Our Science-Constrained Education is Suffocating Us
White Rock, August 19, 2002
http://www.goodshare.org/stifle.htm
If a poor black man walks into a rich white neighbourhood, he is likely to be spontaneously encircled by those ensuring the security of the community. Similarly, if a long haired male motorcycle rider drives into a Saturday night downtown party scene, or if a person making bizarre statements and doing some 'crazy' things moves into a highly conformant group, ... these individuals as well, may be spontaneously encircled by those assuming responsibility for 'regulating' the behaviours in the community.
This encirclement of individuals with certain 'different' characteristic profiles is induced by the mission on the part of the encircling individuals, to maintain 'security' and protect the community against 'disturbance'.
The encircled individual may 'feel suffocated' and like a 'cornered animal', struggle energetically to regain his freedom. There is a multitude of variants on this 'geometry' within regulated environments, and a close look at what is going on here is 'telling' in terms of the rising emergence of social dysfunction in the world today.
Mainstream science, imbued in our education and through education, into our business, governance and regulatory processes, is blind to the 'inner-outer' aspects of this geometry of 'spontaneous encirclement'. In science, the fullblown treatment of this type of situation is set aside as an 'exception' in the category of 'complexity' and 'self-organization'. For the purpose of social regulation, it is handled by 'educated people' in the manner of mainstream science; i.e. 'linearly'.
If the encircled person is physically aggressive with one of the links in the constraining circle, ... the aggression will be dealt with in the same manner as if two people met and battled on an empty infinite plane, because mainstream science is capable only of inquiry based on 'the assertive behaviours of 'independent' material (causal) agents. What will be examined is whether an individual causes injury to another.
The 'causal' model, emanating from traditional science and imbued in our western education and hence in our management, governance and social regulatory processes, is innately incapable of dealing with 'inductive' influences associated with the dynamical geometry of space.
Meanwhile, we have all been in situations where we have felt that 'the system is closing in on us', ... that our 'possibility-to-act authentically and freely' is being squeezed down to nothing and that our spirit and authenticity is being 'suffocated' and our trained subaware neural responses are triggered into action to escape from this suffocation. If we can't escape physically, nor mentally, this instinctive need of the spirit for authenticity and freedom may lead to us to take our own life.
The sustaining of inner-outer dynamical balance, that is innate in nature, is something beyond the capability of the individual constituent of nature 'acting in his own right'. As we know from our experience in 'driving friendly' on a crowded freeway, we must relax our personal agenda and let our actions relative to others be guided by the mission to sustain balanced possibility-to-act for all constituents. When we are in this mode, we are beyond the judgment of good and bad, ... we do not know why a nearby driver makes an erratic move (perhaps he is tending to an infant that we cannot see), and while we may judge him and swear and curse at him, ... we do not allow our actions to be directly driven by our judgment that 'we are driving correctly' and 'he is driving incorrectly', ... not even if we are driving a semi-trailer and he is driving a Volkswagen. Instead, we let our actions relative to the enveloping others 'accommodate' the erratic moves, transforming what could be the emerging birth of chaos, into codynamical community harmony. When there is a group of us operating in the mode, ... we are the co-creators of a sustained and resilient community harmony. Such community harmony is beyond deduction from the dynamics of the constituents, since the behaviours of the constituents of community are innately 'imperfect' and we must live with this imperfection even though our scientific 'laws' of behaviour of things and people are 'absolute' and 'perfect'.
To manage and govern on the basis of absolute, perfect laws, leads to regulatory strategies based on purification, ... the elimination of incorrect behaviours, ... the pursuit of a fault-intolerant = failsafe system (community dynamic) rather than the pursuit of a fault-tolerant = resilient system. This is the perfectionist folly that tends to emerge from our scientific education which in turns underpins the designs and strategies of management, governance and regulatory theory in the western world, and we can see it's dysfunctional trail everywhere in the modern world.
At the core of the blindness of this western way of purification (elimination of the less perfect and less performant, according to the view of the majority or of the most powerful), is the inability of scientific theory based on 'the actions of things', to perceive the inductive influence of the enveloping geometry of space, ... how it 'feels' to be immersed and included within the enveloping community dynamic.
This blindness in science, imbued in our education and passed on through our social regulatory processes, derives from the imposition of the most simple of space-time reference frames on our sensory experience, ... absolute euclidian space and absolute time. This imposed reference framing is chosen because of its 'convenience' as the French mathematician-philosopher Henri Poincaré notes, in describing the world dynamic in terms of the causal actions (force) of 'independent' material objects and getting rid of the innate interdependency (inductive influence) between the enveloping dynamical geometry of space and the included constituent dynamic, ... and interdependency as just described in the 'spontaneous encirclement' example.
How does science 'get rid of' the inductive effects of the enveloping dynamical geometry of space?
By the mathematical tools of probability and statistics which examine, by regression, the behaviours of particular material agents under many different environmental conditions within the 'operating range' of these agents, so as to attribute the behaviour of the agent solely to its internal constituents. The 'experimental method' used to validate scientific theory comes into play here. In the experimental method, the 'initial conditions' must be controlled so that influences from the enveloping environmental particulars are excluded. For example, if we wish to prove that two objects of different masses will fall from the top of the tower of Pisa towards the center of the earth at the same rate of acceleration (the acceleration of gravity), then we must ensure that we do this when the wind is calm and with objects whose form gives the same relative resistance in their descent through the fluidity of the atmosphere.
By this kind of science, the kind of science that is imbued in our education and in our social regulatory processes, ... we end up with a model of things whose behaviours are 'in-their-own-right'. For example, our model of the physiological functioning of the human body is a 'causal' model where this constituent cell or organ does this or that. Meanwhile, nothing is said about the inner-outer dynamical balancing that the human body participates in; i.e. when the ambient temperature fluctuates, the body spontaneously adapts, and when the body is displaced from an elevation of sea level to an elevation of ten thousand feet, ... its internal systems are induced to adapt so as to sustain inner-outer dynamical balance (community-constituent-codynamical balance).
We know from our experience, however, that things do not 'exist in their own right', that 'evolution' is a continuous ongoing outer-inner dynamical process, and that the 'dynamical geometry of space' does have an inductive influence on the behaviour of the included constituent.
Russell Ackoff, an authority on 'systems thinking' comments on this blatant omission of outer-inner inductive effects on the part of scientific inquiry, ... and the portrayal of systems behaviours as if existing 'in-their-own-right' in empty, non-participating space;
“Perhaps
even more revealing of the environment-free orientation of Machine-Age science
is the nature of the place in which its inquiry [is] usually conducted, the
laboratory. A laboratory is a place so constructed as to facilitate
exclusion of the environment. It is a place in which the effect of one
variable on another can be studied without the intervention of the
environment."
As you read this essay, don't forget the starting theme of the inductive effects of 'encirclement' (the geometry of space) on the behaviour of the included constituents. What I am seeking to bring out here is how social dysfunction emerges from science-based social regulation that is blind to the inductive influence of the enveloping geometry of space. Now, science dealing with 'relativity', quantum theory, complexity (nonlinear dynamics) and self-organized criticality (phenomena manifesting memory and thresholds where catastrophic action can be 'triggered' by a tiny effect when the system is at its threshold) starts to take account of the inductive influence of the enveloping dynamical geometry of space on the behaviour of the included constituent, ... but this 'new science' has not yet been assimilated into mainstream education nor into the regulatory processes developed and maintained by the educated public, and dysfunction is rising due to the amplification of the over-simplifications in the 'old science'; i.e. dysfunction is rising in proportion to the broadening (by globalization) and deepening (by computerized communications) of regulatory schemes based on an inadequate science.
So, the encircled constituent who needs 'space' for his inner-outer codynamics, ... and who is feeling 'suffocated' by the purificationist regulatory strategies of the enveloping community, may, by the force of argument or by physical means, seek to 'escape', ... an act that will be interpreted as 'aggression' against a citizen in good standing (i.e. one who is in compliance with the regulations and/or a member of a regulatory body.).
Why will an attempt to escape suffocation be interpreted as 'aggression'?
In traditional science, in education and in social regulatory schema, there are no 'inner-outer' dynamical archetypes and thus no concept of 'escaping from compression or suffocation'. In order to model such concepts scientifically, one has to 'upgrade' from the simple framing concept of absolute euclidian space and absolute time (which is constrained to seeing things in terms of the 'assertive actions of 'independent' material agents) to a curved space-time reference framing where there is interdependence between the enveloping dynamic of the collective and the dynamics of the included constituent.
If the black man is suffocated and deprived of his possibility-to-act via the enveloping geometry of the community dynamic, ... if he is 'snookered' by his enveloping 'white fellows', ... what does the law say about this?
As pointed out above, western social regulation is based on 'science' that 'sees' things only in terms of the 'assertive actions of 'independent' material causal agents', ... and 'snookering' as we know from the game of pool, is a manipulation of the inner-outer geometry of the continuing community dynamic that transcends, in mathematical and informational terms, descriptions founded on 'what things do'. That is, 'snookering' emerges from the relative inter-relationships of the dynamics of a collective; i.e. it is purely implicit and cannot be deduced from the assertive behaviours of the constituents, ... all that western law-based social regulatory process is capable of 'seeing'.
There is a one-sidedness and 'fork-tongue' quality here that characterizes our western science-based culture.
The individual constituent who is 'different' (in a minority) can be suffocated by encirclement, ... deprived of possibility-to-act space to the point that he reacts against this suffocation, and is 'found guilty' of violating laws based on 'what people can and cannot do'; i.e. laws directed to the behaviour of 'independent' material agents.
There are no laws based on the behaviour of 'independent' material agents that can speak to the spontaneous collaborative encirclement and snookering of an included individual constituent, since assertive behaviours in themselves say nothing about the relative dynamical geometry of space emerging from the assertive actions of multiple material agents relative to each other..
As the skilled pool player knows full well, 'snookering', or more generally, the opening up and closing down of possibility-to-act space, is the deeper way of perceiving dynamics and it transcends, mathematically and informationally, the 'default' manner of perceiving of our culture that constrains itself to 'shots', ... the assertive actions and transactions of the 'independent' material constituents.
If one conceives of the billiard balls on the pool table as a transforming 'web' of geometric (shaped) spaces that constitute possibility-to-move, ... it is easy to see that the movements of the constituents relative to one another can be arranged to co-creatively sustain corridors of possibility-to-move for some colours/types of balls and to co-creatively close down corridors of possibility-to-move for selected other ball colours/types.
Informationally, this view of the dynamical geometric shape of space (representing possibility-to-move) includes everything that is in the traditional scientific view that focuses in exclusively on the actions and transactions of the balls seen as 'independent' constituents. But of course, what the traditional scientific view misses, is that the constituent balls are not 'independent' but are instead 'interdependent'; i.e. there is a simultaneous interdependence between the dynamic of the enveloping plurality and the dynamics of the included constituent by way of the intermediation of the geometry of space (the geometry of possibility-to-move).
The old science, the science imbued in our education and in our social regulatory processes is innately constrained to the over-simplistic notion of the 'independence' of the individual constituent and thus 'blinds itself' to the deeper modulator of 'play' which is the co-creative shaping of the geometry of the dynamics (the shaping of 'possibility-to-act').
Thus the law, which is based on the actions of 'independent' constituents, makes the one who is different and who is being encircled and suffocated by the enveloping majority dynamic assume responsibility for his 'independent' actions, ... but makes no such demands on those who would collaboratively manipulate, by their actions relative to one another, the dynamical geometry of space so as to selectively open up possibility for some and close down possibility for selected others.
The law is one-sided and it is 'fork-tongued' since it pretends that things can be described in terms of the actions of 'independent' constituents, when 'everybody knows' (as Leonard Cohen sings) that our social dynamics emerge from the manner in which our actions relative to one another come into connection and shape the enveloping commons of possibility. In other words, the behaviours of the constituents of community are in no way 'independent'. They are interdependent via how they collaboratively shape the enveloping dynamical geometry of possibility-to-act, ... and this is often done so as to selectively opportunize some and to disopportunize selected others, as is clearly visible in the example of pool.
Of course, the conscious administration of the law does not have to be blind to this deeper dynamical reality, and therein lies a big difference as to whether we put our conscious intelligence into the primacy over a literal interpretation of the law.
But what is necessary, even then, is to 'listen' to those individuals or minorities who are being snookered by an enveloping majority since in the purely assertive action based view of things (analogous to a movie; i.e. a portrayal based on a sequence of actions and transactions on the part of the constituent players), the outer-inner encirclement or snookering (or disproportionate opportunizing), a dynamical geometry that is unique to each constituent, can only be clearly seen from the vantage point of the affected constituent.
This type of listening is not only rarely done, it is often deliberately excluded by the regulatory process which demands 'nothing but the facts', ... 'facts' referring to the details of 'what happened' (the actions and transactions). This view was epitomized in the television series Dragnet where the detectives (the good guys) were always saying in response to testimony, ... 'nothing but the facts, ma'am'.
The science of self-organized criticality (catastrophic outburst that can be triggered by a small effect due to the accumulating memory of enveloping tensions rising to a threshold level) is a nonlinear dynamical science that is not considered in the simplified science of our mainstream education and social regulatory process, yet it is of manifest importance in our real-life experience. An individual who is persistently oppressed (suffocated in an outer-inner dynamical sense) is likely to reach a point where something triggers a lashing out at such oppression in an attempt to break out of it. In the mathematically and informationally degenerate terms of scientific laws based solely on the 'assertive behaviour of 'independent' material causal agents', however, which perceives phenomena in terms of the sequential-causal construction of the immediate future from the immediate past, ... the inner-outer oppressive influence and the memory and threshold effects are not possible because the split-apart absolute space and absolute time reference framing is innately incapable of portraying them.
How a person 'feels' is therefore not considered in law, ... we are responsible for our 'actions' out of the context of how we feel. Yet, collaborative groups such as an enveloping majority, can co-creatively shape the enveloping dynamic in which we are included in such a manner as to immerse us selectively in an oppressive field of influence to the point that we become enraged and our 'spirit' must rise up against the oppression. Is this manipulation of possibility not the complaint of 'femininists' and 'blacks in America' and 'Native Americans' enveloped within a powerful and often oppressive social dynamic? Is it not the complaint of third world 'have-not' nations and of the 'have-nots' within nations, enveloped as they are within often oppressive dynamics of the more affluent and more powerful? Is this not what is referred to as 'the tyranny of the majority' with respect to 'minority rights'?
Our western laws are based on the 'rational behaviour' of the individual constituent rather than on 'feeling' (the feeling of inclusion in the enveloping community dynamic is not a 'fuzzy-wuzzy' thing but a distinct geometro-dynamical concept) while how we 'feel' can be manipulated (with impunity) by the relative actions of our enveloping fellows. This one-sided justice in the west, which led to those of the western culture being labeled as 'speaking with forked tongue' by Native Americans, is a product of being too literal in the administration of logic and 'law' (i.e. 'logic' and 'law' based on the actions and transactions of individual 'independent' constituents) and by being too literal in the application of the purely assertive action model, blinding oneself to the inductive influence of the inner-outer community-constituent dynamics. Lao Tsu, recognizing the limitations of social regulation based on one-sided laws of assertive action, observed;
The more laws and restrictions there are,
the poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
the more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
the more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
the more thieves and robbers.
--- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
This is not to suggest that social regulation should be 'lawless', ... but to suggest that laws based on 'what things do' can only deal with 'the visible', ... the 'facts' dealing with the explicit actions and transactions of the constituents, ... yet 'facts' simply mark the point at which our investigations cease. If a person is subjected to outer-inner suffocative influence time after time, this 'history' is very relevant to an understanding of why violent behaviour may be inductively triggered in him by a relatively minor cause, ... and if one constrains the inquiry to the 'facts of the matter', ... and administers social regulatory policy on that basis, ... one is dealing only in symptoms, ... moving the deck chairs around in response to the ship sinking.
Encirclement, outer-inner oppression and suffocation based on the collaborative manipulation of possibility-to-act space 'happens' and its inductive influence is the deeper, primary source of dysfunction in natural and social phenomena. Oppression (closing down of possibility space) together with 'de-compression' (opening up of possibility space), is the dynamical reference ground that all assertive actions and transactions push off from. That is, the dynamical geometrical configuration that provides the potential for assertive action or 'doing' (the continuously transforming potential field shape relative to the included constituent, if you like) is the transcendent reference ground to which the constituent refers his action.
Our social regulation in the west tends to be oriented to 'purification', the elimination of infractions to absolute laws describing the behaviours of 'independent' constituents. If one stays 'on the right side of the law', ... then one avoids the suffocative force of regulatory authority descending upon one. If one is an oppressed minority within a majority community dynamic, one is caught between a rock and a hard place, ... since to break the rules in the attempt to escape from the suffocating outer-inner closing down of possibility space will lead to an intensification of the oppression and suffocation. Since this social regulation is based solely on the actions of 'independent' constituents and their 'in-their-own-right' behaviours, ... wherein each 'transactional event' is judged in isolation, there is no recourse to the more realistic view wherein a constituent may have been successively 'snookered' to the point of reaching his threshold of tolerance.
In 'representative democracy' by 'majority rule', the appointed regulatory agencies are delegated the power to enforce rules 'literally', even though the regulators may moderate the application of their powers as they 'listen' to the unique experience of the (minority) constituent However, the history of western majority-rule democracy shows that when the majority has a 'good thing' going, the administration of law is oriented to the suppression of disturbance by minorities who may be doing 'less well' (they may be being shut out of the 'good thing' that the majority has going for it).
This insensitivity by the majority to the oppressive influence of the majority dynamic being imposed on and felt by the minority (or less powerful majority, in the case of the global community) is chronic in the domain of psychiatry. As Ongaro Basaglia observes;
"The problem of psychiatric illness and its institutions developed in our society primarily as a question of public order. It came into being as a socio-political problem, namely the defense of the healthy and working community from elements that would not conform to its modes of behaviour and rules of efficiency. Isolated care and treatment justified the segregation and internment of the 'ill' who were considered less for their illness than their potential as disruptive elements. This focus on abnormality and deviance, especially social disruption, meant that subjective suffering was not addressed - nor were the diverse variables giving rise to psychiatric problems. Despite decades of public concern and specific legislation opposing this approach, scientific theories, professional bodies and institutions have resisted abandoning the provision of a style of care that protects society to the detriment of those cared for." (Ongaro Basaglia, Int. J. Soc. Psychiat., 1992, 38, p36). see http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/trieste.html
The point that Basaglia makes here applies generally to traditional science-based social regulatory policy; i.e. it is "...a style of care that protects society to the detriment of those cared for"
Here we see the scientific assumption of the 'independence' of the constituent arising once again; i.e. the individual and the plurality are not seen as interdependent (what you do to the individual you do to society) but are 'split apart' by our western scientific reference framing, opening the door to the 'purificationist' mode of social regulation where 'conformance' to the will of the majority and forced exclusion of the non-conforming is the over-riding tenet. At the moment in world history, ... minority activist groups with non-conforming values and missions are proliferating, as Paul Hawken observes in 'The Resurgence of Citizen's Movements';
“In
the United States, more than 30,000 citizens’ groups, non-governmental
organizations, and foundations are addressing the issue of social and ecological
sustainability in the most complete sense of the word. Worldwide, their number exceeds 100,000.
Together, they address a broad array of issues, including environmental
justice, ecological literacy, public policy, conservation, women’s rights and
health, population growth, renewable energy, corporate reform, labor rights,
climate change, trade rules, ethical investing, ecological tax reform, water
conservation, and much more. These
groups follow Ghandi’s imperatives. Some
resist, others create new structures, patterns and means. The groups tend to be local, marginal, poorly funded and overworked.
It is hard for most groups not to feel justified anxiety that they could
perish in a twinkling. At the same
time, a deeper, extraordinary pattern is emerging.
If you ask these groups for their principles, frameworks, conventions, models, or declarations, you will find that they do not conflict. Never before in history has this happened. In the past, movements that became powerful started with a unified or centralized set of ideas (Marxism, Christianity, Freudianism) and disseminated them, creating power struggles over time as the core mental model or dogma was changed, diluted, or revised. This new sustainability movement did not start this way. Its supporters do not agree on everything --- nor should they --- but remarkably, they share a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people in partaking of its life-giving systems."
The issue of 'ecology' relates fundamentally to the above discussion on our blindness to 'inner-outer dynamical balance' since this is what ecologies are all about, ... the sustained opening up of balanced possibility-to-act space. Natural communities are characterized by 'fault tolerance' and 'resilience' in the manner of the friendly drivers on the crowded freeway, ... accommodating each other's even erratic moves in such a manner as to sustain the opening up of balanced possibility-to-act for the diversity of types included in the group dynamic.
Why be 'friendly' and 'collaborative', ... rather than
adopting a 'survival of the fittest' attitude?
The general geometry of 'why' can be seen in the case of geese collaboratively flying in formation; i.e. they go farther and faster for less expenditure of energy than they could ever do in solo mode ('independent' mode). Of course, in order to achieve this evolutionary advantage (improved migratory range, improved agility to avoid environmental dangers, improved conservation of energy etc.), each 'goose' must relax its individual behavioural agenda in order to participate in the co-creative co-discovery and co-sustaining of 'resonant modes' of the community-constituent codynamic.
Flocks of geese do not form 'elitist squadrons' by purificational processes based on the selective exclusion of 'less performant' individuals, as in the simplistic scientific models of our western culture. In fact, 'survival of the fittest' is currently being debunked by many evolutionary biologists as the artifact of imposing the simplistic reference framing of absolute euclidian space and absolute time which reduces the view of what is going on to one which is exclusively based on 'the assertive actions and transactions of 'independent' material causal agents'. In other words, 'survival of the fittest' is what you get if your model is innately incapable of accounting for the inductive influences of inner-outer geometrical dynamics.
If we make a movie describing violence between blacks and police in the southern U.S. of the 1950's, such an assertive action based depiction is incapable of showing the inductive influence of outer-inner oppression that the black citizen found himself enveloped and included in. In general, each/any constituent of space finds himself immersed within a unique dynamical geometry that exerts inductive influence on him, ... inducing or inspiring him to assert in the manner he does. His kinetic assertions, all that mainstream science and the rules of social regulation capable of considering, are thus the smaller part of the story since they 'push off from' the unique enveloping geometrical dynamic, ... the possibility-to-act spatial configuration, ... that he finds himself immersed in.
This non-independence of the constituent of space; i.e. this dynamical interdependence of the constituents of space, ... an interdependence that derives from the simultaneous reciprocality between the motions of the constituents and the enveloping geometry of space that represents their possibility-to-move (as given by relativity as formulated by Henri Poincaré) plays an over-riding role in the evolution of the 'play', and thus to attempt to regulate the 'play' on the sole basis of the assertive actions of the constituents, is to infuse dysfunction into the social dynamic.
Why do we only focus on the assertive actions of the constituents?
Only the assertive actions are 'visible' in the visual representation of the system (e.g. a movie or television account). One cannot see the inductive influence of the outer-inner dynamics that are eliciting real assertive behavioiural responses since these are unique to each constituent and they are 'felt' rather than 'seen'. That is, our sensory experience is what brings us this feeling of outer-inner compression or decompression (This is the 'acoustic space' of McLuhan as contrasted with 'visual space').
Clearly, the behaviours of humans, planets, molecules, ... are inductively influenced by the enveloping dynamical geometry of possibility that emerges from the motions of the constituents of space relative to one another. It thus runs contrary to experience to suggest that the individual constituents are 'independent' since they are clearly dynamically interdependent yet that interdependence is invisible in a visual representation, since visual representations can capture only the 'motions of things' and they cannot show how, at the same time, each constituent is induced to move in a certain way according to the enveloping dynamical geometry of space, ... a dynamical geometry that emerges from the relative motions of the collective.
The observer of the visual space representation has only one set of eyes and only one perspective at a time, ... however there are as many perspectives at the same time as there are constituents in the space represented and the geometry they look out at inductively influences their manner of asserting, and the relative geometry of their asserting is the source of inductive influence that shapes their asserting.
In other words, 'acoustic space', the space of full-blown sensory perception or 'feeling', transcends in a mathematical and informational sense, 'visual space', the space that is constrained to the portraying of the 'assertive actions and transactions of 'independent' constituents of space.
Referring back to the 'ecological activism' theme, ... we can say that the invisible interdependence, in natural ecological situations, is implied in the expression 'the constituents of the rainforest co-create their own nurturing climate'. That is, as in the example of the group of friendly drivers on the crowded freeway, ... the individual constituent can relax his personal agenda so as to sustain balanced possibility-to-move space for his enveloping fellows (with their diversity of driving styles modulated by their human errors, avoidance of rabbits etc.). More simply, the community collective co-creatively shapes the enveloping geometry of possibility-to-act, ... and it is natural, from the point of view of 'going farther and faster with less energy', to seek the co-discovery of resonant modes for the collective dynamic. This is what ecologies are all about, and this is what the solar system is all about, and we are 'included' within this ecological community-constituent-codynamic and our sensory faculties (our acoustic space sensing faculties) have the capacity to 'tune-in' to it.
Science, ... that is, the popular brand of science imbued in western education and in western social regulatory approaches, depends literally upon visual space representations, ... the representation of community dynamics in the sole terms of 'the assertive actions and transactions of 'independent' material causal agents'. In relying dependently upon visual space representation, ... 'nothing but the facts, ma'am', ... this mode of perception inquiry and regulatory response ignores the over-riding influence of 'acoustic space', ... the inductive influence of the geometry of inner-outer dynamics, that open up and close down possibility-to-act for the included constituent, ... inductive influence that is manipulated by the way special interest groups move relative to one other (i.e. to opportunize selected others and/or to disopportunize selected others).
Suffocation of minorities or the less powerful by special interest majorities or by the more powerful is allowed by western law since western law is based on visual representation, ... the assertive actions and transactions of the constituents, and is blind to the manipulation of (acoustic) possibility space that opens up breathing room disproportionately for some while 'suffocating' selected others.
The rise in ecological activism, the rise in psychiatric non-conformism and prescription drug-taking, the rise in anger and resentment coming from the third world have-not nations and from the have-not minorities within the affluent first world nations, is emerging from biased imbalances in 'acoustic space', ... the inner-outer dynamical space of possibility, ... the 'breathing space' that sustain interdependent ecological life. The bloody-minded literalist deployment of visual space based social regulation of the western educated public underpins this rising dysfunction, as it underpins the suffocation and extinction of many species 'before their time'.
As Leonard Cohen sings; Everybody knows the ship is leaking and the Captain lies, .... everybody knows the deal is rotten: Old Black Joe's still picking cotton For your ribb'ns and bows, .... and everbody knows.
Everybody knows that the visual space representation omits essential behaviour-inducing information of acoustic space necessary for understanding the world dynamic.
What many people don't appear to know is how this omission is built into mainstream science and education and thus how it finds its way into the underpinnings of social regulation and the western justice system.
Science and scientists do not like the complication that comes from abandoning the notion of 'independence' of the constituent of space from his/its positioning within space (space as defined by relativity in terms of relative motion). Science and scientists cannot use the framing of absolute euclidian space and absolute time which is the embodiment of this notion of 'independence' of the material constituent, if they seek to upgrade from the informationally reduced 'visual space' representation to the fullblown sensory experience based 'acoustic space' representation.
Of course, 'science' and 'scientists' are the product of us, the educated public, ... and what we recognize as legitimate science and legitimate scientists comes from the popular will and the media in spite of the many highly competent 'scientific heretics' out there that are simply ignored because what they are saying is not 'popular' to those in power (the majority, the popular media etc.). This squelching of the heretics in science is not surprising since the very structures of power (control hierarchies) are the embodiments of traditional science. The science presented in this essay, like the science of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré (conventionalism) and others who are not 'listened' to in the modern era, and whose ideas are effectively 'shut out' by the gatekeepers of popular science, supports social regulatory approaches more like the Native American 'acoustic space' tradition of participative democracy where the individual's perspective of inner-outer dynamical possibility is valued (as in 'the sharing circle' tradition) and where power is not delegated to a control based regulatory hierarchy, but where power is the order-inducing power that comes from trust, respect and resilience rather than from absolute rule based purification (see 'Peace, Power and Righteousness' by Taiaiake Alfred).
This 'new-science' view of social regulation, that is consistent with our 'acoustic space' experiencing of nature does not imply the abandonment of order-inducing 'hierarchy', but it does imply the subsumation of of the 'visual space' 'linear control' mode of hierarchy by an acoustic space inductive mode in the manner of geese flying in formation, ... the 'leader' does lead by 'control' and 'command' but by an inductive/inspirational role tied to the egalitarian co-creation of community-constituent-codynamical harmony (resonance). An example of this type of egalitarian leadership is given in the Celtic myth of Camelot and the non-linear control basis is indicated by the following dialogue from a modern interpretation ('First Knight');
* * *
King Arthur (to Lancelot as he shows him around Camelot) ...if you must die, die serving something greater than yourself... ... (Regarding the round table and his style of politics Arthur says) ...No head, no foot. Everyone equal. Even the King.
Lancelot: (reading the words around the center of the Round Table) IN SERVING EACH OTHER WE BECOME FREE.
Arthur: That is the very heart of Camelot. Not these stones, timber, towers, palaces, burn them all! and Camelot lives on because it lives in us. It is a belief that we hold in our hearts.
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Such egalitarian leadership and participative democracy is not unknown, particularly in communities where intuition and the wisdom of elders is sustained in a primacy over management theory founded on reductionist science and stark visual space logic. If we wish to pull back from our self-destructive course of purification via the suffocation of non-conforming minorities, we shall have to return 'acoustic space' to its natural primacy over 'visual space' as the basis for our social regulatory schema.
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Footnote: Reference Framing vis a vis Wave-Particle Duality and Scientific Generalization
As the individual constituent looks out at the enveloping dynamic, ... it/he is presented with a dynamical geometry of possibility-to-move that is non-homogeneous, encouraging it/him to move outward from his current position in a particular manner. The collective of constituents acting in this manner co-create the dynamical geometry of possibility that they are moving out into. Since the constituents are moving simultaneously, the geometry of possibility that they are co-creating is continuously emerging from their relative motions. That is, each constituent is presented with a unique geometry of possibility-to-move that is codetermined by their movements relative to one another.
Since the shape of the possibility-to-move space that 'presents' to the individual inductively influences where he goes and his pace of going, and since this is true for everyone of the constituents at the same time, ... there is an interdependency between the space-time shape of the enveloping community dynamic and the dynamical behaviour of the constituent. These two dynamics, the community dynamic and the constituent dynamic, are in reality, two views of a common collective dynamic.
That is, the collective dynamic is a deeper notion of 'dynamics' than the notion of 'the dynamic of the constituent'. In the sciences of complexity, one puts this in the terms that 'the dynamic of the collective cannot be deduced from the dynamics of the constituents'.
There are a couple of important points to note here.
One is that the continuously transforming geometry of possibility-to-move is seen by the constituent included within the dynamic in terms of space-time phase relationships. This can be visualized in terms of the 'friendly driver' on a crowded freeway example; i.e. the included driver, whose movement is, at the same time, co-creatively helping to shape the enveloping geometry of possibility-to-move, visualizes the possibility in terms of the opening up and closing down of 'corridors of opportunity' and he must let his actions respond to these openings and closings in such a way that he sustains his movement through them. His motion rather than being 'independent' and 'in-its-own-right' (the assumption in traditional science), is co-determined by the continuously emerging undulations of the opportunity corridors as they open and close and shrink and fatten.
This view of the world dynamic puts the continuously emergent shape of possibility-to-act (as uniquely and simultaneously 'presents' to the individual constituent) into the primacy over the action of the constituent (i.e. the geometry of possibility induces the space-time form of the constituent's action), meanwhile, the laws of science, by tradition, have oriented to the constituent behaviours-in-their-own-right.
Why this 'simplification'?
As Henri Poincaré observes, science has been imposing a simplifying 'absolute' space and time frame on the basis of 'convenience'. For example, the continuously transforming geometry of the space of our experience is evolving in an irreversible manner and this reality does not lend itself to 'prediction'. For example, we could not have predicted today's world dynamic fifty years ago due to such natural effects as 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' (e.g. what if Churchill had not been born?) and 'self-organized-criticality' (e.g. potential energy tensions in nature build to thresholds then collapse catastrophically, as in avalanches. The timing and magnitude of the avalanches cannot be predicted except in a blurry 'power law' sense which says that there will be many more small avalanches than big ones. This would seem to apply to human conflicts such as wars, as well).
This complexity in nature, that comes to us via our direct experiencing of nature, derives from the fact that the diverse constituents of space are simultaneously moving under the influence of each other; i.e. the manner the constituents of space move is inductively shaped by this mutually influenced emergent patterns of interference.
This is not very convenient for the purposes of 'prediction' and 'control', ... two themes of great interest and importance to homo sapiens. As Newton concluded, after exploring ways to mathemetically capture the simultaneous harmony emergent in the solar system in Propositions 65 and 66 in 'Principia';
"... an exact solution for three bodies exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind."
Instead of an 'exact solution' the solutions for the behaviour of the individual constituent dynamics would, in this unapproximated situation (multi-body simultaneously mutually influencing situation), be interdependent with the relative dynamic of the collective.
The implications with respect to 'independence' of the constituent of space and the space-time framing requirements follow immediately.
That is, in order to have a model which conveniently provides 'exact solutions' and 'predictability', we must somehow simplify the reference framing. In the 'motion is relative' view of our real life experience, the individual constituent references its/his motion to the enveloping geometry of possibility space that is simultaneously interdependent with its/his motion (i.e. he is simultaneously helping to co-create the geometry of the enveloping reference frame that is inducing the space-time phase shaping of its/his motion). This complexity that we experience in real life, wherein the behaviour of the constituent is interdependent with the constituent's unique situating within the enveloping environmental dynamic, traditional science has sought to reduce or simplify. Science has done this by 'getting rid' of this direct referencing between the constituent dynamic and the enveloping community dynamic (that the constituent is simultaneously helping to co-creatively transform), and substituting, for convenience, the notion of space as an absolute, rigid and empty 'containing frame' within which the constituents do their thing 'in-their-own-right'. That is, by imposing the abstract notion of space as an empty, infinite, rectangular container, we impose 'independence' on the dynamics of the constituents (i.e. we remove the innate phase relationship based interdependence between the constituent dynamic and the enveloping collective dynamic that characterizes the world dynamic that we experience that complexifies the task of prediction).
By imposing this notion of space as an empty container for the constituents to 'do their thing in' and getting rid of the space-time phase based interdependent relationship between the constituent dynamic and the enveloping collective dynamic, we create the notion of 'absolute time'. The time of our experience was not 'time on its own', ... but was tied to the transformation of space, and the transformation of space is, according to our experience, an innately bigger notion (mathematically and informationally) than the motion of the constituents approximated as 'in-their-own-right'. It is by the grace of this imposition of the notion of space as an absolute empty container (Euclidian space) that we can talk about the motion of things 'in-their-own-right' and thus speak of 'time' as existing 'in-its-own-right' (as an absolute mathematical axis independent of the three axes of rectangular Euclidian space).
This splitting apart of space and time is a convenience for the sake of formulating 'laws of motion' based on the motion of the constituents as if 'in-their-own-right' that give exact mathematical solutions needed for the purpose of prediction and control. When Poincaré, Lorentz, Minkowski (Einstein's geometry professor) showed that the space of our experience implied an innate interdependence between space and time, these remarks were overtaken by the convenience of the split-apart abstractions of absolute (empty, infinite, rectangular) space and absolute (linear, sequential) time. Hermann Minkowski observed in a famous 1908 lecture;
"Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of unity between the two will preserve an independent reality."
But the evolutionary dynamic of science also does not exist in-its-own-right (though it is convenient for us to think so) but is interdependent with the enveloping social dynamic and the convenience and appeal of prediction and control has over-ridden the assimilation of a deeper science tied more realistically to our complex experience.
As Poincaré put it;
"Space is another framework we impose upon the world" . . . " . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature." . . . "Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree." . . . "the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry." . . . Henri Poincaré in 'Science and Hypothesis'.
So, for convenience, we, science, have imposed a very simplistic notion of space on our science,... space as an absolute empty container inhabited by 'independent' constituents, ... a view that is innately incapable of supporting the interdependent co-evolution of the dynamical geometry of space and its dynamical constituents, ... a view that features a simultaneous conditioning of the collective dynamic (space) and its dynamical constituents (matter) as in Mach's Principle (which Einstein tried to honour in his relativity theory). This simplified notion of space as an empty container for constituents enables us to formulate 'universal' laws of the behaviours of things and to use this laws for the purpose of prediction and control even though the enveloping natural dynamic that immerses and includes us is beyond prediction and beyond our control. Thus a gap arises between our scientific view of the world based conveniently on absolute space, absolute time and the law-based description of the assertive behaviour of 'independent' material agents and the real, unpredictable continuously emergent space-time of our experience.
Why not accept that such science is a useful tool that does not go 'all the way' and continually remind ourselves that the reality of our experience is a bigger thing that we must always keep in the primacy over the approximative models of Euclidian space based science?
Here is where we return to the 'problem' of 'education'. In my education, I was implicitly taught that I could depend upon the Euclidian space based scientific view, the view that underpins our theory and operationalized approaches to management, governance and system of justice. In my life experience, in researching the performance of exceptional and dysfunctional teams, ... I re-learned otherwise or rather I 'unlearned' the false-because-over-simplified-for-convenience scientific views that my education had imbued in me. I learned that to ignore the real-life complexities, the interdependence of the enveloping dynamic of space and the dynamics of the included-in-space constituents, the building and release of potential energy tensional relationships, the sensitive dependence on 'initial conditions' etc. is to infuse dysfunction into the social and environmental dynamic.
Why would the educational system perpetrate such a 'dirty deed' on me, ... on us?... and further amplify it by imbuing it without warning into the teaching of those going into management, governance and law, social regulatory systems that we rely upon for helping us to achieve and sustain community harmony? Why this 'dirty deed' on the part of the educational system, ... the system that underpins 'the educated public' and our social regulatory approaches?
Kepler ran into this question back in the sixteenth and seventeenth century when he pointed out that the planets 'relax' their independence of behaviour and 'give way' ('nachgeben') for one another in the sustaining of simultaneous harmony (system resonance) in the community of sun and planets. That is, he noted the 'interdependence' (the relativity of motion) between the enveloping community dynamic and the dynamics of the constituents as the essential underpinning of the simultaneous harmony. This 'complication' of dynamical interdependence (relativity of motion) that interferes in a fundamental way with the describing of the behaviours of the individual constituents of space 'in-their-own-right' complexifies things for the teacher and the student, and it is more 'convenient' to give the student a simplified view of the world dynamic. Meanwhile, this leads to internal contradictions, as Kepler pointed out;
"As regards the academies, they are established in order to regulate the studies of the pupils and are concerned not to have the program of teaching change very often: in such places, because it is a question of the progress of the students, it frequently happens that the things which have to be chosen are not those which are most true but those which are most easy. And by that division in things which makes different people form different judgements, it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion."
The fact is that there is a dynamical interdependence between the universities and the educated public, ... thus, to give an example of being 'in error contrary to one's own opinion', ... the graduates of the university who go out into the enveloping community dynamic that includes the university dynamic may use their simplified theory based on the 'independence' of the constituents in managing the university. In this case, the university would be viewed by the graduates as a 'thing-in-its-own-right' rather than as having inductively emerged and been shaped 'interdependently', by the enveloping community dynamic. As Russell Ackoff observes, the simplified systems views of mainstream science are one-sided; i.e. proceeding from the dynamics of the inside constituents of the system to construct a model of the overall behaviour of the system (e.g. the university behaviour is seen as emanating from the dynamics of its faculties and functions). What is omitted in this simplified one-sided inside-outwards assertive behaviour based view is the inductive outside-inwards pulling-and-shaping influence of the enveloping community dynamic.
The constituents of 'the educated public', equipped with over-simplified Euclidian space based theory which sees the community dynamic as if 'determined' by the one-sided inside-outward assertive behaviours of the 'independent' constituents, ... are, in effect, in error contrary to their own opinion.
Based on our real-life experience, prior to the imposition for 'convenience' of the abstraction of an absolute rigid and empty container notion of space, within which (once we have put it in place) we see ourselves existing as 'independent' constituents who behave 'in our own right', ... the reality is that our behaviour is, AT THE SAME TIME, 'community behaviour' AND 'constituent behaviour'. The bigger reality, then, is that we are co-creative shapers of the enveloping possibility space that immerses and includes us. That is, 'the continuously emerging dynamical possibility space' is a larger reality than the dynamics of the constituents that are included within who co-creatively induce its transformation during the emergent life-cycles. The continuously transforming dynamical possibility space is a greater reality than the agents of co-creative transformation that upwell and subduct and evolve within this space. As Kepler observed;
"Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, IS GOD HIMSELF (what exists in God that is not God himself?); geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness -- and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes."
That is, the dynamical geometry of space transcends the dynamics of the material constituents of space, since it is an embodiment of the 'form' of possibility while putting the focus on 'things' and their activities (i.e. 'the Creation') is a constraining view that misses the simultaneous interdependence between the motion of things and the enveloping dynamical shape of their possibility-to-move. Our real-life experience, meanwhile, is based on our perceiving and responding to this outer-inner dynamical interdependence, as in the example of the friendly drivers on the crowded freeway. The man-made model of God as the 'Creator of Things' is thus a model that falls short of the beauty and mystery of our dynamical reality, and it thus 'demeans the divine' since the Creator of the dynamical geometry of space is a transcendently more comprehensive creation than the creation of material things and the controller of their causal actions and transactions.
In the modern day, the educated public, we who control the management, governance, legal and social regulatory systems, insist on keeping the abstract notion of absolute space and absolute time, generalizations that we impose on the basis of convenience, in the primacy over our real life experience, and this is leading to rising social dysfunction. It is one thing to 'go for the ultimate theory' which comes to us not through our experience but by some divine 'revealed truth', but should we not be wary when such 'beyond-our-experience' abstraction is in direct conflict with our real life experience? (i.e. we shall never know the whole truth of the enveloping reality, but should we not expect consistency with our experience, as far as our experience goes?). As Poincaré says;
"Experience is the unique source of truth : it alone may teach us something new; it alone may give us certainty. These are two points which no-one can contest." ( L'expérience est la source unique de la vérité : elle seule peut nous apprendre quelque chose de nouveau ; elle seule peut nous donner la certitude. Voilà deux points que nul ne peut contester.) ---Henri Poincaré ('La Science et L'Hypothese' - La Nature, Chapitre IX Les Hypothèses en Physique - Rôle de l’Expérience et de la Généralisation)
Those of us who work these issues of internal contradiction in science are 'warned' off writing about them. For those who hold jobs within the 'policed' disciplines of science, it is very difficult to speak out openly and honestly, since where the ideas cannot be refuted, the attack is directed personally so as to destroy the credibility of the messenger. This is becoming commonplace today, particularly in the discipline of biology where powerful commercial interests seek to open the doors up to markets for drugs and genetically modified plant and animal substances. The traditional scientific model portrays them harmlessly in terms of 'what they do' since it is innately incapable of describing what the induce in the enveloping dynamic they are included in. For example, the genetically modified crop, because it is more resistant to blight etc. no longer participates in the accommodation known as 'resilience' that derives from diversity and characterizes an ecological dynamic. Because the genetically modified crop behaves 'independently', fulfilling the prophecy imposed by an over-simplified science, but that cannot be imposed on nature, ... it no longer participates in the co-creative dynamical accommodation that underpins community harmony and resilience. Its independent resistance thus induces dissonance into the ecological dynamics inducing sickness and extinction in its natural, participative 'fellow' species. It is like a perfectionist behind the wheel on a crowded freeway, ... insisting on its independent correctness and by not participating in the dynamical accommodation that allows sustained balance of possibility for all, so that the group can 'fly farther and faster with more harmony and less energy', leaving dissonance and damage in his wake.
The purificationist approach encouraged by the over-simplified science of a western education, once embraced, abandons the ecological advantages of diversity based fault-tolerance and resilience in nature, and leads on to a dependence on perfection and independence in all the constituents of space. It constitutes a terminal conflict against the innate interdependent diversity-based resilience of the ecological reality of our experience, seeing its scientific 'nirvana' instead in terms of absolutely perfect, absolutely independent specimens that will perform predictably in an environment-independent manner inside or outside of laboratory conditions.
Our science-based education denies the simultaneous duality of the community dynamic and constituent dynamic, and as we, the educated public seek, through our management, governance and social regulatory approaches, to perfect the dynamics of the constituents, we are suffocating the natural diversity and imperfection that is the basis for ecological resilience, the interdependence that sustains diversity.
The current global political agenda, being imposed by the most powerful, the political-economic hegemony of the first world bloc, consistent with our science-based education, is oriented to the forced proliferation of 'best practice', ... 'the practice of the most powerful, to be sure'. Those who protest, seen by social regulatory authorities through the model of independence of the constituents of community, are viewed as problems that must be suppressed or eliminated. Without the interdependence notion that 'they are the community from which they emerge', there is no incentive to reflect on the dissonance in the enveloping community dynamic that is simultaneously reciprocal to the dissonance of the constituent and thus there is a one-sided treatment of the constituents as if their behaviours are fully 'in-their-own-right'. Our valuing of 'characters' and 'diversity' is declining even though these are the underpinning of sustained and resilient community harmony and evolutionary innovation, and the imposing of cultural correctness, the refining of what we've got, is instead on the rise.
From the viewpoint of the 'new sciences' that have not yet been assimilated into the 'mainstream science' of the educated public, we can see how traditional science's imposing of the absolute space and absolute time reference frame equates to the reduction of the 'wave view', which has centers everywhere but no 'containing frame', to the 'particle view' whose behavioural descriptions depend upon the independence of the constituents. In Marshall McLuhan's terms, we are, by this abstract framing, reducing our view of the world dynamic from the 'acoustic space' view wherein our dynamic as constituent is, at the same time, the enveloping community dynamic, to the 'visual space' view wherein there is no longer any simultaneous interdependence between the enveloping community dynamic and the constituent dynamic. In 'visual space' mode (the mode of explicit description in terms of the assertive actions and transactions of material agents), community-constituent dynamical order must be artificially achieved through a time-based sequencing of the actions and transactions of the (assumed to be) independent material constituents. What this means is that the responsibility for dynamical order is now taken outside and detached from the inclusional viewpoints that have access to the dynamical geometry of possibility-to-move (a view that is uniquely tied to the included perspective). So the collective dynamic instead of emerging co-creatively from the included constituents, as in the 'self-organizing' (inclusional regulation) mode of the formation flying of the geese or the friendly freeway driving of the group on the crowded freeway, is imposed on the constituents from the outside on a time-based coordination basis. That is, when the agency of regulation of dynamical order is taken outside the system, the co-creative shaping of the geometry of possibility, as used in the self-organizing mode, is no longer an option since the dynamics of possibility space are uniquely experienced by each constituent. The co-cultivation of resonant community dynamics, as in self-organization', can therefore only be done on an 'insider' or 'inclusional' basis. This means that the resilience that emerges from the resonant dynamics of diverse constituents has to come from inclusionally-sourced regulation and that externally-imposed regulation is constrained to time-based optimization based on the suppression of dissonance or 'purification'.
From a social regulatory standpoint, the message is clear, to achieve community harmony, the constituents must be the primary regulators of community dynamics and the regulatory agencies and their behaviour-based laws must be back-up, .. .and not vice versa. If we continue in the inverted mode of putting regulation by outside agencies and excluded observers into the unnatural primacy over inclusional regulation, we shall be constrained to ordering the community dynamic on the basis of 'behavioural purification' and fault-intolerance rather than on the basis of fault-tolerant resilience and co-creatively sustained community harmony..
It appears that the imposition of an abstract absolute framing space is not nearly as 'convenient' as our philosophical forefathers anticipated.
The imposing of Euclidian space gives us a 'visual space' view that is 'all content and no context', ... the 'acoustic space' dynamical context amongst the constituents being 'dropped out' and re-constructed using the absolute reference frame. The information loss is clear. The simultaneous interdependency between the enveloping collective dynamic and the dynamic of the constituent is lost, and one instead develops 'rules of behaviour' (e.g. the laws of mathematical physics) for the contents (constituents) which are now detached from the particulars of the enveloping collective dynamic. This abstract reduction from 'acoustic space' (inclusion in the contextual dynamic) flies in the face of our life experience which informs us that motion is relative and that the enveloping shape of possibility space (dynamical context) inductively shapes constituent behaviour in an over-riding way.
As McLuhan observed, light is the purest form of information, having no content itself, it enables others to see. What Dennis Gabor further observed was that our visual space impressions use only the 'intensity' of light and we seem to ignore the 'phase' characteristics of light. Gabor's communication and holography theory show that when we include in our sensing interpretation the phase information, we can image the enveloping collective dynamic on a purely relative basis (we can see things from any relative center looking outwards, without dependency upon the notion of an absolute containing space). Light is thus shown capable of giving us the 'acoustic space' view which includes the simultaneous interdependency between the collective dynamic and the dynamics of the constituents, ... a view which informs us of our participation in the co-creative shaping of possibility that inductively shapes the behaviour of the included constituents. Because the constituent can detect no relative difference between his motion and the motion of light (the speed of light is a constant), one must conclude that the observer 'is made of' light (resonant energy). This 'inclusional', 'acoustic space', dynamical-context-in-the-primacy-over-content world view is the worldview of Heraclitus, Bruno, Kepler and Poincaré, and it leads to an egalitarian, community harmony based approach to social order rather than the 'linear control hierarchy', 'purification' and 'survival-of-the-fittest' approaches based on the reduced 'visual space' 'content-in-the-primacy-over-dynamical-context' world view.
'Light' is our substance; i.e. we 'are light', dynamical context, energy resonance, and the abstract content labels we impose on ourselves, that psychologically (synthetically) detach us from the dynamical Unity of space (synthetic detachments that we cannot impose on the reality of our experience within nature), particularly through science-constrained education, are suffocating us.
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