Heresy in the Making: The Rise of  Iconoclastic Youth

White Rock, April 10, 2001

http://www.goodshare.org/iconout.htm

The youth of today are ‘sniffing out’ the ‘something rotting in the state of western society’, and the icons are going to fall, … big time.

At the top of the list of the ‘icons about to topple’ are Nobel physicists, who have known for close to a century what that ‘something rotting’ is, but have failed to ‘blow the whistle’ because their iconic status in society is standing, dependently, on the bough that they would have to ‘cut off’ in the ‘whistle blowing’.  And directly below them, with similar dependencies on ‘boughs that have to come off’ are a whole hierarchy of trusted and revered icons in our science and rationality worshipping western cultural tradition.

The young iconoclasts are coming from their intuition of how nature works and how that differs ‘heretically’ from how we are managing our society.  Included in this diverse team of heretical young ones are some who are infiltrating the icon-rich domain of the biological sciences where the heresy is in full ferment, … a long awaited heresy expressed in very simple terms which resonate with our nature-given intuition;

… “biosphere space inductively shapes and is shaped by its constituents and their actions.”  [1]

In other words, every action of every constituent of space has two simultaneous influences on the environment, … the standard basket of influence which classical science has put all its eggs into; i.e. the causal effect of the assertive behaviours and transactions of the constituents, … and, long ignored by science, the over-riding influence imprinting on the geometry of space, reciprocally and simultaneously with every action, the action-associated transformation of the shape of the containing space, as asserted by the heretical evolutionary biologists in the above ‘biosphere space’ statement.

As youth, not yet fully ‘culturally conditioned’ know full well from their own experience, the shape of space is what governs opportunity for action, … the shape of space allows the motorcyclist to pass through the cars on the bottlenecked freeway to enjoy and close down the fiesta before the space-consuming stragglers have even arrived.   The opportunity-action relationship between roach and man or dinosaur and gazelle have a similar geometry-of-space dependency.   The message is that ‘space is a mediator’ between constituent action and constituent opportunity.

….’biosphere space inductively shapes ….’ … that is, in the short term, we move and act as we do in response to the opportunities which our containing environment opens up for us, and in the long term, we evolve in a manner which complements the geometry of our containing space.  The form of the constituent of the biosphere is in no way independent of the form of its containing space.  The complementarity of constituent forms and dynamics in a diverse ecology and their contribution to the sustained harmony of the ecology is apparent.  Where a particular lifeform with a particular dynamic becomes extinct, its ‘replacement’ within the ecology is one whose form and dynamic complements the geometry of opportunity which has been ‘vacated’.

…’biosphere space … is shaped by its constituents and their actions.’ …. that is, as we move and act, the patterns we co-create relative to our surroundings may close down opportunity for ourselves and our fellow constituents, or may open up opportunity.

Free-thinking youth is increasing aware that the ‘actions’ of politicians and the fellow traveling corporate organizations in the global economy are ‘tightening up’ the ‘shape of opportunity’ in a manner which is profoundly affecting youth, putting them into ever more intense and cutthroat competition with each other and excluding the so-called ‘less performant’ in the unilaterally defined terms of business.

All this, because classical science and the icons of science, … the respected leaders of our modeling of reality and social systems, continue to insist that describing ‘the way the world works’ solely in terms of the assertive causal behaviours of the constituents of space is fully sufficient; i.e. all this, because the icons of science continue to insist that the geometry of space; i.e. the ‘shape of opportunity-to-act’ can be safely ignored. 

The icons of classical science, including the Nobel physicists, by their insistence or their implicative silence, contend that, ‘ceteris paribus’, for the practical purpose of community affairs and social management systems, we can safely ignore the role of the ‘geometry of space’, … the ‘shape of opportunity’ in our modeling of our social and environmental reality.

An increasingly disopportunized youth is smelling ‘something rotting in the state of modern society’, and as the youthful heresy rises, the icons are going to fall.

Einstein’s views are in full accord with the free-thinking youth of today who are rejecting the mainstream drive towards the disopportunizing of the many and the unbalanced opportunizing of the few.  The ‘field equation’ of Einstein’s general relativity theory says, in full accordance with the biologist’s empirically determined ‘shape of space’ statement above, that the geometry of space is of overriding importance and that the curvature of any spherical volume of space is given in terms of the 'excess radius',  G/(3*c**4) times the total energy content within the spherical volume where ‘G’ is the gravitational constant and ‘c’ is the speed of light (the ‘total energy content’ includes the energy equivalent of mass contained within the region).   This view of reality contains within it the principle that space is first and foremost an ‘inductive space’ constituted by a geometrical distribution of energy which induces all of the following; …the precipitation of material constituents, the form of the material constituents and the patterns of motion of the material constituents.   The motion of the material form simultaneously, reciprocally transforms the geometry of this inductive space (a reciprocal inductive-assertive process otherwise known as ‘evolution’).   Applying this to man and his containing biosphere;

… “biosphere space inductively shapes and is shaped by its constituents and their actions.” 

The icons of classical science who would deny this primacy of inductive space over assertive matter stand squarely in the path of the ‘heresy’ of free-thinking youth.

What difference does the continued ignoring of the primal, mediating role of space make in our ‘social systems management’?

Well, relativity asserts that a person’s actions simultaneously, reciprocally transform the shape of opportunity which governs action.  It means that the action of taking the last chair at the dinner table transforms the shape of opportunity governing the action of sitting down at the dinner table.   And it means that a corporation’s action in taking the last barrel of oil out of the ground transforms the shape of opportunity governing the action of taking barrels of oil from the ground.

The icons of science contend that it is sufficient for us to model the causal behaviours of the constituents of space and to ignore the role of the geometry of space, … after all ‘space is empty and infinite’ in the Euclidian definition of space which is their mainstay.

Einstein was a heretic, though his ‘heresy’ continues to be ignored by the icons of establishment science who ‘rule the roost’ in modern reality modeling methods which underpin our managing of social systems.  Einstein empirically demonstrated that ‘space was not empty’, and that space ‘was a participant in physical phenomena’,… that space played a ‘mediating role’ between action and opportunity, .. assertions which are in full accord with our everyday experience.

The icons of science persist in their contention that all we have to include in our models of reality is the causal behaviours of the constituents of space and that we can ignore the geometry of space, … the ‘shape of opportunity’, … because the shape of an ‘infinite, empty, nothing’ (the Euclidian geometry that mainstream science imposes on our scientific view of space) cannot possibly make any difference.

However, it is transparently obvious to today’s free-thinking youth that ‘the shape of opportunity’ is in a natural primacy over the ‘assertive behaviours of the constituent’ as Einstein’s heresy has also asserted.   Without opportunity to act, we cannot act, and in our ‘acting’ we transform the opportunity to act, as today’s heretical biologists also maintain in their asserting that ‘the organism is its environment’.

The icons of science are going to fall as the free-thinking youth of today flow into and permeate the social organism, carrying their ‘space-over-matter’ ‘return to a more natural living’ heresy with them and co-implementing it within all of their endeavors.

Like the skilled pool player, they will act in full awareness that the reciprocal to the ‘shot’ is the transformation of the shape of space which opens up for, or closes down their ‘opportunity’ to shoot.  

Like the friendly freeway driver, they will move ahead in full awareness that the reciprocal to their driving action is the transformation of the shape of space which opens up for, or closes down their ‘opportunity’ to move ahead.

Unlike the businessman and politician who say that the global economy is an economy of assertive causal behaviours in the production and distribution of goods and services, the ‘free-thinking youth’ will say that the global economy is an ‘opportunity economy’, … that space is not empty and infinite, … and that in today’s economy, business implicitly conspires to corner the market on a biospheric resource (all resources are finite legacies of the biosphere) so as to sell this finite opportunity for resource-access back to the worker, forcing him to ‘sing for his supper’ by producing goods and services in a manner which has less and less to do with his natural role of  collaboratively sustaining the health of his local community.

“…… “global-economy-space inductively shapes and is shaped by its constituents and their actions.” 

The ‘name of the game’ is ‘opportunity’, … opportunity is the ‘mother of all action’, though the icons of science persist in their contention that ‘causal actions’ are ‘all she wrote’.

It will be the heresy of an intuitive, free-thinking youth which will rise up in their place, as the sapling rises up opportunistically from the hulk of the fallen trees who, having had ‘their season’, were toppled by the winds of change.

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[1] Excerpt from a presentation at the 'Language of Water' Conference in Bath, U.K. by biology professor Alan Rayner (Bath University) entitled 'Holey Water: Intraconnecting Living Space' which captures very well the current 'organism is the environment' heresy of modern evolutionary biology.

"Consciously or unconsciously, my paintings and writings over the years have dwelt on how water, as fluid medium, reveals the reciprocally transforming inductive space, the deep hole or immaterial presence, that both shapes and is given shape by explicit material substance and action. Aware of this living space, through which outsides communicate via their insides, we can relate our selves to other as fellow inclusions, in proportion. Ignorant of it, as when we trap ourselves conceptually in rationalistic reference frames that exclude other, we engender division and conflict, and lose proportion."