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FORWARD:

I feel like I’m at another ‘milestone’ point in my researches and I wanted to share it with you and get your feedback, if possible.

My guess is that you, all of you, are fully able to ‘free-think’ and explore without having to endorse or reject.

Basically where I’m now at (the understanding associated with my research seems to evolve and deepen as in a fractal view of the earth). I don’t think there is an ‘end point’ but I can tell you briefly where I’m at, which I’d like to ‘capture’ as in the film business where they shoot a scene and say ‘that’s a wrap’.

To me, the common beliefs of our society have ‘locked in’ to a suboptimum being-based understanding. The problem with ‘lock-in’ is that the switching costs become high; i.e. it is like locking in to the choice of Microsoft’s operating system which is trash, but when so many developers, suppliers and customers ‘lock in’ and become dependent on using it ‘as it is’, the ‘switching costs’ can become formidable. that’s where we are today in the world, as I see it, and my ‘stroke of insight’ has improved my view and understanding of it.

I know that this sounds like ‘the same old stuff’ that I have been working on, but it is not the same old stuff to my mind; i.e. the ‘fit’ has tightened and I am interested in finding out if the increased ‘tightness of fit’ is shareable with yourselves. Tuning in to your impressions is valuable to me prior to my broader sharing of these understandings/ideas.

I am trying to think, on the fly here, how to characterize ‘what’s new and different’ about this ‘latest edition’ of the same/continuing theme. I can ‘feel the difference’ but it’s one of those synergy sort of differences that can come from sanding down all the pieces so that the fit becomes more amazing.

In other words, I can’t really pick out ‘one thing’ that makes the current edition an ‘update’ on prior editions. However, in what goes on in my mind, there is a tightening of the understanding of ‘sub-optimization’, which I write about in terms of how our popular Western culture habit is to use the abstract concept of ‘being’ in a foundational way, by ‘naming’ things and thus imputing ‘persisting being’ to them. Of course, all this has been said by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, but locked-in cultures such as Western culture don’t change overnight because of the high ‘switching costs’, and more particularly for the reasons cited by Henri Laborit in ‘The New Framework’;

‘We’ who explore such topics, cannot easily share them because (a) they do not fit into the typical dinner conversation format of our present culture, since to express them takes a lot of relational connections that can’t fit into a rapid-fire repartee, and (b) because the humanism implicit in trying to share them is not seen as “a humanism of real worth” since it undermines, besmirches or topples the esteemed icons, pillars of society, founding fathers, and celebrities of the culture-in-place. – Henri Laborit, ‘La Nouvelle Grille’

The ‘lock-in’, in the case of Western (operative) culture, is the lock in to the abstract concept of ‘being’ or ‘things-that-be’ which is a ‘lie’ built into language, and as Wittgenstein observes, we keep repeating this lie to ourselves to the point that we can no longer see that it is a lie. The indigenous aboriginal culture stands apart from ours in that there is understanding that ‘everything is in flux’ and ‘everything is related’ (mitakuye oyasin) which accords with modern physics which we, as a culture, feign to ‘accept’ but which we have not incorporated into our everyday ways of understanding that shape our individual and collective actions; i.e. our cultural dynamics continue to be shaped by ‘a belief in being’ that is triggered by ‘naming’, … the big no-no in Taoist wisdom.

If there is anything ‘in particular’ new in my ‘latest edition’, it would be the refocus on the nature of ‘lock-in’. It is pretty transparent when we read/view the obituaries that celebrate ‘the esteemed icons, pillars of society, founding fathers and celebrities of the culture-in-place’, such as John McCain, for example. Celebrities and iconic figures reflect the values of the culture in place. The values of indigenous aboriginals, which are consistent with a world in flux, where one does not see the murder or rape as jumpstarting from a human ‘being’ (there are no such abstractions in the indigenous aboriginal and/or modern physics view), but from relational dissonances in a world where ‘relations are all there is’. John McCain did not ‘get to where he is’ by not knowing that humans are ‘independent beings’ that are each fully and solely responsible for their own actions and achievements (even if they are ‘taken prisoner’). This sort of bullshit is foundational in Western society’s cognitive mode because it is based on the foundational role of the abstraction of ‘being’.

I am not knocking John McCain, but only the social apparatus based on belief in the perceived ‘reality’ of ‘being’, and from there on to ‘good beings’ and ‘bad beings’ and the social obligation to celebrate/amplify ‘that which is good’ and deprecate/suppress ‘that which is bad’. This binary approach is what generates ‘lock-in’ which in turn generates ‘high switching costs’. The culture in place enjoys this ‘lock-in’ which is secured by humongous ‘switching costs’ as alluded to by Henri Laborit.

Einstein spoke of this ‘suboptimization’ in the context of locking in to an over-simplistic (tunnel vision based) model;

“To use a comparison, we could say that creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles of our adventurous way up.” –Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, ‘The Evolution of Physics’, 1938

Once we build roads and housing development and economies and, indeed, a whole way of understanding our ‘situation’, on the flanks of what we had believed to be the unique mountain slope leading to a solitary highest peak, … the ‘fog lifts’ so that we realize that we are not on the flanks of the overall peak, but we have instead been building our infrastructure on the flanks of a ‘foothill’ so that all our onward and upward development effort is actually digging ourselves into a hole; i.e. our efforts to advance onward and upward to the ‘summit’ are actually ‘locking us in’ to a ‘dead end’ destiny.

This popular self-imposed ‘trap’ permeates Western ‘being-based’ (Newtonian) investigative thinking, and has been termed ‘suboptimization’ by systems theorists, including Martine Dodds-Talyard and Gyorgy Jaros in their 1995 paper, ‘The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’, outlined in their following abstract;

“The name of the Devil is suboptimization.”The above aphorism, attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence, complexity, different levels of economic and political sophistication and accelerating change. The authors explore the manifestations of suboptimization within our world‐views, mental models, value systems, organizational assumptions and practices, management of society and. social dynamics. Although this debate, initiated by the Systems Sciences since the 1950s, has gone a considerable way within sections of the academic community, it is yet to transform the obsolete institutional forms of social, political and economic power which currently still obstruct human, organizational and social development. The authors concur with those thinkers who, like Jamshid Gharajedaghi, feel that “more of the same is not going to swing it in the world today.” We need to change what we do, how we do it as well as how we think about reality. To paraphrase Russell Ackoff on this topic: what we need is revolution, not reform. The challenge is to make it and make it bloodless.

The point is that Western society’s scientific-minded ‘progress’ has been built on the back of the abstract notion of ‘being’ and ‘naming’, and this is leading us into a cul-de-sac called ‘suboptimization’ as in the case of ‘nationalism’ where the naming of a nation imputes ‘independent being’ to it. This is the sort of thinking that Martine is critiquing, and also Einstein with his comment; ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of the world’.

In suboptimizing, our development efforts are on the flanks, NOT of the main mountain, but on the flanks of a local ‘foothill’ [that we plant a flag on and ‘Christen’ with a name that imputes ‘independent existence’ to it], cultivating the thought that we are on the flanks of the overall ‘one-and-only’ main mountain that leads to a unique and ultimate summit. This aberrant ‘vision’ is what we Western ‘being-based thinkers’ then employ to organize our ‘national’ or ‘corporate’ or ‘individual’ (thing-in-itself being-based) developmental effort, thus ‘locking ourselves in’ to a local (sub)optimization effort, a lock-in that generates ‘high switching costs’ that we must pay when we eventually realize that our progress onward and upwards is taking us to the summit of a ‘foothill’; i.e. a cul-de-sac that blocks continuing growth.

This cognitive confusing derives from imputing ‘being’ by ‘naming’, an intellectual/linguistic abstraction that is in basic contradiction to our real-life experience as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.

By ‘shaking off the illusion’ of ‘being’ that comes from ‘naming’ [or at least softening it by acknowledging it as poetic inference], we can liberate ourselves from our commitment to local suboptimization and re-apply our efforts within a more comprehensive, less limiting relational framework (e.g. as in the message in Laborit’s La Nouvelle Grille).

Unfortunately for those like us [Western acculturated] who have ‘locked in’ to ‘being-based’ understanding and built a huge amount of psychological and material infrastructure based on that ‘error of grammar’ (that imputes ‘being’ by way of ‘naming’), extracting ourselves from ‘being-based thinking’ is no simple chore;

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,” – Nietzsche

‘Being’ is an ‘absolutism’ (abstraction) that is cognitively triggered by ‘naming’, but only in Western culture. In indigenous aboriginal culture, ‘names’ are used poetically to get to relational understanding as in ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ which is how physicists Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler describe the process of cognitively grasping the beinglessness of the (innately relational) world of flow of modern physics.

‘God’ is the (notional) ‘Supreme Being’ that establishes the legitimacy of ‘being’ and sets the stage for imputing the existence of ‘human beings’.

Anyhow, I do not mean to deliver the whole essay in this note, just to allude to the salient theme in the essay which is to expose what waits for one, cognition-wise, when one let’s go of the foundational role of the abstract concept of ‘being’ which is created by ‘naming’. In the aboriginal culture, as in poetry, names are used only as expedients to cultivate the cognitive impression of relational flow which is the basic essence of the world of our actual experience. Once we have cultivated a cognitive impression/understanding via poetic use of names (shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?), …we can ‘let go of’ the expedient ‘names’ standing for ‘beings’ that we used to tease forth purely relational cognition.

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” — Wittgenstein

John McCain doesn’t usually think and express himself poetically, … he ‘calls a spade a spade’, and understands the difference between ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’ for he is no fool but an intelligent human ‘being’. McCain is ‘the right stuff’ that our kids should model themselves after, … at least that is one of the messages our society puts out by elevating certain people above the masses. This is superstition, of course, as we do not really ‘know’ these people from personal experience. Knowing by name is a ‘magic game’ as in the fable of Rumpelstiltskin, where the name holds the secret of ‘turning straw into gold’ (transforming a pauper into a prince) which is part of Western culture belief system with its stories of the magic sword of Excalibur etc. which can transform a peasant into a Knight of the Round Table. ‘Christening’ refers to the magic of naming that makes you into something other than is available to our immediate relational experience.

This naming that imputes being’ is unique to Western culture; e.g. the indigenous aboriginal culture does not have the concept of ‘being’ as in ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’. This is superstitious belief that Newton made foundational to Western science. The replacement science [which abandons the keystone role of the abstraction of ‘being’ ] is still ‘waiting in the wings’ because of the massive ‘lock-in’ to belief in ‘being’ [and high switching costs which keep it in place] that has been secured not only by Western religions but also by the Western secularized religion of Newtonian being-based science, which Western society is currently promoting ‘belief’ in through its educational systems and is in fact ‘largely employing to ‘manage its affairs’.

“It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.” —Newton, cited in ‘the Tao of Physics’.

Overall, I am saying that we can see the switching costs that are holding back the cognitive updating from ‘being’ as the basis of the reality of our intellectual cognition, to ‘flow’ as the basis of the reality of our actual experience, in the mass celebrating of public icons such as John McCain and the long list of celebrities that foster belief in the reality of ‘being’ as underpins ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (not simply as relational dynamics but as emanations from ‘beings’)

Those of us who would ‘put down celebrities’ as it may have appeared that I have just done with my remarks re John McCain; i.e. although I do not know him personally, I do not question that he is a great guy to be around, … its just that I know many great guys who do not have a name that transforms them from straw into gold, as happens in this magic-embracing (superstitious) society of ours that employs names in the magic of designating persisting ‘being’ within a world of flux where there is no such thing as ‘being’ or ‘human beings’; i.e. where there are only relations (mitakuye oyasin) and relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.

Of course, pointing out the problems that arise from common belief in ‘being’ by way of ‘naming’ amounts to a diminishing of the reputation of the icons of our society including those paupers that we make over into princes by means of ‘naming’, and such diminishing of popular icons tends to be resented as is the person doing the diminishing in the spirit of helping a return to a more natural relational mode of understanding;

b) because the humanism implicit in trying to share them [ideas that undermine ‘being’] is not seen as “a humanism of real worth” since it undermines, besmirches or topples the esteemed icons, pillars of society, founding fathers, and celebrities of the culture-in-place. – Henri Laborit, ‘La Nouvelle Grille’

* * * END OF FORWARD * * *

… Yes, I can relate to Marianne Williamson’s comparison of the buffalo that runs into the storm because it can’t avoid it. That’s what I have felt like when I have been with a loved other when she has gone into her storms. At first there is fear and trepidation and thoughts of ‘how can I prevent this from happening?’ … but once one accepts that there can be no avoiding it, a peacefulness and strength and acceptance flow in and take over from the fear, uncertainty and doubt. I can see myself, in those moments, as Williamson’s buffalo that turns into the storm.

Mind you, everything is a mix and Williamson’s interest in national politics seems incongruous to me (i.e. the harmonies of the whole cannot be cultivated ‘by parts’ as in national politics. And her seeming acceptance of what one has to do to win an election (play the game) also seems out of harmony with her basic spiritual orientation.

With respect to my own researches, I understand much better than I ever did, the interplay between PRC (poetic relational cognition) and BBC (being based cognition), however, PRC is the spiritual realm which is a great mystery uniquely experienced by each of us, so a general understanding is not possible and one must follow one’s (spiritual) instinct.

That being said, I believe it is possible to learn how to ‘stay out of trouble’ of the sort we get into when others influence us; e.g. the woman who influences another person’s thoughts about a third person that she doesn’t even know (e.g. imputing ‘evil influence’ to him). Those type of thoughts are ‘being’-based and it seems clear that the concept of ‘being’ is problematic. That is, the notion of an ‘evil being’ depends on the belief in the existence of a ‘being’ which is unreal abstraction. ‘Beings’ do not exist in a transforming relational continuum. Sure, nasty actions precipitate but the source of all actions is relational and while such actions may ‘come through’ an individual human form, this does not mean that actions originate within the human. In fact, it is when we name the human and by so doing confer ‘being’ on the human, that the notion comes to us that the human is an ‘independent being’ whose behaviour is fully and solely internally sourced. This is blatantly false. The human is NOT a being, the human is a relational form in the transforming relational continuum.

‘Being’-based thinking is what gets individual ‘human beings’ convicted of sexual assault. Sexual assault is chosen for use in this discussion because of its utility in cultivating a more general understanding of the cognitive influence of linguistic deployment of ‘being’ based forms versus ‘relational’ forms within a transforming relational continuum [aka flow-field].

There is no ‘being-based authorship’ because there is no such thing as ‘being’. Because there is no such thing as a ‘being’, there are no ‘superior beings’ (or ‘Supreme Being’) and/or ‘inferior beings’ nor are then any ‘good beings’ as distinguished from ‘bad beings’. Relations that are sourcing relational forms (in the relational flow-continuum) are all there is.

A sexual assault (or other violent act) may come through an individual and injure another individual but it does not jumpstart from within a notional ‘human being’ because there is no such thing as ‘being’ in the transforming relational continuum aka ‘the natural world that we share inclusion in’ [i.e. ‘naming’ a relational form may cognitively impute ‘being’ to it [e.g. hurricane Katrina] which facilitates talking about it as if it were an independently existing thing-in-itself with its own internal behaviour-sourcing powers, but that is just ‘being-based abstraction’ that is not supported by the reality of relational experience].

As in the indigenous aboriginal culture understanding, the reality of our natural experience is as relational forms within a transforming relational continuum that is the source of individual relational forms (NOT ‘BEINGS’) and ‘their’ relational dynamics. I put ‘their’ in quotation marks because the relational dynamics of a whorl in the flow are not authored by the whorl; i.e. the whorl (or human) IS the relational dynamic and NOT a ‘thing’ that is capable of authoring relational dynamics. The ‘whorl’ is not a ‘thing-that-is’ that is the author of a dynamic, the whorl IS the dynamic. To use language to impute authorship to a ‘whorl’ is an ‘error of grammar’, as Nietzsche points out;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Likewise, to say ‘the whorl is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘the whorl is heading for the Gulf Coast’, … ‘the whorl is wreaking destruction on New Orleans’, … ‘the whorl is weakening and dispersing’, … constitutes the use of language and grammar to impute ‘being’ to visual forms that are purely relational patterns in the overall flow, recasting them as ‘things-in-themselves’ that are the purported authors of their own dynamics.

When spherical soap bubbles keep forming in a confined space, they transform into hexagonal cells. It is not that ‘the spherical soap bubbles ‘transform themselves’ into hexagonal cells. Hexagonal cells are far more efficient in their construction and storage capabilities than ‘packed spheres’; i.e. hexagonal cells have shared walls (less material requirements than packed spheres), and there is no waste inter-cell space as there is between packed spheres. The point is that the ‘cell’ does not transform itself into a more efficient form as if it understood the advantages of such transformation. It is the abstract notion of ‘being’ that hijacks our thinking here; i.e. we think of the cell as a thing-in-itself [our language names it ‘a cell’ and in so doing imputes ‘being’ to it] rather than understanding it as it a relational feature in the flow. Once we name it and by naming it impute independent being to it, then we must explain its transformation in ‘being-based terms’; i.e. as if its transformation from sphere to hexagonal cell is being authored by inside-outward asserting development (‘nature’) or outside-inward induced development (‘nurture’).

Both of these ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ options for explaining transformation are based on the initial assumption of ‘being’ (thing-in-itself existence), so that we ask ourselves; ‘does the cell transform from a sphere into a hexagonal cell due to inside-outward asserting influences [‘nature’] or ‘does the cell transform from a sphere into a hexagonal cell because of outside-inward (environmental) inductive influences [‘nurture’]. Both of these options of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ pivot from our initial assumption of ‘being’ of the cell that comes from ‘naming’ the cell ‘cell’ [a noun or name symbolizes a thing-in-itself with persisting existence or ‘being’]. After ‘naming’ the relational form to impute ‘persisting being’ to it, we then use language and grammar that makes it the subject of its ‘own’ transformation. WAIT A MINUTE, the cell is a purely relational feature within a relationally transforming medium aka ‘flow’. The cell is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we can talk about as the author of its own transformation.

OH YES WE CAN, AND DO! e.g. ‘the whorl (aka ‘Katrina, the hurricane’) is growing larger and stronger’, … ‘the whorl is heading for the Gulf Coast’, … ‘the whorl is wreaking destruction on New Orleans’, … ‘the whorl is weakening and dispersing’.

What did we just do??? We just went and did what Lao Tzu warned us was impossible to do, we captured ‘the flow that can’t be told’ in words that we present as if they tell the story of what is actually going on in the world. It is not what is actually going on since a transforming relational continuum that includes everything, including ourselves, can’t be reduced to words that tell what is going on and make it appear as if we can represent it by way of word-invoked images of ‘things-that-be’ that move about and interact on a mind’s-eye screen in front of us.

The dysfunctional thinking here is very hard to ‘get straight’ in our Western heads, because we are continually repeating this error of being based conceptualization.

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” — Wittgenstein

It is worth noting, and noting again, for emphasis, that this assumption of ‘being’ that derives from ‘naming’ is a mistake, an error, since this error is endemic in the ‘normal’ Western conceptualizing of the world. Ok, we can use ‘naming’ in a poetic fashion so as to bootstrap relational understanding, but we can’t take name-based inferring of ‘being’ LITERALLY. In a transforming relational continuum, THERE ARE NO ‘THINGS-THAT-BE’, THERE ARE ONLY RELATIONAL FORMS IN THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM. IN OTHER WORDS, THERE ARE NO ‘BEINGS’ THAT ‘AUTHOR ACTIONS’.

The same is true for the ‘cell transforms’; i.e. in saying ‘the cell transforms’, I have posited the cell once as an activity (the opening of a spherical bubble-space in the fluid flow) and a second time as a subject that ‘is’ and does not ‘become’

For example, the world understood as a transforming relational continuum has no problem in delivering understanding of the behaviour of flocks of sheep in their relations with their food supply [it is all relational transformation and there are no ‘beings’ involved in it, even though we invoke the notion of ‘beings’ in trying to share a (crude) picture of what is going on].

“It was (and still is in England) illegal to sell off a complete hirsel [large mixed flock of sheep] from any mountain, because it takes several generations of sheep to learn their individual ‘sheepwalk’, and some of the older, experienced sheep must be left to guide the newcomers, who would otherwise starve. The small narrow sheep trails through heather (that can easily mislead walkers) are definite sheep roadways to and from their special grazing grounds, resting places, and dormitories.”

This is the same sort of ‘inexplicably intelligent behaviour’ problem as in the David Suzuki ‘Nature of Things’ documentary ‘Smarty Plants’ which struggles with how plants (which have no brain) manifest such ‘smart/intelligent’ behaviours in caring for their offspring and in their general behavioural dynamics. The ‘solution’ to these enigmas arrives when we suspend imposing ‘being’ by way of ‘naming’ on individual relational forms in the flow (transforming relational continuum). It may be convenient to ‘name’ and thus impute ‘being’ to relational forms in the one-flow (Tao) for the purpose of expeditious signalling (e.g. “watch out, the tornado is coming towards us!) or sharing complex relational observations and experiences. But there is no need to believe that the ‘being’ implied by ‘naming’ is ‘real’ in the same sense as our experiencing of and as relational forms in a transforming relational continuum.

Indigenous aboriginals also name things, but without imputing ‘independent being’ to them in the process; i.e. ‘naming’ can be done in a ‘poetic’ sense or ‘Wittgenstein ladder’ sense as in ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ (Geoffrey Chew, John Wheeler) as an expedient ‘cognitive conditioner’ to tickle forth an understanding of natural dynamics that are purely relational (without dependence on ‘being’). The belief in the ‘reality’ of ‘being’ is a major Western culture self-deception;

“Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naïve power of persuasion than the error concerning being as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive witch she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’.

There is a long list of cognitive problems in Western society that derive from a misplaced ‘belief’ in ‘being’ as hyped by noun-and-verb language and grammar.

‘Sexual offences’ are relational dissonances that are recast in the being-based terms of ‘sexual offenders’ and ‘victims of sexual offences’; i.e. rather than understanding social dissonance in relational terms, sexual offenders are linguistically depicted as ‘independent beings’ that are fully and solely responsible for ‘their sexually offensive acts’. This cognitive impression derives from the language and grammar based imposing of ‘being’ on relational forms otherwise known as ‘humans’. While a sexual offense in indigenous aboriginal understanding would derive from problems in the relational social dynamics of community, the Western culture being-based model of social dynamics attributes the source of such dynamics to the individual lightning rod through whom the action transpires while conceiving of the damage as being exclusively born by the recipient of the action.

The community, conceived of as a group of independent beings is thus deemed an otherwise fully healthy community populated by healthy independent beings, apart from the ‘bad apple’ in the batch that needs to be removed before he contaminates the whole barrel of apples. But there is no justification in modern physics, nor in the indigenous aboriginal understanding (mitakuye oyasin, everything is related) for the imputing of ‘independent being’ to the relational forms in nature.

To repeat, for emphasis, … in the relational reality of our actual experience, there are no such things as ‘independent beings’ and thus the view of ‘sexual offenses’ in the indigenous aboriginal culture, as with other violence, is seen as arising from issues within the relational web (all my relations) rather than from notional independently-existing ‘beings’, meaning that ‘it takes a whole community to raise a rapist/murderer’ and the solution to violence must be sought through transforming the relational community dynamic; i.e. there is no concept of ‘independently existing beings’ that are ‘fully and solely responsible for their own actions’. This makes no sense in the indigenous aboriginal culture nor does it make sense in modern physics. The concept of ‘being’ is abstraction that is rife in ‘superstitious belief systems’ as Newton dabbled in, in coming up with his ‘three laws of motion’ which are underpinned by the abstract foundational concept of ‘independent being’ of ‘material objects’;

In this statement of Newton’s, we can see his evident belief in ‘material being’ as the foundation of ‘reality’, a radical departure from the ‘flow’ of Heraclitus and modern physics. The belief in ‘being’ sets up the belief in ‘evil beings’ and ‘good beings’ as well as the value hierarchy of ‘greater beings’ to ‘lesser beings’; That is, names have always, in the Western culture of humans, suggested a hierarchy of existence exemplified by St. Augustine’s Christian beliefs in ‘the Great Chain of Being’.

“The ‘Great Chain of Being’ is a strict hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought in medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, demons (fallen/renegade angels), stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, wild animals, domesticated animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals and other minerals. This ‘scala naturae’ is a concept that draws from the writings of Plato and Aristotle (in his ‘Historia Animalium’), which was further developed in the middle ages and reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism.”

The abstract concept of ‘being’ imputed by ‘naming’ and thus implying persisting existence of the named thing even if it is a whorl in the continually transforming flow named ‘Katrina’, underlies Western beliefs and Western concepts of movement and justice. If a whole relational community is suffering from relational dysfunction, as individuals trapped in this mess ‘pop off’ like popping corns in a heated pan, the ones that have ‘popped off’ are deemed fully responsible for their own actions in Western justice. That is, Western Justice assumes the truth of the abstract ‘existence of independent beings’ identified, or rather ‘defined by’ ‘naming’, this assumption of the ‘independently-existing being’ rendering such ‘beings’ fully and solely responsible for ‘their own behaviour’ i.e. their own ‘actions’ and the ostensibly ‘causal’ results of their actions. That’s what the abstract assumption of ‘being’ bestowed by ‘naming’ or ‘Christening’ does to cognitive understanding. Not only is the entire premise of ‘being’ bogus, there is the complication within the concept of ‘cause-and-effect’, described variously as ‘the fundamental dilemma of causality’ [Donald Rubin, Harvard Medical School] and/or the ‘thin skull’ premise in criminal law]; i.e.

The eggshell rule (or thin skull rule) is a well-established legal doctrine in common law, used in some tort law systems, with a similar doctrine applicable to criminal law. The rule states that, in a tort case, the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them.

These logical complications arise from the first mistake we make, which is to impute ‘being’ by ‘naming’ which is pure and total unrealistic (non-experience affirmable) abstraction that is not made by indigenous aboriginal people and their justice system, nor is it supported by modern physics; i.e. there is no such thing as ‘being’ either as a perpetrator or victim of some or other actions such as rape or murder. In the relational understanding of modern physics and indigenous aboriginal cultures, ‘it takes a whole community to raise a rapist/murderer’. In other words, rape and murder are relational dissonance and we do not need to impute being-based authorship to them;

“Our judgement has us conclude that every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” [or, ‘rapists rape’ I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

If a woman becomes hysterical or emotionally disturbed when a man makes a sexually suggestive remark to her (or she interprets it as such), this falls into the same category as the ‘thin skull rule’ in Western forensic understanding; i.e. … “the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them.” In indigenous aboriginal justice, all such issues are understood in relational sourcing terms; i.e. the problem is understood as a problem in the relational social dynamic, but not in terms of human-being-instigated cause and effect. In this case, the whole community accepts responsibility for such ‘short circuiting’ as gives rise to someone being zapped and someone being the lightning rod that sources the zapping. In other words, the indigenous aboriginal cultural assumption (consistent with modern physics) is that ‘relations are all there is’ and there is no assumption of ‘being’ and thus no assumption of a ‘being-based’ sourcing and receiving of the zapping. The short circuiting is a purely relational phenomenon that the community must address by transforming their relational dynamics in such a manner as to subsume the relational tensions which are the source of conflict in the thingless (being-less) (relational) understanding of community.

The assumption of ‘being’ by way of naming is the great folly of Western culture that continues to ‘bedevil’ Western society. It is an invention of the ego, as Nietzsche has pointed out.

Very few popular expressions of belief give me the same sort of intense creepy feeling that this expression of belief in a human as a ‘being’ (independently-existing thing-in-itself) gives me;

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

1731 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.

1732 As long as freedom has not bound itself definitively to its ultimate good which is God, there is the possibility of choosing between good and evil, and thus of growing in perfection or of failing and sinning. This freedom characterizes properly human acts. It is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach.” – Vatican Archives, The Catholic Catechism

I have seen sex offense trials where the defendant might have encountered a ‘thin skull’ situation (e.g. a woman with un-diagnosed ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ from prior experiences), but could not use the ‘thin-skull’ defense where it seemed warranted. While a little girl who popped a balloon that induced a heart-attack in a war veteran suffering from ‘shell-shock’ might be forgiven because she was unaware of the potential harm of her action [i.e. this parallels the ‘thin-skull’ situation in criminal law], there are no such allowances in criminal law involving sex offenses for ‘thin skull situations’. I am talking about ‘borderline’ cases here, just to bring forth the nature of the complication/ambiguity, referred to in nonlinear physics (chaos theory) as ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’.

The ‘thin skull’ situation in a physical assault event corresponds to the un-diagnosed ‘post-traumatic-stress-disorder’ situation in the realm of emotional injuries. In both cases, the law will convict the aggressive party on the basis of the ‘harm caused’ regardless of any preconditioning of the ‘recipient’ that would make them susceptible to emotional injury where the very same actions might ‘bounce off’ others without the ‘thin skull’ condition. This is a complication of the being-based understanding of a human in regard to social interactions. That is, I bring up these anomalies not to take one side or another in such debates, but to point out that such ambiguity arises from first making the assumption of ‘being’ to characterize a ‘human’. Once we assume that a human is a ‘being’, this forces us to explain human behaviour in inside-outward asserting terms. No such assumption of ‘being’ is made in indigenous aboriginal culture, and neither is the assumption of ‘being’ supported by modern physics [relational influence is all there is, as in a ‘field’].

In the case of a brutal rape and murder by a ‘child soldier’, only rarely will this be attributed to the aberrant relational dynamics of the community wherein the child’s development was inductively shaped. For example, in the wake of civil wars in Africa, there were ‘restorative justice’ initiatives aimed at bringing child soldiers who had killed civilians ‘back into the fold’ with ‘healing rituals’. Meanwhile, the standard Western concept of justice is ‘black-or-white’ whereby the ‘individual being’ is judged innocent or guilty while all others in the community apart from ‘killers’ and ‘victims’ are deemed uninvolved and therefore ‘innocent’ non-participants. This tripartite division into ‘innocent victim’, ‘guilty aggressor’ and the uninvolved innocent majority comes from the imposing of the concept of ‘independent being’ on humans which is foundational to the Western worldview.

In indigenous aboriginal justice, because there is no assumption that humans are ‘independently-existing beings’, it is assumed, in cases of rape and murder, that the relational dynamics of community and the tensions and dissonances therein, are the root source of outbreaks of violence and it is therefore the relational dynamics problem that must be resolved [i.e. there is no assumption of the existence of independent ‘beings’ whereby the ‘being’ is deemed ‘fully and solely responsible’ for ‘his own actions and their results’]. Even if the individual with the violent behaviour has to be ‘taken out’ by those working to restore balance in the community dynamic, there may be reluctance to do so and perhaps an apology to that person who is being ‘taken out’ since it is understood that an individual’s actions derive from his unique relational situation within the transforming relational continuum [‘mitakuye oyasin’, … all my relations]. That is, there is no assumption of ‘independent being’, as in the Western religious and civil worldview whereby; “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

The idea that humans are ‘independent beings’ that are ‘fully and solely responsible for their own actions’ is unrealistic abstraction that disagrees with indigenous aboriginal beliefs and disagrees with the findings of modern physics. Humans are relational forms in the transforming relational continuum as captured in the indigenous aboriginal expression ‘mitakuye oyasin’, ‘all my relations’. Western society has not yet assimilated this understanding even though it is supported by modern physics and the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’. It is also supported by the philosophical inquiry of Ludwig Wittgenstein;

”Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. “ … “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.” — “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”– Wittgenstein

and also by Nietzsche as already cited;

Western society at present, continues to operate on the basis of assumptions proven to be false and misleading and thus the source of ‘incoherence’ in the social dynamic. These incoherent social dynamics, based on belief in ‘being’ as imputed by ‘naming’ are ‘locked in’ due to ‘high switching costs’. This problem is headlined by Henri Laborit in ‘La Nouvelle Grille’ (the new framework);

There is a huge and growing gap between our ‘locked-in’ systems of understanding which put the abstract language of ‘being’ by way of ‘naming’ into an unnatural precedence over the experience-affirmed understanding that ‘everything is in flux’. This gap can be glimpsed by considering the observation of David Bohm shortly before he died;

What is needed, Bohm argued in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, is a new sort of language, one based on processes and activity, transformation and change, rather than on the interactions of stable objects. Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode.” It is based primarily on verbs and on grammatical structures deriving from verbs. Such a language, Bohm argued, is perfectly adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought.

David Bohm had not known when he wrote of that concept that such a language is not just a physicist’s hypothesis. It actually exists. The language of the Algonquin peoples was developed by the ancestors specifically to deal with subtle matters of reality, society, thought, and spirituality.

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

In any ‘locked-in’ system, continuing development is likely to ‘dig the hole deeper’ that one is eventually going to have to extract oneself from. For example, ‘wonder-drug’ and ‘wonder-technology’ based solutions may be a case of ‘putting our ladder up the wrong wall’ and thus sourcing new issues that will demand new solutions that are inaccessible from our current position of advancement. That is, our ‘advancements’ may be taking us on a path that commits us to an ascent of a ‘foothill’ that we had believed was the ‘main mountain’ and after having blazed the trails and paved them to facilitate mass movement up some very steep slopes to a new summit, we then discover that we have our ladder up the wrong wall; i.e. our well-engineered ascent is taking us to the summit of a foothill rather than up the main mountain, obliging us to back down and retool for an ascent of the new and more comprehensive summit. This appears to be our predicament in the Western culture, having ‘locked in’ to the superstitious ‘being’-based science of Newton and having made great advancements up that slope, only to discover that it is taking us to a dead-end summit that is actually ‘distancing’ us from the relational understanding of modern physics and our relational life experience.

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APPENDICES

I am including the following two appendices, the first by system sciences pioneer, Russell Ackoff, and the second, a comment by Ernst Mach. Both of these comments give cause to reflect on the concept of ‘being’ as we habitually use it. That is, the being-based concept of a system fails to acknowledge that every system is included in a suprasystem. The question is, should we understand this inclusion in terms of the logic of the excluded third or the logic of the included third? That is, should we consider the ‘whorl’ and ‘the flow’ as two separate things, or should we consider the whorl as a relational form within the transforming relational continuum (the flowing suprastem). In the case of a hurricane, it is clear that we must use the logic of the included third, but what about when we consider the ‘system’ and the ‘suprasystem’ in general systems theory? And more importantly, what about when we consider the human in the transforming relational continuum? Would this be a human ‘being’ or would this be a relational form in the transforming relational continuum? Modern physics only gives us the latter choice, however, our being-based language does not give us that choice since by naming the system (human) we impute persisting ‘being’ to it. This is the problem raised by Lao Tzu that still has not ‘registered’ in Western culture, though it is implicit in indigenous aboriginal and some Eastern cultures (Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism).

If we first assume ‘being’, then we force ourselves into imputing ambiguities on the sourcing of behaviour of the ‘being’ such as ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’,, and also question as to whether the ‘being’ is ‘matter’ or ‘spirit’. This manifests as confusion in people as to whether they are ‘spirits with bodies’ or ‘bodies with spirits’. This confusion ONLY ARISES by first imputing ‘being’ to the human. The indigenous aboriginal and modern physics understanding of a human as a relational form in the transforming relational continuum is not troubled by this unresolvable dichotomy because the dichotomies of spirit and matter, and then again, nature or nurture, only arise when one imposes the abstraction of ‘being’ on the relational form in the transforming relational continuum.

APPENDIX I” COMMENT BY RUSSELL ACKOFF ON WHETHER THE RELATION BETWEEN ‘SYSTEM’ AND ‘SUPRASYSTEM’ IS ACCORDING TO THE LOGIC OF THE EXCLUDED THIRD OR THE LOGIC OF THE INCLUDED THIRD. (with introductory prelude by myself)

[NOTE: this comment by myself is copied without editing/correction from a quickly written email in 1999]

On cold, damp afternoons, out on the tip of Point Gray, students pour out of classrooms and converge from all sides onto a square open-air terrace in the center of the Buchanan building-complex, … their purpose, … to get to their next class as quickly as possible, … perhaps pulled by the thought of reuniting with classmates, … or to gorge themselves on new knowledge, … or maybe just to re-enter into the warmth and dryness.

It is a common experience that one does something deliberate to the state of one’s consciousness as one approaches such a terrace, … a switching off of the frontal lobe whose well-meaning efforts would quickly put a wrench in the gearworks. I suspect it is a feeling everyone has, when approaching this type of situation, … otherwise, we’d all still be back on those terraces and traffic circuses, … playing pinball or bumper cars.

One day when I was making ‘the crossing’, … an engineering friend who had accompanied me who was seeing the place for the first time (the Buchanan building was in the ‘Arts Zone’), … asked me, incredulous, … how does this work?, … how do all these people make it across without colliding? I just nodded and smiled out an ‘indeed’, thinking at the same time that it should have been me asking him the question, … since he often chided me for being in ‘science’, … portraying it as just a loosey-goosey version of engineering.

Having had about forty years to think about this (generic) question of ‘the terrace crossing’, … I believe I am coming close to an understanding of it, in terms of the theory of relativity and quantum physics [1], … but how does this mesh with and/or clash with the ‘systems sciences’ view?

The first, salient piece of evidence, which was well-known to me then, was the avoidance of eye-contact in a ‘lock-on’ sense. Somehow, sustained eye-contact kept you in ‘two-body’ calculation mode. When you locked eyes with someone else, and tried to manage your trajectory on that basis, … you could easily get ‘out of harmony’ with the others, … and take the lockee out as well. On the other hand, … if you took your frontal lobe ‘out of gear’, and left your intuition in the drivers seat, which seemed to go hand in hand with no sustained ‘eye-contact’ or sustained ‘perspective’, … and abandoned yourself to purpose, everything seemed to work, but how did it work?

As it now appears, one bumps up against the ‘three body problem’ here, … and the same feeling that Newton got when he ran across this problem. As he put it, … “An exact solution for three bodies, exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind”. Of course, it was not an ‘exact solution’ that one was looking for in the ‘terrace crossing’, …. one could stand a bit of fuzziness and trade off some time against a bit of space (and vice versa) and give up a few compass degrees on the point of emergence, … and perhaps this ‘fuzziness’ was what allowed the mind to somehow come up with solution patterns which were harmonious and, … well, … aesthetically flavored rather than engineering flavored. The Buchanan terrace solution was closer to Swan Lake than to Clapham Junction, … closer to Tschaikowsky than to John Phillip Sousa.

Now there is also this aspect which Ackoff has apparently brought up in the context of a child solving the ‘maze’ problem by starting from the ‘outlet’ (the answer) and working one’s way back, which simplifies the problem considerably. There is no doubt, when confronted with the terrace crossing type of situation, … that one imagines the result of being already at the outlet and letting this feeling or imagery pull one towards the solution, rather than seeing the task as a series of ‘interception’ or ‘collision avoidance’ problems which have to be solved. I suspect that this gets us to Nietzsche’s point that “The belief in cause collapses with the belief in purpose.” Taking one’s frontal lobe out of gear and letting intuition or one’s ‘relational intelligence’ slip into the driver’s seat seems to represent this incompatibility of perceiving things in terms of ’cause’ versus ‘purpose’, suggested by Nietzsche.

Ackoff’s ‘maze’ observation seems to be operating in multi-dimensional mode in this terrace crossing problem. As in the game of billiards, … there are multiple ‘outlets’ on the periphery which act as ‘attractors’. Since people are not fussy about what point of the compass, within a few degrees, they emerge at, … one could even say that the ‘containing space’ which immerses the terrace IS the attractor.

Classical science, ‘the way we do things around here’ in western society, as contrasted with Ackoff and systems science, … proceeds with an ‘understanding of how things work’ by abstracting a subset of the problem and explaining it in a causal sense. Classical science has no tools for directly addressing ‘the pull of the containing space’.

Now any sub-playing-field of potential collisions and channel fairways we may want to explore on the terrace are continually exposed to an ‘evolutionary force’ represented by the ‘pull of the container’, … and this is a problem in doing any causal calculations on the subset, because there is no independent subset which I can consider to be a closed system, … the place where classical computation starts. This is relativistic, curved space-time here on the terrace, … just as it is in the case of the game of pool, … but this time, things don’t reflect off the banks to simulate balls rolling around on the outside surface of a sphere, … this time new entities keep appearing on the fringe of any subset which commence to disturb the subset and interfere with the calculations.

How does ‘systems science’ handle this, … I wonder?, … is it consistent with curved space and relativity?

According to Martine Dodds-Taljaard, an associate of Ackoff’s, Russ has made a number of observations which depart from the classical, causal view, which include abandoning the classical notion of causality. As he points out, .. where causality assumes that in the case where X causes Y, … the occurrence of X is a necessary and sufficient condition for the occurence of Y and since it’s necessary and sufficient, … and says we don’t have to consider anything else, .. this doesn’t jibe with the cause and effect relationship between an acorn and an oak tree, … where environmental context is important.

We seem to be in agreement here, and the problem can be expressed in terms of there being no ‘closed system’ subset in this terrace crossing problem, or anywhere else in nature, come to think of it, … a ‘closed system’ being an ‘unnatural’ approximation of the nature of things.

Ackoff says, in fact; “therefore, the concept of the environment was irrelevant in classical science. this is apparent if you look at the concept of a laboratory. A laboratory is deliberately constructed so that anything outside of it is irrelevant, and the whole effort of science is to break the world up into relations which can be studied in isolation, independently of their environment. Using modern language, this approach gave rise to what we would call ‘ a closed system’ view of the world.. That becomes apparent when we look at how we conceive the world as a whole…..”

Ok, … we are together on the ‘closed system’ problems and where Ackoff uses ‘environment’, I tend to use ‘container’ which, for me, gives more of a notion of ‘mutual inclusion’, … wherein the container and its constituents SIMULTANEOUSLY CO-OCCUPY space-time, as in the case of a magnetic field and iron filings. This mutually inclusive relationship of space (the ether) and matter is the geometry which exists in the theory of relativity. So, what about the notions of ‘self-referential’, curved space-time and ‘reciprocal disposition’ which Einstein spoke about, and which give rise to ‘container-content-coevolution’ as in the game of pool? Does Ackoff embrace this, or not?, … I wonder.

He has said that; “Systems consist of a set of parts, a collection of elements, which must satisfy three conditions. Firstly, the performance of the whole is affected by every one of the parts – that is a basic characteristic of a system. If you think of a corporation as a system, which it is, this means that every department can affect the performance of the corporation. That is the first condition for membership in a system. The second essential characteristic of a system is that the way any part affects the whole depends on what at least one other part is doing. Or to put it another way, no part of the system has an independent effect on the whole. …… Third condition is the most complex one, and the most important. It says that if you take these elements and group them in any way to form sub-groups, these sub-groups will be subject to the same first and second conditions as the original elements were, ie. each sub-group will affect the performance as a whole, and no sub-group will have an independent effect on the performance of the whole. ” . . . ” If you put those three conditions together, a surprising thing emerges. a system is an indivisible WHOLE. And it is in the difference between an indivisible part and an indivisible whole that the roots of the intellectual revolution lie. ”

Up to this point, the systems thinking and the relativity-based thinking appear to be consistent, except perhaps, for this one nagging little ‘loophole’ of mutual inclusion which seems to re-raise its head where he says; “The second essential characteristic of a system is that the way any part affects the whole depends on what at least one other part is doing. Or to put it another way, no part of the system has an independent effect on the whole.”

This is the point where Newton twisted off from Kepler’s bigger idea of the precedence of multi-body (simultaneous) harmony over two-body (sequential) harmony. If we implicitly limit the problem to the ‘two-body’ problem, … we simplify things considerably by avoiding the three-body problem, … but we effectively fall back into the causal domain once again. The key issue here is whether we want to see phenomena in terms of a ‘field’ which IS and which influences its constituents, as in the case of electromagnetism, … or whether we want to view problems in a purely materialistic way, … where we see space as being ’empty’ (euclidian) and the contents of space being all we have to worry about.

Perhaps this question, of how Ackoff implicitly handles this issue will become clearer in the further review of Martine’s citations of Ackoff.

In terms of how to ‘think’ about ‘how things work’, … Ackoff says;

“Up- and -down-thinking:

The first essential difference is the conversion of our preoccupation with the parts of which things are made, to a preoccupation with the whole and with the wholes of which THEY are a part. We can refer to this new point of view as ‘expansionism’, based on the concept of a system. It has given rise to a new kind of thinking which I will call synthesis, or, as it is more popularly known, the systems approach or systems thinking. [ … cites references to ‘The Systems Approach’ by C. Wes Churchman and ‘Systems Thinking’, by Fred Emery.]

. . .”Let me describe the shift and then show you its significance. Remember, in analysis, if you had something you wanted to explain, you took it apart, explained the parts, and put the explanation of the parts back together gain. In synthesis, when you want to explain something, you do exactly the opposite. You don’t look at the thing to be explained as a whole to be taken apart, but as part of a larger whole. You attempt to explain the whole of which it is a part, and then extract an explanation of the thing you started with from an explanation of the whole.

… “This is up-and-down-again-thinking, as opposed to down-and-up-again-thinking. ….lastly, a very important counter-intuitive hypothesis which has a fundamental impact on our notion of how to run things in this world. …”

Well, Ackoff goes on to explain suboptimization where one optimizes a part out of the context of the whole, … the bane of the western culture which has become, unfortunately, very familiar to us all; e.g. optimizing insect killer out of the context of the effect of the toxin on the containing environment and its water recycling roles, …. optimizing transportation via gasoline engines out of the context of atmospheric oxygen recycling systems etc., …. BUT, he still seems to be talking about ’cause’ in ‘linear time and euclidian space terms’, … only in an inverted sense now, … from whole to part instead of from part to whole, … and failing to account for ‘mutual inclusion’ as in the simultaneous change of ‘reciprocal disposition’ with any movement of any part of the system, … failing to make the shift to ‘relativistic dynamics’ which include ‘causal dynamics’ as a special case subset. That is, as he said earlier, … each part effects the whole; … “Firstly, the performance of the whole is affected by every one of the parts – that is a basic characteristic of a system.”, … but he continues to omit whether or not he is going for the Heraclitean or Aristotelian flavor of this ‘affect’; i.e. Heraclitus opted for ‘simultaneous unity and plurality’, … as in the theory of relativity and the game of pool (as seen by the skilled player), …. while Aristotle opted for ‘sequential unity and plurality’, as in the view of phenomena as being a succession of events (euclidian space and linear time).

This is the same point on which Newton split off from Kepler, … Kepler opting for ‘simultaneous unity and plurality’ and Newton opting for ‘sequential unity and plurality’.

So which is it to be, Russ? …. simultaneous mutual inclusion which keeps space-time intact?, … or sequential mutual exclusion, a degenerate form or ‘special case’ which splits apart space and time and drops us back into non-relativistic euclidian space?

Come to think of it, the answer to this question is kind of implied in the insertion of the words ‘and’ and ‘again’ in Ackoff’s statement ; “… up- and- down- again- thinking, as opposed to down- and- up- again- thinking, … and also in his statement; “The second essential characteristic of a system is that the way any part affects the whole depends on what at least one other part is doing. Or to put it another way, no part of the system has an independent effect on the whole.”

The former statement implies sequentiality of ‘affect’ rather than ‘whole-and-part’ ‘affect’. And the latter statement also implies sequentiality. In a relativistic curved-space system, … as in the game of pool, … there is only CO-EFFECT, … when one part moves, … all other parts are simultaneously affected because ‘space is a participant’. This is clear in the terrace crossing problem as well as the game of pool; i.e. the ‘opportunity space’ (navigational configuration) for each and every part is simultaneously modified by the movement of any part.

One must conclude, … on the basis of this rather brief review, as least, …. that Ackoff’s systems science sees ‘the intellectual revolution’ (“And it is in the difference between an indivisible part and an indivisible whole that the roots of the intellectual revolution lie.”) not in terms of ‘container-content-coeffect’ as demanded by the theory of relativity [1], … but in the more limited terms of moving from the ‘closed system’ approximation to the ‘open system’ approximation while retaining a non-relativistic Aristotelian-Euclidian phenomenal framing for ‘how the world works’, … that is, remaining on Erich Jantsch’s (‘Design for Evolution’) second ‘mythological’ level of perception and inquiry.

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Response received via Martine Dodds-Taljaard from Russell Ackoff on October 12, 1999

From: Interact etc.

Date sent: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:13:56 EDT

Subject: (Fwd) forward to russell ackoff?

To: Martine

Dear Martine

Unfortunately, I have more commitments than I can meet. I just can’t take on a detailed reply to Lumley although he deserves one. He should publish in Systems Practice and see what reaction, if any, he gets.

He misinterprets several things I can only mention here without going into in depth. A system is not indivisible it he same sense as a physical or chemical element is. A system can be divided physically and even functionally, but when it is, it loses its defining function. It appears to me, but I could be wrong, the Lumley does not fully understand teleology–function and purpose. A glance at ON PURPOSEFUL SYSTEMS might help.

My warmest regards,

Russ

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Discussion of Appendix I

Note: Re Ackoff’s insistence on the ‘purposeful system’ base. This first implies that a system must ‘exist’ (must have the property of ‘being’) in order to be understood as a ‘system’, however, a purely relational ‘system’ such as a whorl in the flow is not based on a ‘thing that is’ that is the author of a ‘purposeful behaviour’, … but is rather a ‘continual becoming’ (relational form in the flow) even though ‘it’ has influence and must be reckoned with. Yes, we name it and speak of it as if ‘it’ is the author of change; e.g; ‘Katrina is devastating the city of New Orleans’; …. but that is just the expedient use of language that captures/conveys cognitive impressions in terms of ‘things-that-be’ and ‘what these things-that be’ do. But what is really going on is relational transformation that manifests as relational forms in flow. How to articulate this beingless relational dynamic requires thingless rhetoric or ‘poetic rhetoric’ wherein named things are employed merely as expedients to induce cognition of purely relational phenomena. As it is explained in Taoism;

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.”

The other said: “The wind is moving.”

The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”

Mumon’s comment: The sixth patriarch said: “The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.” What did he mean? If you understand this intimately, you will see the two monks there trying to buy iron and gaining gold. The sixth patriarch could not bear to see those two dull heads, so he made such a bargain.

Wind, flag, mind moves,
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.

(Source: The Gateless Gate, by Ekai or Mu-mon, trans. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps [1934])

The articulation must be ‘poetic’ (purely relational) as Wittgenstein notes; i.e. we use names of things only as an expedient to induce cognition of that which is purely relational and without ‘being’; i.e. in terms of our real-life experiencing of the world as a transforming relational continuum.

As Nietzsche points out, we try to ‘explain’ unfolding dynamics in terms of causal authorship even though it makes no sense to try to impute ‘local authorship’ to inherently nonlocal relational transformation aka ‘the Tao’.

Only when we impute ‘being’ to a relational form does the need for the concept of ‘purpose’ (the purpose of the being) arise. The pursuit of ‘balance’ (dynamic equilibrium) is immanent in the beingless flow (the Tao). The union of opposites is more fundamental than the two aspects considered separately, as in the wind and flag koan which makes the point that it is the mind that breaks the relational unum into two opposite parts.

Eg. as in the following discussion of the fragments of Heraclitus. This brings us back once again to the cognitive option of understanding difference by way of the logic of the excluded middle and/or by way of the logic of the included middle;

It’s possible, however, that Heraclitus’s idea of a unity of opposites involved more than just the succession of opposed states that occurs in cases of change. His example of a bow or a lyre may illustrate a kind of opposition in which the opposites are simultaneously compresent in a single object. Cf. fr. 59=B51:

They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.

The point comes out more clearly in Freeman’s (slightly less literal) translation:

They do not understand how that which differs with itself in is agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.

Here the tension between opposed forces – the string being pulled one way by one end of the bow and the other way by the other – enables the bow to perform its function, to be the kind of thing that it is. It seems static, but it is in fact dynamic. Beneath its apparently motionless exterior is a tension between opposed forces. Cf. KRS, 193:

“… the tension in the string of a bow or lyre, being exactly balanced by the outward tension exerted by the arms of the instrument, produces a coherent, unified, stable and efficient complex. We may infer that if the balance between opposites were not maintained, for example if ‘the hot’ began seriously to outweigh the cold, or night day, then the unity and coherence of the world would cease, just as, if the tension in the bow-string exceeds the tension in the arms, the whole complex is destroyed.”

We should not be surprised to find this, for, as Heraclitus tells us, ‘nature loves to hide’ (12=B123) and ‘An unapparent connection (harmonia) is stronger than an apparent one’ (37=B54).

These two themes – the tension of the bow and the opposites – are tied together beautifully, if somewhat metaphorically, in fragment 64 (=B48):

The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death.

[The accent is on different syllables in the two Greek words, but they are spelled the same.] The bow in tension represents the tension between opposites in conflict; the opposition is expressed metaphorically in the name of the bow, which (with the help of a pun) means just the opposite of what the bow’s work is.

APPENDIX II: COMMENT BY ERNST MACH ON ‘THE FOURTH DIMENSION’

Excerpt from;

SCIENCE OF MECHANICS

A CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ACCOUNT

OF ITS DEVELOPMENT

ERNST MACH

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF INDUCTIVE SCIENCE IN

THE UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

THOMAS J. McCORMACK

* * *

*As the outcome of the labors of Lobatchevski, Bolyai, Gauss, and Riemann, the view has gradually obtained currency in the mathematical world, that that which we call space is a particular, actual case of a more general, conceivable case of multiple quantitative manifoldness. The space of sight and touch is a threefold manifoldness; it possesses three dimensions ; and every point in it can be defined by three distinct and independent data. But it is possible to conceive of a quadruple or even multiple space-like manifoldness. And the character of the manifoldness may also be differently conceived from the manifoldness of actual space. We regard this discovery, which is chiefly due to the labors of Riemann, as a very important one. The properties of actual space are here directly exhibited as objects of experience, and the pseudo-theories of geometry that seek to excogitate these properties by metaphysical arguments are overthrown.

A thinking being is supposed to live in the surface of a sphere, with no other kind of space to institute comparisons with. His space will appear to him similarly constituted throughout. He might regard _it as infinite, and could only be convinced of the contrary by experience. Starting from any two points of a great circle of the sphere and proceeding at right angles thereto on other great circles, he could hardly expect that the circles last mentioned would intersect. So, also, with respect to the space in which we live, only experience can decide whether it is finite, whether parallel lines intersect in it, or the like. The significance of this elucidation can scarcely be overrated. An enlightenment similar to that which Riemann inaugurated in science was produced in the rnind of humanity at large, as regards the surface of the earth, by the discoveries of the first circumnavigators.

The theoretical investigation of the mathematical possibilities above referred to, has, primarily, nothing to do with the question whether things really exist which correspond to these possibilities; and we must not hold mathematicians responsible for the popular absurdities which their investigations have given rise to. The space of sight and touch is three-dimensional ; that, no one ever yet doubted. If, now, it should be found that bodies vanish from this space, or new bodies get into it, the question might scientifically be discussed whether it would facilitate and promote our insight into things to conceive experiential space as part of a four-dimensional or multi-dimensional space. Yet in such a case, this fourth dimension would, none the less, remain a pure thing of thought a mental fiction.

But this is not the way matters stand. The phenomena mentioned were not forthcoming until after the new views were published, and were then exhibited in the presence of certain persons at spiritualistic séances. The fourth dimension was a very opportune discover^ for the spiritualists and for theologians who were in a quandary about the location of hell. The use the spiritualist makes of the fourth dimension is this, ‘it is possible to move out of a finite straight line, without passing the extremities, through the second dimension ; out of a finite closed surface through the third ; and, analogously, out of a finite closed space, without passing through the enclosing boundaries, through the fourth dimension. Even the tricks that prestidigitateurs, in the old days, harmlessly executed in three dimensions, are now invested with a new halo by the fourth. But the tricks of the spiritualists, the tying or untying of knots in endless strings, the removing of bodies from closed spaces, are all performed in cases where there is absolutely nothing at stake. All is purposeless jugglery. We have not yet found an accoucheur who has accomplished, parturition through the fourth dimension. If we should, the question would at once become a serious one. Professor Simony’s beautiful tricks in ropetying, which, as the performance of a prestidigitateur, are very admirable, speak against, not for, the spiritualists.

Everyone is free to set up an opinion and to adduce proofs in support of it. Whether, though, a scientist shall find it worth his while to enter into serious investigations of opinions so advanced, is a question which his reason and instinct alone can decide, if these things, in the end, should turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed of being the last to believe them. What I have seen of them was not calculated to make me less sceptical. I myself regarded multi-dimensioned space as a mathematico-physical help even, prior to the appearance of Riemann’s memoir. But 1 trust that no one will employ what I have thought, said, and written on this subject as a basis for the fabrication of ghost stories. (Compare Mach, Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit.)

* * *

DISCUSSION OF APPENDICES

Both appendices include discussion that wrestles with the problem of the limiting of cognition by language based on notional ‘things-in-themselves’ (i.e. ‘being’ based rhetoric and cognition). In both cases, the issue is with the innately limited cognition arising from linguistic constructs that are dependent on the concept of ‘being’ as imputed by ‘naming’. For example, the understanding of a human as an ‘independent being’ forces us to explain the development and behaviour of the human (as a ‘being’ aka ‘thing-in-itself’) as deriving either from inside-outward asserting influence (termed ‘nature’) and/or to explain the development and behaviour of the human (as a ‘being’ aka ‘thing-in-itself’) as deriving from outside inward inductive influence (termed ‘nurture’). That is, the ‘nature-nurture’ paradox of the innate ambiguity as to the degree to which a human ‘being’s development and behaviour is shaped by ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ derives from initially assuming that a ‘human’ is an ‘independently-existing being’ rather than a relational form in the transforming relational continuum.

The cultural lock-in to the concept of ‘independent being’ which is the source of the ‘nature’ vs. ‘nurture’ ambiguity associates with the common Western culture habit of employing ‘the logic of the excluded third’, a form of logic that conceives of a whorl in the flow as two separately existing realms. In the ‘quantum physics’ ‘logic of the included third’ (also called ‘the included middle’).

Included Middle is an idea proposed by Stéphane Lupasco (in The Principle of Antagonism and the Logic of Energy in 1951), further developed by Joseph E. Brenner and Basarab Nicolescu, and also supported by Werner Heisenberg. … The Included Middle is a theory proposing that logic has a three-part structure.

This is nothing more than formalizing, in logic, the understanding that the whorl in the flow ‘is the flow’, and that they are not not two separate things just because language assigns separate names to them. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and others point out this difference within their discussion without formalizing the mathematics, although the mathematics have been formalized by Lupasco et al. The key point is that, in nature, the whorl and the flow are one and not two separate phenomena. It is only the abstract action of ‘naming’ the whorl that breaks it out, logically, as something separate from the ‘flow’. The whorl is a relational feature within the flow, and not an ‘independently-existing-thing-in-itself, just as a human is a relational feature in the flow and not an ‘independently-existing-thing-in-itself.

Newtonian science, by employing the logic of the excluded third (aka ‘the logic of the excluded middle), as it must to accommodate Newton’s concept of matter as mutually exclusive of the space it inhabits, imposes the logic of the excluded middle in conceptualizing motion; i.e. ‘motion’ is thus understood in terms of ‘being’ (things-in-themselves) moving within an abstract absolute reference frame aka ‘space’, … rather than being conceived of in terms of relational transformation as with the whorl in the flow which is not separate from the flow but is the manifestation of relational transformation. Understanding the whorl and flow as one requires the logic of the included third (included middle) which is NOT the common logic used in Western being-based cognition. However, it is logic that is consistent with the understanding of the world as a transforming relational continuum wherein the whorl and the flow are not two separate entities, or in other words, the impression of ‘persisting being’ that derives from naming the whorl ‘Katrina’ is the abstract artefact of language and grammar that is fundamentally at odds with the understanding that we derive from our actual relational experience, wherein, as Heraclitus has rightly conceived, ‘everything is in flux’.

Again, the Appendices document the discussions concerning whether we should understand the dynamics of nature using the being-based logic of the excluded third, as is the Western culture convention, or whether we should understand the dynamics of nature using the relational logic of the included third, as in the beingless (thingless relational connectedness) of indigenous aboriginal belief and modern physics. As Bohm, Nietzsche and others have pointed out, our Western culture penchant for sticking with the logic of the excluded third, is the source of continuing incoherence/dysfunction, that is being ‘locked in’ by the high social/cultural ‘switching costs’ as have been described in the above essay.

Finally, while Mach’s assumption of a notional ‘fourth dimension’, as he employed it, is consistent with our experience of inclusion in a transforming relational continuum, Russell Ackoff’s ‘hedging’ on the use of ‘the logic of the included third’ in systems theory is understandable in the sense that ackoff was already pushing the limits of cultural acceptance with his innovations in systems thinking as far as they went. My guess is that Ackoff realized that while the shift to the logic of the included third ‘made sense’, … Western science, even the systems sciences, were not quite ready to accept the logic of the included third in understanding the relation between ‘system’ and ‘suprasystem’, … an understanding that would abandon the use of the foundational role of material ‘being’ in the systems sciences, if such abandonment were accepted by the systems sciences community which was in that era unlikely. That Ackoff passed the baton to those who followed is ‘only human’ although others, like Nietzsche and Bohm, were less willing to compromise their views in order achieve some measure of take-up which, meanwhile, could be construed as ‘tenderizing’ the system for the needed ‘more radical’ revisions to theory yet to come.

This entry was posted by ted lumley on August 27, 2018 at 1:37 pm, and is filed under APN. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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