Emile: ... Zeus, .. I'll wager that Shakespeare had a 'John Lennon' twinkle in his eye when he put those words in Hamlet's mouth.

Zeus: Well, ... old WIll sure did have that way of tickling our weaknesses, ... and the seductive pull of the mental form and imagery he conjured up with words, ... indeed makes hungry where most she satisfies, .... but why the allusion to John Lennon?

Emile: Well it was John Lennon who captured the imagery of how we 'suspend' our awareness of our containing lives, by being voyeurs and focusing on rational issues, ...in that great quote "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Zeus: Yes, I like it, and the Ojibway saying, as well; "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky." Immersion in our own lives is a mode of perception and inquiry we use too infrequently. So you're saying that the audience would clearly see that Hamlet's life was 'happening' to him even as he was hung up on questions of existence, ... that Hamlet was contained within his life even as he was looking at life 'from the outside in', ... in the voyeur terms of 'problems' which seemed to con-FRONT him.

Emile: Right, ... but not only that, ... the seduction in Shakespeare's writing is that it induces the audience to think in terms of their own 'sphere of containment', as well.

Zeus: ... Indeed, ... perhaps that's why he called his theatre 'the Globe', ... instead of say, the 'Bristol'.

Emile: Well, ... subliminal advertising has definitely been around for quite some time. ... and we don't alway know what its asking of us. Anyhow, my point is with regard to the commentary on evolution we submitted to *Complexity*, just below you there, ... here we have the situation where it appears that all one has to do is put the container back around the content, ... to put the containing space-time which is needed to provide a home for debating issues of 'to be' or 'not to be' around the issue of evolution, and a whole lot of understanding of observed reality starts dropping into place real fast. If the question of 'to be or not to be' is asked, in an evolutionary or any other context, .... then someone must ask it, ... it must wrap itself within a containing story.

Zeus: You are, of course, referring to Kirk, Raven and Schofields point that Aristotle blew it by missing that critical point in Heraclitus' containing flow-based model of reality, .. where they say; "Plato clearly distinguished between Heraclitus' SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality of the cosmos and Empedocles' separate PERIODS of Love and Strife. At the same time, they are mentioned together as both alike in believing in the unity and plurality of the cosmos; and Aristotle's coupling of the two might conceivably have been motivated by the Platonic comparison, the important distinction between them being overlooked."

Emile: Yes, an omission which continues to this day to underlie the cultural difference between east and west, .. european and aboriginal. If the unity and plurality of a community of billiard balls is SIMULTANEOUS, then if one individual ball changes position, he changes the whole community , ... in the sense of the order and opportunity which effects the individual, the family or the whole community relative to their purpose, ... where they want to get to. While the changes to the community's future prospects are not predictable quantitatively, one can intuit, qualitatively, which potentials for whom have been enhanced or degraded. .... But if the unity and plurality are SEQUENTIAL then if an individual ball changes his position, we look upon that in the sense that his action may 'lead to' or 'cause' a change in the community, in a quantifiable, predictable and sequential way.

Zeus: Yes, and in the latter option, the 'sequential' or 'Newtonian' option,... this is where relativity raises its ugly, or pretty, as you prefer, head, ... for the question emerges, if something is changed, ... it is changed relative to what?, ... and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put an answer together to that one, at least not an answer which is full and 'complete' with respect to 'initial conditions'.

Emile: Yes, and also, there's an advantage to embracing the unpredictability of the SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality, .... as Lewis Carroll asked in 'Alice in Wonderland', ... 'how can you get lost if you don't know where you're going'.

Zeus: And as Bob Dylan said, ... 'don't look back', ... when you get stuck on issues of 'was I good' or 'did I suck' or 'do I exist' or 'don't I', ... it's futile because all the time you're moving and things are evolving and fans are buying your records, or they're not. What's the point?

Emile: It's a cultural tradition to regard man as 'rational', ... as if he's got a reason for what he's doing all the time, ... but the reason is simply 'analytical backfill' which covers over his real reason, which is not rational at all, ... but simply to preserve his emotional equilibrium. One can ask oneself 'is this the RIGHT thing to do?', ... or 'is this the WRONG thing?', ... but the 'relative to what' reference is always missing, ... and if we're like Dylan, we find ourselves doing 'what feels right' rather than following someone elses so-called 'rational' but intrinsically 'should be' recipes.

Zeus: I have no problem in buying into Henri Laborit's model for the 'Biological basis for social behaviors', the primacy of internal equilibrium over equilibrium with the external environment, ... as it seems ubiquitously manifest in our reality. When people's internal equilibrium is disturbed by sickness and injury, ... they rest in bed, and suspend their going out and interacting with the external world, ... and when they are hurt and angry, ... they strike out in such a way as to assuage the internal turmoil, ... a system which puts 'real need' first, and 'need' is not logical but experience-derived, and experience is relative. So it seems to me that while we have a choice between the SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality, ... the simultaneous or co-temporal relationship between container and content, on the one hand, and the SEQUENTIAL unity and plurality, ... the trans-temporal 'cause and effect' relationship between container and content, ... only one of these emulates nature, ... namely the former. So why don't we just accept it and get on with our lives?

Emile: You've just answered that question, if you think about it. Man is not rational but acts to preserve his emotional equilibrium, and thus it must happen that he evolves an interior balance which allows him to accept that his white daughter is sleeping with a black man, ... or that content and container are simultaneously, reciprocally related. The same absolutism (non-relativity) he brings to bear in seeing himself as 'being right' in his judgement with respect to his daughter, he brings to bear in rejecting the simultaneous relationship between container and content. What he must 'let go' of, to reach that interior equilibrium is his non-relativistic thinking, ... his thinking that his position is 'right' in an absolute sense, .... a notion which draws from rational logic and cause itself, rather than from nature.

Zeus: Let me get this straight. You are saying rationality, ... in the sense of a limited form of reasoning based on logic and cause, ... provides for the existence of absolute 'truth', ... binary judgements on 'right' or 'wrong', 'true' or 'false', 'good' or 'bad' etc., ... and that it is this system of absolutes which prevents him from evolving his interior emotional state, so that he can come to accept change? It is this system of rationality which necessarily references 'truth' to some arbitrary and non-relativistic suite of premises, ... it is this system which prevents him from updating his reference base upon which his notion of absolute truth rests? .... but that is irrational!

Emile: ... you mean that it is 'unreasonable', ... because what you have described is fully consistent with rational systems, which are just one subset of reasoning, as we note in our footnote number 3. below. As Wittgenstein said, ... logic is 'content-free', .. it is just a bunch of tautological operations, ... it must be primed with some 'data' and what you prime it with is all important. But even more important is the containing web of 'story' which the 'what is' content of rational propositions is woven into. Only the containing story can give 'should be' value to rational thought. For example, if I say it is not logical to kill innocent people, or that all those who kill innocent people must themselves be killed, ... such rational propositions do not explain why I would act one way with Truman and another with Hitler. It is one's feeling of 'should be' which comes from one's experiential story which answers those questions which logic cannot. Logic runs into irresolvable paradoxes because of its incompleteness, ... for example, ... Russell's paradox is depicted by; "the barber in a small town who shaves all those and only those who do not shave themselves, and can neither shave himself nor avoid doing so." If we replaced 'barber' with 'judge' here, we would arrive at some of the real issues which are facing us in the world today, both locally and globally.

Zeus: Yes, I see what you mean, .... in international politics, the paradox is resolved by Bill and Tony and what their internal or 'domestic' equilibrium-driven emotional need is telling them.

Emile: ... yes, ... and similarly in colonializing issues with the aboriginals, ... the rational buck stopped with the emotional feeling of 'what was right'. As Taiaiake Alfred and others point out, it is not 'rational' (in the broader sense of 'reasonable') to force your way into the land of another people and impose a system of law which then becomes the only reference by which the original peoples can settle their grievances with their invaders. It is, at the ultimate 'referencing point' of the rational system, a question of 'feelings' of what is right, and for the western european, ... SEQUENTIALITY felt better than SIMULTANEITY. With SEQUENTIALITY, one approaches perception and inquiry by seeking to prove that something or someone 'causes' an effect or problem, whereas, in the case of SIMULTANEITY, once approaches perception and inquiry by recognizing that the move of an individual billiard ball has the ability to change the whole opportunity outlook for the overall community of balls. So the imposition of a social regulatory structure based on 'sequentiality', which precludes 'simultaneity', on an indigenous culture whose reasoning was based on the latter, ... effectively 'snookered' them. How can you 'prove cause' when you were instead checkmated?, ... if I am sitting on the well of the world, ... and withholding the water of life, ... as one of the native creation myths goes, ... how can I prove 'cause', ... it is not what is being done, ... it is the reciprocal, ... what is not being done. Silence can be abusive as they say.

Zeus: Sounds kind of similar to the situation with Microsoft, where one company imposes its own regulatory structure, information wise, .... on a community which has been used to exchanging information on the basis of particular needs or 'local story', ... a tradition which has compreheneded the reciprocal disposition effects induced by individual actions. In that regard, I always thought that open systems 'standards' were something to enhance 'co-opportunity' and ecological behavior, ... rather than to produce one global 'engine'.

Emile: 'One global engine' gives the right sense here, Zeus, in that the 'sequential' mode of perception and inquiry is one which builds up closed systems networks of causal linkages, otherwise known as 'machinery', ... this seems to be what's happening in the process of 'globalization' as human 'relational intelligence' is being taken out of service in the networks and replaced with rational rule structures. Whereas, in the 'simultaneous mode', ... assessments and real-time responses are made with respect to the 'reciprocal disposition' effects of each move which is made, ... the 'container-content fit', if you will. Unfortunately, computers are rational tools which cannot assess their own 'reciprocal disposition' impact on the fly, because of Russell's paradox or Goedel's theorem limitation, ... of being unable, in finite space-time, to judge everything except oneself.

Zeus: To be able to assess the 'reciprocal disposition' effects associated with the 'simultaneous' container-content 'unity and plurality' then, seems to be an issue of qualitative relational pattern recognition, rather than being something tangible, rational and quantifiable.

Emile: That's right, Zeus, ... its subtle and its 'relativistic'. We are talking about notions dealing with the relative movement of multiple things (plurality) relative to themselves (unity). Only when we have 'whole-and-part' harmony can we say that we have a simultaneous unity and plurality, ... but 'harmony' is something which is 'aesthetic' rather than measurable, ... and it has three aspects to it, subject, object and container, ... as in the wind, flag and mind of the Zen parable, ... all three are in motion, as relativity insists, thus we cannot speak of 'harmony' directly in words. The direct words of explanation, ... and in this I do not include the indirect allusions of poetry and metaphor, ... are constrained to 'sequentiality', ... what the subject does to the object by means of the action verb.

Zeus: Can you give me a clarifying example?

Emile: Sure, .. remember last night when we were at Le Bistro a JoJo, ... the bassist Stephen Barry, who looked like he could have been a clone of my old boss, Bob Watkins, ex Penn State maths prof turned oilman? He gave us a living lesson in 'simultaneity' which was congruent with one that Bob had given me.

Zeus: What's with this connection between mathematicians and music?

Emile: Well TH figures the connection is that that they are both fugue-atives from particulate-arity, but that's another issue. Bob, .. I mean Stephen, ... wanted to 'say something' to that blues singing 'volunteer' kid whose ego told him that he just knew how 'blues' SHOULD BE sung and he kept getting up there and 'forcing it' out like it 'should be', ... and finally, mister stephen cool just winked to the kid, just before he was going to start a new song, and broke out in one of his own songs, which gave the kid a double message. I don't know whose lyrics they were but they were definitely relativity and quantum physics compliant, ... telling of how he 'lost his mind' over a woman who was 'sweet and cruel, ... as cruel and sweet as homemade sin', ... and that it had been so good, that his past was now pulling him into his future.

Zeus: Yes, that was a great song and a great delivery, it was great because everything was in phase, the situation in the container of Le Bistro a JoJo, .. the lyrics, the music, the crowd, ... simultaneous self-referentiality, ... the kid sat down on the stage, facing the drummer with his back to the audience, and just listened, and the crowd loved it. And the kid will remember that, but he won't be able to capture it in words.

Emile: Well that's what simultaneous self-referentiality is, ... it is perception of something which is resonating between the container and the content, ... container-content-coevolution, and it cannot be 'measured' quantitatively because there can be no 'outside' to relativistic space-time, ... to 'quantum reality' and therefore there is no outside reference space to reference the measuring instruments to, ... and one would have to get 'outside' in order to get measurement 'traction' on the three-way relativity of harmonic movement between the container and its parts. Kepler remarked on this 'primacy' of container-content simultaneity over the measurability of sequentiality in his 'The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy', ... he even puts the key phrase in emphatic script, and mentions it several times more in his 'Harmonia Mundi', ... but the 'materialist' viewer doesn't 'get it' because it is not a measurable perception, and he rejects information which is 'intangible', such as simultaneous harmonics;

... "For even without the epilogue, the following thesis is upheld by incontrovertible demonstrations: THAT IN THE FARTHEST MOVEMENTS OF ANY TWO PLANETS, THE UNIVERSE WAS STAMPED WITH THE ADORNMENT OF HARMONIC PROPORTIONS; AND, ACCORDINGLY, IN ORDER THAT THIS ADORNMENT MIGHT BE BROUGHT INTO CONCORD WITH THE MOVEMENTS, THE ECCENTRICITIES WHICH FELL TO THE LOT OF EACH PLANET HAD TO BE BROUGHT INTO CONCORD. The most wise Prince [his boss, Emperor Rudolph II] will easily reckon how great an addition this makes in illlustrating the glory of the fabric of the world and of God the Architect"

... The 'most wise Prince' was his boss and grubstake as 'Imperial Mathematicus', ... Emperor Rudolph II, ... and 'God', as Kepler saw it, is the 'geometrical' ordering principle in nature. Kepler's Neoplatonist beliefs followed those of Proclus, whose work he cites extensively in coming to his conclusions in the epilogue to Harmonia Mundi. Proclus articulated his views on 'God and Nature' in an essay by the same name; "We affirm Nature to be a certain power implanted in things producing like things out of like. For Nature generates, augments and nourishes all things. Wherefore it has in itself the names of all things. An animal is from Nature; a stone, wood, a tree, and the bodies which you see are from Nature and her maintaining. Nature is the blood of the elements, and the power of mixing which brings to pass the mixtures of the elements in everything in this sublunary world, and has imprinted on them a form agreeable to their species, by which that thing is distinguishable and separated from each other thing. Nor is Nature of any colour, yet a partaker and efficient of all colours: also of no weight, nor quality, but finally the fruitful parent of all qualities and things. What is therefore Nature? God is Nature, and Nature is God: understand it thus: out of God there arises something next to him. Nature is therefore a certain invisible fire, by which Zoroaster taught that all things were begotten, to whom Heraclitus the Ephesian seems to give consent."

Zeus: I see, ... the movement of two planets around the sun, which Kepler cited, makes this simultaneous whole-and-part harmonic generalizable for three and more bodies, ...and by implying that that the ensemble of all bodies, ... the whole 'universe' or container "was stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions", ... gives rise to the notion that the 'creator' or 'the evolutionary force' has a permanant and ongoing position within nature, as the aboriginals also believe.

Emile: ... yes, and Kepler tries to 'drive home' the notion of container-content 'simultaneity' even more solidly in his epilogue in 'Harmonice Mundi'; "Furthermore, a great distinction exists between the consonances of the single planets which have been unfolded [separated out of the whole-and-part harmony of the system] and the consonances of the planets in pairs. For the former cannot exist at the same moment of time, while the latter absolutely can;"

Zeus: So what Newton dropped out was the qualitative perception, which could not be described in words and equations, of the simultaneous whole-and-part harmony characterizing the full ensemble of Sun and planets, ... the 'adorning of the container with harmonic proportion', so that the planets 'had no choice' in the matter, as Kepler says. So what Newton did, ... and what our culture does, ... is to first 'unfold' the system into parts, which immediately drops out the simultaneous harmonic properties, which are, in any case, not quantifiable. Yet, as Kepler says, ... this harmony of whole-and-part or 'container-content-co-resonance', pre-determines what the contents, seen in their own right, must do on the local, sequential harmonic front.

Emile: It does indeed, ... and in a practical sense, ... this was what my old boss was telling me, in his smoke-puffing and back-and-forth pacing sessions in his office, which periodically erupted in decisions and advice. His remarks came at a time when I was having to select someone to fill a position and I was flipping back and forth between actual candidates and a profile of what the person 'should be' like, according to the common 'wisdom', ... and he said; "...yanno emile, ... you don't EVER want to get caught up in playing 'should be' games, ... ya go for 'the best man for the job', .. that's it, ... that's all." What that brought into my mind was the imagery of whole-and-part harmony, ... something which you could never get to from a list of of 'should be's which came from a disenfolding of simultaneous harmonies, ... .harmonies which emerged from the bringing into connection of a multitude of experiences in the mind..

Zeus: In other words, ... he advised you against 'being rational' and basing your choice on 'explanation', ... though I suppose you would end up 'rationalizing' why you chose whomever you did, 'after the fact'.

Emile: In those few words, you've exposed the whole rational facade, ... Based on our experience, we tune-in to the container-content-coresonances, and this tuning-in gives us a 'feel' for things, ... a 'feel' which we can either act on or not. And it's only after we get this 'feel' that we being 'backfilling' into those, initially, content-free boxes of logic and word, .... which we proceed to fill up selectively, according to our emotional need, ... from the smorgasbord of our experience. We know, internally, when we are letting ber driven 'politically', ... i.e. when there is a gap between our rational explanation and the 'feel' we got from tuning-in to the simultaneous co-resonances, ... and when we are not being driven 'politically', ... when there is no gap, ... and this tells us when we are being 'honest'. When we are fully 'honest' about what we do, ... we often do not even feel the necessity to provide the 'analytical backfill', .... as they say, 'love' and 'trust' are felt things rather than things that one can declare in factual mode, since they are 'co-evolutional' rather than existing 'in their own right'.

Zeus: Ok, we have covered a lot of ground here, .... from Dylan's 'don't look back', ... to Lennon's 'life just happens while you're doing your rational thing', ...to 'the non-existence of problems', ... and let's not forget to add Joplin's non-sequentiality treatise; " ... tomorrow never happens, ... its all the same fucking day", .... and this all leads back to our submission to *Complexity* and to Darwin's intended meaning, or mode of perception, in his closing statement to 'Origin of the Species'; ... "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers , having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;"

And l, for one, would interpret him to be in 'immersed mode' of perception, ... where, after all his studies and bringing all his real and imagined experiences into connection in his mind, ... he is visualizing that old curved-space feeling, ... of a simultaneous harmony, ... a container-content harmony, ... where the breath of the container is inhaled by its contents, ... in a kind of hot evolutionary foreplay which is manifest in a whole-and-part harmony of the 'few and the one.'

Emile: Aye, and therein lies the rub, ... for in this sleep of the death of exclusion and the rational, what dreams may come, ... must give us pause.

Zeus: ... Wait a minute, Emile, ... we already decided that life goes on happening regardless of what rational 'problems' we may seek to homocentrically and abstractly create and set in front of ourselves, ... it is our choice to do, or not to do like the gunfighters in the westerns, ... who go head to head on the main street of town, insisting that the town is 'not big enough for both of us', ... while simultaneously, in the adjacent valley, ... the commanches are having it off with the wives and girlfriends.

Emile: My words were with reference to this 'emotional equilibrium' thing, ... the small child could care now't for what size and curvature of space-time he's gonna be taught, ... the different options are already being used in the different cultures. But for those who have built their current equilibrium upon the non-relativistic sequential time 'standard', ... on WMT rather than RMT as the redmen say, ... his acceptance of this reasoning we have been dealing in will remain highly unlikely, ... even if his rational-over-relational model looks more and more broken all the time, ... and let's face it, ... the 'rational-over-relational' model has been coming under attack for ages, ... not only by the arts, but internally, ... within science and technology, as well as within the bureaucracies.

Zeus: Yes, .... but most of the seriously considered and armed attacks are just more rational-over-relational 'judgements' about who's 'right' and who's 'wrong', ... rather than being concerned with flipping our reasoning polarity back to 'relational-over-rational'. Even the aboriginals, apart from the traditional elders, have become 'rational-over-relational' finger-pointers carrying heavy law books, ... whiteman's law books, into their change initiatives.

Emile: Zeus, ... what we are falling back into right here and now is the same old question of 'to be' or 'not to be', ...and that is not the question, ... and Shakespeare never intended it to be the question. Such questions of 'what is' or 'what is to be' are most useful when restricted to a role of tensioning the 'springs' within our interiors rather than paralyzing the inquirer, and when the interior is tensioned, ... when the southern whiteman hears that his daughter is sleeping with a black man, ... he then has to leap to his own 'should be', ... and there are, in general, three choices in dealing with 'problems', as we presented in our pool story, ... (a) 'war and elimination', ... (b) 'ethnic cleansing and forced segregation', ... and (c) 'ecological jamming', the latter requiring one to be reborn into a new and larger story, ... to slip into something more comfortable, ... to 'let-go' of ones non-relativistic subjectivity and 'get down and relativistic', 'lose your mind', .. abandon your delusions of rationality, and induce in oneself some 'deep thoughts' which immerse you once again within your container, ... which take you out of voyeur mode and put you back inside your own life.

Zeus: Do you think that our reviewers and potential readers are ready for a rebirthing?

Emile: ... who's to say that they have not already undergone rebirth, and are out there in front of us, .... having simply been held down by a control-oriented environment, just like we have been? .... Maybe there are whole nests of bass-playing mathematics profs in the scientific journal reviewing and reading community?

Zeus: I like your reciprocating disposition on what someone else might easily see in terms of 'being' a 'problem'.

Emile: As I said, Zeus, ... 'problems' are 'what is' which is surreptitiously laced with 'what should be' and passed off as 'rationality', ... to say 'this is a problem' is an error of grammar, as Nietzsch pointed out, ... It's all relative, bro, ... 'to be or not to be' is not the question.

* * *

* * *

John L. Casti,

Executive Editor Complexity,

1399 Hyde Park Road,

Santa Fe, NM, 87501

August 27, 1999

Is Evolutionary Computing Evolving?

In the essay 'Notes on the Origin of Evolutionary Computing' by Moshe Sipper (Complexity, Vol 4, No. 5, May/June, 1999), Sipper avers his surprise at the continuing relevance of Darwin's 140 year old 'Origin of the Species', yet notes the pragmatic goals of evolutionary computing which allow it to settle on a 'simplified simulacrum'. Such a simplification implies the type of space-time container characterizing evolution. That is, the 'simplied simulacrum' of the individual being the 'unit-of-evolution' implies the euclidian space and time assumption.

The whole outlook is changed, however, if one assumes a relativistic 'curved space-time continuum', for we are then unable to separate out the 'individual' and use it as an independent base for modelling evolution. Relativistic curved space-time is self-referential or self-interfering, as Einstein, Feynman and others have pointed out, ...in finite, spherical space, when things go forward around a closed curved surface they 'bump into themselves'.

Einstein described this in terms of 'reciprocal disposition', ... the pattern of order associated with 'inter-thing' space, ... as is the focus of the experienced pool player. Pool, by virtue of its 'mirror-like' banks, emulates a finite curved space within which the contents interfere withselves; i.e. they are 'contained' by themselves. In viewing evolution in curved space-time, then, ... we must account for the fact that each 'individual' is inseparably 'connected' to the container (of the ensemble of all individuals) through its unique 'reciprocal disposition' which 'causes' the container (seen in terms of 'order') to change simultaneous with movement (change) of the individual.

As the good pool player knows, ... the patterns of 'reciprocal disposition' equate to 'opportunity' patterns with respect to the individuals and families ability to be able to evolve towards their purpose.

Their purpose, in the game of pool can be seen in terms of improving 'order', or qualitative 'purification', ...where the 'good' or 'strong' balls' (balls 1 - 7 or 'low balls') try to disenfold from the overall ball configuration, and segregate from the 'bad' or 'weak' balls (balls 9 - 15), ... the terms 'good' and 'bad' simply being used to set up the 'conflict' which arises naturally from the purpose of increasing order by disenfoldment. [1. the purpose of improving order in the configuration can be seen to lead to three 'human type' strategies, one of which leads to a 'deepening' of enfoldment of a particular, ordered type]

The 'reciprocal disposition' of finite curved space-time, then equates to 'opportunity', or rather 'co-opportunity', which links the individual to its container, ... the ensemble of individuals constituting the 'space-time container', ... each individual being a participant and interpretor, 'co-evolving' with its container. Since opportunity, in an 'order' sense, is based on pure geometrical patterns (reciprocal disposition) and since the motion of all matter is influenced by 'fields' such as electromagnetic attractions and repulsions, ... there is an effective 'participation and interpretation' going on at all levels. Given these natural forces (polar opposition, and disenfoldment of opposites), ... the evolution of 'orbital' order, the 'deepening' order described in footnote 1.) is a naturally evolving structure.

That we are currently struggling, at the homo sapiens level, with the three options opened up to us in this curved space-time theatre, ... 'war', 'ethnic cleansing', and 'ecology', ... is evident. It is also evident that the euclidian 'flatspace' assumption which dominates in our 'rational' culture, leads only to the first two options, 'war' and 'ethnic cleansing' and not to ecology (a spherically nested, co-opportunity inducing system).

The native american traditions are rooted in this type of curved space-time model, ... that is, ... the model is most apparent in the 'laboratory' of human life and history. For example the native notions that 'man is merely a strand in the web of life', ... and 'he who spits upon the earth spits upon himself', are a clear reflection of a belief in 'container-content-co-evolution'. The native tradition of 'sharing' is also distinctive and curved space-time oriented, and that is evident in native council meetings and community initiatives, where there is a sustained awareness of 'reciprocal disposition' which governs everyone's opportunity, associated with each person's communications (in the meeting) and actions (in community initiatives).

In the native american tradition, this awareness of reciprocal disposition (effects is not restricted to the sphere of human community, as native story such as Paula Underwood's 'And Who Shall Speak For Wolf' demonstrates. In this story, man does not give voice to wolf at its council meetings and systemic dysfunction results ('war' and 'ethnic cleansing').

The embracing of relativistic curved space-time answers questions of the type reflected upon by Lee Smolin in 'The Life of the Cosmos', ... in regard to the need to invoke some type of feedback mechanism to explain the stability of non-equilibrium systems such as the earth and the galaxies, .. "The only question is then the nature of these feedback processes.", ... "... it seems, a priori, at least equally plausible [to restricting the feedback to inorganic sources] that the feedback effects that maintain the environment in a state hospitable for life involve the living things themselves. At the very least this would be the more parsimonious and elegant explanation."

Smolin also notes the shortfall in the notion of the 'fitness landscape' which is fixed (non self-referential with respect to evolving organism, ... a situation which has us think in terms of the 'evolution of things', a euclidian vision, ...rather than the co-evolution of content (organism) and container (ensemble of contents). No doubt our refusal to allow the 'law of non-contradiction' (emanating from euclidian space and aristotelian logic) to be subordinated to the inclusionary geometry of curved space is an attitudinal factor here. Smolin describes this fixed 'fitness landscape' ; "... while being useful for certain purposes, is too naive to address issues such as the Gaia hypothesis. Instead, the niches --- and the environment in general --- are created by the species as they evolve. In such a situation, one species cannot mutate without there being an effect on the fitness of a number of other species."

Clearly, Smolin is describing a situation which seems to cry out for the notions of finite curved-space-time 'reciprocal disposition', ... or 'container-content-coevolution'.

Not only do the apparent patterns of conflict resolution in todays world, the native american sharing tradition based on 'co-opportunity' growth, represent 'real data' which points to 'container-content-coevolution', ... physics continues to play with the Heraclitean notion of a 'containing flow' which is "a simultaneous unity and plurality" [2].

The problem in accepting 'container-content-coevolution' arises from the limitation in logic described in Goedel's theorem, and discussed by WIttgenstein (whose ideas in 'Tractatus', picked up by Kurt Goedel via the Vienna Circle, led directly to Goedel's theorem), in that if one starts with fixed structures (propositions) one cannot build up to the containing 'story' within which such structures were defined and arranged. One can only use the propositions as a 'ladder' to visualize the container which holds the propositions, and then stepping over onto this visualization and 'throwing away the ladder'. In other words, logic and rationality can only deal with issues of 'what is', whereas, in order to be useful, such ideas must be woven into a container, and the weaving implicitly demands a 'what should be' (purpose) which is outside of the domain of logical-causal rationality.

Thus the euclidian space assumption, which detaches from time (and therefore becomes the domain of 'what is' out of the context of 'what should be') defends itself against its own takeover by the relativistic curved-space assumption (which involves natural purpose, in terms of improving container-content (whole-and-part) order; i.e. improving 'co-opportunity' or 'harmony'). The hitch here is that curved space is the general case where 'reciprocal disposition' effects are non-zero, where euclidian space is the special case where 'reciprocal disposition' effects = zero. One cannot build a 'space with physical properties which participates in physical phenomena' as Einstein described space-time, if one's building materials are constained to 'things' and 'void'.

If one views phenomena from 'inside the container' (Smolin notes elsewhere that there is no outside to space-time), then one can see oneself 'relative to' the ensemble of things which make up one's 'container', rather than seeing oneself 'in one's own right', as a detached and container-independent euclidian 'thing', and thus one can tune-in, in this immersed mode of perception and inquiry, to the notion of container-content-coevolution and how one's actions impinge upon 'co-opportunity' of the whole-and-part. This is the 'evolutionary' level of perception and inquiry in Erich Jantsch's 'Design for Evolution'. Clearly the euclidian view in which one sees oneself, 'in one's own right', is in conflict with the theory of relativity, ... and when science sees itself in the euclidian terms of existing in its own right, ... it is blind to its reciprocal disposition relationship with its container (humanity, earth). More than this, ... the fully detached euclidian view, as Einstein noted, ... can speak only to the domain of 'what is', and thus does not have the capability of being the 'loom' which weaves the knowledge of 'what is' into a purposive 'story', .. the weaving requiring an understanding of 'what should be'. Evolution itself, ... the move towards disenfoldment of opposite poles, which leads to deepening enfoldment in terms of harmonic orbiting can, on the other hand, provide its own, natural 'should be'.

From Darwin's statement that "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers , having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;", one can surmise that Darwin approached evolution in the 'immersed' mode of perception and inquiry, as opposed to the euclidian 'voyeur' mode, as is apparently most common in the field of 'evolutionary computing'. Sipper's 'recasting' of passages from Darwin 'within the modern evolutionary computation framework', might therefore involve the same inversion in thinking which operates between the native american traditions in perception and inquiry, and those of the western european culture; i.e. putting the euclidian voyeur view (the special case where reciprocal disposition effects = zero) into primacy over its own containing case (of non-zero reciprocal disposition effects), and in the process infusing unseen (because invisible to the voyeur perspective) 'non-relativistic' distortions in the translation.

If one utilizes the 'bootstrapping' notions of Geoffrey Chew, which equate to the 'disposable ladder of logic and causality' notion of Wittgenstein, and the 'bringing a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into connection in the mind', .. the process by which we can understand curved space-time (relativistic and self-referential space-time), then we can indeed, without ever abandoning scientific reasoning [3], where 'science' is taken in its largest, Heraclitean sense of "understanding the way the world works", arrive at the container-content-coevolutional vision of native america.

"So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."

Emile

eco-ego for,

Ted Lumley

Good$hare International

[1] The purpose of the game of pools seems in many aspects, to emulate our homocentric reality; i.e. the natural, intuitive need to increase the order in our 'containing' surroundings, and here's where some familiar options began to open up. Seen from the immersed perspective of a ball with 'purpose', ... and the good pool player goes into an 'immersed' mode where he effectively 'lends' his purpose to the ball when he plays, ... in order to 'increase order', the ball can (a) eliminate nearby balls of the opposite 'polarity' (war), (b) dis-enfold the balls so that the balls of opposite polarity are segregated (ethnic cleansing), or (c) condition the configuration so as to improve the latent opportunity for elimination of the opposing polarity (stalk the opposition).

Each of these approaches has its 'evolutionary' drawbacks, with respect to increasing the order. The eliminating action in the war (a) approach often results in a setback to (b), dis-enfolding the balls, since balls are inadvertently induced into strange new alliances or 'enfoldments' by the singular focus on elimination, thus, the segregation which has been 'growing' in the overall configuration as constituents flocculated into equilibrium cells or 'cells of common polarity', is disturbed. The drawback of the dis-enfolding action is that it makes the space disjoint so that one can't get across it without disturbing the order that has already been induced (one becomes 'snookered') and this leads back to a course of war and elimination to open up some new channels. The drawback of the third approach, (c), of continually conditioning the configuration to improve the options for elimination is that you have to suspend the enfoldment issue (b), in the process of making clean, unobstructed paths for getting to and embracing those of the opposite polarity in an eliminatory death-kiss. Suspending the enfoldment issue is akin to suspending the notion of a 'problem'. And if one suspends the notion of the enfoldment 'problem' to get a clear bead on members of the opposite polarity, ... one has to endure the tension of this game of musical chairs, to develop and sustain an 'intimacy with the 'enemy'', ... a 'thin line between 'love and hate' effect, as they say,... and allow, as an interim expedient, the evolutionary engendering of even deeper levels of enfoldment or 'quantum entanglement'. This third approach (c) is a double sided sword in that as one opens up clear paths for 'death-kisses', ... one is opening oneself up for the same demise. It ends up that this third strategy enhances 'co-opportunity' and it can only do so in an environment of 'trust'.

[2] The following quote from 'The Presocratic Philosophers', Second Edition, G.S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, Cambridge University Press, ... makes clear that the subtlety of the curved space-time view of the cosmos, which cannot be conveyed directly in our euclidian 'thing-oriented' language, ... may well have been lost 'in translation' between Heraclitus and Aristotle, ... just as Darwin's similar intent may be lost in Sipper's 'recasting' of passages from Darwin 'within the modern evolutionary computation framework'. The omission shifts us from the domain of SIMULTANEOUS HARMONY also noted by Johannes Kepler in connection with the system of sun and planets and dropped out by Newton, to the domain of SEQUENTIAL TIME PERIODS, .. that is, the 'recasting' takes us from a curved, relativistic space-time continuum, to a rectangular (non-self-referential) non-relativistic disjoint view of independent things populating an inert and non-participating void, ... i.e. material existence out of the context of a unified whole-and-part harmony oriented space-time container.

"Plato ('Sophist' 242D, DK 22 A.10) clearly distinguished between Heraclitus' SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality of the cosmos and Empedocles' separate PERIODS of Love and Strife. At the same time, they are mentioned together as both alike in believing in the unity and plurality of the cosmos; and Aristotle's coupling of the two might conceivably have been motivated by the Platonic comparison, the important distinction between them being overlooked. See also Guthrie, HGP1, 455f, and 458, with further references, and D. WIggins, 'Heraclitus' conceptions of flux, etc.' in Language and Logos, ed. Scholfield and Nussbaum (Cambridge, 1982), 1ff."

[3] David Bohm, in 'The Implicate Order', points out that scientific 'reason' does not have to be constrained to aristotelian logic and euclidian space, ... concepts which are exclusionary and constrained to the 'law of non-contradiction. 'Reason' is a broader concept, ... "It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony of fitting between mind and matter." Clearly the scientific reasoning of Heraclitus, Johannes Kepler, Einstein, with respect to 'how the world works', ... finding consistency amongst a multitude of phenomenal experiences and imaginary experiences (thought experiments) by bringing them into connection in the mind, opens the door to inclusionary understanding, as transcends logic and causality and as is needed in those situations where the container coevolves with its own contents (its contents are participants and interpreters whose unified whole-and-part ordering constitute their 'container'). Bohm says;

"Rational law [science in the sense of how the world works] is not restricted to an expression of 'causality'. Evidently, reason, in the sense that is meant here, goes far beyond causality, which latter is a special case of reason."

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Footnote Comment: Subsuming Euclidian 'Things' with 'Info-somatic' Networks

The notion of curved space-time and 'container-content-coevolution' not only implies SIMULTANEOUS unity and plurality (via reciprocal disposition effects) rather than SEQUENTIAL unity and plurality (via classical determinism), but effectively 'transcends' the Euclidian notion of 'things'. As scientists such as Heisenberg, Laborit and Stapp have noted, ... this does not take us into the domain of mysticism, but into an expanded form of inquiry which includes the tools of inquiry within the inquiry.

To give a backdrop to this discussion, it may be useful to refer to a Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Henri Laborit. In responding to a question on whether he thought there would be convergence between scientists and mystics, ... Laborit critiqued claims by some physicists of having reconciled the laws of quantum physics with the laws of Indian mysticism, saying; "The problem is that all of this is the fruit of their brain. Yet they don't know how their instrument of inquiry, ... their brain, ... functions. People affirm thousands of findings without even understanding what it is that they have done to discover them."

Similarly, Henry Stapp, in reviewing Heisenberg's work on quantum physics and experience, re-states the view that science is actually about our knowledge, which is imbedded in our experience, and hence that the correct way to formulate physical theory is as a useful tool for making predictions about our experiences, ... noting that this quantum reality notion is in line with the ideas of WIlliam James, "thought is itself the thinker", and that 'we *are* our consciousness'. The imagery which comes to mind here, is once again of collective thought which co-evolves with its own content; i.e. curved space-time 'container-content-coevolution.'

This expanded view of inquiry, which includes the tools of inquiry within the inquiry, resolves the head-to-head conflict between reductionism and holism, since we are no longer speaking of which method best explains what's 'out there', but have shifted our inquiry focus from a voyeur 'out there' mode to an immersed 'in here' experience mode. As Stapp notes, when we include the functioning of consciousness in our inquiry, the classical mechanics approach is innately inadequate since, "... the logical structure of classical mechanics pertains exclusively to, and encompasses solely, things expressible in terms of certain objective concepts, the classical notions of particles and fields. These are concepts that correspond to idealized versions of what can be "seen" by an observer that is far away from and detached from, what is being observed, whereas experiences *are* the observer: the thought is the thinker."

If one accepts such a curved space-time self-referential (bootstrapping) base for the tools of inquiry, ... then it follows that we shall be building our view of 'what's out there' in the objective world upon that base and the Euclidian notion of a 'thing' in its own right can then be seen as a subsidiary simplifying notion, a special 'flatspace' case of the more general geometry of curved space-time, which plays a similar support role as a 'word' does in sharing implicit thought. What also follows is the possibility of perceiving 'what's out there' in terms of curved space-time, ... a way of visualizing which has been knocking at the door for cultural approval for quite some time.

Laborit, in addition to critiqueing physicists for not including their inquiry tools in their inquiry, ... also critiqued them for not including informational exchanges across nested subsystems as found in living systems (ecologies). Laborit's biological model features nested spheres which englobe each other, in the manner the atmosphere englobes the oceanosphere and the lithosphere, ... an 'open systems' and 'inclusionary' view in which 'inner-outer' (one-to-many) and 'outer-inner' (many-to-one) information flows play a critical role in determining system behaviors.

Dealing with complexity (emergent behaviors, evolution) manifest in natural systems of all types would seem to support the usefulness of this nested sphere model, particularly if one removes the constraining imagery of Euclidian 'things' and invokes instead the imagery of a fractal hierarchy of curved-space-time nestings. For example, in social systems, outer-inner (container-content) informational infusions, such as Federal Reserve announcements or speculation on such announcements, induce turbulence in the investment sphere, regardless of the 'actuality' underlying the information (i.e. the effect is purely informational rather than tangible-causal). A similar situation is occurring in the case of the Y2K 'problem'.

In social situations, for example, where the girlfriend announces to her boyfriend that she is pregnant, ... this also can induce significant system behavioral response (including container-content turbulence), whether or not the information is underpinned by tangible fact or event.

In the case of the lady who smiles, ... such as Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, ... we can look for an answer in reductionist terms, ... a bottom-up, logical-causal, biochemical explanation (e.g. indigestion), ... or we can look for an outer-inner informational inductive source. In fact, if we use the 'psychosomatic network' model of biochemists such as Candace Pert ('Molecules of Emotion'), where information comes in through the skin and lungs as well as in through the retina to the frontal cortex, ... this fits very well with the curved space-time notion wherein open systems nestings of containers and their contents engage in simultaneous 'coevolution', each nesting level seeking to preserve inner equlibrium and inner-outer equilibrium. We can also invoke the notion of a generalized 'info-somatic network' in a nested sense wherein what we formerly conceptualized as 'things in their own right' (in Euclidian space) now become 'informational cell' boundaries in the nested info-somatic network.

Such a self-similar geometry could be used to describe the whole system (cosmos) as well as any microcosmic subsystem.

Current literature indicates a common, rising perception of the essential substancelessness base to our reality (i.e. 'material things' or 'tangible cause' do not appear to be necessary to drive the system into new states, ... but instead, the system can be induced into new behavioral states by informational flows; i.e. systems (contents) coevolve inductively with their supersystems (container)). For example, global economies seem not to be built upon tangible underpinnings but rather to 'float' on a base of informational exchanges, and similarly in our media-dominated lives, where information is its own wellspring, and media presentations of students killing their mates can induce more of the same.

Given the availability of emerging models such as the 'info-somatic model' of the biochemist, it seems that no hard and definitive 'thing-boundary' need be used in the basic level of conceptualization ('things' can be instead seen as an expedient for communicating with one another) anywhere in our reality, not even down at the level of basic particles (e.g.; as Stapp says, in "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" (1993), "An elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalyzeable entity, it is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things."

This type of fractal, curved space-time model, is not unknown in our society but is the model embraced by the native north american culture, and its effect is to invoke a very different view of communications and sharing than the Euclidian space and linear time model, ... a view which also seems to be in common with exceptional teams in the western culture (whose lives tend to be transient and brief). For example, the westerner, because he thinks in the Euclidian terms of 'things in their own right' (a non-relativistic view), appraises things on the basis of their positioning with respect to a statistical mean, a statistical mean which acts as a 'should be' reference but whose 'should be' implications are rarely inquired into (an example is the current exponential rise of 'schizophrenia', a behavioral condition which is deemed 'abnormal' with respect to the statistical mean which establishes 'normal' behavior. Most people would agree, however, that the complexity of the containing society 'induces' non-normal behaviors in its constituents, and that this co-evolutional process will not be overcome by a one-sided focus on chemical lobotomization of statistically defined 'defective' contents).

This non-relativity in the Euclidian 'things in their own right' modelling of reality, obscured by 'should be' statistical referencing, is transcended in the traditional native american perception and inquiry approach (where used), due to a persistent thinking in terms of 'whole-and-part' harmony of container and content (collective wisdom and individual experience). The native cultural view is that man is nested within community which is nested within nature.

In this perception and inquiry approach, council meetings are commenced and terminated by invocations which allude to the 'simultaneous unity and plurality' and to its 'evolutionary force', commonly termed 'the creator',... and by this process of engendering a respectful container, ... explicit statistical norms and rules are avoided and the meeting becomes more of a jam session where anything goes which will cultivate whole-and-part imaging of collective wisdom. Whereas the western standard of 'communication' is measured 'in its own right', ... by the degree to which a person has clearly articulated his thought (made it explicit), and the degree to which others have explicitly understood him (which leads to a 'sum of the parts' view of communication), ... the aboriginal assesses communications in terms of 'sharing', ... assessible by questions such as, 'how well did the whole-and-part imagery come together?', ... 'to what degree did the collective container coevolve with its contents an implicit understanding of issue and action required?' This type of sharing, to coevolve implicit understanding, evolves skills which are sensitive to the diversity of views and the diversity of levels of articulation skills. To respect and tune into these diversities is part of the ethic of this 'info-somatic' (ecological) hierarchy view of reality, which extends beyond the community of man (as evident in native myth such as 'And Who Shall Speak for Wolf').

This 'immersed' mode of perception and inquiry equates directly to the shift described by Heisenberg, wherein classical science effectively bypassed inquiry into the influence of the observer (its tool of inquiry) and went directly to a detached 'voyeur' conceptualizing of objective reality, ... and where quantum physics now demands the inclusion of the tools of inquiry within the inquiry, which equates to operating on our 'experience' in order to get to a conceptual view of 'what's out there', ... an approach which effectively 'immerses' the observer in his own field of inquiry.

Immersed observer perception and inquiry cannot proceed directly to a synthesis of observations because they are no longer 'out there' but 'in here' and 'all around', ... and one must instead use the quasi 'holographic' technique described by Einstein in 'Geometry and Experience', ... of 'bringing a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into connection in the mind'. The result is 'implicit' understanding which can subsequently be 'downloaded' into explicit statements for the purpose of sharing.

This is the approach of the native north american tradition, ... and it is this 'container-content-coevolutional' sharing process which is the primary ethic in the aboriginal culture. This process puts implicit understanding (relational intelligence) in the primacy over explicit knowledge (rational intelligence) and avoids the non-relativistic situation when using the Euclidian space and detached time model, .. where the statistical assessment of 'what should be' drifts off, seemingly out-of-control.

In summary, the use of self-referential, curved space-time in place of the Euclidian space and detached time model, represents a demoting of the euclidian notion of 'things in their own right' and classical determinism, to a supportive role (in sharing concepts). In the primacy, instead, is the notion of a fractally nested 'info-somatic' network through which simultaneous whole-and-part harmonies may be cultivated. This model provides an alternative model for evolution of the network (nature) and for the evolution of ideas. It is the (implicitly) preferred model of the traditional native north american, and provides a wholesome and harmony-inducing alternative, in regulatory process, to Euclidian control hierarchy.

[1] Excerpt from Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Henri Laborit "Le mot Dieu ne mord pas" (The word 'God' doesn't bite) http://www.esculape.com/textes/laborit.html

LNO.-Croyez-vous à une convergence possible entre savants et mystiques.

H.Laborit.-Dans " Dieu ne joue pas aux dés ", j'évoque les travaux des grands physiciens qui ont trouvé un rapprochement entre les lois de la physique quantique et les lois de la mystique indienne. Le problème est que tout celà est le fruit de leur cerveau. Or ils ne savant même pas comment leur instrument de travail - leur cervelle - fonctionne. Les gens affirment des milliers de choses sans même comprendre comment ils ont fait pour les trouver. Cela fait 40 ans que j'étudie le cerveau, alors je reste un peu circonspect devant les personnes qui affirment quoi que ce soit sans même connaitre leur outil de base.

[2] Excerpt from H.P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics p.22, 160. which cites W.Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy (Harper & Rowe, New York, 1958)Ch III The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, p. 54-55

That was precisely the key move of Bohr and Heisenberg et. al., namely to recognize that science was actually about our knowledge, which is imbedded in our experience, and hence that the correct way to formulate physical theory was as a useful tool for making predictions about our experiences.This quantum viewpoint should satisfy the defender's of the idea that experiences are realities that must be dealt with up front as real`observables', for in this view experiences are the basic realities of the ontology, the epistomology, and the physical theory.

There is no problem with the `observer' or any infinite regress: the quantum view is in line with the ideas of William James, "thought is itself the thinker" [Stapp, 1993].

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