Archive for November, 2009
Gravity is One Slippery Dude
0We have been taught that ‘gravity’ is a ‘field’ and that it is ‘everywhere at the same time’ in the universe, so that if we move, the whole universe is immediately changed by it.
That sounds bizarre for one reason and one reason only; — because of our ‘self-ish’ perspective; i.e. we are in the habit of ‘putting ourselves before the universe’.
Do we really believe that we can move before the universe ‘knows about it’? No way. If we could beat the universe in this game, we would be able to, as well, slip away from our own shadow.
So, if, when we move, the whole universe immediately knows about, isn’t this notion in conflict with science’s contention that no effect can propagate faster than the speed of light? (more…)
Author’s Subtext – Representative Government
0In spite of the fact that many investigators of the social dynamic, from time to time, have suggested that politics derives from how we view ourselves; e.g. as in ‘social darwinism’ wherein we consider ourselves to be a member of a ‘favoured race’, politics is usually discussed in terms of an intellectual ‘world view’ … ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘liberalism’ etc.
What this does is to put the focus, MISLEADINGLY, on the intellectual architectures of these different approaches and into debates as to the ramifications and side-effects of each and judgements as to which will work out the best for the overall ‘system’ etc.
We even insist that government is ‘secular’, that ‘church’ and ‘state’ can be, and currently are, kept separate. This is evident nonsense, but it is politically correct to ‘go along with it’.
We all know that ‘religion’ is woven into the issues of governance even though we argue the case for this politics or that politics on ‘intellectual grounds’. (e.g. see Peter D’Errico’s ‘American Indian Sovereignty, Now You See It, Now You Don’t’)
But if we are honest, we would have to acknowledge that it is not all about the merits of our respective ‘social dynamics management systems’ that we build into our ‘politics’. It is more about ‘who we are’, how we give representation to ‘our selves’. (more…)
Who puts the ‘Representation’ in ‘Representative Government’?
0Evidently, there continues to be confusion over whether ‘representative government’ was intended to be the result of the social dynamic or the cause of the social dynamic.
Some representatives, and some leaders of groups of representatives, seem to feel that their job is to ‘direct’ the social dynamic in the manner that the ‘director’ of an orchestra would direct a group of beginner musicians that did not yet have a feel for how the music itself can become the orchestrator of individual and collective dynamical play. In this mode of ‘representation’ wherein the music itself, through the players becomes the primary source, the ‘director’ becomes the ‘mirroring back’ of the unfolding performance, so as to serve in a support role rather than as some kind of ‘controlling creator’ that must be followed meticulously, even if he takes the music to a place wherein the musicians are no longer inspired to play it.
This is an issue in the politics of nations. To what degree should the government of/by representatives have those representatives ‘direct’ (centrally-source) or ‘orchestrate’ (mirror back) the social dynamics of the nation?
It is clear that in the time of war, the social collective must become a ‘war machine’ and everyone accepts that this requires ‘centrally-sourced direction’, but in times of peace, this is where new symphonic works emerge from the self-organising dynamics of the collective, where a new collective persona arises that opens up new spatial possibilities for the blossom of never-before-seen creative potentialities.
For those politicians aspiring to use their ‘elected representative’ status to become leader-directors and to personally impose shape on the collective, the wartime mode is preferable, since it gives the leader the power to locally instigate and implement changes of his own preferred architecture. (more…)
Genius, or just Talent?
0When nature stops making human beings, human beings will not be able to make more human beings.
So, why do we always talk as if man is in control of ‘populating the earth’? This sounds a lot like the ‘megalomania’ that the Amerindian accused his European colonizers (Western man) of; i.e. Western man’s belief that he is in charge of the interdependent web-of-life rather than being merely a strand within it.
Do we really believe, like we teach our children, that babies come from two humans, a male and female, by their coming together in the ‘reproductive act’ and, voila,- a new little human being. In this self-congratulation for our claimed, amazing powers of creation, aren’t we forgetting something? Aren’t we forgetting that Nature decided that humans would be here and will decide when there is no longer any need for them? Shouldn’t we be understanding that it is not really ‘us’, the local man and woman, that is making the babies?
Emerson discusses how we western humans tend to confuse ‘talent’ for ‘genius’. (more…)
“Organisation” : What is it?
0Nine hundred people committing suicide in one place at the same time would appear to be a ‘highly organised’ occurrence (Jonestown Guyana, November 18, 1978). On the other hand, it is ‘organisation’ that is somehow different than the organisation we see in the fall where the northern skies are filled with birds, flying southward, in formation.
I would say that ‘organisation’ differs by whether it is ‘grounded’ in what’s going on in the space it is included in, or not; i.e. whether the organisation concerns only ‘what thing do’ or whether it comprehends, at the same time, the dynamic relations of things and the dynamics of the space they are included in.
For example, when groups of people organise, it is often due to their ‘knowledge’ so that the organising is internally driven from out of the individual organisms. This sort of organisation is ‘ungrounded’ in the dynamics of space in which it is included.
Consider three groups of people who come together at the same place and at the same time, but at different times for each of the three groups. (more…)
Nature ‘versus’ Nurture
3The arguments over apportioning which of those aspects of a person derive from ‘nature’ (genetics) and which aspects derive from ‘nurture’ (environmental influence) is a bullshit argument (so, thank you very much, ‘sciences’ of ‘biology’ and ‘psychology’). Just because we can take a picture of a DNA string and define and label it, doesn’t endow it with local existence and life-creating powers in its own right. For christ’s sake, when you get right down to it, there isn’t any such thing as ‘local-material structure’, the ‘atomic particles’ that were the supposed ‘building blocks’ are now recognized to be resonances in the energy-field-flow. Space and matter have a wave structure. And, in any case, As Barry Commoner observes, ‘DNA didn’t create life, life created DNA!
In the energy-field-flow continuum of nature, the organism is the environment, the inhabitant is the habitat, there are no absolute ‘local existing objects’ and the relationship between energy-loaded space and the ‘illogic’ of what ‘APPEAR’ (Schroedinger’s ‘schaumkommen’) to be ‘LOCAL’ ‘material bodies’ is ‘explained away’ by Ernst Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity; “The dynamics of the habitat condition the dynamics of the inhabitant/s AT THE SAME TIME as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’. That is, space-and-matter are a conjugate dynamic unity, … organism-and-environment are a conjugate dynamic unity, inhabitant-and-habitat are a conjugate dynamic unity. There is no ‘dual sourcing’ of what goes on with one purported source BEING INTERNAL ‘genetic building blocks’ and the other purported source BEING EXTERNAL ‘environmental influences’. This artificial ‘split’ in the sourcing of creative dynamics, which comes from the ‘idealisations’ that science imposes on nature’s dynamic, is where this bogus ‘nature versus nurture’ paradox comes from.
The invisible conjugate aspect of ‘self’ (the ‘soul’ of the ‘self’) is the continuously unfolding continuum of nature in which the material conjugate aspect of the ‘self’ is uniquely, situationally included. By ignoring the habitat-inhabitant conjugate unity and one-sidedly reducing our notion of ‘self’ to that of a local, independently-existing organism with its own ‘local, internally originating behaviour’ is to intellectually ‘exorcise’ the ‘soul’ aspect. So, would our educational institutes please stop brainwashing our children by treating this ‘nature versus nurture’ paradox as if it were ‘real’, and admit that it arises from our own over-simplified definitions? Where does one complain about this? Will the next cultural pandemic hatch out of the blogosphere? (;-}

DNA, like all forms, is the 'result' NOT 'source' of creative dynamics
Author’s Subtext: Poetry and Pornography
2Writing this article was prompted by dialogue with a friend who recalled our earlier dialogues wherein we both agreed that there was no way to speak literally to these foundational issues regarding culture, outside of poetry. Her note included the following;
“To me inclusionality is a feeling of being in the flow; as you say, it’s the Tao – and the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. … You or I (I forget which of us it was) once said that poetry was the only thing to get the Tao across – and probably haiku at that. Because real poetry sidles up on it sideways instead of trying to describe it exactly. That’s why your images of geese and fish and stormclouds and even cars on the freeway work, and mathematical or other descriptions don’t.”
But, at the same time, poetry can be pretty ambiguous, and even though most people love it, the world of the poetic and the world of rational prose go on unreconciled.
My thought was that there needs to be some ‘reconciliation’ here, (more…)
Poetry and Pornography: Inversion that elicits perversion
2What could the link possibly be between ‘poetry’ and ‘pornography’?
Imagine that ten different people were asked to make a movie that portrayed life in a small mountain village. What variants on this theme might emerge, and why?
‘Life’ is a four-letter word that can take on many different meanings; i.e. we can impute many different meanings to this little choo-choo train of abstract symbols that mean nothing in themselves, with the engine ‘L’ pulling them along and the caboose ‘e’ pulling up the rear.
Should we start the film with a helicopter shot of the morning sun lighting up the peaks of the mountains (majestic classical music in the background, with horns and tympanums, perhaps a soprano voice), the morning light descending down the verdant slopes to lift away the darkness that obscures, to reveal the village nesting comfortably in the mothering embrace of the nurturing landscape. In this ‘framing’ there is the sense that (more…)
Talking-the-Walk
0Well, it is not everyone that wants to philosophically probe the depths of our ‘mind’ where the production system lives that brings us our everyday view of the world, but it usually happens that those who do want to, have an energy for doing so that is intense and persisting. So it was with the wife of the son of an old friend visiting these parts when they stayed with me over the past few days. Our discussions started each morning and lasted for hours, recommencing in the afternoon when we came back in, got the fire going in the woodstove and poured a glass of wine.
There are always points of agreement (and disagreement) in these discussions, as might be expected, and in this case, there was lots of agreement but it was curious that one of the points of strong agreement turned out to have, within it, a point of disagreement. That is, we both acknowledged that the action that ‘actually happens’ is the combination of the male assertive aspect and the female opening of possibility aspect, as in examples like the throwing of a cigarette into the forest, and the example of Hitler’s inflammatory rhetoric and the tensions in Germany relative to the European powers (the couple are from Holland).
Ok, we both agreed that things don’t happen without the opening of spatial possibility, and that our culture tends to commonly, mistakenly attribute all of ‘what happens’ to a purported ‘causal agent’; i.e. to say ‘the careless smoker caused this’ (a burnt out forest) and/or ‘the aggression of hitler’s nazi regime was the cause of WWII’. That is, the real situation is more as Pasteur and Béchamp put it, “le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the purported causal agent is nothing, the opening of spatial possibility is everything). If the forest is not dry and ready to go, tossing a cigarette into will do nothing, and, similarly, the intended ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ of the politician, will not take ignite the populace if the accrued potentials are not ‘in place’.
The subtle point of ‘disagreement’ was, (more…)
Author’s Subtext – Sociopathic Epidemic
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The Sociopathic Epidemic – ‘Author’s Subtext’
There is a problem with the way we ‘present’ social issues in our culture and in our culture’s media, in that the presentations often start ‘in the middle of things’ and treat the middle as a local-system-in-itself. Can we understand the organism as a local system out of the context of the environment; e.g the storm-cell as a local system out of the context of the fluid-flow of the atmosphere? The ‘Sociopathy Epidemic’ article invites us focus on a problem WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, as if there were nothing to be gained from opening our inquiry to dynamics in which the US is at the same time included (the world dynamic, nature). The problem with ‘limiting our inquiry’ to the notional ‘local system’, as has often been pointed out by the systems sciences, is that it forces us to identify the source of all behaviours (functional or dysfunctional) as originating within the ‘local’ system. If we inquire into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ functionality of a university, we will always be able to point to something in its operations that we can credit or blame for good or bad results. But as Russell Ackoff has pointed out, the system we call ‘university’ is included within the suprasystem of ‘community’ and had we started our inquiry at the level of community, we might have found that there was a problem that associated with the manner in which the ‘subsystem’ (formerly ‘the system’) called ‘university’ co-operates within an interdependent web of subsystems.
So, the author who would like to shift the ‘framing’ of the inquiry so as to look upstream’ from the nominal ‘local system’ has to hunt for some device to do so, and it may not be easy.
In the case of the ‘Sociopathy’ article, the framing is ‘the nation’ (the United States), and the contention of Robin of Berkeley is; (more…)
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