Weblog: March 31,
2006
In yesteday’s blog, and in fact all through my website, i make the point that there is no such thing as ‘individual behaviour’ in the sense that the behaviour of an entity is purported to be independent of the spatial-relationships it is bound up in; i.e. the dynamic of the collective is more meaningful than anything we can deduce or construct from the behaviour of individual entities. the implication is thus that the group dynamic (e.g. ‘community dynamic’) is more meaningful (richer in meaning and implication) than the dynamics of the individual entities (‘entities’ being humans, organisms, particles or other INDEPENDENT OBJECTS) that are included in the group dynamic. furthermore, i often allude to physics (relativity) to support this view. it occurs to me that i should do my best to elaborate on this most basic of issues as clearly and as simply as i can.
one will not ‘get to this view’ by reading einstein (who is a physicist par excellence), but one can get to it by reading poincaré (who is a philosopher of science who puts the generalizations of physicists in the context of natural reality). these two have very different views about the fundamental implications of relativity), as can be gleaned, in particular, from the four or five pages in the section Origin of Mathematical Physics in the chapter Hypotheses in Physics in poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis where poincaré points out that the apparent simplicity in physics comes from us ‘letting our mind get ahead of our experience’; i.e. we cannot really decompose sound or light in to mono-frequencies since they do not exist in nature, only in our mathematically idealizing minds (e.g. a ‘frequency’ can only be a ‘single frequency’ if it is never-beginning and never-ending (i.e. if it is continuous all the way from a time of minus-infinity to a time of plus-infinity). meanwhile, we use the concept of ‘a [single] frequency’ and ‘multiple frequencies’ all the time as if they were ‘real’ but in fact they are idealizations that cannot be confirmed by our experience/experiment. our idealizing mind has ‘taken the differentiation of frequencies to the limiting notion of ‘a discrete mono-chromatic ray’ (light) or ‘a discrete mon-frequency’ (acoustics), JUMPING AHEAD OF OUR EXPERIENCE. poincaré also notes that our mind jumps ahead of our experience when we deal with the dynamics of ‘several bodies that move simultaneously’, and this is where i would like to focus in showing, in discussion similar to that of poincaré and to the same end, how it is that there is no such thing in nature as ‘individual behaviour’ (that the dynamic of the individual can only be RELATIVE to the spatial-relational dynamic in which the individual is included).
we don’t have to be physicists to understand this. this is a matter of philosophy and natural experience and the manner in which we perceive through ‘feeling’ and ‘seeing’, and as mentioned, poincaré was not just a physicist but a philosopher of science and life.
our attention here is directed to the notion of a ‘body’ (‘corps’) versus the mathematical notion of an ‘object’ which we normally ‘exchange’ for ‘body’. while a ‘body’ refers to the local concentration of energy in the gravitational field (a ‘form’ in the energy-flow), an ‘object’ is by its nature something that has an idealized ‘absolute’ existence; i.e. it is a local, self-centered entity, and when we speak in terms of ‘objects moving’ or ‘the behaviour of objects’, our mind gets ahead of our experience in accepting that the behaviour can be explained starting from the ‘object/s’ and ‘what they do’ as if their dynamics originated from their local self-centers. while our experience informs us that we are included within spatial-relationships that are continually transforming (like the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine), we can always let our mind get ahead of our experience by re-constructing the world dynamic in terms of ‘local self-centered objects’ and ‘what they do’.
so the notion of an ‘independent object’; i.e. the notion of
‘the identity’ of a thing in itself, is problematic, a case of ‘the mind
getting ahead our experience’;
“Poincaré argued that the axioms of geometry implicitly rely
on assumptions about the nature of objects which they are supposed to “define,”
thus giving us a vicious circle that defines nothing (“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.””
that is, if our world is a tranforming field of energy with local concentrations called matter, we cannot presume any absolute separation between the ‘flow’ and the ‘lumps-in-the-flow’ that we refer to as ‘matter’. in fact, as schroedinger put in, the ‘material object’ is mere ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), being an undulation in the quantum wave-structure of space.
meanwhile, we are very used to ‘letting our mind get ahead of our experience’ and going with an ‘object-based re-construction’ of the real-world dynamic we and everything is included in, and confusing this object-based reconstruction, which is what enables the idealized notion of independent ‘individual behaviour’, with ‘reality’. that is, we can say that dynamics are ‘spatial-relational’ (relative) but we cannot say that they are ‘object-based’ without ‘letting our mind run ahead of our experience’.
of course ‘physics can do it’, as poincaré discusses in The
Origin of Mathematical Physics, thanks to these simplifying assumptions, these
‘idealizations’ wherein the mind runs ahead of our experience. in the last sentence
in that section, poincaré reminds us that ‘in the natural sciences’ (biology
etc.) these ‘idealization’ based generalizations do not hold and “c’est pour cela
que les naturalistes sont obligés de recourir à d’autres modes de
généralisation.” (“it is because of this that
naturalists are obliged to resort to other methods of generalization.”)
physics thus recognizes that it’s own generalized formulations are simplifications that describe, approximately, natural dynamical phenomena, and in particular, they do this by OBJECTIFYING persisting features/forms in the energy field-flow and endowing them, by this objectification, with local self-centered (independent) existence which is amenable as a foundation for re-constructing the energy flow-dynamics in the simplified terms of the behaviours of local objects that are seen to relate to their self-centers, and in the case of so-called ‘animate objects’, such self-center based behaviour is seen as being driven by the ‘inner purpose’ of the idealized local ‘independent’ object.
this simplified reconstruction of dynamics based on idealized ‘independent objects’ provides a generalized means of describing dynamics that no longer relies on the particular and unique spatial relationships the individual entity is bound up in. that is, our experience informs us that we are situationally included within a unique web of spatial-relationships and that our behaviour is relative to these spatial relationships. it is one thing for us to feel that we would like to actualize some assertive behaviour but in reality what we actualize in the way of assertive accomplishment is co-influenced by the accommodating backpressure of the group dynamic we are included in. if we are the son of a king or a millionaire, our inside-outward actualizing of assertive potentials may be far more receptively accommodated than were we the son of a farmer or a pauper, thus to attribute our ‘assertive accomplishments’ solely to our inside-outward assertivity would be to over-simplify the dynamical reality.
this ‘disparity’ manifests between ‘the law’ which is based on the behaviour of individuals seen as ‘independent local objects’ and the principle that ‘all men are equal in the eyes of the law’. minorities complain that they do not have ‘equal opportunity’. that is, they complain that there is disparity in the accommodative quality of the community hostpace, it being selectively more receptive or more resistant to individuals in their actualizing of assertive potentials; e.g. there is much cronyism amongst white euro-american males so that they condition the shared hostspace to be more accommodating to ‘their kind’ and less accommodating to ‘others’. since the law is based on the idealized concept of the ‘independent individual’ and sees his behavior as being locally sourced from within his self-center, driven by his ‘inner purpose’, the law is blind to dynamics seen in the more realistic terms wherein the actualizing of assertive potentials and the accommodating backpressure of the hostspace in which the individual is situationally included MUTUALLY SHAPE the ASSERTING ACTUALITY.
no matter how extensive and detailed is the examination into the internals of the rich king’s son and into the internals of the poor farmer’s son, the causal source of the greater assertive accomplishments of the rich king’s son will not be discovered. thus the model of dynamical behaviour in terms of independent object-entities is an over-simplification that makes the model incapable of explaining everyday macro-behavioural phenomena.
the relativity of motion applies generally at the macro as well as micro level and the idealization of absolute motion (as is required for an individual’s behaviour being seen as driven from out his self-center) is an over-simplification that depends upon the idealized notion of ‘objects’ that exist independently of the dynamical hostspace (energy-flow) in which they are included.
if we ask ourselves whether our actualizing of our assertive potentials is co-influenced by that accommodating quality of the community hostspace dynamic we find ourselves situationally included in (imagine different situations such as a white in arab society or an arab in white society etc.) and we find the answer to be ‘yes’ (as it rather obviously has to be) then we have, in a word, established that models of dynamics based on the behaviour of local self-center possessing objects with local self-center-sourced behaviours is an innately over-simplified and indequate model for capturing real-world dynamics. furthermore, we can say that there is no way that we can isolate our individual dynamic from the dynamic of the shared hostspace in which we are (uniquely, situationally) included.
that is, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
‘INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR’ (it is a
simplified idealization that we find it convenient to use, it is a case of the
mind running ahead of our experience). the behaviour of hurricane katrina is not ‘katrina’s’; i.e.
it is not sourced from katrina’s self-center, but is instead innately
non-local, a-centric and RELATIVE. and so it is with the behaviour of the
the ‘hard, clear-thinking’ politics of david warren, mentioned in yesterdays blog acquires its ‘hard, clear-thinkingness’ by clinging tenaciously to the idealization of ‘independent individual behaviour’ wherein we purport the source of the behaviour to lie within the independent individual, and thus the criminal behaviour of a jean valjean (stealing a loaf of bread) is seen to emanate 100% from his interior purpose. the fact that there was plenty of food around and that the community hostspace was not very accommodating to the actualizing of his assertive attempt to hunt or gather something to eat for the crying, famished children, has no traction or bearing at all, when one is coming from the idealized model wherein individuals are seen as ‘independent’, their behaviour being fully sourced from within (rather than from the mutual influence of hitting and fielding; i.e. from the mutual influence of the actualizing of assertive potentials and the accommodating backpressure of the hostspace the asserting is situationally included in).
on the scale of nations and tribes, the same ‘hard, clear-thinkingness’ can be applied if one holds rigidly to the model of independent object (nation-state, insurgent-movement) based behaviours. it is this model that allows us to dissolve the spatial-relational relativity of behaviour and thus to speak of ‘good behaviours’ and ‘evil behaviours’ of independent individuals (individual persons, nations, groups). this has proven to be a convenient camouflage for nations that seek to propagate their ‘superior civilization’. for example, the colonial powers set up protectorate nation-states by drawing some imaginary lines (convenient to themselves) on a map and having their powerful brothers endorse the mapped space as a nation-state governned by a central authority. the central authority being one of the tribal chiefs of the region, friendly to the powers, who was then in a position to dispose of the riches of the overall multi-tribal region space and promise some share to the colonial powers, and when the other tribal chiefs rebelled, their actions could then be shown to be ‘illegal’ and ‘criminal’ behaviour whereas the humiliation they experience, by being alienated from their generations-old relationship with the land and one another, by the new radial force of a central autocratic control hierarchy whose powers derived purely from ‘idealization’, the idealization of ‘property’, objectified land’ which comes about when powerful nations impose imaginary lines on the map of a landscape that is innately continuous and unbounded, endowing that idealized ‘property-object’ (the sovereign nation-state/protectorate) with local self-centered existence and local self-center sourced behaviour via a central governing authority.
for the tribal chieftain, for whom the generations-old evolved relationship with the local land and one another was ‘sacred’, ... to have this relationship over-ridden by imposed subservience to a central governing authority born of imaginary line drawing powerful others and their imposed ‘idealization’ of a ‘property-object’ was/is hugely humiliating. but the ‘hard, clear-thinking’ politics of david warren holds that the illegal, criminal behaviour of the individual person, group or nation is 100% derived from within the individual, so does it follow that the individual guilty of criminal behaviour must be punished, incarcerated or eliminated. the issue of humiliation through hostspace-based disaccommodation via imposed idealization is a non-issue the david warrens since there is no such thing as hostspace-based disaccommodation in the crisp and clear mental model based on reconstructing the dynamics of our real-life experience by a local self-centered (independent-individual) object based re-construction.
because our culture is continually imbuing in our minds this pseudo-reality (illusion whereby our mind runs ahead of our experience) of ‘independent individual behaviour’, it is not easy (but not impossible, either) to ‘hold onto’ the realization that ‘there is no such thing as ‘independent individual behaviour’ and that our individual behaviour is inseparable from the accommodating backpressure of the common hostspace we are all operating within. once the imaginary line boundaries of the object-i-fiction ‘sovereign property’ are drawn on a map by the powerful and the nation-state becomes a ‘legal entity’ (an idealization that exists only be agreement amongst the powerful ones who have imposed it) the grounds exist both to humiliate the tribal peoples who reside within the imaginary lines, to alienate them from their traditional relationship with the land and with one another, and to label any angry response to these injustices as ‘illegal’, ‘criminal’ and even ‘evil’. such are the conditions that continue to prevail in the case of iraq and afghanistan and in those north american imposed nation-states which will never be accepted by the grandsons of the humiliated tribespeoples; e.g.;
WE DIDN'T CROSS THE
BORDER: THE BORDER CROSSED US!
What are borders? What is the
when we allow ourselves to think in terms of independent local self-center possessing objects with independent local self-center driven behaviours such as ‘canada’ and ‘the US’, we are ‘letting our mind run ahead of our experience’. these nation-states exist only as idealizations in our minds (the minds of some of us) and their existence is proven only by our agreement to their existence and the modifying of our behaviour accordingly, as if they did exist. the borders of empires dissolve when people stop believing in them or when those who were forced to behave as if they believed in them accrue such power that they no longer have to be subservient to those ‘central authorities’ that demand their belief in them. the ‘reality’ of their existence and their capacity to source behaviour exists only in our idealizing minds, and only if we are willing to ‘go along with it’, there is no experiential reality that supports the existence of ‘property’ or of ‘the sovereign nation-state’, or generally, of ‘individual object existence’ and individual object-existence-sourced behaviour.
intuitively we know all this, but as far as as mental modeling goes, to BELIEVE in such idealization allows us the ‘hard, clear-thinking’ politics of a david warren, where things can be logically debated and problems solved all within this object-i-fiction world of idealization, far from the innately relative and spatial-relational reality of our felt experience of inclusion within a common hostspace. of course, to put our faith in ‘idealization’ and its constucts is to alienate ourselves from our natural felt experience of spatial-relational inclusion which is the truer informant of how the world works. we can label tribal chieftains, humiliated by the ‘take-over’ of central authority empowered purely by some imaginary line-drawing by powerful outsiders as ‘illegal’, ‘criminal’, ‘evil’ and prejudicial to the health of a ‘democratically elected government of a sovereign nation-state’, but they will act out of their humiliation and out of their being alienated from the land and one another and out of the insult that is being delivered to their ancestors who have cultivated their tribal relationship with the land and one another over many generations.
we can ‘put them down’ and ‘the law will be on our side’ because the law respects the legal status of the nation-state that the imaginary lines say that they are now squatter on, and which demands that they accept subservience to the central governing authority of that legally constituted nation state, endorsed by the world community and particularly by the world powers who commit to help it defend its imaginary-line boundaries from those who would contest them from within or from the outside.
our western culture has a side to it that puts idealization before experience-based reality, and it is very convincingly articulated since experience-based reality is spatial-relational and thus purely tacit (‘fuzzy’) while idealization is hard, crisp and clear, like the ‘supremacist’ politics of a david warren.
Weblog: March 30,
2006
We are ‘the
civilized’ are we not? We, the people of
european descent who have managed to save the indigenous peoples from
themselves (from their own barbarism) , who began the
major job of cleaning up the
no, i am
not ‘serious’, ... just introducing today’s blog by way of the ‘philosophies of
the right’ as the conflict within canada continues to tension up in regard to
the role of canada’s military in afghanistan, and as the ‘holier-than-thou’
attitudes come into full blossom, such as ‘Against
barbarism, the civilized must be ferocious’ --- David Warren, The Ottawa
Citizen.
my interest
is not in politics, right-versus-left per se, ... my interest is in exploring
how our conceptions of space and time (mutual exclusion versus mutual
inclusion) ‘condition our political viewpoints’.
for
example, in the non-euclidian space of relativity, spatial-relational dynamics
take precedence over ‘idealized motion’ in terms of ‘objects’ and ‘what they
do’. this is consistent with our
understanding that material objects are concentrations of energy included
within a hostspace that is a continuously flowing (dynamical
equilibrium-seeking) energy flow-field.
now, you
might ask, ... what the hell does that have to do with global politics? and the answer is, that if we put the
idealized motion based on the local existence of ‘things’ and ‘what they do’ in
an ‘unnatural precedence’ over the spatial-relational transformation of the
common living space we are included in, then, and only then, do we come up with
the notion of ‘good thing-behaviours’ and ‘bad thing-behaviours’ and the
corollaries that ‘some things behave better than others’ and thence on to ‘we
can improve the behaviour of the world by proliferating good behaviour and
eliminating bad behaviour’. (i.e. there can be no meaningful assessment of ‘hitting’
[individual asserting behaviour] out of the context of ‘fielding’ [spatial
accommodating by the common hostspace collective])
now, if we
see things in the terms that ‘we’ have a civilized behaviour that is ‘better
than’ the barbarism of ‘others’ out there, this kind of ‘independently sourced
behaviour’ [non-relative, ‘absolute motion’] view provides the mental
justification for proliferating ‘our’ civilization and eliminating ‘others’’
barbarism in the process.
the first
nations peoples don’t buy this type of western reasoning. they have always known that nature is about
‘balancing’ not about ‘control’ by ‘eradicating the pathogenic’.. for example;
”In the winter of 1534 discovering
Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew
attempted to make their way down the [St. Lawrence] river. Trapped in five feet
of snow and ice-blocked water-ways, the expedition was forced to spend the
bitter winter months on the
in western medicine as in western politics, it is not ‘balance’ that is sought but ‘control’ that puts ‘the good’ in authority over ‘the bad’. thus we use the imaginary line-bounded nation-state concept to ensure that ‘good’ dominates over ‘bad’ rather than seeking to sustain dynamical balance within a free hostspace. david warren credits george bush with the same realization as he has, i.e; “we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not.”
this view, based on objectified behaviours that can be ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, is shared by many people, and david warren is credited with being able to articulate it very clearly, as in this except from his recent writing;
”... there is not and never was a
“clash of civilizations” [citing Wafa Sultan]. It is in the nature of things
that only one civilization can prevail at one time: that the inferior will
aspire to the superior, and be assimilated to it; or else, it will aspire to
bring the superior down. The clashes are thus between higher and lower; between
civilization and barbarism in their many degrees; and barbarism prevails where
its hard beak meets the soft mush of decadence.
... We fight in
... For part of the superiority of
the high civilization is to be found in its self-confident ability to defend
itself, and to uphold civilized norms. We maintain and extend the frontiers of
our civilization; or else they shrink.
.. I am so damn proud of our Canadian
guys, in
david warren’s remarks are right on target IFF the world dynamic truly is accurately describable in terms of ‘object-behaviours’. if we can assume that ‘western civilization’ is an ‘object thing’, an ‘assertive agency’ that is capable of ‘sourcing an assertive behaviour’ that pushes out from its self-center driven by its ‘inner purpose’ (its vision, mission, plans to construct a ‘better tomorrow’ etc.).
but of course the ‘real world’ of our experience does not conform to such a simplified idealization. the real-world of our experience conforms to ‘mitakuye oyasin’ --- ‘we are all related’ --- as is the situation when one takes into account that the actions of local entities are RELATIVE to the hostspace dynamic in which they are included.
we know how the nation-state has been used to suppress locals, and so we might say that the battle is between using the nation-state as a device whereby those that conceive of themselves as ‘good’ or rather ‘superior’ can ensure the suppression of those they conceive of as ‘bad’ or rather ‘inferior’. (warren uses ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ aspect of global civilization; i.e. the civilized and the barbaric).
my citing of the following comment on the Zapatista movement is not ‘political’ but seeks to bring out one example of the numerous struggles around the world to restore man’s relationship with the land and one another to its natural precedence over the central control of the nation-state;
“In Fall 1996, the Mexican president signed
an agreement with the Zapatistas (called the Accords of San Andreas). The
Accords said three things: First, that the Mexican government will grant
limited autonomy to the Indigenous people of
On a more poetic note (and
this movement is full of poetry), the Zapatistas see Indigenous people as the
forgotten memory of the Mexican nation -- the people who preserve color, song,
and diversity in an increasingly monochromatic global economy. They are rebels
with dignity, rebels for dignity.
The Zapatista vision offers
local community autonomy as an antidote to globalization. Each community would
have control over its internal affairs, its economy, and the natural resources
that surround it. The Zapatistas demand that collective rights be included in
the Mexican constitution. This is a major departure from the
institutionalization of individual rights, both human and civil, that the
international community now supports.”
it is not just the residue of colonized indigenous peoples who wish to restore man’s relationship with the land and one another to its natural precedence over central control, there are numerous internet based new-culture movements such as ‘GIVE’ that orient to this same direction or, rather, this same precedence-giving, e.g;
“GIVE means Globally
Integrated Village Environment, a research institute set up to explore the
full potential of regional and local economies and human ecologies which are
embedded in global streams of communication.
The idea of GIVE is that
these communication streams have dramatical influence on the things that matter
in our life. Whatever we do begins in our mind as a conscious choice, but also as
a result of our knowledge and wisdom. If we have access to the worlds best
knowledge, we can dramatially change our living environments. If we have
this access even in the small villages, the small villages can become our real
homes again. We can bring the wealth of our civilisation back to a simple and
secure environment, where we dwell with nature and have learned to join forces
with the living world around us. We become stuarts of the planet and can halt
and reverse the degradation of soil and landscape. We are using
microelectronics - not to flood the world with “products” it does not need
anymore, but to provide for ourselves with decentralized fabrication based on renewable
resources. We are sharing design and knowledge to constantly improve this
process. We create villages where we live our values together with others, but
these villages become Global Villages by connecting and working with
each other on the global cultural heritage of mankind.” --- Franz Nahrada
one can also cite the ‘sovereigntist’ (i.e. anti-sovereigntist in the sense of anti-central-control) movement in quebec that seeks to preserve local cultural heritage that is seen as being suffocated by central control based administration, as an example of this persisting desire to restore man’s relationship with the land and one another to its natural precedence over the autocratic control hierarchy of the sovereign property based nation-state. (now, this does not mean an ‘abandonment’ of federalism. the iroquois six-nation confederation was much admired by engels and marx and also by the founding fathers of the united states, who borrowed from its balance-oriented thinking (there was not then a readiness to accept the equality of women as was an integral aspect of the iroquois confederation)).
in nature, we have this sort of ecological networking based on sustaining dynamical balance amongst a multiplicity of local mutually influencing participants, the same sort of balancing based on spatial relationships as when we drive friendly in the shared hostspace of freeway traffic-flow.
what david warren articulates so clearly is ‘colonial theory’. it is based on a belief that there are ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ movements in our global civilation and it is imperative that our ‘superior’ aspect go to war against our ‘inferior aspect’ (no sign of ‘dynamical equilibrium seeking here, the message is that the ‘good’ must constantly keep a lid on ‘the bad’.), i.e;
It
is in the nature of things that only one civilization can prevail at one time:
that the inferior will aspire to the superior, and be assimilated to it; or
else, it will aspire to bring the superior down. The clashes are thus between
higher and lower; between civilization and barbarism in their many degrees; and
barbarism prevails where its hard beak meets the soft mush of decadence.
afghanistan then becomes an outpost of ‘the good aspect of our global civilization’ which persists because of the protective backup we continue to give to it, as in the case of the ‘protectorate’ of ‘libya’ set up by mussolini, described earlier in these march, 2006 blogs (mussolini dropped rebel tribal chiefs out of his military aircraft into the center of their villages to ‘discourage’ the rebellion and of course such action may simply drive the rebellion underground rather than cultivating genuine support for the new central governance authority. people will of course vote in elections and ‘democratically elect’ a government to make the best out of their limited options, but the people are not going to be given access to a referendum as to whether they should have this centrally-governed nation-state system or not. they are not given the choice of going back to an iroquois multi-tribal federation which retains the precedence of local tribal peoples’ customs, their relationship with the land and with one another, as many afghanis and zapatistas are prepared to fight to the death for.
our military thus has a mission, in this context of david warren’s and those of the same mindset, to impose the values of our civilization on others so as to paternalistically ‘save them from their own barbarous traditions/elements’; i.e. as warren say;
“Our
this colonization by a ‘superior civilizaiton’ proposed by warren has quite a history of its own, cited by a muslim author who is incensed that the current Pope Benedict has lectured muslims, holding them responsible for policing their own, as if the insurgencies have nothing to do with the bolshy practices of the western powers, which, as warrens comments make clear, have not divested themselves of their superior culture’s‘nobless oblige’ colonizing mission;
“According Steven T. Newcomb,
Director of the Indigenous Law Institute, Pope
Alexander VI delivered the Inter Cetera papal bull on May
4, 1493.
Accordingly, this document, issued shortly after
In the year of the
the question is thus raised; ‘IS CONTINUED WESTERN COLONIZATION IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN AND ELSEWHERE (as advocated by warren and others) TO ENABLE OTHERS TO GET THE CHANCE TO ENJOY OUR SUPERIOR CIVILIZATION, AND IN RECOGNITION THAT ‘THERE IS NO NEUTRAL GROUND BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM (as in the logic of the excluded middle), NOT IN ITSELF A ‘binary’ FORM OF BARBARISM?’
* * *
ok, moving right along, ... is there such a thing as a ‘peace-keeping mission’? we might as well work our way through this since we use that term all the time. warren would admonish and label people (mushy lefties) for even stopping to reflect on this question, i.e;
“The
pansies of the Left are already fibrillating: “We didn’t think this was going
to be a war!” Grow up, little people.
... this is the ancient story.
The peace and freedom, the religious and cultural and scientific creativity of
a high civilization, depend finally on the will to maintain order, to vindicate
the right, to stop the criminal and insurgent. There is no neutral ground
between civilization and barbarism. There is not even a boundary. You are
either going up, or you are coming down.”
if one has the ethic of nature as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related, our good and bad brothers included), then the mission is to intervene without judgement to help restore dynamical balance and harmony (not to permanently commit to keeping a lid on the evil and inferior). we do this all the time in real life even as children and teenagers. it is a viable model which the late larry hein (jesuit priest) refers to as the ‘third model of God’ (i.e. three models of Governance), the three being (a) the chieftain who enforces the rules of right and wrong (‘fairly’), (b) the parents of the prodigal son (mushy leftists who wait for their sons to repent and forgive all, for those that repent), and (c) the autistic teacher/student model where one intervenes into conflict without judgement (assuming that we each live within our own emotionally shaped worlds) to limit injury while allowing the antagonists to revive their own local dynamical balance and harmony (i.e. to give them time to heal naturally, since only the natural organism can heal itself and the ‘doctor’ can merely open up the space for the organism to do its own healing).
such an inclusive and balance-oriented, rather than mutually-excluding of good versus bad, philosophy as is embodied in (c) does not use the euclidian absolutes of ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ in their approach to governance. just as nature includes all, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, so it is with the philosophy of (c), ‘mitakuye oyasin’.
thus, THERE IS INDEED ‘MEANING’ AND ‘RELEVANT PLACE’ FOR ‘PEACE-KEEPING’ in the sense of non-judgemental (non-side-taking) intervention into regions of conflict to open up some space for conflicting parties to heal themselves.
meanwhile, few people would deny their abhorrence of female genital mutilation, stoning to death of female adulterers, the stoning to death of women who secretly educate their daughters, and the condemning to death of a muslim that has converted to christianity (abdul rahman, who was to be tried under Shariah law in afghanistan) and so the question arises as to whether ‘we’ should go to war against those who condone the continuance of such practices.
this brings to mind the experiences shared by a friend with the New Orleans Police Dept. who recounts that his most dangerous of encounters have been in answering domestic dispute calls (in the rough districts he works). while the woman may have called 911 because she is being beaten by her partner, the police officer intervening has to be concerned that if the male partner resists and has to be taken by force or threatened with lethal force, the same female who ‘blew the whistle on him’ may attack the police officer. the point is, that she wants help in reforming him, not in killing him or putting him away for the long terms. she could have done either of those herself, by shooting him or leaving him. she wants the ‘good in him’ to increase in proportion to the ‘bad in him’ and she is not ready to give him up; i.e. she is seeking ‘transformation’ rather than judging him as ‘either good or bad’.
and so it is, in many cases, with local communities that have continued to cultivate/condone abusive practices. they could use ‘policing’ help from foreign military to give them some space for transformation, rather than having them ‘blow away’ their brothers whom they suspect to be capable of abusive practices. the potential for alienating an increasing proportion of the local population is strong, depending upon how the foreign military ‘policing force’ sees its role and how it carries itself.
the alienated proportion is certainly going to be increased if david warren’s columns are circulated amongst afghanis in the manner that the danish mohammed cartoons were circulated within the islamic community.
therefore, the david warrens and other western-civilization supremacists, by their attitudes and remarks are increasing the dangers for the troops.
to summarize today’s blog, much of the support for sending canadian troops to afghanistan, rather than being based on ‘peace-keeping’ (giving the local peoples of the region space to ‘heal themselves’) is based on the belief in the supremacy of western civilization and the need to propagate it globally or to have it fall.
this view is based on the ‘object-i-fiction’ that there is some discrete entity called ‘our civilization’ that is capable of sourcing its own behaviour, having it push out from its own self-center driven by its vision, mission and plans for constructing a ‘better tomorrow’.
if, on the other hand, we accept our experience-validated natural reality that we are all included within a common, shared hostspace dynamic, where our local actions have nonlocal interdependency, then it makes sense to orient our social dynamics management efforts to the cultivating and sustaining of dynamical balance and harmony on a centers-everywhere (non-euclidian space/ relativity of motion) basis.
Weblog: March 29, 2006
Yesterday,
my ‘inclusion
her
notion was that “... trying
to make CSR practices profitable misses the point, and that it allows social
problems to persist. A more appropriate view therefore would be a systemic,
inclusional one.”
and she was looking for prior work that
explores; “... how solutions in our current thinking
only perpetuate the problem, and a more inclusional view expands our perspectives.”
well, i have inquired into and
written a fair bit in the past on ‘exceptionally performing teams’ from an
‘inclusional’ viewpoint including an article entitled ‘Complexity and the ‘Learning
Organization’’, published in the (Santa Fe Institute) journal *Complexity* (Complexity, Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 14-22, 1997), but my earlier work seems, in
retrospect, ‘more obtuse’ than my current writing. that is, my continuing work has informed me,
not differently, but more simply and directly, that our problem is with ‘ide
that is pretty simple (which
unfortunately makes it more ‘objectionable’); i.e. ‘if your model is based on
independent objects with independent object behaviours (‘objecti-i-fiction’)
then the implementation of the model in the real world will deliver unintended
results, ... making the use of such models ‘incoherent’ (bohm) and
dysfunctional.
and since the typical ‘business
case’ orients to benefits to ‘the corporation’, seen as a local object with a
local object behaviour that pushes out from its self-center driven by an
‘inner-purpose’ (vision, mission, business plan), the typical business case is
object-i-fiction based.
it is not easy to critique something
that so many people take for granted as ‘good practice’, or rather, it may be
easy but it is hard for such views to elicit serious consideration because
everyone ‘knows YOU are wrong’ on the basis that ‘the millions of others in
which they include themselves can’t be wrong’.
so, there is little difficulty in
meeting the objective to show; “... how solutions in
our current thinking only perpetuate the problem, and a more inclusional view
expands our perspectives.” but
there is a great deal of difficulty in eliciting any serious consideration of
these ‘inclusional’ ideas.
i say this from years of experience,
not just mine but that of others who i have worked with, ... but that is
another story.
the exceptionally performing teams i
formally studied (and those i have continued to study informally, from outside
observation) literally and deliberately let their own DISCRETE/OBJECT identity
dissolve in the hustle-bustle of the community activity in which they were
included. so we can’t really talk about
‘what THEY did’ since the ideal that they exist as a local team-object with
local, independent, team-object behaviour that pushes out from the center
driven by their internal purpose NO LONGER PREVAILS.
this is the general case. we can’t help but let our notional
independent local center-driven object-self attune TO SOME DEGREE to the
suprasystem dynamic of the shared hostspace we are operating in. we know this from navigating crowds or
driving on busy freeway. in order to
persist in our ide
now, we can fight against this by
designing a team or business organization like a bulldozer, that truly strives
to execute a fully one-way inside-outward precision plan; i.e. a plan that is
fully dictated by and executed in a self-center-driven manner, regardless of
the conflicts that arise with others operating in the same shared hostspace. in that case, we would be striving towards
the unre
the point is, that the individual
(person, team, corporation, nation) always ‘flexes’ his independent self-center
driven agenda when operating within a shared hostspace, and when multiple
(three or more) entities do this at the same time (move under one another’s
simultaneous mutual influence), a dynamical complexity arises that cannot be
resolved in ‘causal’ terms (this is the ‘three body problem) and the
behavioural evolution becomes ‘co-evolutional’ (the notion of the individual
self as the causal source of his behavioural evolution dissolves)
this is pretty simple stuff in the
sense that we all know it from experience; i.e. we make our plans as if we were
going to execute them in empty euclidian space but in fact we have to operation
the NATURAL alternative is to accept
diversity and to work on schemes to sustain harmonious flow while respecting
diversity. this is essentially what we
(many of us) do when navigating with the shared space of the busy freeway
traffic flow; i.e. we do not have information on why this or that driver
swerves suddenly or why this or that driver brakes suddenly (there could be
many reasons other than ‘m
its pretty hard to incorporate all
this in ‘a master plan’ so instead of going for ‘fault-intolerant operation
so the question to ask today’s
business planners is; ok, i understand your vision, mission and business plan,
now where are you going to deploy this?
at which point he will look on you as
an annoying imbecile and respond, ‘why, right here in our community, of
course!’.
if, at this point, you reply; ‘but
our community is a common hostspace with all kinds of stuff going on in it, and
you haven’t even mentioned the spatial-relationships that are involved and the
fact that your operation is not a ‘linear add-on’ but a transformative
intervention, ... your plans only speak to ‘what YOU are going to do’, as if
you were free to ignore the rest of the activities in the shared hostspace. will the accommodative backpressure of the
hostspace you are operating in not shape the actu
the planner might respond; ‘we will
do the best we can, adapting our plans where we have to’, or something like
that. in other words, he will have an
ethic of bumping into others and letting ‘who wins’ and ‘who loses’ determine
the alteration to the plan.
the exceptionally performing teams,
on the other hand, accept that we live in a continuously flowing hostspace
dynamic where many things are moving under each other’s simultaneous mutual
influence and so ‘the plan’ cannot be foundational. instead, the hostspace dynamic the team is
included in is taken to be ‘foundational’ (after all, it is going on all the
time and there is no ‘empty space’ such as is implied by the ide
these ideas are ‘not new’, they have
been propounded by, for example, martine dodds-taljaard (The Devil is Suboptimization), Boulding, Ackoff and others, but
there is little ‘take-up’ of them since our western acculturation is all about
‘suboptimization’ in terms of ide
of course this is unre
so all we have to do to answer our
initial question about ‘the business case for CSR’
(corporate social responsibility) is to recognize that ‘hitting’ and ‘profits’
are the same kind of one-sided (inclusion-in
a common hostpace ignoring) ‘performance indicator’ that purports to
reflect the ‘independent behaviour’ of the object-entity (the individual, the
team, the corporation, the nation).
PROFITS ARE NOT THE MEASURE OF THE INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE OF A BUSINESS
ORGANIZATION, simply because ‘independent behaviour’ is a fiction, an
‘object-i-fiction’. there can be no
meaning to ‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’. in other words, the notion of independent
behaviour of an object-entity is untenable and thus THE NOTION THAT THE
CORPORATION PRODUCES THE PROFITS IS UNTENABLE.
the members of the exceptionally
performing teams that i interviewed understood this. they recognized that they were included
within a web of dynamical interdependencies with their customers, the people in
the host communities they were operating in, their suppliers, their service
contractors and they recognized that their behaviour was RELATIVE to this interdependent
network dynamic (in fact, a spatial-relational dynamic since in re
in operating in this way, the team
was unique and authentic because of its unique situation within, and relative
to, the shared hostspace dynamic, but it had lost its ide
so what did they use for a ‘business
plan’? they just made one up. as mintzberg and others have suggested,
business plans are for shareholders and for analytical pegagogery. they have little rapport with the way the
world works; e.g;
“Governmental, non-governmental (NGO’s) and educational
institutions continue to dedicate considerable efforts towards the promotion
and training of business planning activities for entrepreneurship.
Surprisingly, the importance of business plans by entrepreneurs has limited
empirical support. We compare and test instrumental and institutional theories
to explain the widespread prevalence of the business plan dogma. A
quantitative/qu
today, ‘shareholder interest’ dominates in the dynamics of business investment. a ‘business plan’ is required by the shareholders and the business plan portrays the firm as ‘an independent entity’ which it is not, and it portrays the behavioural performance of the corporate entity as ‘independent’ and as pushing out of its self-center driven by its ‘inner purpose’ (its’ business purpose and plans, its vision and mission etc.), which it is not.
the
‘business plan’ and ‘business case’ then, are fictional stories based on the
‘object-i-fiction’ of the existence of ‘independent object entities’ with
‘independent object entity behaviours’ when we are in re
the making of ‘the business case’ for CSR is thus ‘self-delusion’. if a business is big and powerful enough, the customers, suppliers and service contractors will play the ‘follower role’ in its dancing with the business ‘leader’ and try to make it look good in the same way that employees play the follower role to the manager’s lead so as to make him ‘look good’ (because they need the money). because it is our habitude, in western cultural tradition, to describe the world in the stark terms of ‘what things do’ (ignoring their inclusion within a shared hostspace dynamic), we attribute what the boss does or what the company does, entirely to ‘the boss’ or to ‘the company’ (‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’), according to the business plan wherein instructions cascade down from the top in a machine-like imagery (machines have independent behaviour that pushes out from their self-center driven by their internal energies; i.e. in assessing their performance we ignore their consumption of fossil fuels and their polluting output, their inclusional participation in our shared hostspace). so, to underscore this object-i-fiction of the independent behaviour of the corporate object-entity, we now reward the CEO with 1000 times (one thousand times) the compensation of his average employee. as bill moyers observes in Restoring the Public Trust;
“... on the eve of President George W. Bush’s second
inauguration, the editors of The Economist, reporting on inequ
As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of
society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between
the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five
fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100
chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average
worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker.
A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American
economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’
share of
to
summarize today’s blog, we continue to operate with a fictional model of social
and business dynamics based on the ‘object-i-fiction’ of the ‘independent’
existence of object-entities and their ‘independent’ behaviour that pushes out
from their self-center driven by their internal purpose (their internally
generated vision, mission, plans). ‘the
business plan’ is one such ‘object-i-fiction’ (the personal resumé is
another). there is no mention in this
fictional model of the re
all
of this clean and tidy object-i-fiction modeling ignores one trivial!? bit of
re
ok, i admit that this has not been very helpful to Alan’s student because it simply exposes the flaw in our mental modeling in such a way as to make it EVEN MORE UNACCEPTABLE to most people, particularly to those who are heavily invested in the ‘shareholder interest’ ethic.
one
can hope for the creativity of students who have an interest in ‘getting to the
bottom of this’ to come up with new ways to share the ‘inclusional’
inquiry/viewpoint that do not
.
Weblog: March 28, 2006
yesterday’s discussion on the division between piaget’s ‘structured learning’ and vygotsky’s ‘situational learning’ encapsulates the essense of the basic divisions in our society. it is the same division as that which sourced the vicious debates in evolutionary biology between dawkins et al (structured evolution) and stephen jay gould et al (situational evolution). now that gould has died, the dawkinsian revisionists are busy trying to complete the discrediting of gould’s ideas, accusing him of having introduced confused ideas into the science of evolutionary biology.
what
gould maintained, which was anathema to the rigid structur
we
are not talking only of evolutionary biology theory here, we are speaking of a
general mental modeling precept that applies at all levels from micro to
macro. one can assess what gould is
saying on the basis of one’s own experience.
all that is required is to ask whether, in the actu
if
your answer is YES, as it must be since we have all experienced ‘oppressive’
situations where the particular hostspace that we are situated in
DIS-ACCOMMODATES IN A HIGHLY RESISTIVE FASHION the outwelling actu
the
‘accounting system’ of dawkins et al, orients solely to ‘assertive
accomplishment’ as if the situational influence can be bundled into the qu
this
is where there is a fundamental split in the way we think about the world; and
it concerns the way we think about ‘space’ and ‘time’; i.e. if motion is
relative, we cannot separate, other than conceptually in our mental modelings,
the actu
we
see ourselves, individual humans in this ‘split out way’. or at least those of us acculturated in the
western mindset do. native american
tradition
there is not only ‘nothing wrong’ with this view, in the sense that there is nothing there that conflicts with our experience or even with our (modern) science (relativity and quantum theory). it not only DOES NOT conflict with modern science, it conforms far more coherently with science than does any theory that depends upon the ‘independence’ of ‘material objects’. as poincaré says, ‘objects’ are something that we impose on our rational mental models that are not impose on nature.
but let’s take another look at Piaget’s powerful influence on education. “Piaget was a psychologist with a fundamentally biological orientation. He was an epistemologist who regarded empirical studies of infants, children, and adolescents as an essential source of information about the nature of knowledge.” He believed that ‘knowledge was ‘biological’ in nature.
Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) was a former philosopher/literary critic turned psychologist who wanted to understand the nature of aesthetics and concept formation. he did not place such severe constraints as a biologist tends to, starting from ‘the biological organism’ (‘the hurricane katrina’) and studying it as an ‘independent entity’ whose behaviour and capabilities must be fully explained in terms of its ‘internals’ (if it is ‘independent’ then what it does must be sourced from within it).
to
get an idea of how literary critics think (which one can easily see as implicit
in vygotsky’s psychological works) the following except regarding the ideas of
russian phlosopher/literary critic mikhail bakhtin (1895 – 1975) whose ideas on
the ‘inter-individual’ nature of language were very close to those of vygotsky;
i.e. the assertive utterance and the accommodating qu
“ To Bakhtin, an 'utterance' (any expression produced in a
living, concrete , and unrepeatable set of circumstances) is always directed
towards somebody. An utterance is
inconceivable without a speaker and a listener. As Bakhtin puts it; 'Discourse (as all signs
generally) is inter-individual. All that
is said, expressed, is outside of the "soul" of the speaker and does
not belong to him only. But discourse
cannot be attributed to the speaker alone.
The author (the speaker) may have in
here again, we have this same geometrical consideration. it seems to crop up everywhere and concerns the relationship between ‘subject’ and ‘object’; i.e. it is as fundamental as fundamental can be in our mental modeling. the question is this;
are the subject (e.g. ‘hurricane’) and the
object (atmospheric hostspace-flow) REALLY independent of one another , ... or
are we ‘making it up’?
both
bakhtin and vygotsky imply that the ‘field’ of understanding that is
continuously evolving (they use that word) is greater than the individual
assertive action and/or assertive utterance, which means that we shall never
come to an understanding of the dynamics of a collective by trying to
understand the dynamics of an individual, ... whether we are speaking of
‘behaviour’ or ‘utterance’; i.e. neither assertive behaviour nor assertive
utterance can be seen to possess meaning in their own independent right, ...
the meaning of assertive behaviour and assertive utterance are instead mutually
shaped by the accommodating qu
the word ‘field’ is significance since all of this leads to the suggestion that ‘field’ is the ‘mother dynamic’ from which we mentally extract the reduced notions of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. e.g. ‘the atmospheric field-flow is the source of features/forms which have ‘apparent’ local centers and apparent ‘local center sourced independent behaviour’ but in the case of the hurricane it is clear that such local centers and locally sourced independent assertive behaviour ARE ILLUSIONS that we impose on our visual perception based mental models. IN REALITY, such object-centers are nonlocally inferred and a-centric, as is the apparent assertive behaviour.
now, if it doesn’t make sense to you to think of ‘your self’ as being nonlocally inferred and your assertive behaviour being ‘a-centric’ rather than coming from your ‘soulful’ ‘inner-purpose’, it may be useful to review yourself as one of the people in the cart on the way to the guillotine. you have the choice to ‘forget about’ being inextricably bound up in the hostspace flow, and focusing on ‘what you all are doing’. if the ride is long enough, you might put on a stage production of ‘showboat’ within the cart, an activity that would ‘preoccupy’ the mind and ‘occlude’ any awareness of being bound up in the hostspace flow.
similarly, one can imagine individuals in the cart being so pre-occupied with the awareness of being bound up in a flow that is taking them to the point of extinguishment of their lives, that they cannot possibly ignore this and participate in a stage production of ‘showboat’ even if everyone else is ‘doing it’.
yet,
is it not an ‘opiate’ of a sort, to go into this ‘sub-re
if
we open up our awareness to being included in the hostspace flow, as in the
native tradition of cultivating man’s relationship with the land/hostspace and
one another (the equivalent of bakhtin’s ‘trio’) then the absoluteness of the
split between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ dissolves and we find that while the actu
instead of being locked in a struggle with the hostspace, WE ARE THE HOSTSPACE (the inhabitant is the habitat, as the gouldian evolutionary biologists say). ‘we are the hostspace’ together with every other ‘brother form’ that participates in the common space of nature.
we do not have to ‘play’ solely on the
individual-assertive side of things, we also, together with others, have a
handle on the spatial-relational accommodative side of things and given this
REAL WORLD geometry, we can shape the actu
as already mentioned with the aid of the ‘hurricane’ example, the inside-outward sourcing of behaviour and the outside-inward situational (spatial-relational) inductive shaping/sourcing of behaviour are a dynamical one-ness and it is a matter of our convenience, the convience of ‘simplification’ that has us impose the euclidian space and time convention (consistent with visual perception) so as to ‘split out’ the included flow-feature and make it over into an ‘independent object’. this is the same psychological process as engaged in by the men in the cart on the way to the guillotine who ‘occlude’ their awareness of being bound up in the hostspace flow (their inclusion in an evolutionary spatial-relational dyamic) by re-focusing on ‘themselves’ as ‘things that do stuff’, or, to expand that slightly, as ‘independently existing local objects that source independent local behaviour that push out from their self-centers driven by ‘inner purpose’ (that must come from their inner biological workings).
the
‘epicycles’ to keep this over-simplified absolutist view ‘hanging together’, in
addition to ‘inner-purpose’ lurking somewhere in our internal biological matter
include ‘feedback’ and ‘adaptation’.
these two concepts provide an ‘at-a-distance’ re-connect between the
‘assertive agent’ who is now ‘split out of its inclusion the hostspace
flow-field’, and the ‘environment’ which is now ‘everything else but the
independent assertive agent’. in this
way, we can give our mental model based on absolute independence of the
asserting entity a simplistic means of ‘staying in touch’ with the hostspace
without having to be ‘included in it’.
this is where the epicycle of ‘sequential time’ is born; i.e. ‘time’ is
not needed in the case where we envisage space as a continuously transforming
flow-field as in relativity. time is
needed when we split out ‘objects’ from the field and describe THEIR behaviour
(in terms that see them as ‘independent’ of the hostspace field-flow). if we were doing this in the case of the
hurricane, we would say; ‘first katrina builds pressure and pushes out, then
the ‘surrounding air’ pushes back, and where it pushes back least determines
the direction that katrina will move in.
the notion of temporal sequence is thus an artifact of our mental
splitting apart of ‘the hurricane’ (the asserting agent) and ‘the environment’
everything else but the asserting agent.
this object-i-fictioning allows us to retain the logic of the excluded
middle in our conceptu
to
summarize today’s blog, ... at the bottom of many disagreements in how we
perceive and manage things is a common geometry. it is the geometry of relationship of
‘subject’ and ‘object’ and whether we can really split apart an individual
entity from the hostspace it is operating in.
as the imagery of the people in the cart shows, they can occlude the re
if one listens to gould and to vygotsky,
one concludes that it is not meaningful to conceive of ourselves as capable of
‘independent assertive accomplishments’ (that which we put in our ‘resumés’)
since the accommodative qu
if one listens to dawkins and to piaget,
one concludes not only that it is perfectly meaningful to conceive of ourselves
as capable of ‘independent assertive accomplishments’ but to reward and respect
and empower ourselves on that basis (as our western culture is wont to do).
but
if we are mesmerized by this visual re-construction of what is going on in the
world as being, as dawkins and piaget say, traceable back to the biological
internals of independent assertive agents (ignoring the inductive
behaviour-shaping influence of our situational inclusion in a common hostspace
dynamic), then what will become of the qu
the
fact is, that the men in the cart, by occluding their awareness of inclusion
within the hostspace flow, wrest themselves (merely illusionally, to be sure)
from their relationship with the land/hostspace and see themselves as included
in a new re
our
most popular evolutionary theory (dawkinsian) with its ideas of ‘the most fit’
and its ‘occlusion’ of the over-riding behaviour-shaping influence of the
feminine-accommodating qu
Weblog: March 27, 2006
yesterday’s blog spoke about the problem that even if we RATIONALLY uncover incompetent foundations in our western cultural ways, it is not simply ‘rational understanding’ that maintains the status quo but our emotional capture within our spatial-relational situation; i.e.
“...whether or not we come up with a ‘rational explanation’
... of what ‘is going wrong’ in our society, our behaviours are ‘emotionally’,
‘situationally’ shaped, and if the boss continues to ask us to trade out our
freedom for subservience to his autocratic control hierarchy in exchange for
money to live and feed our families by, and if the sovereign nation-state
continues to ask us to trade out our natural freedom for subservience to its
autocratic control hierarchy in exchange for the ‘privilege’ of being able to
reside within that region that powerful military-backed people have ‘brought
into existence’ by drawing some imaginary line border, then we could be ‘stuck’
in this status quo for a long while, a status quo that forcibly imposes
top-down rational models that
to
some, the notion of recscinding our central-control manner of organization
(i.e. subordinating it to our relationship with the land) may be
unthinkable. but is it certainly not
unthinkable for those peoples whose traditions never ‘bought into’ such
absolutism and still do not (First Nations, the country people of
the
honey bee, as he builds the hexagonal cells to keep his larvae safe, sets out
to build a little sphere, but as he does so together with his brothers, he re
there is nothing in this world that is truly ‘independent’ so we can expect practical problems any time we make ‘independence’ foundational to a social practice such as organization/governance.
our feelings inform of our inextricable inclusion in spatial-relationships and it is only our visual perception that informs of things that are purportedly ‘independent’ and stand alone like an island.
but wait a minute, the island appears to stand alone and to be independent, but it is really an independent entity? when the water level drops, the island gets bigger, when the water level rises, the island gets smaller, ... whoops, too high a tide and the island disappears. when the water level drops really low, the island is no longer an island but is connected to the ‘mainland’ and so is part of a ‘peninsula’. and if the water drops ‘all the way’ so that the ocean deeps are now exposed land, then we no longer have the concept of ‘islands’ and ‘continents’ which depended upon the intersection of water surface with the lithological landscape.
‘political tides’ rise and fall too, and borders expand and contract, nation-states emerge and submerge, but all the while we agree they exist (they only exist by our agreement) and have a name, ‘krakistan’ or whatever, we speak about ‘those krakistanis’ and ‘the krakistan economy and its rising GDP’ and ‘krakistan’ being the ‘cause’ of global unrest by its harbouring of terrorists etc. etc.
‘independence’ is a visual concept. we use visual concepts in the rational modeling in our mind..
our ‘feeling experience’ of being spatial-relationally included within a shared hostspace knows nothing of ‘independence’. we are inextricably bound up in the flow of an evolutionary dynamic (this cannot be ‘pictured’; i.e. we cannot ‘photograph’ an inclusional spatial-relationship). the sailor in a brisk wind who is tacking back and forth up the shipping channel can see what good speed he is making by his wake from his bow and stern, ... but from INFERENCE as he takes repetitive sightings of a headland or marker on the shore, he can see that he is actually being taken backwards down the channel by a strong tidal current. he is included in a flow, and his spatial-relational inclusion cannot be photographed or directly pictured, it can only be inferred..
but like the men in the cart on the way to the guillotine, we can ‘prove our independence and free will’ and get up and sing a song and dance a jig of our very own choosing, and concentrate our ‘worldview’ on ‘what we do’ as ‘independent object-entities with ‘free-will’ whose behaviour pushes off from our self-centers driven by our inner purpose, ... but all of this ritual and incantation is not going to change the REALITY that we are inextricably bound up in a spatial-relational flow THAT OUR LOCAL CENTER-BASED BEHAVIOURS ARE RELATIVE TO, rather than our behaviours being ‘ABSOLUTE’ or ‘in-their-own-right’.
of
course, the men in the cart, like western man, are free to ‘believe in’ their
visual perception based on ‘independent human-objects’ that we purport ‘exist
absolutely’ and have behaviours that emanate from their self-centers driven by
‘their inner purpose’ and that radically-limited ‘story’ will hang together
within itself, and we can even develop and v
the
problem is this; we are putting visual perception and the object-pictures it
delivers to us, in an unnatural precedence over our felt-experience that
informs us of our spatial-relational inclusion in an evolutionary dynamic. the first nations tribespeople go with their
felt experience that informs them of their spatial-relational inclusion in the
habitat (which includes themselves) and when instructions come from a central
authority that has empowered itself by imposing some imaginary line boundaries
that purportedly creates an ‘independently existing sovereign state’ whose
behaviour, since it is ‘independent’ must come from its self-center, driven by
the ‘inner purpose of the sovereign state’,
then one cannot blame the aboriginal for (a) wondering if the white man
really believes that such centr
the most important things in life are beyond being picturable, ... the feeling of being ‘held in embrace’ by a loving mother or loving other, of being held in embrace by one’s habitat, by one’s community. these are not picturable experiences but they are felt experience and they are far more ‘real’ than imaginary borders, independent objects/properties and the ‘right to power’ claimed by a central authority that has drawn an imaginary line based picture on the continuous landscape, and called it a ‘sovereign nation-state’.
is love more important? love is like a resonance we are included in, and it is therefore ‘spatial’ and we can bask inclusively within it, as in our non-picturable ‘acoustic space’.
this
difference in the capability of sensory faculties to bring us understanding of
the hostspace/habitat we are included in was much discussed by
Bruce Powers: We are constantly suppressing the awareness that the material universe is comprised of resonances; that no straight lines exist.
Marshall McLuhan: Exactly. Because the Euclidian construct is controllable. The 'center' of acoustic space is everywhere and, therefore, seemingly chaotic.
in a synopsis of McLuhans work on the difference between visual space and acoustic space (by Anthony Hempell, see http://www.cios.org/encyclopedia/mcluhan/credits.html ), visual symbol/object based perception (visual space) and felt spatial-relational experience (acoustic space) are summarized respectively as follows;
Visual and Acoustic Space
The Mind and Eye The Physiology of Visual Space
Western history has been dominated by the perception of the
world as a linear thought everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
McLuhan hypothesizes that this linearity is a side effect of the phonetic
alphabet, which compresses the range of human speech and thought into a
symbolic system of 26 characters. The result is a world view dominated by
linear logic and the symbolic abstraction of meaning.
The alphabet and writing strongly biases our communication
towards the world of visual space. Our discourse about our environment is
constricted into ideas of lines, planes and grids. The universe is perceived as
having a beginning, and at some point an end; time is constructed as a line.
These models are not necessarily "truth," but abstractions based on
our perceptive tools which are built to heighten our awareness of visual space.
McLuhan states that it may be partly due to the physiology of the human eye
(which perceives lines and perspective in great detail) that we are prone
towards the visual.
The Lost Dimension Acoustic Space
In contrast with the linear biases of visual space, acoustic
space is analogous to the natural environment. Acoustic space surrounds us; it
approaches from 360 degrees. It is a simultaneous process of "centers
everywhere and margins nowhere." Acoustic space was dominant in
pre-literate societies, where or
Writing and publishing are the main technologies that have
focused Western society on the visual; however, McLuhan claims the
counteraction of two "acoustic" technologies (cash money and the
compass), have kept us with some balance. Acoustic technologies focus on the
intangible (cash as a metaphor for value/wealth; a means of increasing the
"velocity" of the economy over barter) and the global (compass
reconstructs the world as a navigable sphere).
Table 2 Attributes of Visual and Acoustic Space
* * *
Visual Space:
Left hemisphere of the brain
Linear, sequential; based on the line, plane, grid,
perspective.
Heightens response of the eye.
Linear conceptualization, [universal sequential time],
causality.
* * *
* * *
Acoustic Space
Right hemisphere of the brain
Gyroscopic, 360 degrees, reflective, reverberant,
simultaneous.
Heightens response of the ear (balance)
Oral culture, myth, time as a cycle.
* * *
to summarize today’s blog, we live in a world which we can understand on the basis of visual perception (of ‘objects’[visual symbols] and ‘what they do’) and on the basis of our felt experience of inclusion in spatial relationships. our euro-american western culture has developed a propensity for putting visual perception based on abstract visual symbols, into an unnatural precedence over our felt experience of spatial-relational attunement to our local habitat and to one another. our behaviours are guided by both at the same time, by the rational acceptance of a central authority of an imaginary-line based ‘sovereign nation-state’ AND AT THE SAME TIME by our attuned spatial-relational inclusion within a common hostspace that includes the social collective.
conflict inevitably arises between the two. when the imaginary borders were drawn around the US and Canada to give rise to notional ‘central authorities’ in washington and ottawa, the instructions that issued forth down through the autocratic control hierarchy governance organizations imposed european-christian ethics on the indigenous peoples whose allegiance was to the land, the sacred hostspace in which they were included that embodied the traditions of their ancestors. their resistance led to their suppression by force.
today, the western powers continue to use the now euro-american notion of the ‘sovereign democratic state’ in iraq and afghanistan, installing ‘puppet’ central control authorities (‘puppet’ since they could not sustain themselves without protective backup from the outside ‘protecting powers’) which ‘clashes’ with the tribespeople who find themselves re-defined SYMBOLICALLY as ‘iraqis’ and ‘afghanis’ by the ‘fact’ that their local habitat and place of residence happens to fall within the imaginary line borders of the abstract ‘sovereign nation states’ of ‘iraq’ and ‘afghanistan’.
the modern euro-american sense of ‘justice’ and ‘ethics’ are thus infused through the ‘puppet’ central authority, creating a ‘backpressure’ between the central authority and the local peoples of the region who are still ‘coming from’ their evolved relationship with the land and one another. this conflict between visual space based central authority (the central authority that derives from abstractly ‘objectifying’ the land) and the felt-experience based attunement to the natural habitat tends to induce insurgency against the puppet central authority.
while
western nations used their own internal strife and dynamical balance-seeking
experience to evolve equal rights for women and for different religious factions,
they are now imposing these values (along with property-ownership and
free-market economics), from the outside, onto other peoples (through
protective agreements with their central authorities) whose practices are SEEN
as ‘medieval’ and ‘barbaric’.
individual who are included in evolve spatial relationships with the
land and with one another are thus ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’
with respect to evolving their practice, and also as regards the question of
which deserves precedence, the visual space-based central authority of the
symbolic sovereign state, or the acoustic space-based a-centric spatial
relationship with the land. within the
western nations themselves, this question of precedence continues to be a ‘live
one’ as indicated by movements to ‘pull out of’ the central authority based
scheme and to renew the relationship with the land and one another which is
being destroyed by the mono-cultur
it may require a bloodbath of epic proportions for western powers, operating from ‘noblesse oblige’, to impose their own current values on the ‘medieval and barbaric laggards’ of the world through the installation of ‘western style democratic sovereign nation-states’ headed up by ‘friendly-to-the-west’ locals who no longer need to work with their brothers in evolving the local traditions since they have the backing of powerful others to impose western style justice (protection of individual independence and ownership of independent property) and ethics, along with free-market global economics that also operates on the basis of independent object-entities (corporations) with autocratic hierarchies and rewards the most powerful win/lose competitors almost regardless of the ‘collateral damage’ done to our shared hostspace.
in short, the visual space paradigm of the west is having us believe that we can take control of our own evolution using centrally imposed rationally structured plans backed by force, over-riding man’s spontaneous relationship with the land and one another which brings us back to ‘education’ and the different views of piaget (structured learning) and vygotsky (situational learning) discussed in yesterday’s blog.
which way should society evolve? by imposed nonspontaneous structural learning? ... or by spontaneous situational learning? in first nations terms; by ‘hawk learning’ or by ‘eagle learning’ (see paula undewood’s definitions of these in A Native American Worldview at www.goodshare.org/ecoethic.htm )
it is not hard to see piaget’s educational theory at work in the global politics of the western powers.
Weblog: March 26, 2006
Yesterday, a friend reminded me that; “it takes a long time to stop the forward momentum of deeply held belief systems...even when they no longer serve but to maintain the status quo”.
that’s the funny thing about working on what i work on, and reach out to share via this website and other activiities; i.e. i acknowledge that our sense of inclusion in the world is through FEELING EXPERIENCE, while our rational view of a world ‘out there’ is through the DETACHED OBJECTIVITY of visually perceiving voyeurs who stare with the cold judgement of the crow into the living evolutionary dynamic that ‘is us’. how then can i expect that, because i, or someone else, can convincingly establish, by rational argument, that our current western worldview is built on an incompetent foundation of local objects with self-center-based behaviour, that that ‘clears everything up’ and we can simply shift our behaviour over to the more competent ‘inclusional’ foundation wherein our relationship to our hostspace is more like the relationship between the hurricane and the atmosphere.
the fact is, there are many aboriginals and buddhists and taoists and hindu vedics in the world who already embrace the notion that we are ‘included in nature’ and that is what we all believed at one time (i.e. we are all ‘indigenous peoples’ of the world, some of us have just ‘forgotten’ that dirty business, just as parmenides, the father of binary thinking in the west, tried to forget the dirty business of his own birth which he found ‘disgusting’).
the
writings on this website are in western scientific terms and deal with how we
construct our western worldview and the role of western analytical science in
this, in particular, which has become so fond of imposing the convention of
absolute euclidian space and time framing on everything, we have come to
confuse the simplified imagery it delivers, for ‘re
in
fact, early on in working on ‘incluson
if
you put on a blindfold and get on the back of a motorcycle, you will be able to
FEEL the accelerations and to mentally integrate them in your mind (the first
integral gives relative velocity (relative speed and direction) and the second
integration gives distance. if you are
taken, still blindfolded, to a debriefing room, you can take a pencil and paper
and draw out the trajectory of your journey.
if you have a couple of c
this brings out the point that ‘forward’ and ‘backward’, our everday terms for describing VISION-based motion are ‘absolute motion’ terms that imply a fixed point location. our ability to DIRECTLY SENSE ACCELERATION informs us when the acceleration is zero there is no such thing as ‘stasis’ or ‘motionlessness’ available to our felt sensing of inclusion within an accelerational or gravitational field (e.g. the astronaut in a weightless, zero-gravity condition, may be in motion at a very high speed, depending upon what ‘fixed point’ we want to use to reference his motion to; e.g. ‘the center of the earth’ or ‘the edge of the expanding universe’ etc.
this brings us to the point that ‘visual perception of motion is in terms of ‘absolute motion’ and is thus ‘subjective’ since it depends upon a subjective choice of reference frame, usually ‘moi’. this was a long-standing problem in physics that ‘relativity theory’ overcame. that is, while one observer says the velocity and hence the kinetic energy (one half the mass times the square of the velocity) of the baseball bat he is holding still in his hands is zero, the pedestrian on the street who is struck by the bat that extends out the window of the speeding car in which the man who is holding it is riding, sees the velocity of the bat and its kinetic energy as very large.
‘visual perception’ is subjective since it is ‘absolute’ and depends upon the choice of absolute frame.
‘feeling experience’ (of the inertial guidance type) is relative and is of the form where one is an included inertial element within an accelerational universe. it is purely spatial-relational and free of dependency on absolute (euclidian) space-frames.
these are two ways of understanding our inclusion in the world, ‘seeing’ is absolutist/judgement based while ‘feeling’ is relative spatial-relationship based.
our western culture has made ‘seeing’ (visual space in macluhan’s terms) foundational to our representing of the world (setting aside the ‘feeling’ based representation), while the aboriginal tradition has made ‘feeling’ (acoustic space in macluhan’s terms) foundational to our representing of the world with visual perception in a supporting role..
where the western culture maintains that ‘seeing/judging is believing’, the aboriginal and eastern (buddhist, taoist) culture maintains that ‘feeling/relating is believing’.
we are now experiencing rising conflict between those who would hold ‘seeing/judging’ or ‘feeling/relating’ as deserving ‘precedence’ over the other.
wherever we are, we are included in spatial relationships, access to the forest for building materials, to streams or ocean for fish to eat, to the plains for game and to one another for the diversity of skills that sustain community. this, our ‘human-hostspace’ (human-habitat) spatial relationship which includes our relationship with one another is something we can ‘attune to’ and sustain harmony with. when multiple participants attune and sustain harmony via the human-earth relationship, we have ‘community’ in the natural and aboriginal sense of ‘community’.
western man, meanwhile, by declaring the objectification of regions of space by the specification of imaginary line-borders and designating the objectified space as a ‘nation-state’ capable of ‘its own independent behaviour’, creates the need for a ‘central governing authority’ that will be responsible for the ‘independent nation-state behaviour’ that is mentally modeled as pushing out from the center of the nation-state driven by an inner (national) purpose.
in
spite of this all being based onthe
purely imaginary (non-physical re
the potential for conflict coming from the meeting of the imaginary rational model and the real relationships with the land and with one another is evident.
the
instructions cascading down through the autocratic control hierarchy are based
on rational models (models which are ignorant of our inclusional spatial
relationships with our habitat and one another). thus the centr
herein manifests the debate between the russian developmental psychologist lev vygotsky (who advocated SITUATION-INDUCED learning based on one’s inclusion in spatial-relationships) and the swiss developmental psychologist jean piaget (who advocated ‘structured learning’ based on our internal biological abilities to CONSTRUCT our ‘knowing’ as in his ‘genetic epistemology’);
Jean Piaget says; —
“I think that all structures are constructed and that the fundamental feature
is the course of this construction: Nothing is given at the start, except some
limiting points on which all the rest is based. The structures are neither
given in advance in the human mind nor in the external world, as we perceive or
organize it.” — Jean Piaget
* * *
Lev Vygotsky says; — "Piaget comes to the conclusion
that the child's thought is devoid of objectivity, critical approach,
understanding of relations, and stability --- in a word, those characteristics
essential for mastering historical material. Consequently, on the one hand,
spontaneous concepts are shown to be of no value in rendering systematic
knowledge. Piaget 'resolves' this contradiction by suggesting a principle of
antagonism between development and learning. It seems that when he says that
nothing is more important for effective teaching than a thorough knowledge of
the spontaneous thought of children, he means that the child's thought must be
known as any enemy must be known in order to be fought successfully.
We shall counter these erroneous premises with the premise
that the development of nonspontaneous concepts must possess all the traits
peculiar to the child's thought at each developmental level because these
concepts are not simply acquired by rote but evolve with the aid of strenuous
mental activity on the part of the child himself. We believe that the two
processes --- the development of spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts ---
are related and constantly influence each other. They are parts of a single
process: The development of concept formation, which is affected by varying
external and internal conditions but is essentially a unitary process, not a
conflict of antagonistic, mutual exclusive forms of thinking." — Lev
Vygotsky
vygotsky is implying that our spontaneous concepts that form out of our felt situational (inclusion in spatial-relationships) experience and our nonspontaneous (structured) concepts constitute a dynamical one-ness in the manner our felt experience of inertial inclusion (in an accelerative field) and our visual perception of material structure constitutes a (holo-) dynamical one-ness. vygotsky suggests that our developing of one in context with the other is evident early on, as in this example;
“When we observe the child in action, it becomes obvious
that it is not only the word ‘mama’ that means, say, ‘Mama, put me in the
chair, ‘ but the child’s whole behaviour at that moment (his reaching out toward the chair, trying to
hold on to it etc.). Here the
‘affective-conative’ directedness towards an object (to use Meumann’s terms) is
as yet inseparable from the ‘intentional tendency’ of speech. The two are still a homogeneous whole, and
the only correct translation of mama, or of any other early words,
is the pointing gesture [i.e. the spatial-relational transformation
induced appeal attaches to the word and even after we soci
in
our modern western society, the ideas of piaget now largely shape our
educational system and thus the default is (abstract logic-based) ‘structured learning’
that is given precedence so as to ‘drive out’ any interference from
(spatial-relationship-inclusion-based) ‘situational learning’. such an education prepares the child for an
adulthood in which he can ‘rise up the ladder’ of autocratic control hierarchies
and impose clever rational models on a populace that has traded out its natural
freedom for subservience to a ‘central authority’ in exchange for ‘the
privilege of residence’ or the ‘privilege of employment’ and thus has agreed to
comply with top-down imposed schemes which
the
‘identity’ or ‘value’ of the westernized person thus shifts to ‘what they do’
(their ‘assertive achievements regardless of how they may do injury to
spatial-relational harmonies) as a purportedly INDEPENDENT individual, rather
than the person’s value being grounded in attunement to the spatial-relational
situations in which they are included.
the western ‘leader’ in government and in business is rewarded for
imposing rational plans that may well serve to
“We see this in corporations, civil institutions as well as [western]
governments – the upshot is that those ‘in control’ of the game rules become
largely concerned with their position, status and rewards, and in keeping
‘power’ centered in themselves, since there is no real accountability in the
system. Those exercising authority over the policy decisions, are not
responsible for their implementation or execution. Accordingly, the ‘top’
has the ‘bottom’ to blame if nothing happens or corruption and other
pathological ‘products’ of this model emerge, and the ‘bottom’ can blame the
top, because they are ‘only doing their duty’ as prescribed, and not
responsible for the system, since they have no authority to change anything and
are not allowed to make effective or efficient decisions about how to do what
they do. Within governance, this is in effect, a circle of ‘lawlessness’
and impunity. It is also a recipe for corruption, gridlock, polarization
and unaccountability.” --- Martine Dodds-Taljaard, The Challenge of
Governance in an Interdependent World.
--- (Note: Martine presented her
paper jointly with mine, Indigenous Wisdom and its Lessons for the Systems
Sciences, in a panel presentation at the world congress of systems sciences
in toronto in 2000. both papers capture the same ‘inclusional’ findings in
different terms; i.e. by martine in terms of governance, and by myself in terms
of community as ‘complex system’ .
to
summarize today’s blog then, ... whether or not we come up with a ‘rational
explanation’, as has been attempted herein, of what ‘is going wrong’ in our
society, our behaviours are ‘emotionally’, ‘situationally’ shaped, and if the
boss continues to ask us to trade out our freedom for subservience to his
autocratic control hierarchy in exchange for money to live and feed our
families by, and if the sovereign nation-state continues to ask us to trade out
our natural freedom for subservience to its autocratic control hierarchy in
exchange for the ‘privilege’ of being able to reside within that region that
powerful military-backed people have ‘brought into existence’ by drawing some
imaginary line border, then we could be ‘stuck’ in this status quo for a long
while, a status quo that forcibly imposes top-down rational models that
children
who are rewarded for their gifts of abstract reasoning within a structured,
not-situational, educational system (i.e. out of the context of situational
meaning) will be prone, later in life, to forcing the application of abstract
models simply because they are a means that justifies a purported ‘good end’,
and out of the context that those having responsibility for operation
Weblog: March 25, 2006
are
we ‘controlled’ by intellectuals, ... those people that get ‘good marks’ (are rated
high relative to our current paradigm of understanding) and who ‘rise into
positions of power’? and are we
currently undergoing some kind of ‘anti-intellectual’ revolution? (some intellectuals are suggesting that our
western culture is suffering from ‘sophiaphobia’, ‘fear of wisdom’ since their
audience seems to be dwindling, but cynics might say that we are rejecting
western intellectu
what exactly are ‘intellectuals’? Native elders (male and female) were key influencers in the native culture based on their ‘wisdom’ but that doesn’t fly in our modern western society. we may appreciate our equivalent of ‘elders’ locally, but they are not elected or appointed to positions of power either within corporations or political governance systems.
native writers (e.g. taiaiake alfred Peace, Power and Righteousness: an indigenous manifesto:) note the fundamental difference in the nature of personal power of leadership in the indigenous peoples society and in western euro-american society. while the power of the indigenous leader is drawn directly from the people, the power of the western euro-american leader is drawn from ‘position’.
those of us who have experienced ‘big promotions’ and ‘big demotions’ experience how differently one is treated depending upon whether one is ‘on his way up’ or ‘on his way down’ in the position hierarchy. ‘on the way up’, people who yesterday would have nothing to do with us, are now tugging at the forelock and promising us their unending fidelity and commitment. this is not uncommonly traded out for mockery and contempt at the news that we are ‘on the way down’.
understandably, many people resent having to be subservient to someone in a ‘higher position’ just because they occupy that higher position and thus ‘their word is thy command’ (however stupid and uninformed it may be).
there is a ubiquitous foundational ‘geometry’ that characterizes this euro-american approach to power-based organizing and it is very simple, so simple that it has become invisible to us westerners because we grow up with it being imbued and embodied in almost everything we do, yet it is entirely unlike the organizing approach of the indigenous peoples culture.
here it is;
as you can see, this is a general way of LOOKING AT THE WORLD , breaking it up into objects and ascribing to them their own self-centered existence and their own self-centered behaviour, but it is certainly not the only way of UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD since our experience informs us that the world is a continuously evolving hostspace that everything is inextricably bound up in and continuously being recycled in.
only
if we are ‘liter
"We cannot build physics on the basis of the
matter-concept alone. But the division
into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and
energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and
build a pure field physics? What
impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a
comparatively small space. We could
regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background
could be created. Its final aim would be
the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws v
‘centr
could it be that this notion of ‘independent existence’ and ‘independent behaviour’ of ‘objects’ is just our ‘contrivance’?
how could it be otherwise? we should have to deny a lot of our own scientific findings (relativity and quantum theory) in order to insist on the ‘independence’ of animate and inanimate self-centered objects.
there is a clue to how we westerners deceive ourselves in the metaphor of the people in the cart being taken to the guillotine. this is a metaphor for being inextricably bound up in a ‘flow’ that takes precedence over our notion of local self-centered behaviour (our individual ‘free-will’). what we ‘see’ when we ‘zoom in’ is the people in the cart exercising their free will and behaviours that push out from their self-centers driven by their individual, independent inner-purpose. as we look at them and ‘what they do’, we tend to ignore or set aside, for the moment, their inclusion within an over-riding hostspace flow. in this metaphor, the rectangular cart, its floor and sides, provides a ‘reference frame’ that separates the people out from the hostspace flow they are included in. we, the observer, impose such reference frames all the time, in order to split out ‘the objects of our observation and ‘what they do’’ from the hostspace flow or ‘evolutionary dynamic’. the cart, in this case, just makes this apparent.
in the case of poincaré’s ‘does the earth rotate; --- no, it does not rotate’, since this would require an ‘absolute space’ that it was rotating relative to and an absolute self-center-based objecthood and a self-center-sourced behaviour for the earth. as poincaré says, it is convenient for us to impose this CONVENTION of an absolute euclidian space-frame on our mental modeling of nature, but such convention-imposing, which is for no other reason than the convenience of simplification, is NOT IMPOSED ON NATURE.
so, the men in the cart on the way to the guillotine can easily ‘prove’ their free-will and independent (self-center-based) existence and behaviour to themselves WITHIN THE LOCAL SPACE-FRAME and the observer can easily be comfortable with their independent (self-center-based) existence and behaviour WITHIN THE LOCAL SPACE-FRAME, but such independent self-centeredness is merely being imposed on our mental modeling and is in no way being imposed on nature; i.e. they remain inextricably included within the larger spatial-relational flow-dynamic of the community (the revolutionary dynamic) which in turn is inclusionally nesting within the spatial-relational evolutionary flow-dynamic (‘nature’).
the
aboriginal tradition
WE DIDN'T CROSS THE
BORDER: THE BORDER CROSSED US!
What are borders? What is the
however,
to the euro-american acculturated individual, it is very difficult to ‘let go’
of their acculturated beliefs in absolute space and accept that their ‘nation’
(property-object-based rather than people-based) is simply an ‘imaginary entity’
that is born to serve the convenience of simplification as with the ‘centr
all
of this is a ‘neat way’ of MENTALLY extracting innately interdependent
dynamical entities from their inclusion within the hostspace flow (the
‘evolutionary dynamic’) and endowing them with self-center-based independence
of existence and behaviour, ... but the representation of the world that we
‘re-construct’ from these ‘independent objects’ depends solely on our ‘belief’
in these ide
for
many, this ‘independent self-center-based objects’ with its center-sourced
behaviour (centr
aboriginal
tribes-people, both on a local community level and on a transcommunity level
used their relationship with the common hostspace to organize, rather than
central authority by an autocratic control hierarchy. this approach had some similarity with modern
peer-to-peer networking as has been enabled by the internet, and a revival of
the aboriginal peer-to-peer organizing ethic is re-emerging by way of internet
communications; e.g. the ‘zapatista’ movement in chiapas which continues to
network on a global basis as the following excerpt from John Holloway and
Eloína Peláez’s Zapatista!
Reinventing Revolution in
“Properly understood, the working relationship that has
developed between the indigenous and peasant struggles in what most people
think of as "primitive" or "backward" Chiapas and the
"modern, high-tech" world of computer communications systems is not
as surprising as many seem to think. Well before the uprising,
Moreover, as part of their struggles to resist exploitation
and oppression and to develop their own ways of life and community structures,
they have developed their own forms of self-organization which turned out to be
complementary to the computer systems with which they would link up. In efforts
that have been renewed throughout their history, long before the beginnings of
Zapatista organizing, they have drawn on old communal customs and invented new
ones as alternatives to co-optation by the Mexican party-state, e.g., the
conversion of local leaders into caciques working for the long
governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Within the dynamics of
such dramatic changes as hydroelectric development and jungle colonization, the
workers of
On the other side of the symbiosis, the cyberspace world of
computer communication networks was itself already the terrain of manifold
struggles and thus open to appropriation by those whose own forms of
organization were pre-disposed to building strength through linkages with
others”
meanwhile,
today’s blog is neither about supporting or resisting transnationally networked
forms of ‘revolution’ or ‘resistance’ to the advancing ‘centr
no,
this blog is aimed at bringing-to-greater-awareness the philosophical
assumptions that underly such rising conflict in the modern world; i.e. the
artifici
for
my own part, having lived in
are we independent self-centered objects which require central governing authority by autocratic control hierarchies? or are we inclusions in the evolutionary field-flow dynamic? is god ‘outside of nature’ or does ‘Nature = God’ as Proclus maintained, making us and everything into ‘una gente in Dios’?.
Weblog: March 23,
2006 (The URL for this particular
March 23rd
entry is www.goodshare.org/blog.htm#james
)
An
excerpt from my yesterday’s blog was posted on
“It [the discussion on inclusion
whether we are driving within a busy traffic flow or pursuing work objectives within a busy industry, we run into this question of whether we should just ‘bull our way through’ or whether we should ‘give way’ to others. our intuition suggests to us that ‘harmony’ versus ‘’conflict’ are tied up in our collective manner of resolving this question. one way to resolve it is by a ‘hierarchy of rights-of-way’ where the lower classes must give way to the upper classes. but this promotes peer-to-peer conflict since the right-of-way is unresolved in the case where multiple peers each demand the other ‘give way’.
in general, a multiplicity of individuals operating within a common space is faced with this question and the influence of ‘how we deal with this ‘bull-through-or-give-way’ question on the overall ‘flow-dynamic’ becomes complex since we are speaking of multiple participants moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence. this non-resolvability of this problem, encountered by kepler, then newton, then poincaré in regard to solar system dynamics, is called ‘the three-body problem. that is, THERE IS NO ANSWER in terms of ‘what an individual should do’ in order to avoid conflict.
why do you think this is?
it is because the notion of ‘individual behaviour’ vanishes when one is operating within a condition of simultaneous mutual influence, as experienced by the INCLUDED experient (the individual driver in the traffic flow, the individual planet in the solar system).
individual behaviour is something that is declared by the ‘excluded observer’. poincaré brings this out by showing that it is not true that ‘the earth rotates’ (it is a meaningless statement). if is true, then it implies that the earth is rotating relative to something else, but what is that ‘something else’? if we say ‘space’ then we are imposing the notion of ‘absolute space’, a pervasive rigid emptiness that is mutually exclusive from the matter of the earth. but it is not scientific to impose such an absolute convention because we can never prove that space is absolute; i.e. there is no experiment we can propose that could confirm that ‘space is absolute’. furthermore, relativity suggests that the matter of the earth is a local concentration of energy within the energy-field (i.e. ‘space’ can be seen as an energy flow-field in which matter is local concentrations of energy, ... ‘undulations’ in the wavey substance of space in quantum theory).
thus, we cannot attribute to the earth ‘its own behaviour’. what we know is that it moves relative to the sun and other planets, the moons and asteroids etc. thus the ‘reference frame’ is no longer ‘absolute space’ but the overall ‘traffic-flow’ dynamic.
this is what comes up in the ‘three-body problem’. imagine you are one of four aerobatics pilots making the figure of an ‘inverting triangular pyramid’. three of you are making a ‘shrinking triangle’ by flying in a horizontal plane towards a common virtual ‘collision point’. the fourth pilot is climbing vertically so as to ‘thread the needle’ (penetrate the shrinking triangle just before it shrinks to a point, inverts and beings enlarging again). you are all of course going to avoid collision by a hair to thrill and excite the crowd watching the airshow from the ground below.
if you should ‘crash’, how will it be determined ‘which pilot caused the crash’?
there is no explicit solution to this question since you are each letting your behaviour be driven by the form of the collective dynamic you are co-creating. you are participating in a purely spatial-relational dynamic which has no absolute reference frame and thus allows no such concept as ‘individual behaviour’. if one pilot gooses it or shifts his relative positioning due to a gust of wind, everyone else must put their movements in the service of sustaining the evolving geometric form that is, at the same time, the reference frame for their individual movements.
in order to allocate ‘causal fault’, one would first need to establish ‘individual behaviour’ so as to assess whose behaviour was ‘better’ and whose ‘worse’, but in order to establish individual behaviour one needs an absolute space frame (as in poincaré’s example pointing out the falsehood of the statement ‘the earth rotates’) and that is NOT available in a system of purely relative ‘spatial relationships’.
perhaps it may appear as if one pilot was ‘out of step with the rest’ but then the job of all of the pilots was to sustain the purely relative geometric form and ‘the majority has no monopoly what is right’. in fact, any subcollective, by entering into an accord with one another and forcing the odd man out to make up the difference, invokes a synthetically absolute ‘correctness reference’ based on majority accord which then becomes the very source of conflict.
the basic point here is that we can either accept that we as a dynamical collective moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence ARE the reference frame that we as individuals are moving/behaving relative to, or we can suppose that THERE EXISTS an absolute reference frame (absolute euclidian space) that allows us to describe the movement/behaviour of the individual in his own INDEPENDENT right. this makes each individual’s movement/behaviour ABSOLUTE rather than relative to (and thus inseparable from) the dynamic of the collective.
this ‘absolute motion’ (implying an absolute reference space/frame) is what is implied when we say that ‘it was pilot number 3 who was ‘moving too slow’ or was too far the north etc. that caused the collision’.
how did we ‘get’ this absolute reference frame?
it is ‘reverse-engineered’ from the ‘assumed correct’ behaviours of the majority. i.e. the assumption of ‘correct individual behaviour’ implies ‘independent individual behaviour’ (rather than relative behaviour) which implies in turn, absolute reference space.
now, when we ‘plot’ the notional ‘individual behaviour’ of the ‘odd man out’ relative to this implied ‘absolute space’, we can say things like, ... ‘look, he was already behind on his turn here and he took it too wide, then when he approached the shrinking triangle, he came in too late for safely passing through it, when it had become too small for him to get through, thus he endangered everyone’s lives.
the fact is, the task of everyone involved was to ‘sustain harmonious collective flow’ while co-creatively forming an inverting pyramid in which all four points are relative to one another and moving under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence. in such an undertaking there is no such thing as ‘individual movement/behaviour nor is there any notion that ‘the shrinking triangle’ can be ‘correctly executed’ while the ‘threading the needle’ is ‘botched’ (the outside observer can ‘take the pyramid apart’ but not the participants who are its simultaneous mutually influencing four vertices).
meanwhile, the outside observer would tend to say just that, and to allow accord amongst a subcollective to establish the ‘norm’ for ‘correctness’, at which point the ‘absolute reference space’ is imposed and we can then talk about ‘individual behaviours’ in terms of their ‘correctness’ or ‘erroneousness’.
but what good is it if we use the majority to define an absolute reference for behaviour and on this basis speak about the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of individual behaviour, when what we would really like is to sustain spatial-relational harmony of the entire collective. all we have done is opened the door for crony majorities to determine ‘correct behaviour’; i.e. to artificially impose absolutized individual behaviour.
this
is what western man does, but what does nature do? as kepler noted in Harmonices Mundi (Harmonies of
the World) in 1619;
"Nun aber tragen zur Vervollkommnung der Welt mehr die
Gesamtharmonien aller Planeten bei als die einzelnen Harmonien bei je zwei und
die Paare von Harmonien bei je zwei benachbarten Planeten. Denn die Harmonie
ist gewissermaßen ein Band der Vereinigung. Es liegt aber eine weitergehende
Vereinigung vor, wenn alle Planeten miteinander eine Harmonie bilden, als wenn
immer je zwei für sich in doppelter Weise harmonieren. Im Widerstreit dieser
Harmonien mußte daher von den beiden Harmoniereihen, die Planetenpaare
miteinander bilden, die eine oder andere nachgeben, damit die Gesamtharmonien
aller bestehen konnte."
"Now, the 'harmony-of-the-whole of all the planets
contributes more to the perfection of the world than the single harmonies by
twos and the pairs of harmonies by the twos of neighbouring planets. For
harmony is, so to speak, a volume of unity. A deeper unity yet is presented,
when all the planets form a harmony with each another, as when just two at a
time harmonize in a bivalent manner. In the interference of these harmonies
deriving from the dual harmonic line-ups, which the pairs of planets form with
each another, the one or the other giving way,
so that the [spatial-relational] harmony-of-the- whole can
prevail."
the point here is this; movement/behaviour in nature is inherently RELATIVE and SPATIAL-RELATIONAL and there aren’t really any absolute reference frames and therefore there is no such thing as ‘individual behaviour’ in-its-own-independent-right’. the individual behaves relative to the collective dynamic (spatial relationships) in which he is included. the traffic flow he is included in, which involves a multiplicity of participants moving under one another’s simultaneous influence IS A MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE REFERENCE FRAME (continuously evolving, to be sure) for his behaviour. in order to even have something called ‘individual behaviour’ to judge as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we have to first declare an absolute reference frame, and there is no ‘natural way’ to do this. we can only reverse-engineer it by anchoring it to the behavioural pattern of some sub-collective (such as the pilots forming the shrinking triangle) and insisting that the behaviours of ‘the other individuals’ should be in conformance with the former. that is, the very notion of individual behaviour, which requires an absolute reference frame, depends on our allowing the behavioural pattern of a subcollective to define an absolute reference frame.
the three aerobatic pilots whose actions were consistent within themselves may walk away from a crash inquiry feeling that ‘they were right’ and that ‘the fourth pilot was wrong’ which means that they set themselves up as the absolute reference frame that allows for the concept of individual behaviour. but their mission was for each to ‘nachgeben’, to let their own behaviours ‘give way’ in order to sustain the harmony of the whole team, and insofar as they were unable, as a team, to do this, the fault lies with the team and cannot be attributed to any individual behaviour since ‘individual behaviour’ is not a meaningful concept without an absolute reference space-frame.
my
sense is that james’ observation is de
“It [the discussion
on inclusion
in
order to integrate this ‘nachgeben’ principle into our theoretic structures, we
have to revisit the shift in thinking as to the nature of dynamics that took
place between kepler and newton (newton imposed absolute space and time in
order to develop absolute laws of motion for individual object behaviour) and
to the observation by poincaré that we cannot re
the control hierarchy organizational method which demands subservience of its lesser participants to its greater participants is a means of setting up an absolute reference frame that enables us to speak of ‘individual behaviour’ and whether it is ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in the sense of whether it is conformant to the instructions of the absolute reference frame (constituted by the absolute central authority).
the
peer-to-peer organizational method does not necessarily escape from absolute
reference frames and judgement of individual behaviour since, as in the example
of the aerobatics team, this absolutist condition can be established by
peer-to-peer subcollectives who themselves embrace the ethic of absolute
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ rather than ‘nachgeben’ in support of sustaining overall
harmony. in order to avoid crony subcollective
imposed absolutism and sustain overall harmony, individuals and subcollectives
(teams, any type of peer-to-peer organization) must employ the art of
‘nachgeben’, the one or the other giving way, so that the [spatial-relational]
harmony-of-the- whole can prevail."
Weblog: March 22, 2006 (The URL for this particular
March 22 entry is www.goodshare.org/blog.htm#p2p
)
today, like every day, when i wake up in the morning i am aware of being included in a hostspace that can be sunny and warm, or, as it is today, cloudy and windy. like a frog in water that is slowly coming to a boil, i am inextricably bound up in the space i inhabit and as goes my hostspace, so go i.
how
is it then, that like the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine, i can
turn the tables, declare my free will and
how
is it that italy under mussolini, and later britain, france and the US could
invent some imaginary boundaries and impose them on a huge piece of north
africa, converting the geographical region of ‘libya’ into the INDEPENDENT
sovereign nation-state ‘protectorate’ of ‘libya’ and installing a puppet
constitutional monarch, king idris, as its central authority? the central authority, backed by his
protectors, having centr
the
concept of ‘property’, the ide
without
the imaginary line borders and without the notion of property, we were ‘free
men’ in a natural sense. with our
imposing of these ide
WE DIDN'T CROSS THE
BORDER: THE BORDER CROSSED US!
What are borders? What is the
the
concept of the independent human being follows exactly the same pattern and
biologists and philosophers are set against one another today, in arguing over
the ide
such
an over-simplified piece of ide
so
that’s how the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine can refocus,
mutually exclude himself from the habitat-flow (evolutionary dynamic) he is
included in, and assign more importance to his ide
all of this ‘miraculously’ (superstitiously) extricates him from his inextricable inclusion in the hostspace he is situationally included in. like the frog that is in water being slowly heated towards the boil, ... or like the man in the cart being taken to the guillotine, the individual can consistently demonstrate ‘his INDEPENDENCE’, that he can move in this direction or that, whenever he chooses to exercise his ‘free will’ to do so.
that’s
how strong this ‘ide
such
an ide
so,
really, ... how truthful is it for us to render our vision of the world in the
ide
should we NOT give precedence to our felt experience of INCLUSION in the world hostspace, as comes from our acoustic sensory faculties and our inertial guidance/balancing faculties which orient us in a purely relative spatial relational sense, or should we give precedence to our visual perception that EXCLUDES us from the common, shared space we inhabit as it is informing us of the behaviour of ‘INDEPENDENT OBJECTS/PROPERTIES’ ‘OUT THERE’?
once
we invent some imaginary lines to ‘objectify’ a region and make a ‘property’
out of it, as in the case of ‘the sovereign nation-state’ we can, the next
moment, say; ‘The US did this’ and, ‘the US did that’ etc., and not even blink
an eye as to superfici
“As Indigenous people we make no distinction between the
and anyways, what would our exalted western medicine and psychiatrists do without the model of our body as a ‘sovereign property’ that is centrally governed? if we did away with that, we would have to concede the illness was a falling out of inhabitant-habitat dynamical balance, rather than focusing on the secondary symptoms of such unbalancing in the interior of the centrally managed ‘independent’ property known as the ‘human being’.
* * *
thus,
our western acceptance of ‘central control hierarchy’ which is bound up in the
western ide
the
day before yesterday was
[
these
goodshare webpages resonate with similar intention to that which are embodied
in the collected works and dialogue which
what
is missing in most of the writings on P2P in
“Peer to peer is specifically
the relational dynamic that arises in distributed networks. ... It is a
specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its
participants , organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the
performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of
decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the
network. ... Cooperation must be free,
not forced, ... It exists to produce something. It enables the widest possible
participation. ... Whereas participants in hierarchical systems are subject to
the panoptism of the select few who control the vast majority, in P2P systems,
participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see
the whole.”
what the writers are NOT talking about
(generally speaking) is the cooperation of the ‘wildgeese’ and ‘exceptionally
performing teams’ which, rather than emanating from the assertive actions of
discrete participants, involves the manner in which the dynamical
inhabitant-habitat balance is achieved (through attunement and sustaining
harmony). that is, when one
acknowledges that the dynamics of the inhabitant and the habitat dynamic are
relative (rather than seeing the inhabitants as INDEPENDENT pieces of property
whose actions push out from their self-centers driven by their ‘inner-purpose’)
the way is opened for achieving the condition of ‘resonance’ in the
inhabitant-habitat’ codynamic.
this is the cooperation of the wildgeese
as they fly in their inverted ‘V’ formation and it involves their relationship
with the space they are included in which coordinates their relationship with
one another. cooperation which is pure
logical cooperation amongst a multitude of ‘independent’ participant objects is
‘ide
both the control hierarchy organizational
model and the ‘peer-to-peer’ model defined above are based on the highly
unlikely (impossible, in fact) scenario where the organization operates in
empty (euclidian) space. in re
‘holoptism’ is not an option in the ‘real
world’ wherein a diverse multiplicity of cooperative ventures are underway
within a common, shared hostspace. a
local ‘group activity’ within an ecosystem does not have a ‘holoptic view’ of
the entire ecosystem (which, for example, have been shown to put sockeye salmon
in interdependence with pacific coast rain forests via the connecting services
of grizzly bears). the individual teams
in nature let the actu
my aim is not to ‘put down’ the P2P initiative but rather to support it (by broadening it, so that it acknowledges the hostspace dynamic in which all ‘realworld’ (as opposed to rationally modeled) P2P initiatives must transpire within.)
in
a nutshell, the thrust of the current thinking articulated in P2P
News and the P2P Foundation blog is rational/causal (employing the logic of
mutual exclusion) while the thrust of P2P in goodshare.org (and in ‘inclusion
(1.)
in its simplest-because-ide
(2.)
a more complex and re
the more complex form of peer-to-peer (2.) includes the simple form of peer-to-peer (1.) as a (mathematically) degenerate case in the same way that the euclidian space of classical dynamics is included as a mathematically degenerate case in the more complex (non-euclidian) spherical space of relativity. another way of saying this is that the ‘suprasystem dynamic’ in which multiple teams in a common operating hostspace (‘habitat’) move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence is what the individual team’s members ‘push off from’ and thus the motion is not absolute but relative to the hostspace dynamic (the inhabitant’s dynamics are relative to the habitat dynamic).
one can ‘check this out’ in a simple thought experiment. imagine that you were on a team that was trying ‘to produce something’. would there be any difference if you were the only team you ever encountered during your working operations, versus finding yourself working within a common, shared space where there were 100 teams of which yours was just one, all of the teams working for their own particular ‘common good’ and ‘produced somethings’?
how
then, can we re
.so,
while i am strongly inclined towards the intent behind
the
typical writers featured on the P2P website, because they ignore the
over-riding role of space (habitat), bypass the whole question of the conflict
between ‘ide
“Control Culture was a warrior culture--competitive,
belligerent, macho. And a culture based on
war tends to be authoritarian. Slaves
and serfs have to be kept in line, and fighting men--trained to be competitive
and quarrelsome--have to be controlled.
So rigid hierarchies with rigid rules of behavior became the norm. And because war was viewed as the most noble
masculine profession, parents raised their boys to be 'from Mars'--that is,
stoic, rigid, and aggressive, while women were expected to speci
Connecting Culture reverses all
the themes of Control Culture, seeking to tear down the artificial walls it has
built. Whereas Control Culture viewed
the universe as a gigantic, clockwork machine controlled from above, Connecting
Culture sees it as a self-generating organism.
The Connector world-view is consistent with the revolutions in science
brought about by Darwinian theory and quantum physics. Its growing power is one reason the
evolution-creationism debate is so heated. The spread of democracy, the Women's
Movement, the global economy, the ecology movement, the Internet, New Age
philosophies, Chaos Theory, organic farming, the growth of international
institutions and international law, the sudden interest in understanding other
cultures and in communicating with other species, the interest in telling old
stories from new viewpoints--these things are all part of Connecting
Culture. Connecting Culture is about
integrating diversity. Control Culture
was about eliminating it.”
this
‘control culture –to- connecting culture’ is all ‘head-stuff’ (rational ide
“The Spring Equinox [Gwyl Canol GwenWynol or Eostre ] defines
the season where Spring reaches it's apex, halfway through its journey from
Candlemas to Beltane. Night and day are in perfect balance, with the
powers of light on the ascendancy. The god of light now wins a victory
over his twin, the god of darkness. In the Welsh Mabinogion, this is the
day on which the restored Llew takes his vengeance on Goronwy by piercing him
with the sunlight spear. For Llew was restored/reborn at the Winter
Solstice and is now well/old enough to vanquish his rival/twin and mate with
his lover/mother. And the great Mother Goddess, who has returned to her
Virgin aspect at Candlemas, welcomes the young sun god's embraces and conceives
a child. The child will be born nine months from now, at the next Winter
Solstice. And so the cycle closes at last to begin anew.”
to
be re
“In the eyes of the Kanien'keh?:ka the boundary that
separates
so any ‘re-write’ of history in terms of a shift from a ‘control culture’ to a ‘connecting culture’ that ignores the cultural split between the western european tradition of objectification of everything; ‘man’ as an independent object and ‘property’ as an independent object is closing its net and proceeding to haul it in though the fish has eluded it.
a
moment’s reflection shows that the invention of property, by ide
peer-to-peer
cooperation has always been a natural part of our dynamic. without it, no control hierarchy could ever
work since operating within a common shared space wherein a diversity of
initiatives are simultaneously influencing each other does not lend itself to
management by instructions issued by a central authority that is not privy to
local spatial-relational circumstances.
the local participants are always using their attunement to their spatial-relational
circumstances (as we do when driving ‘friendly’ or peer-to-peer cooperatively
within a heavy traffic-flow space) and they put this peer-to-peer cooperation
into precedence over the instructions coming to them from the central
authority, else there would be all kinds of conflict and collision. just imagine if they worked blindly ‘to-rule’
on the basis of their marching orders coming from the top/center, like totally
obedient robots; i.e. the central hierarchy could never work, not a common shared
space where are hundred such central hierarchies are all orienting to different
‘common goods’ and ‘production objectives’ at the same time. the central control hierarchy is an ide
we
do not literally have to ‘leave behind’ our ‘control culture’ ways and move on
to embrace ‘connecting culture’ ways, ... we need to acknowledge that we have
allowed ide
it is true that the internet is fostering a revival of our awareness of our own peer-to-peer cooperative capacities. we have always had them and have used them, but we have falsely given the central authority ‘credit’ for what we have been co-achieving with them (the boss takes credit for the performance of his organization, but his downward transmitted instructions did not include having an employee go out over the internet and finding a way to solve an impending disaster and saving his company’s ass. the citizen of sovereign-owned property termed a nation-state may give credit to his ‘nation’ (property-nation rather than people-nation) and its central authority for everything good that happens to him, ... but in that same land, before the imaginary lines were drawn on a legal document and before the invention of ‘property’, peoples lived and cooperated in a peer-to-peer fashion and the freedom they enjoyed and the access to beauty and resources of the land knew no dependency on a ‘nation state’ nor on a ‘central authority’. did all this ‘peer-to-peer’ mode of organization ‘vanish’ the moment the legal document was signed declaring the existence of the sovereign property based ‘nation-state’ with its central governing authority?
the
internet is reviving our awareness that peer-to-peer cooperation is nature’s
way and since we are included in nature, it is our natural way as well. what we are looking at, with the help of the
internet is a ‘re-awakening’, a coming back to our natural sense of re
so,
i would like to toast
Weblog:
March 20, 2006
current
experience in iraq and afghanistan recalls the ide
for
example, unlike aboriginals, we let our faculty of vision take precedence over
our acoustic and balancing (inertial orientation) faculties with the result
that we CONSTRUCT re
this same model we apply to the territory of our own body. we objectify it by imposing the notion of imaginary boundary lines coincident with the surface of our skin (even though material and energy flow is continuously ‘ignoring’ this imaginary boundary. then we install a puppet central authority called ‘the ego’ which tries to nullify all of our naturally evolved body – living-space relationships and run the ‘sovereign property person-state’ with disregard for the natural precedence of the spatial-relationships in which the individual is uniquely situationally included.
aboriginal psychology assumes that man is included in the living space dynamic and thus avoids the imagining of an absolute independent existence managed by ‘the ego’, which writes its resumés as if it is the sole author of its own behaviour (rather than behaving RELATIVE to the flowspace in which it is included).
the western ego is our puppet central authority and is based on the illusion of ‘independence’ that comes when we make us some imaginary boundaries (euclidian lines and geometric surfaces) to give ourselves a closed form and take ourselves (psychologically) out of our natural state of inclusion in the spatial-relationships of the evolutionary dynamic.
Weblog:
March 19, 2006
i
woke up thinking about how crazy it sounds for stephen harper and george bush
to say; ‘we will not cut and run’ (as caus
just what are ‘principles’ and ‘committments’ anyhow and who is the ‘we’ that is keeping to them? ‘we’ install a government and commit to protect it until it is established and has trained an army and police force that can forcibly maintain it. we call this ‘the establishing of a western style democracy’. are we not really committing to ourselves?
and
our ‘principles’ are always these space-ignoring principles about ‘what we do’
as if the ‘we’ we are referring to is exclusive of the ‘what’ that we ‘do stuff
to’. for example, we invented this
notion of a sovereign nation-state. for
those of ‘us’ that have enough power, we can draw some imaginary lines across
the continuous landscape and say, .. inside of these bounding lines is the
sovereign nation-state of
so,
‘principles’ in terms of ‘what we do’ or ‘doing what it is deemed good to do’
are part of this illusion where we break out ‘objects’ from the flow and
re-construct their dynamics as if they were ‘absolute’ and pushing out from the
interior of their object-selves. the re
oops,
i forgot one thing. one needs a large and
powerful military to ‘make believers’ out of all those who mock the purported
existence of this imaginary nation-state, ... and the one’s who may mock the
loudest and strongest are those tribal peoples who inhabit the region now
bounded (in the mind) by those imaginary lines and who will have none of
it. as mentioned earlier, tactics like
dropping the chiefs who rebel against it from airplanes into the middle of
their villages (mussolini in
our democratic principles, then, include our ethic of supporting our fellow sovereign nation-states, as britain and france and other colonial powers did in the case of the imposing of ‘libya’ as a political entity over top of the region of libya and its previously free tribal peoples, nullifying their freedom and replacing it with forced subservience to a central authority headed up by a puppet constitutional monarchy (king idris) who, reciprocated for the services given him by his ‘protectors’ by allowing them to establish military bases on the land (the more convenient for putting down rebellion from his angry tribal peers) and opening up the land’s trade and natural resources to easy access to the ‘protecting’ colonial powers.
‘we must keep to our principles and commitments’, ... yes, indeed, ... how noble of us,.... it brings tears to my eyes and strains of ‘rule britannia’ to my ears. oh we as such gooood guys!
Weblog: March 18, 2006
[Error Log: this website was
‘down’ from March 4th till March 15th due to migration problems
at the ISP (August.com). Most
incoming emails were lost (never seen or received) during this period.]
this past couple of weeks has been filled with a lot of writing (and calls to the ISP to get the website and email problems sorted out).
the
‘biggest’ item that has been under discussion in this interval is the ongoing
public debate on Canadian involvement in
what
those who support this ‘we keep our commitments’ logic fail to acknowledge is
that a ‘commitment’ is an ide
foreign troops can have that kind of effect on the locals they have ostensibly come to assist.
what our western thought and language does not acknowledge is that we are included in the world ‘out there’ that we objectify with word-labels which makes it appear as if these object-entities are ‘independent’ things that exist in their own right and have a behaviour that is purely ‘theirs’ which pushes out from their self-center driven by their ‘inner-purpose’.
the
re
i
am not ‘playing games’ with my word usage here.
i am in fact underscoring how our everyday communication are already
based on ‘playing language games’ (Wittgenstein).
thus,
afghanistan-the-political-unit does not change when the canadian troops are
included within it, but the physical re
what is ‘letting us down’ here and confusing our thinking is ‘vision’, the images we see do not inform us on issues of ‘inclusion’. for example, we say that ‘beauty is transient’, since if we watch a flow sprout up, blossom and die, it certainly appears so, and if we watch a young girl grow up into a fine-looking women and later become wrinkled, toothless, once-firm and formful breasts now sagging and flat, then we say that ‘beauty is transient’. but who is this observer that is watching this and what is happening to him during this observation? is it not true that he is included in this aging? i.e. that everything is included in this aging? everything is included in something that is continually renewing which is continuously manifesting beauty. beauty is therefore timeless (beyond time).
therefore, how can we say that ‘beauty is transient’?
we say so by excluding the observed ‘object’ from the continuing beautiful world she is included in. she is more than this physical form that emerges, blossoms, withers and is recycled. she is included in spatial relationships with the evolutionary dynamic and contributing to the continuing rebirth of beauty. she cannot be separated from it.
in fact, ‘she’ never was an object in her own right, she was always a flow-form within the spatial-relational evolutionary dynamic, and it is only our visual perception and tactility, which are incapable, in themselves, of sensing ‘inclusion’ that have had us ‘split her out’ from the evolutionary dynamic we are all included in. this splitting out of objects and seeing them as independent objects that come and go in time says something about the observer. the observer, in this visual perceiving excludes himself from the aging (from the spatial-relational transformation that he too is inextricably bound up in) in order to leave himself with the impression that it is the object ‘out there’ that is the author of their own action (‘aging’).
as
poincaré made clear, to say that ‘the earth rotates’ does not fit the data of
our experience. it is the same
‘illusion’ as ‘the woman ages’; i.e. the observer is INCLUSIONALLY bound up in
the same spatial-relational transformation as he is looking out at. if the observer-astronaut on the moon ‘sees’
(and video records) ‘the earth
rotating’, such imagery ignores the fact that all of the planets ‘behind his
back’ and asteroids and moons are bound up in this (simultaneous mutually
influencing) dynamic which in no way can be accredited to ‘the earth’, so to
say that ‘the earth rotates’ is a radically distorted representation of re
our
visual perception articulated in terms of ‘what things do’ is an ide
when
foreign troops enter the geographical region of
when
foreign troops enter the geographical region of afghanistan, the political
entity ‘afghanistan’ is not transformed since it is an ide
yet the presence of foreign troops may induce a halo of inflammation around the foreign troops which seeks to remove their presence. the foreign troops seen as a surgical knife to cut out putrefaction in the manner of snipping off diseased branches from an infected tree, may instead be the equivalent of a ‘dirty knife’ that induces its own putrefaction, increasing its cutting requirements as it cuts.
for the head of the nation that has supplied the foreign troops to say that he will persist in his commitment is like the surgeon saying he will persist in operations to remove putrefaction after he learns that his instruments for removing putrefaction are introducing putrefaction. this is an attitude that opens up the exposure where ‘operation is successful, patient dies’.
.
Weblog: March 1, 2006
White men are
always counting. Everything, but mostly money. And time. Eh, well! (native american source)
to
say that ‘canadian history is a load of tripe’; that nation
all of these items; history, the games, viral theory and ethics can be perceived in two ways. looking at them in one of these ways makes them look ‘like a load of tripe’ and looking at them in the other way makes them look fully legitimate.
what are these ‘two ways of perceiving?’
the typical canadian history book skims over the pre-1497 millenia and moves quickly on to focus on the european colonizer and what they did, ‘they’ now being defined as ‘canadians’ and ‘their accomplishments’ largely defining ‘who they were’.
when
we describe history in terms of ‘who did what’ (the Newtonian ‘what things do’
representation of re
since
political entities such as ‘
we
can see how this problem develops in the case of ‘canadian history’ if we zoom
out to a view of the whole earth so that we can see what goes on in that region
called ‘
as
the systems sciences note, one cannot re
yet we do this ignoring of the hostspace we are included in all the time and go with the simple ‘newtonian’ representation of ‘what things do’.
this
is our western culture’s way of thinking, and it corresponds to the imposing of
Euclidian space --- an ide
picture
the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine. he is inextricably included in the ‘flow’ of
the times, but we can imagine him ‘manifesting his free will’ as he gets up and
dances a jig of his choice. imagine
there are several men in the cart and imagine we mentally construct a little
box for them so that we can concentrate just on them and what they do, pushing
off from the center of their selves driven by their inner purpose. as we focus on ‘what they do’ we lose track
of the fact that they are all inextricably included in a flow-dynamic, the
‘suprasystem dynamic’ which is taking them somewhere they don’t really want to
go. the re
our
visual-mental focus may be able to extract canada from the world flow-dynamic,
break it down into people-parts and re-construct it from the activities of the
parts to get a canada-centric history of canada, … and likewise for the US,
Britain, France, Germany etc., … so that we have a whole collection of national
histories which portray these ide
what
is ‘real’ is the continuing world hostspace dynamic that we are inextricably
included in and the rest of the stuff, the ‘what things do’ representation of
re
of
course ‘what is in our heads’ influences our behaviour and our behaviour
influences the REAL world hostspace dynamic, but that doesn’t prove that the
representation of re
when
one looks at the world dynamic overall, and in this context the multiplicity of
dynamical nation-states in
- A point equilibrated on all sides remains at rest, for the very
reason that it is endowed with motion.
this is consistent with ‘the relativity of motion’ and if we want to look at the dynamics of nations in this way, then it becomes impossible REALISTICALLY to isolate the dynamics of the nation from the world dynamics in which case it becomes impossible to REALISTICALLY write ‘a history of a nation state’ in terms of ‘what a nation-state ‘does’ or ‘has achieved’. it is the same problem as with the notion of a nation ‘achieving’ in the olympic games; i.e. it is PURE IDEALIZATION.
to
mistake ‘ide
henri
poincaré was the ‘deep thinker’ on relativity and when he showed in science and hypothesis the problem of
visual perception in regard to ‘the earth rotates’, that such a view demands
that space is absolute, which is an unnatural ide
the
same principles that apply to ‘the history of
"I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from physical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they all may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy."
.
newton’s
substitution of absolute stasis for the ‘base case’ or ‘initial conditions’ enables
us to think of the world in terms of ‘moving parts’; i.e. ‘machinery’ where the
hermetics (and aboriginals, Buddhists, Gnostics etc.) saw the world space as a
living evolutionary dynamic in which everything was included. it is in this ide
so,
pick any subject involving dynamics, medicine, psychiatry, you name it, … and
it is possible to see how we scientific-minded westerners are imposing ide
e.
fuller torrey is committed to showing that schizophrenia and bipolar condition
have a viral cause. his book ‘the invisible plague’ is well received
by many in his discipline. in essence,
he is writing a ‘history of the schizophrenic’ in the same manner as the
‘history of the nation’, … ide
the
alternative is of course to understand the dynamics of the schizophrenic
relative to the suprasystem he is included in; thus the actu
relativity says, meanwhile, that we cannot attribute internal (biophysical, biochemical) behaviour solely to the internals of any system (e.g. the internals of the human individual) but must take into account, as relativity would have us do if we are an astronaut looking at ‘the earth rotating’, that both we, the observer, and the system we are visually perceiving, are included in a common hostspace dynamic that we cannot get outside of.
the
OBJECTIFICATION of the system of the men in the cart or of the nation-state
dynamic is what BLOWS AWAY THE REALITY of both the observer’s and the observed
system’s inclusion within a common suprasystem space flow-dynamic. this ‘objectification’ is achieve by mentally
modeling the system dynamic as if it were going on within a fixed (ide
if
the earth’s rotation developed ‘a wobble’, this Newtonian/Euclidian view of
dynamics would be interpreted in terms that ‘some external event ‘destabilized’
the earth’s dynamic. but in
understanding this in terms of relativity, one cannot say that ‘the earth has a
dynamic’ since its motion is relative to the hostspace dynamic (the collective
of sun and planets, moons asteroids etc. etc.) in which it is included. in which case, it can only be the hostspace dynamic
that has changed. our sense that ‘the
earth has a dynamic of its own’ is an ide
this principle (relativity) applies generally, thus we cannot say that any ‘thing’, human individual or other, ‘has its own behaviour’. it’s behaviour is always relative to the hostspace dynamic in which it is situationally included; i.e. the system dynamic is relative the suprasystem dynamic in which it is included.
to cite Stephen jay gould again; ‘there can be no assessment (counting up) of hitting out of the context of fielding’.
imagine
how you feel when your are in a hostspace that disaccommodates your every
attempt to actu
- A point equilibrated on all sides remains at rest, for the very
reason that it is endowed with motion.
now imagine that you feel so stifled and suffocated that you lash out in an illegal way. since the Newtonian model sees your motion as ‘absolute’, ignores your inclusion in the hostspace dynamic and sees you as pushing out from the center of yourself driven by your inner purpose, those using this model have not choice but to attribute your criminal action to ‘criminal inner purpose’.
imagine
there is a trend to rising incidence of criminal actions. the Newtonian model can only interpret this
in terms of a trend to ‘rising incidence of criminal purpose’. the role of the suprasystem in
disaccommodating and stifling the actu
thus,
in our standard western visual perception based mental model (Newtonian), there
is no encouragement to address the disaccommodating qu
so, what has been presented here is a description of how; history, the games, viral theory and ethics can be understood in either a ‘newtonian’ or ‘relativity’ based manner.
obviously, reading this blog is not going to change anyone’s mind. we live in a social hostspace dynamic which implicitly demands that we view the world in Newtonian terms. if we say, in our Canadian history class, that Canadian history is a load of tripe, we will not pass go and will not get to collect our $200. if we go to the Olympic games and cheer some other nation’s athletes more than our own, we will be looked down on for our lack of patriotism. if we tell our doctor that viral theory is crap, we will be forced to go to naturopaths who have been kept barefoot in the closet by the powerful western medical establishment.
how about ‘ethics’?
the
ethics of relativity would have us attune to the hostspace dynamic in which we
are included and serve the sustaining of balance within it. the ethics of Newton see our behaviour as
‘absolute’, pushing out from the center of our self driven by our inner purpose
and therefore seeing the qu
as
in the above example of criminal actions in response to hostspace
disaccommodation which in the ethics of relativity argue for a restoring of
accommodative balance, a Newtonian foundation underpinning Christian ethics
allows no other course but to orient to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour since the
accommodative qu
hence the split between those arguing for zero tolerance for crime (more police to get safer streets) and those arguing for rebalancing the social system to re-integrate the disaccommodated.
few
people who debate these issues; history, the games, viral theory, and ethics
are interested in probing the philosophical foundations in terms of how we
perceive re
the
more general problem is that the more we come from our ide
Weblog: February 28, 2006
there is a very robust and coherent pattern in the relationships amongst the words that issue forth from me and ‘decorate’, in the form of explicit content, the two dimensional space of this weblog. it is a pattern that is beyond my grasp but not beyond my awareness. it ‘images’ in the manner that the 3D hologram images as one opens oneself up to it, as one observes the explicit markings on the two dimensional magazine page.
we understand more than we think we do.
the comprehension of explicit ‘content’ does not teach understanding. in fact, to become mesmerized by content is the affliction of our western culture.
am i not making sense?
would you like me to ‘spit it out’ in terms of explicit content?
that would contradict the very proposition that i am reflecting on; i.e. what i am sharing with myself or anyone who would care to participate in this reflection.
let
me try ‘narrative’ that extends the topics of the popularity of the da vinci code and the quasi-fanatic
nation
my children live in different places as we all do if we relate ‘place’ to ‘space’ since our personal situation within the evolving nature-space of the continuing present is unique.
there
is also the ‘ide
both definitions of place vie for influence on how my children behave, and the same is true for me.
i have made my choice as to which takes precedence and they will have to make theirs as we all must.
i believe that ‘balancing’ is innate in me and in all of nature, and that it is spatial-relationship oriented.
thus
what i believe to be ‘foundational’ and to deserve ‘precedence’ in guiding my
behaviour is very much in the manner of what i quoted yesterday from La Clef des Grands Mysteres by eliphas
levi (the pseudonym for Alphonse Louis Constant (1810 – 1875) a
French occultist who "believed in the existence of a universal `secret
doctrine' of magic throughout history, everywhere in the world.");
but no, i am not versed in the occult, have never been a member of a secret society and my understanding comes more from physics (relativity and quantum theory) as reconciled with life experience. my point in mentioning these ideas on equilibrium being ‘foundational’ is in connection with the ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ that haloes the popularity of, and animosity to, the da vinci code, and the need to avoid ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ just because the ideas happen to be uttered by ‘occultists’, whoever they are.
i am talking about ‘the relativity baby’ because ‘relativity’ leads to the notion that nature is balance-seeking rather than coming from absolutes and ideals, and this induces one to put the sustaining of balance within the ‘place-as-space one lives in’ ahead of living one’s life in conformance to the place-as-abstract-ideal, as in ‘nation’ or ‘state’ where the ideal behaviours for that place are centrally prescribed in a legal document that comes with the certificate of permission to reside in that place, … something that nature never asked us for.
‘who i am’ is shaped by my sustaining of balance with the place-as-space i am situationally included in.
my father developed very differently from his brothers because of the different space he had to sustain balance within (Canada, rather than England) and my mother and her parents developed very differently from their relatives because of the different space they had to sustain balance within (Canada rather than Italy).
one
could still perceive the phantom presence of ‘the Englishman’ in my father and of
‘the It
ah, you say, … but what about their ‘genes’?
what’s with this evolutionary theory that portrays ‘genes’as a linear combination of other genes? (inducing some critics, noticing that there is no explanation of the origin of ‘genes’ in this ‘genetic determinist evolutionary theory’ to quip “DNA did not create life, life created DNA”.
why should ‘genes’ be anything more than a record of the history of balancing undertaken by the transgenerational organismic collective? it has been noted by kaufman and other researchers in ‘the sciences of complexity’ that “the structure of the organization is also the record of the embodied know-how’.
our bodies are continuously seeking balance with the space we are included in, even at levels below our conscious awareness (as in our sleep and in comas). the present day world as experienced by our subaware physiological processes is a fairly homogeneous and slowly changing place or space and thus we can expect the know-how of those sub-aware balancing acts embodied in our DNA structures to be far more slowly changing than know-how of our aware balancing acts embodied in the structure of our personas.
in this case, our ‘genes’ as manifest in the structure of our DNA would equate to our transgenerational persona deriving from our ongoing balancing act with the space we are included in. we can then regard ourselves as inclusionally nesting enfoldment of the embodied record of our nested levels of know-how, from the fast-moving intra-generational social hostspace balancing dynamics to the far more slowly moving (relatively) transgenerational nature-hostspace balancing dynamics.
that
‘everything is relative’ is a viable and consistent principle on which a belief
system can be based (such belief systems DO exist and ‘relativity’ argues for
their being more consistent with the world of our natural experience than ide
i
make no secret of the fact that my own belief system is relativity and
spatial-relational balancing based (i.e. ‘beyond good-and-evil’), and it has
this basis in common with aboriginal and other natur
our
reductionist belief in ‘genes’ as atomic units that determine the ontogeny of
the individual phenotype is pure ‘ide
if
we invert the coin and look it from the other side, we may ask ourselves why it
is that the world is split between peoples that put ‘ide
a
related but simpler question, perhaps more suited to the limited space of this
today’s blog entry, is; ‘how might those with ide
this
brings us back to the (often venomous) attack on the da vinci code and the revived nation
what
does it have to do with me, an observer in the stands, if someone wearing a red
maple-leaf down there on the playing field wins a race? why should i jump up and yell and shout and
go beserk over a red maple-leaf on someone’s gym strip? is this ‘ide
can
i truly tell myself and others that i am at the games because ‘i appreciate competitive
athletics’, …’i am inspired by the spirit of the competitor’,… ‘i respect
commitment to self-discipline and arduous training regimes’, and so on and so
forth. how can i say this if i am
dispirited by loss since it is not
really ‘loss’ but ‘someone else winning’.
the difference between ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ is therefore ‘ide
who am i?
i
(in the ide
as
a collective, we seem to be torn between whether to put ‘ide
ide
since
the ide
the
ide
this
may in fact be why ide
at
this point we would be in the realm of john lennon’s ‘imagine’ where there are
no countries, no heaven above nor hell below since these are the ‘absolutist’
trappings of ‘ide
my father, who knew only too well the experience of friends and family in england and from canada that helped one another sustain balance and navigate WWII, was always irritated when his american friends would insist that ‘America won the war’ which was, bizarrely, a common utterance by Americans in the immediate postwar period. later on, in the world of corporate business, i experienced similar irritation when management would attempt to selectively identify and reward ‘whoever was most responsible for’ a ‘particular result’, as if ‘assertive accomplishment’ pushed off from initial conditions of stasis and could be reduced to a linear combination of causal agencies large and small, rather than emerging from dynamical balancing act, allowing us to ignore ‘small causes’ as insignificant contributors to the outcome.
such
‘linear ide
"A very small cause which escapes our notice determines
a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that that
effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the
situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the
situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the
case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only
know the initial situation approximately.
If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same
approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon
had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it
may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great
ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an
enormous error in the later [i.e. the 'butterfly effect']. Prediction becomes
impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon [i.e. 'deterministic chaos'
aka ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’]." --- Henri Poincaré Science and Method (1908)
did the invisible spark of spirit, fanned by a Churchill speech or by a local act of courage contribute significantly or insignificantly to the resolution of the war? and do we see the restoring of peace as ‘the absence of conflict’ or the restoring of balance in the dynamic of our shared hostspace.
hermes trismegistus and i agree that;
- A point equilibrated on all sides remains at rest, for the very
reason that it is endowed with motion.
not
that i am a member of the secret ‘hermetic’ society, but that i have correlated
the implications of relativity and quantum behaviour (physics) with my own
natural experience and found this to make sense. it is icing on the cake to hear erwin
schroedinger, the father of quantum wave dynamics refer to the essence of a
material particle as pure resonant energy, energy in inner-outer balance. thus a material object cannot, in any
consistency with nature and our experiencing of it, be ide
do i believe in history? or do i, like dan brown, author of the da vinci code, believe that history is fiction written by ‘the winners’.
one
has to distinguish here between ‘natural history’ and ‘political history’. with respect to the former, i live on an
island in the s
as
far as ‘political history’ goes, such as ‘the history of canada’ (Canada as an
ide
maybe
the 40 million people who have read the
da vinci code are ‘ready’ to bite that bullet and accept that history (of
the political variety) is fiction, … that this great and noble civilization
that we have founded our own identity on is self-deception told in the
thunder-like booming voice of the GREAT HISTORIAN IN THE SKY and that instead
of the world today being the result of causal agents; kings, emperors, nations,
… it is the continuous outwelling of a global balancing act wherein a
multiplicity of players move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence,
… the ‘history’ representation being a neat way to impose simplification on
dynamics that are essentially relative.
was saddam hussein the powerful authority figure that history says he
was, who made a lot of (nasty) things happen in a causal sense, or was he a
shrewd rider/orchestrator of a regional balance-seeking dynamic? our ide
if
saddam is the powerful causal agent, then his removal, portrayed by the same
ide
so what about dan brown’s ‘secret societies’ which he seems to really believe are the hidden causal force that lie beneath the fictional façade of our political history? and what about the critique of brown’s statement;
“In the past,
knowledge was something that was handed down by authority figures; now we seek
and discover for ourselves.” in the context that john jalsevac puts it; “And that, sadly, is
an accurate depiction of the predominant mindset of the Western World. It is the
core belief that lies behind books like The
da vinci code, and it is what makes them so attractive. There is no truth.
We are all gods.” ?
jalsevac
seems to miss the point that this ‘relative’ belief system that ‘we are all gods’ is the belief system of aboriginals,
buddhists, taoists and vedics. it is
only by jalsevac’s CHRISTIAN ETHICS, which do not recognize ‘sustaining harmony
and balance’ as an ethic. the Christian
ethic is instead an ‘ide
so
the ‘secret societies’ play the role of ‘phantom cause’ (the proverbial disease-causing
virus that we are unable to see, yet) to make the ide
the dissenters of the theory that ‘HIV is a virus that is the sole cause of AIDS’, which include several nobel laureates struggle with the same problem that ‘health’ is not seen in terms of ‘sustaining balance’ but instead in terms of a positive causal condition (all parts working correctly) and thus ‘disease’ can only be seen in causal terms (attack by a causal pathogen, or a broken or defective causal subagency etc.). western medicine is constantly seeking ‘phantom cause’ to make the reductionist science model ‘hang together’. psychiatry is also a case in point where the currently esteemed theories of e.fuller torrey (‘the invisible plague’) would have it that not only does mental illness have biological cause (rather than being ‘dynamical imbalance’) that it’s ongoing plague like growth (from 1 case per 1000 to 5 cases per thousand) must be presumed to be due to a viral causal agent;
“Torrey hasn't totally ignored genetic research.
"There's no question that genes play a role," Torrey says. "I
just don't believe the genetic aspect is that strong.[claimed by another
psychiatrist to be responsible for 40 – 50 % of ‘mental illness’] " Genes
are involved in all infectious diseases, Torrey explains, which is why even
though most people of his generation were exposed to the polio virus, not
everyone got sick. The major problem with a purely genetic theory of
schizophrenia, he says, is that viruses are known to attach themselves to genes
and to get transmitted that way.”
so,
the ide
as
long we are stuck with the over-simplistic ide
dan
brown’s ‘secret societies’ therefore, like e. fuller torrey’s
not-yet-found-viral-cause of schizophrenia, fill the need of ‘phantom cause’
that persistently emerges from our western ide
we do indeed appear to be tossing the baby out with the dark bath waters in which we have bathed it.
Weblog: February 27, 2006
two
items in the news today invited some ‘connective reflection’ vis a vis
‘inclusion
there
is a certain meeting of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ in both of these events that can
fascinate. not being a fan of ‘the
Olympics’ (although i appreciate sports competitions, particularly without the
nation
there is a lot rolled up into the Olympic games, politics in particular and if one is amongst the fanatics, you are either with them or against them. as Seneca said about the Roman gladiator spectacles,
“Either you will be
corrupted by the multitude, or, if you show disgust, be hated by them. So stay away”
those interested in the ethics of sports debate whether the Nietzschean ethic where to win is everything, is appropriate, or whether the ethic should be oriented to humanistic goals; i.e. to appreciating the journey rather than the destination. the ‘citius, altius, fortius’ motto of the Olympic games (faster, higher, stronger) seems to leave the spirit of friendship, unity and fair play hanging in the balance. apparently, Canadian hockey fans were not much interested in ‘the journey’ part of it.
i
guess my complaint is the ‘herd ment
anyhow, instead of looking at the ethics of the participants, we can look at the ethics of the crowd. it was recognized a long time ago that the crowd is always a winner, being almost always able to associate with the winners rather than the losers. this is made all the more easy if one’s nation sends a large contingent of athletes to the games.
next there is this ‘malleability’ that wells up in the crowds attending sports spectacles, which recalls what those versed in the ‘mysteries of magic’ have had to say;
“Madmen and idiots are more sensitive to magnetism than
people of sound minds; it should be easy to understand the reason of that: very
little is required to turn completely the head of a drunken man, and one more
easily acquires a disease when all the organs are predisposed to submit to its
impressions, and manifest its disorders.
Fluidic maladies have their fatal crises. Every abnormal
tension of the nervous apparatus ends in the contrary tension, according to the
necessary laws of equilibrium. An exaggerated love changes to aversion, and
every exalted hate comes very near to love; the reaction happens suddenly with
the flame and violence of the thunderbolt. Ignorance then laments it or
exclaims against it; science resigns itself, and remains silent.”
the ‘fascism of crowds’ subject has also been explored by Thomas Mann in Mario and the Magician (1929); i.e. we know that if we give ourselves up to the ecstasy of exalting something then the ecstasy can build to a powerful intensity that we become one with (and thus inherit the power of the multitude). we are kind of like a ‘superconductive’ fluid at this point;
“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool,
for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side
of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed
together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey
knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the
other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”
thus,
in the crowd dynamic at the sports spectacle we can use the exaltation of one
of our guys/gals winning to co-create a powerful field of ecstasy in the
super-conductive one-ness of which we can bask, … spicing up our normally more
mundane daily experience. of course by
giving ourselves up in this way, we become enormously malleable to whomever
wants to manipulate us while we are in this mode, hence Mario and the Magician as Thomas Mann’s warning of rising fascism
in
having
participated in crowds attending sports spectacles, i have tasted the pleasures
too and make no declaration herein of any commitment to abstinence. my problem is with associating the ‘nation
ok,
back to ‘the da vinci code’ and its
fabulous popularity. there is a certain
‘darkness’ in it as might emerge when a woman watching a video of several men
taking turns having sex with the same girl comes to the re
there is a certain sense of liberation from responsibility for what you have done and will do in your life if the society you live in is a deliberate sham, a giant con that secret societies which have infiltrated our authoritative structures have conspired to keep you captive in and do with you what they will.
a critic of ‘the da vinci code’ writes;
However idiotic Brown’s attempts to popularize a ‘new’ version
of history might be, his book and the popular response to it is a useful gauge
for the present state of our culture. With all the focus on the ‘conspiracy’ of
the suppressing of the ‘sacred feminine’ by the Catholic Church, etc., many
readers have no doubt missed what is perhaps the most fundamental passage of
the whole book. It occurs when Teabing (the royal historian) jubilantly
declares, “Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius—the water
bearer—whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think
for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now.”
Just to make sure that nothing has been misunderstood, the idea was put even
more clearly by Brown in a Washington Post Interview: “In the past, knowledge
was something that was handed down by authority figures; now we seek and
discover for ourselves.” And that, sadly, is an accurate depiction of the
predominant mindset of the Western World. It is the core belief that lies
behind books like The da vinci code,
and it is what makes them so attractive. There is no truth. We are all
gods.” --- john
jalsevac http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jan/050114a.html
dan
brown says that ‘history was written by the winners’ so that ‘where we are
coming from’ starts to get very blurry when one begins to think that we are not
in touch with what is REALLY happening to us, that we live within a kind of
‘theatre’ wherein the true re
apart
from the fundament
Q: Your novel raises
the question of whether technology will save us or destroy us. Which do you
believe?
A: I believe science will save us...although I tend to be an optimist.
Obviously, science has wonderful potential to control disease, create new fuel supplies,
engineer efficient food sources, and even allow us to migrate to new worlds.
The problem, of course, is that every technology is a double-edged sword. The
rocket engine that carries the space shuttle can also carry warheads. The
medical breakthroughs that can eradicate disease--genetic research, for
example-if misused, can bring about the end of the human race. The question is
not whether or not science will expand to meet man's growing needs, but whether
man's philosophy will mature fast enough that we can truly comprehend our new
power and the responsibility that comes with it.
Q: The characters in Angels & Demons battle with some
tough moral issues... primarily regarding the battle between science or
religion? Which do you think will ultimately win the war?
A: That's a difficult question because in many ways I see science and religion
as the same thing. Both are manifestations of man's quest to understand the
divine. Religion savors the questions while science savors the quest for
answers. Science and religion seem to be two different languages attempting to
tell the same story, and yet the battle between them has been raging for
centuries and continues today. The war in our schools over whether to teach
Creationism or Darwinism is a perfect example. We live in an exciting era,
though, because for the first time in human history, the line between science
and religion is starting to blur. Particle physicists exploring the subatomic
level are suddenly witnessing an interconnectivity of all things and having
religious experiences...Buddhist monks are reading physics books and learning
about experiments that confirm what they have believed in their hearts for
centuries and have been unable to quantify.
what
is being missed here is that ‘ide
there
is nothing in a model of ‘how things behave’ that speaks to the qu
so
western religion and western science and blends thereof are not the only horses
in the race. the other ‘candidates’
waiting in the sidelines are eastern and aboriginal natur
in
the ‘magical’ camp of the ancient natur
Regularity
and variety in movement result from the different combinations of equilibrium.
A
point equilibrated on all sides remains at rest, for the very reason that it is
endowed with motion.
Fluid
consists of rapidly moving matter, always stirred by the variation of the
balancing forces.
A
solid is the same matter in slow movement, or at apparent rest because it is
more or less solidly balanced.
this
notion of ‘balancing’ is in the yin/yang of the east, in the native traditions
of the four directions of the medicine wheel and represents an alternative to
the ide
the
intensity of the advocates of the Olympic games, on the other hand, seems to
connote an attempt to preserve and revit
what
we seem to be seeing then, is a social shift away from ide
Weblog: 2’nd Entry for February 26, 2006?
my last entry perhaps should have been dated ‘February 25th’ since it is definitely the 26th today and this is my first weblog entry for the day. since i often write after midnight, it is difficult to keep track of the dates relative to statements like ‘i woke up this morning’.
today has brought insights from reflecting on, and
responding to Michel Bauwen’s comments on his p2p foundation blog ( blog.p2pfoundation.com ). what i am re
‘memory’ (in the sense of an internal information archive) is thus an intellectual contrivance to make this reductionist view ‘hang together’ and ensure that within the visual record, there is a way to explain EVERYTHING in terms of ‘what things do’.
if the world is instead understood to be space that is evolving in the continuing present, there is no need to pack ‘memories of the past’ into some imaginary archive in the individual (if you have read books on research into memory such as Daniel Schacter’s Searching for Memory, you will see how elusive the location of the purported archive actually is). there is no ‘temporal past’ when we understand the world in terms of ‘the evolving space of the continuing present’, only a continuously metamorphing space with us being bound up in this metamorphosis. ‘we still are who we were’ and ‘the world still is what it was’. thus when the woman gets off the ferry and runs to, and embraces her lover, she is not driven by her inner purpose informed by her memory (as a robotic version of her might be made to do), she is experiencing the deepened and enriched space which is continually infusing her with nonlocal influences from the remote EVOLUTIONARY past (as opposed to temporal past).
if there is no ‘temporal past’, there is no need for ‘memory’ in the context of an archive of ‘temporally past events’.
complex systems studies have already informed us that the structure of the organization is an embodied record of acquired know-how so there are clues here as to how we might attune to the experience-deepened space in a sentient-somatic-experiencing manner, rather than intellectually (in the manner that a computer access its memory archive).
before
get on that track that might lead to a re-inventing of Rupert sheldrake’s
‘morphic fields, there’s another way to look at this, that follows
what’s that got to do with insisting that an understanding of ‘what things do’ must come from within the visual record of the things doing what they do?
when we gaze into the visual record, our analytical mind strives to ‘drill down’ ever deeper into the ever smaller detail in search of the ultimate understanding of the authoring source of the behaviour; i.e. we drill down into the woman’s organs, into her biophysics and biochemistry, we drill down into her brain and into her neural structures in search of the authoring source of ‘what she does’. in this process we set up a logical ‘branching’ that goes from the highest order visual aspects of the system to the lowest order detail that is seen as ‘causing’ the higher order behaviour. but what if the understanding we are looking for is not to be found there? what if we do not ‘have the fish in the net’? this has been called ‘the reductionist nightmare’ by ian stewart and jack cohen in The Collapse of Chaos [this problem is also implied by Henri Poincaré in asking ‘does the earth rotate?’ to answer ‘yes’ implies the existence of absolute space relative to which it rotates. the visual record of the behaviour of the earth obtained by an astronaut would not contain the information needed to understand the earth’s behaviour. for than, one would have to acknowledge that the observing astronaut and the earth were bound up in a spatial-relational flow that was beyond ‘knowing’ through visually perceiving the behaviour of things within it, such as the earth’s behaviour.]
it the uppermost element in the following graphic represents some behaviour on the part of the woman, then we can use the causal model and look back in time to identify the sequence of causal actions (e.g. biophysical, biochemical, neural) that were responsible for that visible behaviour.
what our reductionist model ignores here is the influence of the ‘contextual space’ the woman is included in. and, consistent with the reductionist ‘cybernetic’ model of the human organism, some of these ‘causal contribution’ branches would represent ‘access to information stored in the ‘memory’ archive’, … the problem is, we haven’t been able to ‘find’ where and how memory is stored, exactly and even if large portions of the brain are destroyed, it is still possible to almost fully ‘recover one’s memory’. nor can we explain where ‘inner-purpose’ comes from (how was it ‘programmed in’?)
but
it is only this reductionist model that insists that we have to explain what is
going on on the ferry dock in terms of the visual record of this dynamic
(assuming that one can drill down and in to inquire into the causal sequence as
deeply as we need to). our real-life
felt experience says that we are at the same time included in a continuously
evolving flowspace that embodies nonlocal influence from the remote (spatial-relational)
past. this spatial ‘context’ in which
we are included and ‘which we are made of’ does not show up in our reductionist
drill down inquiry. thus the
‘reductionist nightmare’ that after we get all the tools and the multi-speci
the following comments by cohen are relevant to this discussion on ‘worldVIEW’ versus ‘worldSENSE’;
http://www.psych.lse.ac.uk/complexity/Seminars/1998/report98dec.htm
ORGANISATIONS AS COMPLEX
EVOLVING SYSTEMS (OACES) CONFERENCE
Concluding Keynote Speech
The Human Mind as an
Emergent Phenomenon:
The Complicit Coevolution of
Intelligence and Extelligence
By Dr Jack Cohen
A reductionist's
nightmare
Our alternative to
Neo-Darwinism emphasises the way a system is shaped by the circumstances in
which it operates, or in which it has come into being. This contextu
The reductionist's view
starts with nature as a whole at the top, then you discover what nature is like
by mapping into lower levels of detail.
…
…
Consider a problem like
insulin-secreting cells. If I go to someone who knows about cells secreting
things, she could say :'I can tell you certain things about your particular
problem, but you should also talk to some chemists as chemistry underlies all
this.' I could then find I need to talk to not just one chemist, but at least
three speci
Explanations do not
simplify on the way down into detail, although they do simplify on the way up
through emergence. My particular 'nightmare' example came from addressing a
relatively small, simple problem about insulin and cells. Just think how much
worse it becomes when looking at bigger questions, like how the universe began.
That is why Ian [Stewart] and I argue that reductionism is contrary to experience
* *
*
in
geologic processes as well, as in
this kind of thing confounds our western-thinking (reductionist) minds. for example, the drivers in a freeway flow and/or the pedestrians in a crowdflow dynamic, like the riverflow implied by these pictures, are the source of the CONTEXTUALIZING landscape that is shaping the REDUCTIVE branching pattern of the assertive flow. if we want to understand a particular behaviour captured in a visual record, such as a ‘collision’, we would reductively work our way back from the collision along the abstracted time-based trajectories of the cars to find out the causal source of the collision (by ‘reversing the video-footage). but that would only ‘work’ (be meaningful) if the landscape, which is inductively channelling the assertive behaviours of the drivers in the manner that the catchbasin inductively channels the river flow, were independent of the assertive action of the river flow WHICH IT IS NOT. that is, plotting the trajectory of a car implies ‘absolute motion’ of the car; motion relative to a fixed frame which suggest that we can speak in terms of ‘the car moving’. but, in fact, in the actual situation wherein a multiplicity of cars move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, the notion of an individual car authoring its own movement has no meaning. in a crowd dynamic (as in traffic flow), the landscape that is inductively shaping the assertive behaviours is the assertive behaviours that are inductively shaping the assertive behaviours. we tend to say that ‘we move through the traffic flow’, … but the real-life truth of the matter is that ‘we are the flow’; at the same time we are both the landscape whose form is inductively shaping the driving behaviour and we are driving behaviour that is shaping the form of the landscape. we whitewash over this by scapegoating the individual/s who are ‘holding the smoking gun’.
there
was really no good reason to propose that the woman getting of the ferry ‘has
an internal memory archive’ and that it
informs her ‘inner purpose’, other than to keep the ‘ide
to recap;
- our western worldVIEW seeks to extract understanding from the visual record, using a reductive approach wherein we drill-down into the assumed ‘causal machinery’ of what we are looking at. because we frame this in absolute Euclidian space, we occlude our felt-experience-based worldSENSE, the non-euclidian alternative wherein space itself (gravitational fieldflow) embodies inductive behaviour-shaping context. without acknowledging this outside-in inductive behaviour-influencing source, we are forced to explain human behaviour fully in terms of the assertive internals of the human individual, which involves ‘drilling down and back’ into the causal sequences that we purport to be fully responsible for the individual’s visual record based behaviour.
- the notions of ‘inner-purpose’ and ‘memory’ (as an internal knowledge archive) are intellectual contrivances needed to make the western visual record based worldVIEW hang together. i say ‘contrivances’ since they are not needed unless one imposes Euclidian space-framing on our mental modeling wherein space is absolute empty and rigid and ‘populated’ by absolute independent objects whose behaviour must, in this case, emanate from the inside outward in temporal-causal fashion.
- human ‘self-consciousness’ implies a ‘looking-in-the-mirror’ which gives us an outside-looking-inward visual record of ourselves which, once again, forces us to contrive an explanation of our behaviour coming entirely from our interior and thus forcing a dependency on the contrivances of memory (an internal knowledge archive) and ‘inner purpose’. as we seek explanations for our behaviour in terms of our ‘memory’ and our ‘inner purpose’ and find none (the reductionist nightmare), we may panic and propose that we have ‘forgotten memories’ due to trauma etc. and that our inner purpose may have been shanghai’d by evil forces etc.
- ‘self-consciousness’
is an adjective that can be generally applied to the reductionist
viewpoint since it occludes our awareness and attunement with the
space-based inductive context that, in nature, our assertive behaviours
are seeking to sustain dynamical equilibrium with. reductionist science therefore renders
the entire collective that takes it and acts upon it literally,
self-conscious, and out of tune with the space it is included in. in other words, taking reductionism
literally (it is a gross approximation based on the ide
Weblog: February 26, 2006
i
woke up this morning thinking about yesterday’s ‘rant’ by general rick hillier
in the more general context of the split between ‘ide
i
will start with this puffed up windbag hillier and his patriotic preaching
while he tries to sell the expansion of Canadian armed forces to potential
recruits coming from families of lesser means on the basis getting a paid
education. in an ideally ‘natural’
world brotherhood, one’s brothers would come to one’s aid in times of need, and
Canadian presence in
the proud rhetoric of hillier depends upon a ‘splitting apart’ of what is innately a dynamical unity. it is like the splitting in the concept of ‘charity’ wherein a minority of people use sweat shops to make huge profits and then give back a small portion, thinking of themselves as ‘superior’ (in performance) and ‘noble’ (in their benevolence).
this
‘splitting apart’ is where the shift from ‘natur
as the systems sciences put it, and with which we can find no disagreement, … whatever is the object of our inquiry; i.e. ‘the system’, it is always included within a larger ‘suprasystem’ and there is some kind of influence going in both directions, from the system inside to the suprasystem it is included in, and from the suprasystem to the included system. in the case of our solar system, we know that this mutual influence is SIMULTANEOUS and so it is seen in general in the aboriginal and eastern way (i.e. material entities are ‘included in the flow’). but in the western scientific manner of thinking, this interaction is SEQUENTIAL (temporal) and we refer to it in such terms as ‘feedback’ and ‘adaptation’.
ackoff noted that ‘systems emerge’ which are not initially name-labelled but are included within the undifferentiated suprasystem. what happens then, when we give them a name-label, e.g. ‘university’ and inquire into their internal structure and functioning? doesn’t this ‘scientific inquiry’ of the standard analytic variety equate to ‘self-consciousness’ on a collective scale, and after those included in the ‘university’ understand, in a scientific inquiry (analytic) sense, ‘who they are’ and ‘what departmental structure or faculty’ they are in and ‘what their function is’, … is this not the point where they become ‘independent’ and start functioning in a way where their behaviour pushes off from the center of their self, driven by their ‘inner purpose’ which is now informed by their scientific understanding?
before
the labelling and the scientific inquiry they were simply included within the
suprasystem dynamic; i.e. the ‘community dynamic’ and doing what came naturally
and spontaneously. the point where we
we name-label and analyze is the point where we are likely to shift from ‘natur
we may conclude that science (analytical science which is the science of the western educated public) constitutes a collective egoism. rather than university staff naturally and spontaneously giving their behaviours up to make whole the accommodative openings that arise in the community dynamic, they begin to push forth from their sense of being an independent self with ‘free will’ that is making a conscious choice to act from their self-center as driven forth by their ‘inner purpose’.
but in natural systems of all types whether said to be ‘inorganic’ or ‘organic’, there is always a coming together of ‘spatial accommodating’ and ‘individual-object asserting’, … and this coming together is guided by a natural ‘resonance-seeking’ in nature as in the celestial ‘harmonies of the world’.
what happens to ‘resonance’ when this scientific self-consciousness descends upon human collectives? is it not the same thing as when we as individuals become self-conscious?... i.e. we fail to have the natural calm and cool to intuit the ‘openings’ that await us, and we start coming instead from our internal self-center and awkwardly bumping into things; i.e. fomenting dissonance. we fall out of phase-lock with the dynamics of the suprasystem we are included in.
biophysicist friedrich cramer describes this analogy via a fictional narrative in the german literature in his book Order and Chaos, in the chapter The World is Harmonic.
science is an undertaking of the social collective, and scientific inquiry is like looking at ourselves in the mirror, … the sort of crow’s eye glance that breaks us out of our own natural spontaneity.
henceforth,
the spontaneous harmony dissolves and we begin to come from the center of
ourselves, from notional ‘inner purpose’ which avoids having to attune to the
accommodating qu
this is not an argument for ‘doing away with science’,… only for not becoming bedazzled by it to the point we lose our natural spontaneity.
hillier’s
ide
Weblog: February 25, 2006
today’s news featured a rant by General Rick Hillier, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, which promoted a new role for Canada’s armed forces and which sought to justify the current mission in Kandahar. it was another of those ‘make it happen’, ‘construct a better tomorrow’ rants that western thinking has come to be known by. It prompted me to write a letter to the editor.
every
time i think about our western self-delusion in our manner of representing re
all
hell would break lose if he had answered ‘simultaneous’, but ‘sequential’ is
the safe answer with respect to not stirring up a hornets nest in our existing
community which has become so accustomed to thinking in split-apart terms
reconciled ‘over time’ by feedback and adaptation. but just imagine when you are driving in a
traffic flow. if you are ‘the system’
and ‘traffic flow you are in’ is the suprasystem, is the mutual influence
between you and the flow ‘simultaneous’ or ‘sequential’? if you are INCLUDED in the flow then the
answer is ‘simultaneous’ since one has to assume a mutually exclusive split
between ‘you’ and the ‘traffic flow’ in order to endow both ‘you’ and ‘the flow
you are in’ with distinct dynamic authorship rights. that is, the mutual influence that a
hurricane and the atmospheric flow it is included in is SIMULTANEOUS since both
the system of the hurricane and the suprasystem (atmospheric space flow) that
it is included in are a dynamical one-ness that our visual perception and subjective
focus simply splits apart (psychologically) but which remain a dynamical
one-ness in the re
‘flow’
is not a ‘substance’ but pure immaterial movement in terms of
spatial-relationship (as in wave dynamics).
since we are used to thinking in terms of material objects, we tend to
choose ‘sequential’ and ‘feedback’ and ‘adaptation’ since the material
constituents we see as discrete and independent. but in the case of the traffic flow, all of
the participants are referring their movements to spatial relational patterns
and therefore to purely immaterial motion (everyone is moving under one
another’simultaneous mutual influence).
it is not that ‘things are moving’, it is rather that space is transforming
(spatial-relationally).
Weblog: February 24, 2006
today is a bright sunny day and right now, as i sit at my computer desk, i can look out through the glass sliding doors, over the deck and through a clearing in the forest i can see the brilliant white of a b.c. ferry as it glides up the swanson channel on the way to otter bay. i could see the same imagery on a video recording but something would be missing --- the understanding that i could go out my front door down the winding road to otter bay and be there just as the ferry arrived to meet and embrace an old friend.
i am included in what i see and my awareness of inclusion comes through my ‘feeling’ experience. it is not that ‘seeing is believing’, it is that ‘feeling is believing’. we are bound up in a living flow and ‘feeling’ is what informs us of that. the man engulfed in the ocean wave or being swept out to see in a swift ebb tide can close his eyes and still be aware of his being included in the flow.
the man who stands or sits still and glares at the world ‘out there’, complaining about all the nasty goings on and the ugliness may convince himself that the ‘world is out there’, finding little difference between the latest television news report and what he sees with his own eyes.
how did we ever come to put so much credence in ‘what we see’?
having spent some years in studying and applying ‘science’, i would have to accuse, at least in part, ‘science’ form ‘dumbing us down’ by having us build a world view based on ‘believing what we see’.
that
is, science has us build mental models of ‘re
and what could be MORE SUBJECTIVE than ‘feeling’? each of us is uniquely, situationally included in the world dynamic (evolutionary dynamic) and what value, science seems to have asked, is there in a world view that is unique and subjective? we need a worldview that is the same for all, and as it turns out, that corresponds to ‘what we see’ with the ‘feeling’ taken out of it.
nevertheless,
the importance of the subjective worldview of our unique situational inclusion
in the evolutionary flow persists, because it is this wordview or more
accurately ‘worldsense’, that inspires or induces us to do what we do. the prince and the pauper may ‘see’ the same
city as they approach it in their travels, but what the city inspires in them,
respectively, is very different commensurate with their feelings of
inclusion. apparently, the city is more
than the objects that make it up. the
city is also ‘a space’ that the visitor will be included in and that space has
an ‘accommodating’ qu
this
is not only true for humans, but for bears, rabbits and even the participating
molecules in crystal-forming dynamics.
that is, individual asserting and spatial accommodating are ‘complex
conjugates’, a dynamical one-ness, … call it ‘relativity’ or ‘quantum entanglement’
or whatever you like; i.e. it is a greater re
so, you and the prince can talk about the city in a visual context and be agreed on the shape of its objects, humans included, … but not of that scientific, objective description of the city is going to inform you on ‘how it feels to be included in the cityspace dynamic’. that is not important to science. but it is of primary importance to us as human individuals.
the systems sciences (e.g. Russell Ackoff) had something important to say about this, but the queen science of physics ‘does not have to listen’ to commoners such as systems scientists. ackoff noted that before we could inquire scientifically into anything, we had to extract it from ‘the mess’ (the whole continuing evolutionary dynamic). he used the example of ‘a university’. on what basis did we extract it? we had the impression that it was an independent entity/organism operating in-its-own-right, which is already and over-simplification. then we use analysis to break it down into its structural components; its departments and faculties and we inquire into how all the people and faculties and departments work and how the relate to one another and come to constitute ‘a university’.
this type of inquiry is in terms of ‘what a thing is’ and ‘what a thing does’, … but as ackoff points out, this ‘in-and-back-out-again’ inquiry doesn’t deal with the relevance of the system in the context of the suprasystem in which it is included (e.g. the local community dynamic, or even the global social dynamic). in order to get to a full understanding, we have to firstly (since it is of over-riding importance) inquire in an ‘out-and-back-in-again’ fashion, getting to understand the suprasystem in which the system (university) is included and into which it was born, and how that coming into being transpired before we deliberately defined and labelled the concept ‘university’ (i.e. when it was just an incipient pattern of social behaviour). only when we understand how the suprasystem accommodates the asserting system within it can we fully understand the ‘system’ per se; ‘there can be no understanding of ‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’ since these two psychological split-outs from a dynamical one-ness.
science
typically considers its inquiry complete after it explains ‘what a thing is’
and ‘what it does’ and this corresponds to the prince and the pauper’s
OBJECTIVE, VISUAL-PERCEPTION based view of the city; i.e. it doesn’t go so far
as to inquire into how entities feel as they experience inclusion within a
dynamical space. even the behaviour of
a planet is inductively shaped by its unique situational inclusion within solar
system space (the gravitational field).
the outside observer’s visual view of the earth’s motion is not privy to
the earth’s situational inclusion in a nonlocal dynamic that is inductively
shaping its behaviour. we, as an
astronaut, could see that ‘the earth rotates’, but as poincaré observes, using
this example, it is not true that ‘the earth rotates’, implying that the earth
is the author of its own behaviour. what
does the earth turn relative to? the answer ‘absolute space’ is not a v
now we have ‘two scientific views’, … the one which allows and encourages us to say ‘the earth rotates’ as if the earth authored its own behaviour (taking the absoluteness of space we have mathematically imposed for ‘reallity’) and another scientific view that says that the earth is situationally included within a spatial flow and it, itself, is a form within the flow, in the manner that the hurricane is a form within atmospheric flow-dynamic.
which one should we choose, and why?
if
we ignore the REALITY that every system nests inclusionally within a
suprasystem and go strictly for the scientific view in which an absolute space
is populated by independent entities capable of ‘their own behaviours’ (this is our western cultural tendency)
we construct a model of re
"First, with respect to time [the first foundational
approximation of mainstream mathematical physics]. Instead of embracing in its
entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect
each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state
of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly
influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to
this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena,
we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation ; for the
laws of Kepler, we substitute the laws of
this
is a reduced, visual-perception-consistent representation of re
do i believe in the importance of my unique situational inclusion in a common hostspace flow?
that’s a trivial question, of course i do, it is what over-ridingly shapes my life.
here’s a better question.
do i believe that it makes sense to exclude consideration of the individual’s unique situational inclusion in a common hostspace flow, … in designing schemes to manage and govern the social dynamic; i.e. reducing the worldsense to a visual worldview in terms of independent entities that author their own behaviours, as in ‘the earth rotates’?
our current culture says ‘yes’, that is the normal way to think about things and to manage them.
i say ‘no’, that it is an insane thing to do, …. which makes my view ‘abnormal’, … though as Giordano Bruno said (just before they burned him at the stake in 1600 for the same sort of ‘heresy’), … ‘the majority has no monopoly on the truth’.
as
i approach the city as a pauper, side-by-side with a prince, we are bound to
agree on the nature of the objects that constitute and populate the city, but
none of this will speak to the different manner in which the cityspace dynamic
will accommodate us, as we each seek to actu
the
government of the city, managing on the basis of ‘what things do’, as in ‘the
earth rotates’ and giving short shrift to how the suprasystem differently
accommodates the asserting of individuals that are uniquely situationally
included within it, … may be more focused on a ‘keep the streets safe’
campaign, than improving the accommodative qu
the
scientific view of the world in the visual perception terms of ‘what things do’
encourages us to believe that we can ‘construct a better future’ and that is
what the reductionist governors are going to propose for their city. by the same token, if there is a ‘wobble’ in
‘the earth’s rotation’ then the challenge is to operate on the earth and get it
to correct its behaviour, rather than to accept that the behaviour of any
entity is inductively shaped by nonlocal influence from the remote past, and
that to conceive of the behaviour of an entity as pushing out from the center
of its self driven by its inner purpose, is an illusory over-simplification
that effectively detaches the entity from its inclusion in the common
suprasystem flowspace in the psychological re
* * *
maybe that ferry is bringing someone to island who cannot be fully described by entity-centric forward-constructing analytics, … maybe she will bring nonlocal influence from the remote past to inductively shape behaviour in the present, … will bring tears to the eyes of her lover waiting for her on the otter bay dock as the long disunited lovers rediscover their loving togetherness.
of
course, we can understand this solely, as science asks, in the
forward-constructive terms of ‘what things do’; the ferry comes in, they move
towards each other with open arms, they embrace, tears run down their cheeks,
he picks up her bags and they walk up to where his car is parked. there is no need to incorporate the
influence of the suprasystem space-flow in which this observed system is
included with its nonlocal influence from the remote past. this picture speaks for itself. it is the primary re
anyone for a ‘worldsense’ that will subsume/transcend our ‘worldview’ by comprehending our felt experience of inclusion in the commonspace of evolutionary flow,… felt experience that keeps us in touch with inductive behaviour-shaping nonlocal influences from the remote past?, … that gives an understanding of our behaviour and why ‘the earth rotates’ that is far deeper than the entity-centric local notion that our behaviour pushes off from the center of our self driven by our ‘inner purpose’.
Weblog: February 23, 2006
yesterday, after a brief conversation with one of the
Islands Trust Trustees, i wrote an
open letter to the trust on how i see the challenges of their accomplishing
their mandate. it exposes (or tries to) how our ‘scientific viewpoint’,
which is ‘ide
now,
that last sentence may sound complicated but it is easily accessible to our
understanding of our experience. for
example, we normally think in terms of constructing the desired future. this is ‘scientific thinking’ or ‘caus
but all the while we are doing this, we are included in a common space and subject, through that common space, to nonlocal influences from the remote past. for example, tensions have slowly been building between the Indian and Burmese plates and this triggers and earthquake and this in turn triggers a tsunami and somewhere in Thailand, while we are in the midst of constructing a desired future; e.g. by building a restaurant, we are inundated by the tsunami. this is an example of the remote past and the nonlocal influencing ‘our present’. all things are included in a ‘suprasystem’, a ‘hostspace’ which exposes the ‘inhabitants’ to what went on some time ago somewhere else; e.g. the pollution your grandfather put into the atmosphere in ‘the old country’ can be influencing your present in ‘the new world’ (the Americas). systems scientists point out that we normally only consider ‘what systems do’ (‘what things do’) but every system nest inclusionally within a suprasystem and that suprasystem allows for the remote past and the nonlocal to influence the system’s ‘present’. the system does not operate in a vacuum, but that is the way we tend to think about things. for example, if someone asks you about your present functioning, chances are you will talk about yourself and what you are working on, as if your behaviour is pushing out of the center of your self, driven by your ‘inner purpose’. you will likely fail to mention that you are included in a space that is exposing you to nonlocal influences from the remote past, like the second hand cigarette smoke from the bar across town or nitric oxides from the pulp mill across the continent.
that’s what i wanted to share with the islands trust. they are in ‘construct the desired future’ mode but all the while, they are exposed to the nonlocal influences from the remote past. there can be no assessment of their hitting out of the context of the ‘fielding’ they are hitting into..
Weblog: February 22, 2006
last
night on CBC’s The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos there was a discussion on how politics associated
with the Olympic Games, showing film
clips going back to Hitler’s 1936 games intended to showcase Aryan supremacy
which backfired when Jessie Owens (black) won four gold medals.
an american commentator pointed out that the feeling about
international sports competition in the
canadian criticism of the men’s hockey team, which ‘was
supposed to win the gold’ and came away without a medal also suggested that
people projected the power of the team on the basis of the number of
celebrities on it, and took the actual ‘teamwork’ for granted.
there can be no assessment of hitting out of the context of fielding; the
team must develop a spatial dynamic that accommodates its own asserting..
Weblog: February 15, 2006
still
more talk about the ‘Mohammed cartoons’, and whether they should have been
re-published or not. one circulating
email asks why muslims were not outraged by the rise of violent acts by muslim
fundament
so, we have this need to ‘manage’ the social dynamic and therefore we have to have some principles or some basic model on which to base our management. in the west, we tend to use the ‘rational’ model. the assumption is that ‘everyone is rational’ which is a very poor assumption. classical economic theory was based on the notion of ‘the rational investor’ which meant that the investor would respond to each piece of good or bad news about the company he was investing in as the news became available. but what modern economists have found is that people have a ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ emotional threshold. if they hear two pieces of bad news about the company they have invested in over a period of six months, they won’t sell, but if they hear three pieces of bad news in six months, then they will say, … and similarly with respect to good news and buying. the main point here is that people have two properties that lead to NONLINEARITY in the system; ‘memory’ and ‘emotional threshold’; i.e. people are not logical circuitry; i.e. they are NOT RATIONAL.
those
who would re-publish the cartoons don’t feel as if muslims who get angry when
they are published ‘are rational’, … but they believe that ‘they themselves are
rational’ and that rational people are not outraged by the publication of
cartoons. they may be rational, but the
assumption that social systems are rational is not a re
as
lafontaine said, those who are most powerful are also the ‘most rational’, …
‘la raison du plus
we are a culture that insists on seeing and managing the world in terms of ‘what things do’, … and this means that we do not take into account the slow build towards the threshold and the explosive release of energy, … we see only the explosive release of energy. if one lives within such nonlinear systems, putting oneself in the service of sustaining harmony and balance is a more stable and resilient approach since one can never know the whys and wherefores of ‘the build’ towards the emotional threshold.
Weblog:
February 14, 2006
the
‘Mohammed’ cartoons issue is very interesting and continues to be written and
talked about. i don’t think that many people recognize the basis for the
‘split’ in views on this. this splitting
into two camps on this issue or that issue is ubiquitous in our westernized
world. some call it the politics of the
right versus the politics of the left, but there is a deeper psychological
source to it than ‘politics’ per se, and it pertains to whether one believes
that re
if we believe that the ‘declaration of independence’ of a nation makes sense (in an evidently interdependent global community space) then we implicitly believe the world is what we make it, as a group of independent assertive achievers. but this ignores the accommodating role of the space we inhabit. if the space become uninhabitable how can we continue to assertively achieve?
can we REALLY define a nation and its ‘assertive achievements’ in-its-own-right, out of the context of the global hostspace it is included in? this is the same sort of question as ‘can you REALLY define the health of a human individual in-its-own-right, out of the context of the global hostspace it is included in? are there not continuously ongoing processes of exchange amongst multiple interdependent participants?
the
same question crops up in communications. can we really declare the content of
our speech ‘independent’? does it ‘speak
for itself’ as in ‘the sound of one hand clapping’. in the wake of WWII when the re
our mistake is to ignore the role of space (the female) and to go solely with (the male) ‘what things do’ (e.g. ‘what words do’). but the fact is that our actions transform the hostspace dynamic we are included in and so do our utterances. we don’t have to give up satire, we can satirize ourselves rather than satirizing other cultures en masse and when we make fun of ourselves, we laugh well. but making fun of ourselves is not an argument in support of making fun of another culture/religion. there was already an inter-cultural mischievousness embedded in the muhammed cartoons.
ok, it was valentines day today and i haven’t written anything ‘sweet’ (one has to go back in my archives to 1998 to find something that approximates ‘sweet’ (or sexy) valentines day writing; e.g. ‘the polarities of resonance’, . i did go out for a game of pool in the pub and while there, a well dressed man and woman came in by taxi from the ferry, … it seemed that he had brought her to the island getaway as a valentines day present, … but in the only ‘nightspot’ on the island, there was just two guys playing pool, a barmaid and a couple of kitchen workers lingering over a beer or two. does the ‘merriment of the party-goers’ exist in-its-own-right even out of the context of the party?