What was I thinking when I wrote ‘The Invisible Spatial Origins of Material Dynamics’?.

The assimilation of ideas of others is an everyday activity, and, most often, the ‘cognitive engine’ we employ in this activity is ‘untouched’ by the ideas we are ‘processing’, but in philosophical discourse, it often happens that there are ideas that concern the ‘cognitive engine’ itself, that require ‘real-time’ modifications to the cognitive engine in order to be ‘properly processed’ so that the ideas can be shared and discussed.

If, bundled in with the ideas, are some ‘instructions’ for modifications to the cognitive engine necessary for the proper processing of the ideas, and if the engine modifications are not made but the ideas are processed with the pre-existing cognitive engine, the ideas that ‘come through’ may be severely ‘bastardized’and confuse the dialogue.

[It may also be the case that our acculturation has been putting ‘governors’ on us that restrain the natural scope of our cognitive powers.]

That presents a problem to the writer (‘moi’, in this case) because it asks quite a bit of the reader.  That is, if he tinkers around and tunes his cognitive engine for this reading, will he be able, at the same time, to get everything back together the old way?

So, when I start writing, I sometimes look at the books on my bookshelf, and think; ‘who might be the easiest person to share this essay with, the one who requires least adjustment to their ‘cognitive engine’?

In this essay, I picked up the book ‘The Ecological Self’ by Freya Mathews,  who I have previously dialogued with, of whom the literature says;

“Drawing on, but moving beyond deep ecology, Mathews (The Ecological Self, 1991) presents a metaphysical and ethical explanation for the concept that all-is-one. Mathews draws heavily on systems theory, the work of the philosopher Spinoza, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity including geometro-dynamics, to present an argument she suggests is at this present time ‘speculative’ and undogmatic.”

Yes, it would be nice to dialogue with Freya again, but we see all the time,  in science as often as in philosophy, where two ‘specialists’ talk excitedly to one another on topics they are both ‘tuned’ to, and it sounds like absolute gibberish to everyone around them.  I like the poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay in this regard;

“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…”

Edna St Vincent Millay, From Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)

Anyhow, I have never studied Spinoza and while deeply interested in the concepts in physics and modern physics, and the philosophical issues therein and there-around, I have never done a course in tensor calculus (my ‘formal’ physics education stopped with vectors).  Meanwhile, I ravenously consume everything in sight on the ‘concepts’ that associate with Spinoza’s philosophy and with relativity and quantum physics.

The basic concepts are pretty simple and have been around for ever and we continue to struggle with them in different ways, and that’s what Freya does and what I do too.  That is, how do we explain the One-and-the-Many?  What is the difference between our human ‘self’ and a ‘rock’; i.e. does a rock ‘have purpose’ or does it just sit there and let itself be ‘worked over’ by the rest of the cosmos?  And how about ‘us’, what is the relationship between how the cosmos ‘works us over’ and how we ‘purposively’ push forth out of the centre of ourselves?

When we start thinking about such complexity, we may tend to say; ‘what the hell, let’s just take life as it comes, and make the best of it’.

But the ‘fly in the ointment’ is that both as individuals and as collectives, we somehow keep doing stupid stuff that has horrendous effects on people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, not to mention animals, insects, oceans and atmospheres (and rocks).

That is, while we human beings have done amazing things through ‘organisation’ (by families, communities and nations, and now globally, by trans-national corporations and NGOs), amplifying our faculties of reach (global economy), vision (global tv), communications (global internet), touch (ICBMs and drones loaded with bombs etc.), … we suffer from something we call ‘intellection’.

Intellection employs the notion of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’.  This brings us back to the notion of ‘purpose’, and the associated notions of mission, vision, strategies, goals and objectives.

[[N.B. Intellectual structures proceed from some assumption of the present (‘initial conditions) and use some ‘theory’ to calculate how things will unfold in the future.  The theory is generally formulated by assuming that the present depends only on the immediate past (forget about avalanches and earthquakes and buildups of energy in the distant past that release much later to directly influence what goes on in the present).   It is impossible to capture what really is the current state of affairs in specifying ‘initial conditions’, for example, what about all the cycles of spatial spring-loading (ex-tensional and tensional) that goes on?  So, the specified ‘initial conditions’ are not the ‘true initial conditions’.  But, never mind, science has this technique called ‘the experiment’ that it uses to ‘validate theory’ by establishing some ‘initial conditions’, capturing some of the perturbations to the system, and measuring whether the unfolding future (as measured relative to the ‘initial conditions’) corresponds to the theoretically predicted unfolding future.   A professor of English, Marshall McLuhan, put the limitations of ‘experiment’ in their proper context when he noted that an experiment wherein we set up Cadillac and/or cornflakes producing systems, specifying initial conditions and the perturbations to the system, will indeed confirm that the unfolding future does indeed correspond to theory, but only in the limited sense of what we specify for ‘initial conditions’ and therefore what we ‘track’ through the before and after unfolding.  If we are interested in the ‘real world dynamic’ in which the experiment is necessarily included, the transformation of our relations with one another and the environment, as a result of conducting the experiment, are intrinsically more important (the experiment is a subsystem that transforms the suprasystem it is included in and its influence on the suprasystem cannot possible be accounted for in the experiment/system) .  As the scientist announces to the world how his experiment exactly confirms his theory, indicating that he really does know what he is talking about, he explains this from within a circle of confusion of media reporters streaming in from around the world and satellite transmitter trucks that are destroying the floral ecosystems  on the laboratory grounds, announcing with great confidence how we are increasing the precision with which we  understand what goes on in the world.  This is a local causal agent ‘forcing’ view which, thanks to the implicit imposing of an absolute space frame, ignores the participation of the dynamic space it is included in’]]

The ‘organisation’ associated with ‘intellection’ is unlike that of the ‘rock’ which is always ‘in the now’ of sky-valley’s forcing of changes in the rocky terrain, and worried only about the possibility of a rough ride  (ouch!) and perhaps undergoing some crude form of reproduction in the process, members of the family lineage becoming progressively smaller (a chip off the old block), though gaining mobility in the process, perhaps enough for travel towards the coast with its beach-bars and deep-sea diving.

No, ‘intellection’ is the source of people running around frenetically in the present, directed by a voice on high, … by, a vision of a desired future (a ‘voice-in-here’); i.e. by a goal or objective.  Of course, people are ‘bumping into one another’ all over the place because these ‘visions of the future’ vary greatly.

Only if we remove [or consolidate within the present] the influence of the future and the past do we get to see what we humans are like without ‘intellection’.  Of course, as infants we start off this way, but unfortunately we are at that point unable to share what we are experiencing.

But there are clues, such as when a group of people are convinced the world as they know it is coming to an end.  Then they want to love and cuddle and protect those close to them.  In other words, they revert to behaving ‘like animals’.   This was the case in Concrete, Washington when Orson Welles did his famous radio program ‘War of the Worlds’ stunt.  In Concrete (a small town in the hills near Bellingham),

“Seattle CBS affiliate stations KIRO and KVI broadcast Orson Welles’ radio drama. While this broadcast was heard around the country, it made a deep impact in Concrete, Washington.  At the point where the Martian invaders were invading towns and the countryside with flashes of light and poison gases and the lights were going down, there was a loud explosion and a power failure plunged almost the entire town of 1,000 into darkness. Some listeners fainted while others grabbed their families to head into the mountains.”  — Wikipedia

People had no use for ‘money’ or anything of non-immediate value in that circumstance and they shifted out of their ‘destination orientation’ and invested fully in the unfolding journey.

Another situation where we can ‘get a look at ourselves’ as if ‘without intellect’, is where we have our hands so full of dealing with the unfolding present that we don’t have anything much left over for mission, vision, strategies, goals and objectives.  This is the situation with the Nenets, Inuits and Saami people of the Arctic.   They are pretty much fully focused in their engaging with the unfolding present.  In fact, this distinguishes them from we ‘urban dwellers’ who are protected by technological shells to the point that we can sit around in our air-conditioned apartment and tally up the money we are going to receive when we retire forty years from now, and plan what we are going to do with our lives at that time.

Researchers into the social dynamics of the Nenets have shown that their behaviour is not primarily ‘knowledge-driven’ but ‘cosmically forced’, meaning that as the climate changes, and as the migratory patterns of the reindeer (which nest inclusionally within the climate) correspondingly change, the Nenets let their social dynamic patterns change accordingly.  That is, they let their movements and behaviours be orchestrated by the dynamics of the space (habitat) in which they share inclusion (with the reindeer etc.).

The ‘picture’ here is one in which ‘nature is alive’ in a spatial sense and the Nenets see themselves as ‘participants’ in these spatial dynamics.  The same used to be true of the Inuits, however, as part of a western program (e.g. Canadian government program)  to ‘acculturate’ (‘civilize?’)  the Inuits, the nomadic aspects of their lives have been traded out for living in permanent settlements and using technology (snowmobiles) for foraging expeditions, insofar as they do not wish to live on government subsidies entirely.

So, it is hard to get a peek into who humans are when they set their intellect aside and ‘become like animals’, except for the odd situations like the Nenets of the European and Siberian Arctic and the people of Concrete Washington (situations wherein the future, which was the animating source of their behaviour in the present by way of ‘intellection’, is demoted from its powerful behaviour-orchestrating primacy) during that time they entered into the future-less reality given to them by Orson Welles and company, back in 1939, during his ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast.

The results for ‘humans as animals’ who have cast off ‘intellection’ based on ‘mission, vision, strategies and objectives’ is really not all that bad.  In fact, many urban dwellers have had a hankering to go back to living in a ‘cosmically forced’ manner of the Nenets and traditional Inuits.  They deem it ‘more real’ that the current ‘bullshit society’ that they find themselves currently woven into.  A recent film, ‘Into the Wild’, directed by Sean Penn, brings out this desire in (many of) us to, like Christopher McCandless (the real person the story is about)  break free of the expectations of urban society and let ‘who we are’ emerge for ourselves to see and feel, in our direct engaging with the ‘cosmic forcing’ of nature.

As one of the actresses (Marcia Gay Harden) says of what the film brought forth in her;

“I felt a very, very deep yearning to remember what my voice is like for that quiet place within, and understanding that society … is this magnet that sucks us to march to a specific formula in time and that, .. FREEDOM, that the boy gave himself… and I mean, FREEDOM is a word that is as expansive as the spelling … a beginning and a middle and an end, and it’s an amazing word, and I feel like, WOW, what would it be like to have FREEDOM again,  in that spirit, of the soul, of the spirit, and of time  … and it most likely would absolutely exist in nature because there you’re unfettered by other people’s opinions of who you should be and what you should be, …”

What Chris McCandless was looking for, which Marcia is acknowledging, was ‘what the Nenets have’, this freedom to directly engage with the cosmic forcing influences and allow these to bring out ‘who you are’ in the unfolding now, rather than being driven from within by a whole lot of social theories and civilized concepts as to the ‘correct’ way to govern yourself in the artificial shell that modern civilization has set up for itself, where FREEDOM is understood as ‘freeing ourselves from direct engaging with the cosmic forcing influences’ so that we can be driven entirely from within, kind of like a wind-up toy in playland, or like the passenger in the luxurious comfort of the restaurants, casinos, bars and ballroom in the belly of the Titanic, where the protocols of the rich and powerful are the social dynamic ‘forcing influences’

Anyhow, without writing a book or a film, one is challenged to find a way to share concepts that require modifications to the old cognitive engine in order to be ‘heard’.  And, again, the unmodified cognitive engine will definitely ‘hear something’ but without modifying itself, what it hears will be a highly bastardized version of what is being intended.

So, my ‘mission’, …. whoops, did I really say ‘mission’, … let’s replace that with ‘challenge’, … in the essay ‘The Invisible Spatial Origins of Material Dynamics’, is to invite the reader to temporarily suspend his ‘standard acculturated cognitive engine’ and reconfigure it a bit (but in the gizmo that deals with profundities) so as to be able to ‘see’ what would otherwise not be seen, … kind of like putting on some 3D glasses to see a 3D movie.

Now, this is not too bad an analogy because the modern 3D technology (on television screens) allows you to see TWO DIFFERENT  DYNAMIC SCENARIOS AT THE SAME TIME.  That is, every alternate ‘frame’ on the screen presents the same scene viewed from a different angle the immediately preceding (or following) frame and the electronic glasses behave like rapid shutters so that the left eye sees only the one series of frames which are viewed from the left and the right eye sees only the series of frames viewed from the right.

In the case of the subject matter in the essay, we are trying to comprehend two dynamic scenarios at that same time; (a) cosmic forcing of the dynamic, and, (b) local internal forcing of the dynamic.

The thing is, both of these, evidently, are going on at the same time, in any and all dynamics in our real-life experience.

This is why there is a ‘silver lining’ in the ‘global warming debates’ because it is now getting our serious attention, using the ‘earth’ in place of our ‘self’ (as Nietzsche observed, science seems to be anthropomorphism in that we understand the experiences of ‘things’ in terms of how we understand our own experiences).

That is, some scientists argue that the earth’s climate is (a) cosmically forced wherein we would be talking about the earth being included in the spatial dynamic in the manner that the hurricane is included in the flow of the atmosphere, and/or, (b) internal process forced wherein we would be talking about the earth as a ‘local system’ with ‘its own locally originating (internal-process driven) behaviour.

Well, as it turns out, we have this same ‘questions’ as to the nature of ‘ourselves’; i.e. is our behaviour ‘cosmically forced’ or is it ‘internal process [biophysics, biochemistry] forced?

Evidently, we do need something like ‘3D glasses’, and if this is the case, why has Nature not provided us with them?

Who says Nature hasn’t provided us with them.  Maybe we have just forgotten how to use them.

That indeed is the suggestion in ‘The Invisible Spatial Origins of Material Dynamics’, which starts off talking about ‘The Theory of Communication’ of Dennis Gabor.   The space we live in has ‘quality’ and this varies spatially.  If the quality of the space we are in changes, this can orchestrate our actions, and give rise to ‘nomadism’.

What we ‘see’ is ‘people on the move’, but the Nenet people say that it is their practice to continually accommodate environmental change, while a modern man of the urban world, like the passenger on board the Titanic, would claim that he is fully and solely  responsible for his own movements. .

So which is it to be?

Gabor put things in a different light.  He spoke of ‘time language’ and ‘frequency’ language, not as if these were mutually exclusive languages but that they were ‘talking about the same thing’ in different ways.  He picked up on this at a time where quantum physics was coming into vogue, and where Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was causing everyone to scratch their heads.  At the time Schroedinger insisted that the world dynamic was a resonant phenomenon and there were no ‘quantum leaps’; i.e. they were only ‘appearances’.  Mathematically, one could argue the case both ways (one put waves first and the other put particles first, but both satisfied quantum mechanics).

Schroedinger ‘lost the argument’ but as the saying goes; ‘The majority has no monopoly on the truth’, and Schroedinger’s view was arguably ‘stronger’ since it deals with the two options at once, rather than dropping out a lot of essential understanding.

That is, if one understands ‘space’ as a ‘plenum’ (an energy-filled spring-loaded medium), then particles can be understood in the analogy to ‘convection-cells’ in a fluid flow (energy-field-flow) which are not only animated by spatial resonances but which are created by them.  In this sense ‘particles’ or ‘material bodies’ are secondary ‘affects’ or ‘appearances’.  This agrees with Bohm’s view, the holodynamic view etc. etc.

Gabor was coming from communications theory where one has the same sort of options between ‘solid content’ and ‘harmonic medium’.  For example, any amplitude versus time plot (including the global temperature plot used by climatologists) can be understood as a composite sum of harmonics of different amplitude and frequency.   This different interpretation of some measurement (any measurement) plotted against time has been brought up a lot in geology.  Hence J. Barrell’s suggestion that the ‘cycles’ of sediment deposition are tied to the cyclic nature of climate;

sedimentation-curves

Of course, one might say that Barrell was starting off from some assumptions as to the basic character of Nature, as a resonant phenomenon, much as Schroedinger had been (and Herclitus and Pythagorus and the Orpheatics, before him); That is, Barrell, in his paper “Rhythms and the Measurements of Geologic Time’, observed;

“Nature vibrates with rhythms, climatic and diastrophic, those finding stratigraphic expression ranging in period from rapid oscillation of surface waters, recorded in ripple-mark, to those long-deferred strirrings of the deep imprisoned titans which have divided earth history into periods and eras.   …. Nature pulsates with many rhythms, small and large, fast and slow. Their combination gives a varied curve which, if the rhythms are incommensurable in period, may never recur in quite the same combination.”

So, if nature is an essentially resonant phenomena, as Schroedinger and Barrell would have it, what happens to ‘time-based measurements’?

Well, as Gabor made clear, with his ‘complex signal’ based Theory of Communications, which, by the way, is implicitly foundational to all kinds of 3D imaging techniques in seismology and in medicine (body scans etc.); i.e. IT WORKS, … the ‘time language’ turns out to be the ‘real component’ of ‘the complex information signal’.  That is, it is a ‘reduction of the real-natural phenomena’ to the ‘real-mathematical/intellectual plane’; i.e. it is a reduced partial view of things.

Well, didn’t we always know, intuitively (without the explicit details) that our actions can bring on ‘repercussions’ so that what we actually do, and thus ‘what is visible’ fails to take into account that we are letting our behaviour be orchestrated by these ‘rhythms’ that Barrell is talking about?

How, then, can we take for ‘reality’ what we can visibly see playing out ‘in time’?  The answer is, ‘we can’t’, not if nature is intrinsically resonance-based phenomena.

So, back to global warming, what is the meaning of the ‘temperature curve’?  Henrik Svensmark, the weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre claims that cloud cover is a resonance based phenomena and that the resonance is from cosmic forcing rather than being ‘forced’ from within the earth;

“Henrik Svensmark, …. believes the planet is experiencing a NATURAL PERIOD of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.  … This, he says, is responsible for much of the ‘global warming’ we are experiencing. — “It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds.”

So it’s ‘back to the cosmic forcing notion’ once again, at least according to Svensmark, and that means that we can’t interpret the temperature versus time curve in the standard causal terms, whereby the present depends only on the immediate past, as in ‘greenhouse gas climate forcing’.

Let’s face it, these two different interpretations as to the source of dynamic behaviour, (a) cosmic forcing, and (b) local forcing, are always cropping up.  Schroedinger was pissed off till the day he died with the likes of Max Born, Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest having promoted their view in the global scientist membership club, and thus in the media and in the school textbooks etc.

Gabor’s communications theory, which provides reconciliation of the two views, was never taken serious (it was published in 1944-1946 period) until his ‘holography theory’ (which follows from his communications theory) was actually demonstrated when laser technology arrived in the 1960s.  So Gabor got his Nobel prize in physics in 1971, about 25 years or more ‘after the fact’.

In Gabor’s paper, he uses the analogy of the dynamo (two sets of crossed poles) where the harmonic motion derives from the relationship between a ‘rotating vector’ (the visible local movement [of the rotor]) and a ‘rotating field’, the invisible field-flow or ‘cosmic forcing’).

We can always describe this motion in terms of the most visible eye-attracting movement, as with the pinwheel motion of the hurricane, and this is what we tend to do.  But the dynamic cannot be fully comprehended as a ‘local movement in time’ (where we plot the position of some thing at successive times).  The ‘cosmic forcing’ (associated with the spatial energy-plenum or ‘field-flow’) must also be taken account of.

These are not ‘two different dynamics’ but ‘one dynamic’ in which the ‘movement in time’ (the changing position in time of a local object) is, as Schroedinger would say, ‘schaumkommen’, ‘appearances’.  Space is moving at the same time (it is ‘energy-field-flow’) but we have a trick to select out the ‘local object, organism or ‘system’’, to define it and name-label it, and thus to axiomatically affirm its local existence, and then go on to describe the dynamics of local objects (that we have invented, but which are in fact ‘dynamic figures in the ceaselessly transforming ‘dynamic ground’), these ‘time-based’ dynamics, AS IF THEY WERE REAL when the truth is that they are the MOST EYE-ATTRACTING DYNAMIC PHENOMENA, but certainly NOT REAL but ‘appearances’ that we have idealised using the ‘invariable solids of geometry’ (abstraction) as dependent foundations for our ‘belief’ in their ‘realness’.   As Vladimir Tasic observes;

“So “objects” are implicitly assumed to be invariable bodies. Therefore the axioms of geometry already contain an irreducible assumption which does not follow from the axioms themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty definitions” of objects, definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but in a hypothesis — a “prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer might say — that is prior to logic. As a corollary, our logic of identity cannot be said to be necessary and universally valid. “Such axioms,” says Poincaré, “would be utterly meaningless to a being living in a world in which there are only fluids.””

This brings us back to the ‘real world’ of today which any one of us could capture in similar words to Marcia Gay Harden, in regard to what was common in the experience of Christopher McCandless as re-enacted in the film ‘Into the Wild’; i.e. the yearning to engage directly with the ‘cosmic forcing’;

“I felt a very, very deep yearning to remember what my voice is like for that quiet place within, and understanding that society … is this magnet that sucks us to march to a specific formula in time and that, .. FREEDOM, that the boy gave himself… and I mean, FREEDOM is a word that is as expansive as the spelling … a beginning and a middle and an end, and it’s an amazing word, and I feel like, WOW, what would it be like to have FREEDOM again,  in that spirit, of the soul, of the spirit, and of time  … and it most likely would absolutely exist in nature because there you’re unfettered by other people’s opinions of who you should be and what you should be, …”

The Nenet that takes a trip on the Titanic is unlikely to stay below decks [for too long] in the bars and casinos, charming the girls and playing roulette, and making out as if  his behaviour is fully and solely locally driven, from his internal knowledge and purpose, … a purpose constituted by mission, vision, strategies, goals and objectives, such as getting the pretty girl into bed before the ship docks in New York.  No, the Nenet or Inuit will certainly be impressed by the technology of the Titanic, but he will never forget that ‘nature is in charge’ and he will be up on the deck smelling for icebergs, and reminding himself that ‘whereever he goes’, he has no choice as to being included in the cosmic forcing and to be engaging with it.  And no rich man or pretty girl is going to make him ‘flip’ his priorities and put his time-based mission, vision, strategies, goals and objectives into ‘first place’, in which case his engaging with the cosmic forcing would be occluded and denied.  [to the Nenet, intuitive engaging with the cosmic forcing comes first and intellection is something that you take along on the ride with you, it does not determine the ride and demote intuition to secondary status]

Like those with a ‘sailboating psyche’, the Nenet will never forget that his form, power and steerage all derive from the dynamics of space he is included in, and thus he will sustain his ‘voyage-in-the-transforming-present’ orientation and not be taken over by a ‘powerboating psyche’ in which one assumes that one’s form, power and steerage derive locally and internally from one’s onboard systems; i.e. that one’s behaviour is local-self-forced’, a time-based destination-oriented view in which the space one is included in is psychologically reduced to a vacuum or to a troublesome impediment to the attaining of one’s mission, vision, strategies, goals and objectives-based destination..

For those that do let themselves be taken over by a ‘powerboating psyche’, it follows naturally, … er, … robotically/intellectually, that, this time-based or ‘destination-oriented’ way of thinking is how ‘the rest of the world works’ as well, even to the point of attributing to ‘the earth’ its own locally originating (internal-process-driven) behaviour.

And so we have the current ‘global warming debate’ as to whether the climate is ‘cosmically forced’ or ‘locally forced’, and if Nietzsche is correct in saying that science is anthropomorphism, those who believe that they are firstly and foremostly ‘locally forced’ will opt for the earth’s climate being ‘locally forced’ and those who believe that they are firstly and foremostly ‘cosmically forced’ will opt for the earth’s climate being ‘cosmically forced’.

Sharing ideas like this is a problem if we hold on too strongly to our everyday ‘cognitive engines’ without being willing to tinker around with them a bit.  But if one does tinker around, one can tune one’s cognitive engine in a manner similar to the 3D television technology whereby it is possible to [REGAIN OUR NATURAL ABILITY TO] see, at the same time (a) cosmic forcing and (b) local internal forcing [appearances], in which case there is really no need for a wakeup call of the nature of the Titanic bumping into an iceberg or Orson Welles’ dramatization of War of the Worlds, wherein ‘the future is cancelled’ and is no longer available as the director of today’s behaviours (as it most intensively is in our urbanized, civilized society).  The Inuit who goes out to chase walruses in a kayak is not going to be in need of such a ‘wake-up’ call since the future for him is ‘right now’, and if he even lets the orchestrator of his behaviour slip off into the future for merely the length of time it takes to cook up a pot of walrus soup, he may himself become food for the walrus.

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