Montréal, April 11, 2000
http://www.goodshare.org/headwake.htm
Zeus: Emile, it's not like you to want to add an upfront prologue to an essay we've already written, ... what's up?
Emile: Last night, it came to me why it is so hard to share implicit understanding, ... both transmitter and receptor need to be in a state of wholeness, ... of whole-and-part harmony wherein the message is referenced to the containing medium.
Zeus: Well, if that's the case, why did you kick this essay off with a picture of a guy with his head up his ass? It is really an affrontment which takes the reader out of his state of harmony and puts the whole sharing session on a bad footing.
Emile: Yes and no, ... that's why I wanted to talk to you about this essay. The geometry of self-referentiality, ... spiralling into the wake of one's own experience, ... is an essential geometry that has been 'tainted' by our culture somehow, and it seems to me that I cannot avoid this issue of a tainted geometry, if I am going to share my point of view.
Zeus: And what is your point of view?
Emile: ... It is that everything in physics points to the fact that nature is a space-time flow which we experience volumetrically, yet insist upon describing visually.
Zeus: What's wrong with describing a volumetric experience visually?
Emile: ... There's nothing 'wrong' with it, ... it's just that it's humongously 'incomplete'. Volumetric experiencing allows us to sense and perceive things azimuthally, ...coming inwards towards us and going outwards from all possible radial angles, .... a compression and dilution or 'thrust and parry' sort of experiencing as described by Henri Poincaré. This 'immersed' experiencing gives us access to information about our containing world in 'potential energy' or 'possibility space' terms. By contrast, visual description insists on 'seeing things' in terms of a subject - object dichotomy, ... an observor at a subjective vantage 'point' versus and objective world 'out there'. In making sense of things visually, we invoke a reference frame and then we describe the motion of 'things' in the non-relativistic terms of their velocity, ... a velocity which is with respect to our arbitrary or subjective frame of reference. This 'voyeur' description gives us access only to information about our containing world in terms of 'kinetic energy' or 'actuality space' terms.
Zeus: I think I see what you're saying, and it sounds like Claerbout and Dellinger's point about reciprocity in seismic waves, ... that we must regard the receptor as a spherical point, as in non-euclidian space, rather than a non-volumetric point, ... in order to take care of the azimuthal, compression-dilution and potential energy aspects of the codynamics we are immersed in.
Emile: .... That's right, ... and this mode of observation shifts the observer to the multivalent interface between 'outer' and 'inner' and allows him to take advantage of a higher dimensional perception than is possible with the subject-object dichotomy, ... a view which is essentially bivalent, ... coming towards the subject from the object or going towards the object from the subject, ... that's why the spherical space convention is a mathematical requirement in the immersed experiencing case, while a rectangular space convention is adequate for the voyeur viewing case.
Zeus: ... So you're saying that Physics is screwing up by describing things in voyeur visualizing terms when the basic experiencing is in immersed volumetric terms which is intrinsically higher dimensional and cannot be 'reached' by visual formulations?
Emile: ... You got it, Zeus, ... although I would qualify that and say that the general theory of relativity and quantum theory are trying to expand our scientific views from voyeur-visualization to immersed-experiencing [3], ... although there is a great resistance to this in our culture, ... and this brings us back to the 'mode' of the listener or 'receptor' when we are sharing ideas on this. Like the geophone-receptor, ... he is capable of sensing 'velocity' relative to his subjective reference framing, and/or to sensing 'pressure' between his exterior and interior, ... and while the latter contains the former in an informational sense, the reverse is not true. Thus if he interprets the incoming information stream in terms of velocity and kinetic energy; i.e. in the 'actuality space' terms of material things and their causal transactions, ... he will drop out essential 'possibility space' information on relational interference and their induced space-time transformational effect.
Zeus: ... I feel like saying; ... 'draw me a picture', ... but I guess that's not on.
Emile: ... I can draw you a picture, but the information content needed to take you upwards in dimensionality to emulate immersed experience will necessarily be symbolic or implicit and not fully explicit. For example, I can show you a picture of yourself in a boat, circling the world repetitively and running into your own wake and the refuse you jettisoned on your prior trips, ... but the notion of your experience spiralling or enfolding in space-time can only be implied. In visualization, we can only show the 'things' and causal transactions of actuality space, or 'current' space even though that is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to our continuing experience.
Zeus: ... In practice, I suppose you could show the boat going around the world in a sequence of scenes which the observor would then have to put into context in his mind.
Emile: That's true, ... but the key point about visualizing spherical experience is, ... as Einstein points out in his essay 'Geometry and Experience', ... you have to then 'bring a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into connection in the mind'. As Einstein puts it; "Can we picture to ourselves a three-dimensional universe which is finite, yet unbounded? [as in spherical space] The usual answer to this question is ``No,'' but that is not the right answer. The purpose of the following remarks is to show that the answer should be ``Yes.'' . . .First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To 'visualise' a theory, or bring it home to one's mind, therefore means to give a representation to that abundance of experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement."
Zeus: Yes, I see, ... the corollary to our experience being 'incapable of being directly pictured', is that we are compelled to the domain of implicit relational patterns which we must bring into connection in our mind when we interpret our immersed experience.
Emile: That's right, and this is no problem since we are well equipped for such a mental process. The problem is that Physics and science in general has formulated everything in a bivalent visual manner and dropped out the implicit 'immersed experience' based information in the process. Experiencing our natural reality is an 'immersed' experiential undertaking which is beyond the reach of finite systems of mathematics, as shown by Goedel's theorem; i.e. 'The receptor who pictures all those which cannot picture themselves cannot picture himself and cannot avoid doing so.'
Zeus: ... I'm getting the picture, ...er, ... things are connecting in my mind and I'm getting an implicit understanding of what you're saying. No matter how comprehensive our explicit picturing of things is, ... it is from a given perspective which means that from that same vantage point, there are other views, ... and that we need another observer to give us a picture which puts the first observer into a volumetric context. And once we have that, we will need another observer to put that observer's view into context and so on and so forth ad infinitum.
Emile: ... You got it, Zeus. Equations in physics are like pictures which assume some consistent coordinate system in which the interactions of the variables are described. The difference in relativity theory is that the equations describe space instead of describing material 'things', ... so relativity is a kind of meta-visualization technique which describes a process for picturing resonant interference patterns which 'paint' the surface of actuality. Energy and field based curvature of space adds information beyond what is pictured in euclidian ('actuality' or 'existential') space.
Zeus: What you are saying here about mainstream science being visually explicit and bivalent versus our experience being sensorily implicit and multivalent, is easy to check out and validate or reject. If what you say is true, and it does indeed sound true, ... in terms of being consistent with our experience, ... how could anyone reject it?
Emile: ... Zeus, ... many people have been saying this same thing, ... in a variety of different ways, ... for a long time. Heraclitus said it back in 500 B.C., ... Kepler said it in 'Harmonies of the World' in 1618. As we started off saying, ... the receptor of such ideas must be in a state of wholeness when such concepts are being shared and considered. If he insists on being shown an explicit picture, then he is effectively rejecting the possibility of the larger, immersed view of reality, since as Einstein says; "it is incapable of being directly pictured". Our 'immersed experience' in spherical space is implicit, cannot be directly pictured or explicitly stated and must be understood by being brought into connection in our minds.
Zeus: ... hmmm, .... It seems to me, then, that you might approach the subject more gently without throwing that off-putting image in the reader's face.
Emile: Zeus, you are probably right on that count, Zeus, ... but authenticity is worth something too, and my intuition was just to throw it up there and not to hesitate and allow my mind to be invaded by a horde of politically correct thoughts.
Zeus: In other words, ... you are short on presentation ideas, ... and are willing to concede the struggle on this go-round and just dump the information out there even though the presention style is a 'turn-off'.
Emile: Exactement, Zeus! While the ideas in our essay are 'ready for prime time', ... our mode of presentation is not there yet, ... so my thought is to at least document the ideas, and if somewhere along the way, a new way of looking at things is triggered in the mind of the receptor, ... he will be able to come back to this information and see it in a new light.
Zeus: The problem I see is the likelihood of the receptor never returning to take another look. When you say later on in this essay that the university text, 'Vector Mechanics for Engineers', version of Kepler's 3rd Law is incomplete 'bullshit', the student who scores well on such material has to slight his own success to give you his attention, ... this is not a good way to share, when you ask for payment in advance.
Emile: That's true, ... but it is not those with full cups who I am endeavoring to share with, ... it is with those with a need like mine, ... to understand 'community as complex system'. And the student who already believes that something is missing when you take the harmonies of the planetary system apart, is 'paid in advance' so-to-speak, when he hears this same message about the error or 'incompleteness' in the statement of Kepler's third law. Such a student may enter into this 'state of wholeness' which opens the door to such beautiful thoughts as came to Kepler on nature and which have been so rudely stripped out of his work. I think we all know about this, .... when we go to school and work, we often go with love in our hearts, tuning in to the implicit meaning in things, only to be confronted by the mechanical demands of systems which do not reciprocate our valueing of implicit, sensory experiencing.
Zeus: It seems to me that you are touching on a potential answer to your own question on presentation. There must be an appeal to the personal experience of the receptor, ... a reader who has fresh experience of having entered into a discussion in a state of wholeness and been rejected, .... a reader who have been confronted by the stewards of systems who tell him that all that is required, ... all that is accepted, ... are 'the directly pictured facts' of the matter, ... surgically excised from their implicit context.
Emile: And this to me means that the reader must be 'in charge' and this essay must be like a clothing store wherein he can come in and try things on and take those things which are 'his size' and which may be useful in his own battle against the mind-numbing cultural tradition of putting voyeur visualization in the primacy over immersed experiencing.
Zeus: Well, if that's the case, why don't we do like the girls in the Singapore department stores and take the reader by the hand and give him a guided tour of the various departments according to his personal preferences?
Emile: ... I'll try anything once, Zeus. We can put our [[** consumer's guide recommendations ]] within double square parentheses.
Zeus: ... let's gopherit.
<><><>
[[** This first section is a bit dry because it is trying to set up the geometric and philosophical base for the remainder of the essay, ... but if you like that sort of thing, wander in, ... and if you don't, skip on down to the next set of double parentheses ]]
To say that science has its head up its ass would be to turn self-referentiality into a pejorative image, ... and that indeed is the affliction of our science-worshipping culture.
Kepler's third law, first presented in 'The Harmonies of the World' in 1618, describes the harmonic dance of the system of Sun and planets. It is all about the harmonic relationships amongst the planets in their 'cherishing and adoring' of the Sun and each other. It is about self-referentiality, the simultaneous manner in which something can simultaneously 'be itself' AND be part of its containing ensemble.
In a modern mathematics or physics text, ... you will have to look hard to find any mention of this whole-and-part harmonic aspect of the solar system, since our culture has a blindness for self-referential relationships. More than this, it seems to have a dread, disgust and fear for self-referentiality, ... seeing it perhaps in the context of masturbation, ... of a system which is continually 'playing' with itself.
Instead, in modern physics and maths texts, you will find statements of Kepler's third law which look like this;
"The squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportional to the cubes of the semimajor axes of their orbits. . . . Kepler's third law may also be derived from the results in section 12.12" [Newton's Laws Applied to Space Mechanics.] (from 'Vector Mechanics for Engineers' (1990)).
Dear student of physics, ... please be warned that this statement immediately above is Yin-doctored bullshit, ... it is the reductionist product of a culture which is unawarely on a course to purge harmony from our experiencing of the world.
The 'law of gravity' specified in terms of the attractive relationship between TWO bodies, ... F = (G*M*m)/(r*r) ... where the attractive force is given by the product of the gravitational constant 'G' times the mass of one object, 'M' times the mass of the other object, 'm', divided by the square of the linear distance between them, 'r', ... is a law which can say nothing about the simultaneous dynamical harmony 'emerging' naturally from the codynamics of an ensemble of objects.
Kepler's law, as re-stated above, has been stripped of what Kepler asserted was the most essential aspect of this law of planetary motion, ... namely that the constant of proportionality was the same for all planets in the system and that what was most amazing was the simultaneous relational interference of the ensemble of planets;
[[These two quotes by Kepler are worth reading because they point to the part of science which deals with the emergence of harmonic effects which can't be deduced from the bottom-up, ... in other words, the complex systems aspects. Kepler was totally tuned in to this, and Newton dropped it out, ... and now we have a huge new committment to it, ... e.g. Institutes like the 'Santa Fe Institute'.]]
"Furthermore, a great distinction exists between the consonances of the single planets which have been unfolded and the consonances of the planets in pairs. For the former cannot exist at the same moment of time, while the latter absolutely can; because the same planet, moving at its aphelion, cannot be at the same time at the opposite perihelion too, but of two planets one can be at its ratio of plain-song or monody, which we call choral music and which alone was known to the ancients [The choral music of the Greeks was monolinear, everyone singing the same melody together.] to polyphony --- called 'figured song', the invention of the latest generations --- is the same as the ratio of the consonances which the single planets designate to the consonances of the planets taken together."
"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 [containerfull] 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 doubled 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 must capitulate, so that the harmony-of-the- whole can prevail." (Johannes Kepler, 'Harmonies of the World', 1618)
The modern textbook re-statement of Kepler's third law testifies to the blindness of modern science to the very notion of the whole-and-part harmony in nature, and to western religious reverence for the binary (two-body without reference to containing ensemble) laws of Newton. A worshipping at the altar of linear science and bivalent rationality which would have everyone 'singing the same monolinear melody'. This is what we have taken, through technology and the deification of independent existence, to the scale of a global economy, ... a mononlinear, everyone goose-stepping to the same mechanical tune.
If you get the chance, .... seize a Nobel laureate physicist and shake him by the shoulders until he will admit to you that his work, while self-consistent in a reduced flatspace context, ... is tragically incomplete in guiding our managing of ourselves and our community systems. Chances are, they will simply ignore you, as they are a powerful and respected club 'in their own right' who appoint their own judiciary to determine which of them is most correct, in an ongoing purificationist quark-seeking initiative.
Tell him he has tunnel vision, ... that his head is up his ass, ... and that the problem of our time is that he exalts in his denial and propagates it to us all through the social regulatory and educational processes built on top of it.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory. I do not believe there is malicious intent, ... I believe the intent is humanist and compassionate, ... as was the intent of the Christian missionary for the aboriginal, and the intent of the pre-Pasteurian surgeon for the patient on whose behalf his bacteria-laden hands intervened. Where dissonance, dysfunction and infection erupt, there is a committed, anthropocentric effort to purify and perfect the mechanics of our current state of professional knowledge, without an awareness that our fields of knowledge are in themselves, radically incomplete.
* * *
[[** We are getting out of the dry stuff for a moment, ... and this following 'geometric-experiential' thought is in fact rather wet, and a bit smelly but very organic. It is the real natural life stuff which the purificationist tendency in our culture would have us forget about.]]
The fish in the sea accept that the waters which flow through them and give them life are the same waters which receive and accrue the co-products and codynamics of their living.
Modern man has all but forgotten that he is immersed in an evolution flow, that he inhales the coproducts and resonates with the codynamics of his own life processes. In the indigenous peoples traditions, this understanding of his innate 'relativity' and 'self-referentiality' is not forgotten, as David Abram observes in 'The Spell of the Sensuous';
[[** The north american native stuff is a layover for 'field' theory and includes number theory, spheres-englobing-spheres, ... ontogenetic spirals and the whole works. Abram's book broaches these subjects very effectively and brings out compassionate feeling. Hyemeyohsts Storm's 'Lighteningbolt' is more terse but more thoroughly 'indigenous wisdom' based.]]
"Air or Wind is the very medium in which the natural forces live and act, by transforming the Air through song, the singer is able to affect and subtly influence the activity of the great natural powers themselves.
When a Navajo person wishes to renew or reestablish, in the world, the harmonious condition of well-being and beauty expressed by the Navajo word *hozho* he must first strive, through ritual, to create this harmony and peacefulness within his own being. Having established such hozho within himself, he can then actively impart this state of well-being to the enveloping cosmos, through the transforming power of song or prayer. Finally, according to Witherspoon ['Language and Art in the Navajo Universe], "after a person has projected *hozho* into the air through ritual form, he then at the conclusion of the ritual, breathes that *hozho* back into himself and makes himself a part of the order, harmony, and beauty he has projected into the world through the ritual mediums of speech and song.""
This brief quote from Witherspoon makes especially evident the reciprocal, even circular character of the relation between and Navajo people and the animate cosmos that enfolds and includes them. They are not passive with respect to the other powers of this world, or rather thay are both passive AND active, inhaling AND exhaling, receiving the nourishment of the diverse beings and actively nourishing them in turn. As it is spoken in the Blessingway ceremony: "With everything having life, with everything having the power of speech, with everything having the power to breathe, with everything having the power to teach and guide, with that in blessing we will live."
For the Navajo, then, the Air --- particularly in its capacity to provide awareness, thought, and speech --- has properties that European, alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an interior, individual, human 'mind' or 'psyche'. Yet by attributing these powers to the Air, and by insisting that the 'Winds within us' are thoroughly continuous with the Wind at large --- with the invisible medium in which we are immersed --- the Navajo elders suggest that that which we call the 'mind' *is not ours*, is not a human possession. Rather, the mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans --- like all other beings --- participate. One's individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is imply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through and around one's particular body; hence, one's own intelligence is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land. Any undue harm that befalls the land is readily felt within the awareness of all who dwell within that land. And thus the health, balance, and well-being of each person is inseparable from the health and well-being of the enveloping earthly terrain."
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Now if the above image of our being 'children' of the Air in which we are immersed sound pretty weird to you, ... just change the word 'Air' to (Einsteinian) 'ether', ... and you can reflect on this indigenous peoples perceptual viewpoint relative to our modern scientific understandings. For example;
1. Our relationship with the containing ether. The general relationship of material things is given by Einstein in the following context;
[[** The implication of relativity is that 'field' is a more reliable base upon which to build a world view than 'matter', ... but one gets little chance to reflect on this because few people are willing to discuss it, and you're boss is not likely to take too kindly to your efforts to re-think the business on the basis of putting the immaterial in the primacy. This quote from Einsteain is a no-words-minced statement of the need to 'think field']]
"We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone [a concept which is in the primacy in the euclidian space convention]. 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 valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy."
Einstein's statement, that we are immersed in, and the derived products of our immersing space is geometrically equivalent to the Navajo view. In his further comment on the spherical space of relativity, ... Einstein points to the 'reciprocal disposition' effects of our immersing 'curved space-time continuum';
[[** This next quote on 'reciprocal disposition' or 'reciprocity' by Einstein says something very simple, but very fundamental, that if one lives on the surface of a sphere, every motion of every body has reciprocal effect on its containing space.]]
"Therefore we say that the spherical surface of the globe is an unbounded continuum. Moreover, the spherical surface is a finite continuum. For if we stick the paper discs on the globe, so that no disc overlaps another, the surface of the globe will finally become so full that there is no room for another disc. This simply means that the spherical surface of the globe is finite in relation to the paper discs. Further, the spherical surface is a non-Euclidean continuum of two directions [RECIPROCAL DISPOSITION [1]], that is to say, the laws of disposition for the rigid figures lying in it do not agree with those of the Euclidean plane."
As Einstein further points out, in the relativistic view, there are 'reciprocal disposition' effects between an object and his containing environment.
2. Where does the psyche 'reside'?
Relativity says that our material beings are secondary things relative to our containing 'medium', ... the vision being as in Einsteins allusion to a thrown stone, ... one of a relative concentration of field intensity which moves relative to the entities which surround it. So where is the 'center of perception' or 'psyche'?
Erwin Schroedinger has something to say about this, based on relativity and quantum physics;
[[** We didn't quote Henri Bergson here, but we could have as he says the same thing, ... that there is a volumetric or 'immersion based' 'reciprocity' between subject and object, ... just as there is between the transmitter and receiver in signal processing theory, ... and this leads one to the view that 'the medium is more fundamental than the message'. That is, that 'subject and object' play the same role as 'transmitter and receiver' in that they are just the 'tools' of the observer who is not anchored to the position of the transmitter or receiver but is 'coming from' the medium (collective consciousness). The neat thing to remember here is that all our traditional scientific laws deal with subject and object, but the observer is a free agent and can thus himself be the source of 'emergent effects' since he is not accounted for in the explicit laws and pictures he formulates [he is a kind of 'Maxwell's demon']. By Goedel's theorem, the observer is not governed by the system of rules he has formulated since he has the power to change them by adding a new and larger proposition which enlarges the system perspective ad infinitum.]]
"I think it is most true that in previous centuries, when discussing this question, one mostly had in mind two things, viz. (a) a direct physicalimpression caused by the object in the subject, and (b) the state of the subject that receives the impression. As against this, in the present order of ideas the direct physical, causal, influence between the two is regarded asmutual . It is said that there is also an unavoidable and uncontrollable impression from the side of the subject onto the object . This aspect is new, and, I should say, more adequate anyhow. For physical action always is inter - action; it always is mutual. What remains doubtful to me is only just this; whether it is adequate to term one of the two physically interacting systems the "subject." For the observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical systems . And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. (Erwin Schroedinger, 'My View of the World')."
Gerhard Grössing (Austrian Institute for Nonlinear Studies (AINS), ... a group of three independent researchers) expands on this 'non-material' center for perception in his 1990's evolutionary view of the development of the general theory of relativity ('Die Information der Physik: Subjektal und Objektal' as http://web.telekabel.at/ains/gg2.htm).
This brings us back to the notion of the independence of our personal center of perception from material interactions, and places this center, therefore, within the realm of the ether. Given that the ether is an unbounded space-time continuum, ... this says that our psychical center of perception is an innate local feature 'of the whole' of the space-time continuum; i.e. that there are no boundaries separating our psyche from our containing whole. What separates us is our unique space-time ontogenic experience.
Grössing discusses the historical development of this 'floating' center of psychical perception and why the non-euclidian space convention is necessary to address it; i.e. the constraint in euclidian space that there is no place for the 'observer to sit' if he does not sit on a material object; i.e. on a material 'subject' or 'object', since space is seen in the simple terms of material dynamics within a non-participating void in the euclidian space convention. Grössing puts this into perspective as follows;
[[** This is a very nice bit by Grössing which applies generally to the Fibonacci spiral structure of nature and says that the intelligence which sits between the 'thesis' and the 'antithesis' is what supplies the creativity to escalate the conflict to the point of rebirth in terms of a 'metathesis'; i.e. in terms of a bigger idea within which the old idea is just a small feature on the broadened landscape of the new idea. This furnishes a more harmonic approach to debating rather than the bivalent approach of being 'on one side OR the other'. That is, it sees the two sides of the argument as being artificial in the context of their arbitrary 'smallness' of perspective, and existing merely to stimulate a spiralling creativity. For example, in the native tradition, the sun and the earth are in opposition and while these two could 'hammer out which one should dominate', ... their opposition was instead the force used to produce 'children' (plants animals etc.)]]
"Mach and Einstein pointed out the assymmetry in Newton's physics: while space and time effected matter, ... the reverse was not true. The special theory of relativity succeeded in taking the first step towards integration of this reversal in the description of natural phenonemena: measurements for space and time are no longer absolute, but dependent upon the 'point of view' of the observer, and therefore on [dependent upon] a reference system bound to the presence of matter.
In the general theory of relativity, this [material] presence at last becomes the central theme. The logic of evolution (i.e.; symmetry - asymmetry - integration = meta-symmetry, and so on) also characterizes the development of our understanding of nature (i) subjective schema in Aristotelian physics and alchemy [the view of Protagorus]; (ii) asymmetry between space and time on the one hand, and matter on the other in Newtonian physics; (iii) Integration by means of RECIPROCAL influencing of space-time and matter in the general theory of relativity.
The way is opened, with the development of the causality concept in describing natural phenomena, which leads to the notion of integrative, circular co-dependency, not only in the general theory of relativity but also in the quantum theory; (i) subjective 'explanation' through the personification of nature (mother, spirits, god etc.); (ii) 'linear' objective description of nature (for example, observer-independent planetary orbits in Newtonian physics); (iii) circular, 'wholenesslike' causality (for example the connection between space-time and matter in the general theory of relativity)
Only with circular causality does an essential characteristic of quantum theory become understandable: now we can no longer (in the metaphorically extended sense of 'linear') describe an 'object', unless we put the hermeneutical circle between 'object' and 'observational instrument' in the center of our awareness (whereby the detached independence of these two components shall be understood merely as a thought-prop).
Basically, modern physics is giving this same view as the indigenous tradition, ... that man is a local concentration in the 'flowfield' whose center of perception, rather than coming from a material base (which is now a local concentration of field intensity), is coming from an ontogenic experience-feature within the unbounded, etherial (field-based) space-time continuum. The physics based picture further validates the notion that there is a reciprocal relationship between man and his immersing container and that he is self-referentially impacted by his own output.
Since our culture is not quite as 'open' to the notion of inhaling our own outputs, as the fish culture, and we are more likely to 'obsess' on that aspect of the re-entrant geometry (as in the picture of 'tunnel vision' above), ... it may be more productive to reference to the following diagram;
[[** This diagram of a boat circling the world and running into its own wake is a physically valid thought experiment which exposes the incompleteness of current science and its bivalent 'visual' mode, ... and it is, of course, more 'polite' than the first picture of self-referentiality presented in this essay. If one can view the first picture from the neutral perspective of a Dr. Spock, ... the topological points are well made, ... that a system can re-enter itself and thus a system can be enfolded in space-time so that, in general, it is impossible to separate space and time as in the euclidian space convention and still understand the system]]
[**Insert picture here. ... here is a picture of a small, ocean-covered sphere with a boat sailing upwards (NE) and leaving a 'V'- shaped wake. But one can also see the virtual continuation of the wake behind the boat, in front of the boat, so that it is apparent that the boat is entering into its own wake, ... the same geometry, but in a dynamical sense, as the guy with his head up his arse.**]
The boat is, in effect, entering into its own presence, .... a presence which is a 'wave-based' presence but which still captures, in an informational sense, ... the shape and motion of the boat, and which can be used in a re-imaging of the fossil boat which was but is no more.
The continuing 'active' nature of this residual presence has been studied and validated by quantum physicists in the context of homeopathy and solutions which have been diluted beyond the point where we can conceive of a material presence of a substance within the medium of immersion (solvent). Thus the material presence of things and people who are no longer present can be seen physics-wise, as having the power to continue to transform the constituents of space; e.g. through their disturbance of the possibility space. A metaphor helpful to visualization here is the situation in billiards wherein a ball 'moves through' and disturbs the configuration (induces transformation in the configuration), modulating the shot possibilities (material - causal transaction possibilities).
* * *
[[** This section tries to move out of the heavy theorizing into more practical examples of comparison between voyeur visualization and immersed experiencing]]
Dual Ways of Experiencing Space-Time Flow
We, the observer, have dual ways of experiencing movement through space-time, otherwise known as 'the passage of time', and 'aging'.
If we imagine ourselves to be rocketed backwards and away from the center of our real experience on the earth, .... we can assume a perceptual 'perch' somewhere in the heavens where we can look 'down and in' on things in a voyeur-like manner in which we, the observer, exclude ourselves from the experience. This is where we see 'the passage of time' and where we reference everything 'out there' to a rectangular euclidian spatial reference framing. If we watch a sailor, sailing repetitively around the world, we see him in terms of an ant on the surface, and we can 'zoom' in on him as much as we like, to get the fine detail of his actions.
In this 'voyeur' mode of looking at ourselves and the world, ... where we are not centered in the experience, while there is the sense of 'the passage of time' as a reference for all of the activities, ... there is no sense of us, the observer, 'aging'. Only the things and transactions in our 'field of vision' 'age', .... and we can measure their age by referring them to our voyeur view of the earth's rotation and revolution around the sun. This view of the earth going around the sun, as if we are looking upon it from a god-like excluded perch in space converts our sense of being immersed in a rotational reality, into a 'visual' picture of 'oscillation'. This euclidian view is incapable of capturing the 'immersed' experience because it is solely 'visual', while the immersed experience emerges from the confluence of 'feeling' and 'seeing'.
Now, let's fall back into the center of our experience and become the captain at the wheel of the boat which is circling the world, ... feeling our bare feet upon the weathered planking of the boat as we manhandle the wheel at the stern, which is connected directly to the ships rudder, ... with the engine throttle on a mount right beside it.
As we continually move forward up and over the horizon, we can feel the rising sun's blistering heat on our forehead and as the day continues, we can feel it warming and browning our back. Now there is a 'phase' to our centered and immersed experience, ... wherein all our sensations of 'what's out there' have some azimuthal angle with respect to our center.
Our center of experience is not at all like a 'point' in space, but more like a sensitive sphere which separates the internal from the external and can distinguish between the azimuthal incidence of sensation, ... the space-time phase 'angle of incidence' of our experiencing which allows us to have one side which is hot and another cold at the same time, ... a simultaneous unity and plurality.
Now the visualization of the euclidian voyeur mode, on its own, did not have this simultaneous unity and plurality of azimuthal incidence of sensation accompanying the flatscreen picture of 'what is going on out there'. This only seems to come with the 'immersed', experiential view.
[[** I particularly like the writings of Conrad and Momaday, for bringing out this notion of immersed sensate experience, ... being immersed and centered in our experiencing and thus portraying our experience in terms of multivalent (multi-azimuth) reciprocal disposition]]
From our god-like, non-immersed, ... non-centered in our experience view, we see things in an observer-excluding view. This 'reduced to voyeur perspective' (re-constituted in voyeur terms) scene from Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim' [2] may illustrate the point;
"The sun seemed to circle the earth in a regular oscillatory manner, illuminating a large boatload of something on its way somewhere. In the morning, when the line between the sun and the ship was no longer obscured by the intervention of the body of the earth, the ship was illuminated in sunlight and its daily progress along its trajectory was observable. As the sun moved overhead, the angle of the illumination continued to change until the line between the sun and the ship was once again blocked by the intervening body of the earth at sunset. The ship was staffed by a crew of five white europeans while the passengers on board were all of arabic or colored origin. The awnings on the ships deck distinguished it as a passenger ship and by observing its course, day after day with respect to the regional geography, one could deduce it was a pilgrim ship bound for Mecca. In the day, she was brightly lit by the intenseness of the light at these latitutes and her illumination faded and blackened at the end of each day, at which point she was no longer distinguishable in the black Arabian nighttime period."
This 'voyeur' or 'euclidian' 'visualization' of a boat on the high seas could be represented in its entirety, on a flat canvas, or sequence of canvases, since it does not invoke the notion of 'immersion'. Now let's relativistically move the observor into the center of his perceptual experience and see what the difference 'feels like';
"Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss forever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
The nights descended on her like a benediction."
The feelings of heat and the sensation of sound are now converted to 'outer-inner' experience in this excerpt from Conrad's 'Lord Jim', as opposed to the oscillations on the flat screen of voyeur euclidian visualization, as in the reduced version which preceded it.
Now what is it which the visual method in itself fundamentally lacks?
It lacks the notion of 'convergence' (compression) and 'divergence' (dilution) which are essentially volumetric in nature and can only be symbolically expressed on a flat screen, even if that screen is capable of displaying things dynamically. The flat pages of Joseph Conrad's and Scott Momaday's books are filled with symbolism to re-invoke in our mind the essential volumetric nature of our experience.
Our visual experience on its own, is a reduced-dimensionality, reductionist portrayal of our volumetric experience, ... our co-participation in container-constituent-codynamics.
Kepler's third law is about natural, volumetric compression and dilution harmonies, .... take another look at it, and allow yourself to see this broader, containing context;
"The squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportional to the cubes of the semimajor axes of their orbits."
The squares of the periodic times relates to 'kinetic energy' of the planet and the cube of the semi-major axis relates to material density or 'potential energy' possessed by the containing space. And this, combined with Kepler's statement;
[[**This statement by Kepler, reiterated here once again, ... points to the 'outer-inner' ordering which we have dropped out of physics, by virtue of the choice of the euclidian space-convention with its lack of 'reciprocal effect'. If we could see an animated version which included whole-and-part harmony, ....the solar system would look like a lung-breathing or a heart-pumping portion of space.]]
"Furthermore, a great distinction exists between the consonances of the single planets which have been unfolded and the consonances of the planets in pairs. For the former cannot exist at the same moment of time, while the latter absolutely can; because the same planet, moving at its aphelion, cannot be at the same time at the opposite perihelion too, but of two planets one can be at its ratio of plain-song or monody, which we call choral music and which alone was known to the ancients to polyphony --- called 'figured song', the invention of the latest generations --- is the same as the ratio of the consonances which the single planets designate to the consonances of the planets taken together."
That is, there is a reciprocity between the 'inhalation' of a planets and the exhalation of the overall system of sun and planets in which energy is conserved, ... the kinetic energy transforming into potential energy and vice versa in accordance with the constant of proportionality between the cube of the semi-major axes (giving the dilutional opening-up or exhalation action of space) and the square of the orbital period (giving the velocity of the compressional inhalation of space). Seen in this context, the solar system is dynamicized in the form of a 'breathing' by its containing space, ... a cyclic transformation of energy between material kinetic actuality and immaterial (relational) potential possibility.
Now, it is clear, of these two energy forms, ... potential energy is the more free and higher dimensional, being purely relational and 'of space', latent and invisible and not yet committed in terms of material actuality. Kinetic energy is attached to particular 'things' and their dynamics referred to a particular reference frame (since we cannot think of anything having a 'velocity' unless it is referenced to some fixed frame).
These relationships can be examined in the context of the game of pool since pool emulates spherical space. If we move any ball, the actual and explicit motion of the ball and its collisions, referenced to a euclidian coordinate frame, will yield the kinetic energy changes, ... but there will at the same time be clustering (compression) and declustering (dilution) effects associated with any ball movement, which very much effect the future possibilities of the game play.
The relationships between velocity and density waves (pressure waves) are reviewed in a seismology paper on transmitter-recepter reciprocity by Claerbout and Dellinger
(see http://sepwww.stanford.edu/oldsep/joe/oldArticles/Eisner/README.html); i.e;
"Acoustical energy can be defined at a point as the sum of kinetic energy (velocity squared times density) plus potential energy (pressure squared times compressibility). Where the positive pressure pulses collide (left side of the figure), the potential energy is twice as great but the kinetic energy vanishes (by symmetry because the motion of a wave moving positively is opposite to one moving negatively). Similarly, in the second case (right side) the kinetic energy doubles but the potential energy (and amplitude) vanishes. "Newton's law, mass times acceleration equals force, tells us how to compute the velocity from the pressure.
... density times d/dt velocity = -d/dx pressure
To get velocity from pressure, it is only necessary to differentiate with respect to x and integrate with respect to t."
The point here is that pressure is an invisible, relativistic function of space and while one may use euclidian coordinates to map its whereabouts, the notion of pressure is innately self-referential and concerned with concentration and dilution and does not change with the observer's choice of coordinate system; i.e. if I am sailing with versus against the waves makes a big difference in the value of kinetic energy I ascribe to the waves, but not to their value of potential energy, ... pointing out the VISIBLE wave 'motion' is an abstraction which depends on the observer's choice of reference frame, while pressure is something which is sensed by a centered or immersed receptor. The same is true for players of the game of pool. The skilled player perceives the evolutionary flow of the game in terms of the in-and-out (convergence and dilution) motion (unactualized potentials) which are continually breeding actualities, while the poor player sees only non-relativistic kinetic effects.
Now our western culture- oriented society is determined to ignore the role of invisible potential energies and to fully harness all energies in the form of kinetic energy, the energy of material dynamics, ... to have everyone consume his entire energy legacy in terms of goose-stepping to the same tune, ... to the 'monody' of the greeks, ... which taken to the extreme becomes the monotony of a cloned colony of politically correct 'Johnnie One-Notes'. (see the kinetic and potential energy origins of source-receiver reciprocity and the relation to the complex analytical signal in 'Instructor's Key to Physics & Curved Space 101 Entrance Exam' at http://www.goodshare.org/twinkle.htm)
So where are we?
We are saying that the euclidian, voyeur, visual view of the world is dimensionally limited and cannot in any explicit or direct way represent and convey the 'immersed' compression-dilution codynamic of our real life, center-of-perception experience. We are saying that a binary bit stream, the basis of modern scientific informational representation, is fundamentally incomplete and unable to carry real experiential information which relates to our immersed volumetric experience. That is, we are saying that explicit knowledge which can be conveyed in writing and graphical (visual) forms is radically incomplete with respect to the informational content of our immersed sensory-AND-visual experience.
What is the persisting educational indoctrination of our youth in this massive socio-scientific reductionist over-simplification of our reality doing to us? If we listen once again to Johannes Kepler, the answer is clear;
[[** If one read's Kepler's 'Harmonies of the World' in the context of differentiating between 'voyeur visualization' and 'immersed experiencing', it becomes quickly clear how tuned Kepler was to the archetypical processes of the mind which govern these different forms of experience. Physicists are today 'in error contrary to their own opinion', since the theory of relativity says we can't use matter as a base for phenomenal description without such description being dependent on our subjective choice of inertial reference frame.]]
"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." (Kepler, 'Epitome of Copernican Astronomy')
In a society which worships at the altar of science and rationality, you can imagine how the person feels who has mastered 'Vector Mechanics for Engineers' and built and refined his ideas further from such a base, ... about his knowledge of the world, compared to the artist or poet. He is given scholarships, money, power, Nobel prizes and responsibility by society because of his mastery of explicit visual knowledge, ... knowledge which is fundamentally deficient with respect to a scientific understanding of 'the way the world works', ... fundamentally deficient by virtue of its dependency on the stripped down approximative legacy of visualizable laws and principles bequeathed to society by Aristotle and Rene Descartes through Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton knew that they were stripped down approximations and said so openly;
... in his letter to Bentley;
[[** If you haven't previously seen this first quote by Newton on his 'relativistic' abhorrence for the notion of gravity coming from matter rather than vice versa, ... it is well worth reading and reflecting on.]]
"It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must do, if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is one reason, why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another, at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."
... and in his 'General Scholium' summarizing the 'Principia';
"... and the planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in orbits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained ; but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. The six primary planets are revolved about the sun in circles concentric with the sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. Ten moons are revolved about the earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those planets ; but it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions, since the comets range over all parts of the heavens in very eccentric orbits ; for by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the planets, and with great rapidity ; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detained the longest, they reced to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
So Newton himself, the author of those laws which are so exalted in our society, speaks to their fundamental incompleteness, in the context of the emergent whole-and-part harmony in nature, recognized by our immersed-in-nature experience, which is not explained in terms of mechanical cause, ... the domain of mainstream science and community regulation.
For us to continue to mechanically arrange things on the basis of these incomplete laws, from the bottom up, is leading to much grinding and gnashing of teeth in the overall workings of our environment. We are lacking the knowledge of the whole-and-part harmony, ... the self-referentiality which leads to harmonic emergence. It is a part of our experience which we have not succeeding in capturing and codifying, ... a part of our experience known full well to the child, the poet, the artist and the exceptional scientist such as Kepler, Newton and Einstein. All of these would insist that our experience must be put into a primacy over our simplistic and incomplete mechanical science, ... and while the masses in science listen and feign to hear and accept, they continue to teach and utilize incomplete knowledge, putting its implementations into the primacy over understanding, so that, ... as Kepler says; "it so happens that certain people are in error contrary to their own opinion. "
Relational Summary;
[[** Now that the theory has been covered and some examples given, this last section speaks directly to the problem of 'dropout' between immersed sensate experience and voyeur visualization. There are a zillion proofs of what is being said here, ... all of which are contingent upon the acceptance that our sensate experience is furnishing implicit information which is beyond the dimensional scope of bivalent scientific voyeurism, ... that voyeur science is a dumbed-down version of our experience. If the receptor insists on accepting only that which can be explicitly pictured, ... then there's no point in even talking about the enlarged scientific perception of 'the way the world works' made possible by relativistic information management.]]
This essay is re-telling tales which have been told, but not heard, many times before.
An essential point is that our experiencing of life is a volumetric experiencing, as in Henri Poincaré's essay discussion on 'The Relativity of Space', which cannot be portrayed by explicit visual means. That is, we cannot show the fact that there is a continual tradeoff between kinetic energy and potential energy since kinetic energy must be displayed with respect to some non-relativistic material-based reference frame of our choice; i.e. visual representation, which included written and graphically presented knowledge, is a function of our representational 'framing' of our experience, and it is not dimensionally broad enough to capture the experienced sensation of compression and dilution at the curved space-time boundary of the external and internal, ... the 'place' wherein our experience is 'centered'.
In visual media, such as writing and flatscreen images (television, film, pictures), volumetric compression and dilution can only be symbolically indicated; e.g. by means of 'many-to-one' multicolored arrows which suggest creative synthesis (subduction into potentia or upwelling into blossoming innovation) or 'one-to-many' like-colored arrows which represent radiative propagation of a new informational entity. Visual media can only depict 'states' of existence rather than co-dynamical equilibria which arise from the continual mutual transformation of potentials and material kinetics. This is the complaint of McLuhan, that we treat explicit visual representation as if it were the 'whole story', when it is the lesser part of the story displayed in a lower dimensional manner. This is also the complaint of Joseph Campbell and non-mainstream thinkers, who can see that symbolic information such as myth is needed to share our whole-and-part harmonic experience which depends upon the relational potentials or 'possibility space potentials' which go beyond explicitly framed actuality-space transactions.
We can see the shortfall of the visual in the simple thought experiment of sailing around the world into our own 'wake'. Only if we are 'on the boat' can we feel the boat bobbing up and down' in response to our previous trips around the world (or around the sphere of activity). And only when hit the flotillas of empty champagne bottles from prior new year's celebrations, and have to slow our boat engine to avoid damage to the propellor in the present, that we realize the unboundedness of space-time, ... particularly if we pick a bottle out of the water and find that is of a vintage drunk by our grandfather before we were born. We cannot convey this 'immersed' experiencing of our encounter with a still active past, by visual means, ... we need also this sensory FEELING of being immersed in our own history, ... a history which continues to have an active presence.
This feeling of active history and immaterial presence which continues to transform is not just 'imagination', it is a real property of space-time. The reason why homeopathic solutions diluted beyond the point that there can be said to be a material presence of the solute can still 'act' on the patient's system is explained by quantum physicists in terms of 'white holes' which are concentrations of reciprocal effects of the once concentrated presence of the material, ... which are physically measurable in terms of Beta radiation effects (free electron activity), ... in the same manner as the boat which circles the globe leaves its own 'white holes' (think of a pebble dropped into a smooth pond), ... the memory of the material presence which is preserved by the wave effects, and which continues to act upon and transform the configuration of space-time, ... including the original material presence which noses back up and into its own stream of exhalations. Nosing back into our own 'white holes' is the general geometry of nature.
So, if nature is about induced transformation perceived by centering our perceptions at the boundary between our external container and our internal contents, we stand between the notions of 'subject' (doer) and 'object' (doee), ... and this is what is being said by the philosopher Bergson (Creative Evolution); "... our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect insertion of our body into its environment, to represent the relations of external things amongst themselves --- in short, to think matter." ... as well as by modern physicists such as Schroedinger and Groessing as cited in the body of this essay, ... to whit that our center of awareness is 'of space' and gives rise to the expedient thought-props of material 'subject' and material 'object', though the 'real story' is continual transformation.
Since we 'feel' compression and dilution in an azimuthal sense, our 'self' or 'center of awareness' can never be represented as a discrete 'point' in euclidian space but must instead be represented in terms of a spherical presence in space-time. This can be seen in the discussion of wave characteristics (kinetic and potential energy tradeoff) in the context of reciprocity.
Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious is congruent with this notion that our experiencing 'self' is 'of space' since the space of relativity is unbounded spherical space-time, ... and the linkage back through to the visual, as in the written prose of Lauren van der Post [4] and Joseph Conrad exposes the role for the symbolic and archetypeal, as a necessity in sharing live experience via the dimensionally constrained medium of the visual.
Indigenous wisdom, ... as in the Medicine Wheel, ... corroborates this view of self as being 'of space' and 'of becoming', ... a view wherein experience is seen as a spiralling outwards to understand the outer world of possibility and spiralling inward to understand the inner world of ontogenic history, ... a geometry congruent with that of the boat circling the world and seeing external experience as being deepened by internal experience;
"The Medicine Wheel is the shape of the Zero. The Zero is the symbol and fact of Creation. The Zero Chiefs say that the Zero is not nothing, but is instead Everything. All of Creation's Children were designed and born from the Sacred Zero, and exist as part of the Zero. All of Creation's Children exist as Numbers within the Medicine Wheel. This the Children's Count or the Earth's Count. In the beginning was WahKahn. She is the Creatress Mother and the Great Zero, the Womb that Births All of Existence. Within instantaneous being was born the SsKwan. He is the Creator Father, and is the Dividing of the Zero. Creation, the Zero, is perfectly balanced. The Zero is Female and Male, and has designed and birthed all of Life." (An accounting of the world in the spherical terms of 'The Medicine Wheels' as given in 'LIGHTENINGBOLT', by Hyemeyohsts Storm, 1994).
In discussing curved space-views of nature, ... it always comes round to 'quitting time', ... the time to conclude a discussion, ... and there is always a problem here because there is never a 'clean' sum-up and conclusion, ... and that is the nature of the game, as the Medicine Wheel teaching tries to convey.
So such discussions, even if they are convincing and bring into confluence many mutually validating observations, have historically had little or no impact on the mechanical status quo and we continue to goose-step down the road of trying to bring everything into a common monotonic way of being, rather than 'letting go' and dancing to a diversely relational and harmonic way of becoming.
* * *
[1] Excerpt on 'reciprocal disposition' in a finite and unbounded curved space-time continuum, ... from Einstein's essay 'Geometry and Experience';
"Can we picture to ourselves a three-dimensional universe which is finite, yet unbounded?
The usual answer to this question is ``No,'' but that is not the right answer. The purpose of the following remarks is to show that the answer should be ``Yes.'' I want to show that without any extraordinary difficulty we can illustrate the theory of a finite universe by means of a mental image to which, with some practice, we shall soon grow accustomed.
First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To 'visualise' a theory, or bring it home to one's mind, therefore means to give a representation to that abundance of experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement. In the present case we have to ask ourselves how we can represent that relation of solid bodies with respect to their reciprocal disposition (contact) which corresponds to the theory of a finite universe. There is really nothing new in what I have to say about this; but innumerable questions addressed to me prove that the requirements of those who thirst for knowledge of these matters have not yet been completely satisfied. So, will the initiated please pardon me, if part of what I shall bring forward has long been known? "
[2] Impressions of 'immersed' space-time experiencing from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and from Scott Momaday's 'House Made of Dawn';
'Lord Jim'
"Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss forever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
The nights descended on her like a benediction."
* * *
'House Made of Dawn'
"It was dawn, The first light had been deep and vague in the mist, and then the sun flashed and a great yellow glare fell under the cloud. The road verged upon clusters of juniper and mesquite, and he could see the black angles and twists of wood beneath the hard white crust; there was a shine and glitter on the ice. He was running, running. He could see the horses in the fields and the crooked line of the river below. .... For a time the sun was whole beneath the cloud; then it rose into eclipse, and a dark and certain shadow came upon the land. And Abel was running. He was naked to the waste, and his arms and shoulders had been marked with burnt wood and ashes. The cold rain slanted down upon him and left his skin mottled and streaked. The road curved out and lay into the bank of rain beyond, and Abel was running. Against the winter sky and the long, light landscape of the valley at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone."
[3] Principle of Philosophical Relativity
Michael Conrad
Department of Computer Science
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan 48202 USA
Abstract. The internalist and externalist points of view are distinguished by different attitudes about the relationship between what is given in experience, including the feeling of control, and the description of experience in terms of constructs assumed to refer to properties that have an objective existence outside the self. The principle of philosophical relativity asserts that scientific theories should be open to different interpretations on such antinomic issues. Today's major physical theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are examined from the point of view of philosophical relativity. A model that incorporates the main but conflicting features of these theories (quantum superposition and gravitational nonlinearity) is briefly outlined, and its significance for understanding the biological life process considered. The analysis supports the idea that the universe as a whole, and biological life in particular, are always chasing an unattainable self-consistency.
".... In short, the quantum jumps that occur when the measurement process collapses the wave function from possibility space to actuality correspond to the quantum jumps that occur when a system undergoes time evolution. But the former are described by a probabilistic process, whereas the latter are not.
This is the source of the paradoxes of quantum measurement, and of the great controversies over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. No choice is allowed by the equations of motion. But when we make a measurement we make a choice, first as to what measurement is to be made, therefore what aspect of the system is to be made classical, and second as to when to make the measurement. Furthermore, this choice strongly affects the future development of the system, since if we make one aspect (say position of an electron) precise than a conjugate aspect (momentum) must become imprecise. The quantum mechanical model of acceleration allows no choice when it comes to the possible quantum jumps whose occurrence is retrospectively buried in the time evolution equations (the so-called sum over histories), but requires choice whenever a quantum jump is made explicit. The theory thus satisfies philosophical relativity so far as the possibility of choice is concerned, but not in a consistent way. "
[4] The following are excerpts from the work of Laurens van der Post accessible at http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds.
"The extraordinary life of Laurens van der Post is not easily capsulized. Author of many books, farmer, soldier, prisoner of war, political adviser to British heads of state, educator, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist are titles that barely indicate the depth and breadth of this rare individual. Born in 1906 in the interior of southern Africa, he lived among the people who create the first blueprint for life on earth, becoming the principal chronicler of the Stone Age Kalahari Bushmen. He was also one of C. J. Jung's closest friends for nineteen years. Van der Post dedicated his life to teaching the meaning and value of indigenous cultures in the modern world, a world he felt is in danger of losing its spiritual identity to technology, prejudice, empty values, and a lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of all life on earth. Awarded a knighthood (the C.B.E.) in 1981, Sir Laurens died after his 90th birthday, in December, 1996.
[The following] is an excerpt from the 1982 book by Laurens van der Post titled, 'Yet Being Someone Other'. This portion of the story occurs during his passage on the Japanese cargo ship 'Canada Maru' in 1926 from Port Natal, to Mombasa in Kenya, and thru the islands `slung along the equator like a girdle of emeralds' as Conrad's 'Lord Jim' had found Malaysia and what is today called Indonesian to be, and on to Japan.
This segment is included here because it serves to convey some inkling of the love the author had for history and its deeper psychic significance than what usually passes for the story telling of what our forebearers saw and did. But history includes so much more than what it is usually consigned to by this sort superficial recounting as van der Post describes in the beginning of his 1975 biography of Carl Jung, 'Jung and the Story of Our Time'.
"... History was written in a way that did not explain history and threw no light on its latent meaning. The legends and myths in which it has its roots and of which the dreaming process seemed so dynamic an element, as I had concluded in my amateur way. There seemed an underworld of history filled with forces far more powerful than the superficial ones that it professed to serve. Until this world was brought out into the light of day, recognised, and understood, I believed, an amply discredited pattern of self-inflicted death and disaster would continue to reiterate itself and dominate the human scene. I had even coined a name of my own for it and called it the "mythological dominant of history." I came to suspect that this area in myself, from which my childhood interest in dreams had come, was connected with it in a way not understood, because it was itself the subject of one of the most dangerous errors in our thinking. We assumed that "without" and "objective" were one and the same thing, as were "subjective" and "within." I believed that they were by no means synonymous and that there was something as objective within the human being as great as the objective without, and that men were subject to two great objective worlds, the physical world without and a world within, invisible except to the sensibilities of the imagination." [pp.20-21]
And from 'The Wind of Change';
"How could I, a child of the same Africa, myself have failed then to conclude that no year for centuries had been of so meaningful a transition as this year of our absent Lord, 1926?
It would have been even more startling had I known what I was to discover only after the last World War, which was in itself such a gruesome confirmation of the objective aspect of my subjective feelings of change. But then, in the very Kenya which Mombasa served as port, Carl Gustav Jung had just terminated his sojourn among the Elgonyi of Mount Elgon and returned to Europe satisfied that he now possessed all the objective evidence that he needed to confirm his hypothesis of a `collective unconscious' in man. This, in time, seemed to me at least as great a breakthrough for the human spirit as Einstein's `Theory of Relativity' and those illustrious others who penetrated the secret of the atom and discovered a mysterious universe expanding in reverse. I mention these three re-directions of human seeking not because they were the only ones but because they are all, for me, part of one another. They are aspects of a potential of mind and spirit out of which will come, however much and tragically societies were about to crumble, the energies for a renewal of life and its movement, a recharging of the arrested post-renaissance spirit into greater and more significant forms of being." [pp.134-142]