures for the upward development of … spontaneous concepts toward consciousness and deliberate use. Scientific concepts grow downwards through spontaneous concepts; spontaneous concepts grow upwards through scientific concepts. Vygotsky ‘Thought and Language’, p.194”

the strength of scientific concepts, according to Vygotsky, lies in the child’s capacity (developed through instruction) to use these concepts voluntarily, which he called ‘their readiness for action’. i relate this to nietzsche’s or rolph’s evolutionary flow process wherein the ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence and the inside-outward asserting declaration’ are dual aspects of one conjugate relation. vygotsky continues;

“The strength of scientific concepts lies in their conscious and deliberate character. Spontaneous concepts, on the contrary, are strong in what concerns the situational, empirical, and practical. These two conceptual systems, developing “from above” and “from below”, reveal their real nature in the interrelations between actual development and the zone of proximal development. … “Our disagreement with Piaget centers on one point only, but an important point. He assumes that development and instruction are entirely separate, incommensurate processes, that the function of instruction is merely to introduce adult ways of thinking, which conflict with the child’s own and eventually supplant them. Such a supposition stems from the old psychological tradition of separating the structural from the functional aspects of development. … The entire process of development appears as mechanical displacement of one mentality by another. The child’s own thinking plays no constructive role in this process, being simply, gradually replaced by an adult mode of reasoning. [e.g. as Skinner says, ‘society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him before he has tasted freedom.],This theoretical position leaves no alternative other than antagonism for the relation between development and learning.” – Lev Vygotsky, ‘Thought and Language’ Ch. 6, ‘The Development of Scientific Concepts in Childhood: The Design of a Working Hypothesis.

ok, this is what i see as the problem of our culture in general, as the popular tendency to ‘break apart’ relational/implicit order from absolute/explicit order and once one does this, the explicit is all that one can see. in the above example, we started with the expanding zone or the lightning which is a ‘relative’ concept and using language, we ‘subjectize’ it and make it ‘the subject of its own action’, forgetting about its relational/implicit origin in our experiencing of it. out of the turbulence of darkness we see a jagged flash of light which looks like a ‘thing-in-itself’, like a God gifted with its own powers (Thor, Zeus) that protects against the forces of darkness. this is the role of the ‘subject’ in our language based ‘subject animated dynamics’. we protect ourselves against the darkness of the unknown (what WE do not know) by jumpstarting dynamics from ‘what we know’ from the actions of ‘things’ that we define such as ‘humans’. our popular perspective is that humans are biological organisms with their own locally originating powers of development of form, behaviour and organization driven and directed from their internal biochemistry and neurophysics. in other words, we popularly look upon society as a social dynamic that jumpstarts from the interiors of the participants, … no need to consider the deeper sourcing of everything, including people, in the continually evolving, energy-charged spatial-plenum. that is, we break apart the relational origins of things from the things-as-if-in-themselves, subjectizing them, and re-rendering dynamics as if they originated within the interior of biological organisms.

this is the Fiktion that is currently gripping the world (or a power-wielding minority in the world) with fear, in the guise of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW). poincaré, who wrote that ‘it is nonsense to say that the earth rotates’ [to impute subjecthood to the earth], must be rolling over in his grave in light of the current AGW hypothesis wherein the subsystems within the system [people], the convection cells within the flow, are claiming responsibility for driving the evolutionary flow backwards, thanks to the power of their technology.

vygotsky and nietzsche, taken together, deliver insight on how such insanity comes about.

firstly, we are taught not to think for ourselves; i.e. new scientific concepts come out one after the other, adult learnings that are imposed on the child so that he does not have to do his own creative thinking and evolve his own understanding, all he has to do is to learn each new hypothesis that is presented to him that will, if he can validate and/or trust it, supplant the previous one. but this is the approach that brings us ‘mediocre truth’; i.e. ‘lightning flashes’. or ‘population grows’ [‘populating is already an action’ that we subjectize into ‘population’] when our experience prior to our subjectizing it is in terms of transformation of spatial relations. as nietzsche says in the above quote [aphorism 1067 in ‘Will to Power’]; ‘the world … only transforms itself.”

so, how does this process of supplanting one hypothesis with another work. we can see it going on today. the scientist and/or politician comes and presents his theory of AGW and he presents the supporting ‘facts’ that he has cherry-picked to support his hypothesis, showing us how the hypothesis develops out of the ‘facts’. we are not allowed to infuse observations experiences of our own. we must decide right then and there whether his conclusions are supported by the facts, or show cause why that is not the case. we cannot say; but your argument is predominantly inside-outward determining because the mainstream scientific paradigm is one in which physical phenomena are inside-outward determined. this is like being asked the question; ‘is it true that the vortex causes changes in the flow?’, … whereupon one might say, ‘yes, but…’ and be cut off because the interrogator was only looking for confirmation that ‘the vortex causes changes in the flow’, … or ‘the humans cause changes in the world dynamic’, and he doesn’t want to hear you argue that ‘the vortex is a ripple that forms in the flow; i.e. it is a conjugate outside-inward influx and inside-outward outflux’, it is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ to which we can impute its own ‘subject animated dynamic’ powers.

the scientist is not interested in such ‘outside of his scientific paradigm’ statements. he is employing the Socratic method of ‘dialectic’ whereby one decides at each step of the way along one’s inquiry, whether one’s propositions are ‘true’ or ‘not true’, and this ‘fits’ with the development of models that are constituted by ‘subject animated dynamics’; i.e. logical-causal models that assume absolute space. but as nietzsche observes;

“One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. … As a dialectician, one holds a merciless tool in one’s hand; one can become a tyrant by means of it; one compromises those one conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless.” — Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’

thus, as vygotsky says, in our natural development of concepts and ‘working hypotheses’, the relational [spontaneous] concepts naturally arrive first and provide the context for the scientific concepts. the relational concepts are implicit and are ‘pre-linguification’ while the scientific concepts depend upon them for meaning. BUT NOT IN THE CASE WHERE WE WORK THE SYSTEM IN REVERSE and simply use ‘words’ and ‘definitions’ to construct the concepts without the benefit of developing the relational web that gives experiential meaning to them. in this case, they are not the precipitate of a web of experiential relations, but are in the form of voyeur images. as vygotsky says;

“A child’s everyday concept, such as a ‘brother’, is saturated with experience. Yet when he is asked to solve an abstract problem about a brother’s brother, as in Piaget’s experiments, he becomes confused. … … Another example. After the student explained that ‘those peasants who were the property of a landowner we call serfs,’ he was asked about the life of the gentry in the epoch of serfdom. He answered, ‘They lived very well. Everything was very rich. Ten-story house, many rooms and all beautiful. Electric arcs burned’. This oversimplified development of the concept of serfdom looks more like an image than a scientific concept. At the same time, when asked to define the concept of ‘brother’, the child turns out to be completely captured by the logic of actual situations, and cannot approach this concept as an abstract one. One might say that the development of the child’s spontaneous concepts proceeds upward, and the development of his scientific concepts, downward, to a more elementary and concrete level.”

what we have in natural learning is the evolutionary archetype; ‘relational-experiential context –i– explicit post-linguistification content’.

what we have in unnatural learning via dialectics is ‘mediocre evolution’ by way of a succession of imposed ‘explicit post-linguistification content’ based voyeur images.
one might say that ‘the carpenter’ is stuck in this position where the design and architecture (the relational context aspect of what, in nature, is a conjugate relation) has been hijacked by the ‘architect’ or more generally, by the firm that one works for, which implies, as you say, that;

“I must go to work, losing my life attempting to earn it.

in other words, working for someone else is like giving up the relational context from which the explicit constructs are precipitated from. in accepting AGW and/or the latest scientific theory by merely validating its internal logical consistency, checkout out the logical construction without even delving into the relational web from which the scientist precipitated the selection of ‘facts’ that he needed to ‘build his theory’, one allows his capacity for upstream relational mode of understanding to atrophy. this is what french scientists like poincaré refer to as ‘vulgarisation’, simplifying something to make it more digestible for general public consumption; e.g. he gives the example of galileo’s thinking in supporting the copernican heliocentric hypothesis. it was not a case of galileo simply ‘validating the logic of it’. it was instead galileo’s reasoning that if one supposed that the earth did not move, the observation that all the stars in the sky moved with the same tiny aberrational circles with a period of 365.25 days would have to be taken to be a ‘coincidence’, whereas, the heliocentric model not only explained other previously unexplained phenomena, it removed the need for having to assume such coincidences.

in my discussions with scientists, Ph.Ds, professors, i find that many if not most are unable to ‘go back to this upstream realm’ of relational context from which the now accepted theory had precipitated. the more theory we have developed and the more we accept it by simply validating its internal logic for consistency, the more we distance ourselves from understanding the world in relational terms, and the more our behaviour is animated by ‘reason’, by the ‘learned-by-rote’ theories we have acquired through education and through the media propagated vulgarisations. the result is that we ignore such warnings as;

‘on ne se laisse pas emporter par la raison a fin qu’on va plus vite que la violon’

finally, to close out this note, i want to go back to f. david peat’s interpretation of piaget’s observation, and expand it from ‘mathematicians’ to our culture in general; i.e.

The history of mathematics [the history of our culture], which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy.”

that is, it seems to me as if we are moving from our culturally predominating ‘post-linguification mode of understanding’ back towards ‘pre-linguification mode of understanding’, which in my terms would equate to ‘swapping out absolute space’ in our reference framing and putting ‘relational space’ in its place. from ‘relational space’ we can derive ‘absolute space’ by the process of time-based differentiation (dx/dt). that is the advantage of starting with a space that is less simple in the manner that a polynomial of degree two [curved] is less simple than a polynomial of degree one [linear]. this equates to conceiving of the world as a ‘being’ [as a subject] that ‘itself changes’ as a function of ‘time’. in order for this to be measurable, the world would have to be inside a fixed ‘reference frame’ and have a ‘persisting identity’, otherwise we could not impute ‘its change’ to ‘it’. in this case the world at ‘time t1’ would have to be entirely responsible [to hold within it all the requisite causal agencies] to determine the world as ‘time t2’. this is the ‘Laplacian’ world view which appears to be the most popular extant world view. this is where theories such as AGW come from. as poincare puts it, this view reduces the dynamics of physical phenomena to ‘differential equations’;

“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 that 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.” – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

the mathematicians have dug deeper, going from the geometry of invariable solids to topology which is solely spatial-relations based and looks beyond particular forms; e.g. the topology of a doughnut and a worm and a human and convection cell are all toroidal flows, outside-inward flow that intrudes into itself.

the world may not have found its new idea yet, but it seems to me that the development of NGOs and global affiliations is beginning to carry us beyond the ‘centre-based’ subjectification that we have been imposing via sovereign statism, authoritarianism etc. an NGO is a web of relations (like the internet) that wraps over and around the spherical surface on the sphere of the earth and which therefore ‘has no centre’ or ‘is its own centre’ as in the earlier example which dissolved the notion of an ‘expanding zone’, exposing it as a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation. global centre-less webs of relation could be based on astrological sign associations or on the clan system of the amerindians , not necessarily ‘doing away with the centre-based affiliations but subordinating them.

anyhow, i am about to shut this writing down and watch the international junior hockey game between russia and canada. the announcers speak openly of the ‘hatred’ of the canadians for the americans and vice versa, and each side wants to see its side win, but yet they are not inspired if one side ‘overwhelms’ the other; i.e. they want nail-biting drama and suspense that brings out the best in both teams. once again we have this ‘centre’ in the middle of opposition which is not to do with a simple balance point where the scales will tip one way or the other, it is a hole into the realm of evolutionary will where the evolutionary will induces spirited behaviour on the part of both teams. this is what people really want to experience since it seems to include everyone within its force, as nietzsche suggests. a ‘win’ in the simple, literal win/lose terms of A’s score being greater than B’s is not it. therefore, the supportive audiences on both sides should respect the process and the opposition since without them, the invoking of this evolutionary will is not, in this situation, possible. the question of win or loss is incidental, not paramount as in ‘darwinism’.

ted