Throughout the past year interconnectedness has been a recurring concept in many pieces of film and literature which I have come across. In its simplest form interconnectedness breaks down into the idea that everything is connected together.
Why God Won’t Go Away states that every religion relies on a form of interconnectedness. Andrew Newberg, et al, claims that there are two forms of interconnectedness found in different religions. There is either a union of mankind with the rest of the world or a union of the individual with a greater individual.
The former is found in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Hinduism explains the interconnectedness of self or Atman with others through Brahman. The latter form of interconnectedness is more complicated. This form is found in religions such as Christianity. Through intense prayer individuals feel a profound connection with Christ. Through this connection with Christ individuals realize a connection with all of humanity.
In I ♥ Huckabees we find a form of existential interconnectedness which is very similar to that of Buddhism. Bernard Jaffe presents us with a blanket which he says represents the universe.
Say this blanket represents all the matter and energy in the universe, okay? This is me, this is you, and over here, this is the Eiffel Tower, right, it’s Paris!
Bernard’s blanket is eerily familiar to the Buddhist analogy of Indra’s Net. Indra’s Net is an infinitely long net. Within each knot of the net is a multifaceted jewel which reflects each other jewel. This analogy is made in order to show that everything in the universe exists in a complex relationship with all other beings. Like Jaffe’s blanket, we are all connected to each other and while we may feel like individuals in reality we can’t tell where my nose stops and space begins.
Interconnectedness is not only found in religions. Atheists also believe in the interconnectedness of everything, this time it comes in the form of energy. One of the foundations of modern physics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The first law of thermodynamics says that the total inflow of energy into a system must equal the total outflow of energy from the system, plus the change in the energy contained within the system.
When I cease to exist, whether I go to Heaven or Hell or back to Earth in the form of another being, my energy must go somewhere. Like the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, my actions as a living being will have an effect on the future. Whether my karma results in a reincarnation or I have a reincarnation through scientific means (i.e. my carcass turns to soil from which a tree sprouts), my energy will have an effect on future life.
The atheistic concept of interconnectedness is summed up well through a scene in Waking Life. A purely scientific outlook upon the world leaves us with a problem of free will. If we are all physical systems then we all rely on the rules which govern these systems. We are all part of a system of cause and effect. This system of cause and effect leaves us with the question of how we make decisions, how we can truly choose to do anything.
This is a problem which has faced humanity since we have been philosophizing. Freedom of will versus determinism first took shape in the form of God making decisions for us, but even without an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being deciding our fate, we have this casual relationship between all beings which can remove our true freedom.
This causal relationship is the basis for human interconnectedness. An atheist may not believe that there is a soul or Atman at the root of our essence. Even without this belief we run into the concept of energy which has always existed and cannot be destroyed, we also are presented with a form of Buddhist conditioned genesis through causal relationships between all beings.
Interconnectedness is a concept which seems to reoccur in all social sciences. Sociology, archeology, religions, (and anti-religions) all come back to this concept of cause and effect. This link between all of us may not be psychic but it definitely seems to exist, whether through energy or some greater being.
Or, for that matter, why you think they are ‘new age’ ideas, as I think they have very little to do with new age thought.
Bodi, I have a couple of concerts coming up, and I can’t answer in full. I suspect we would agree about a lot of things, but simply describe them differently.
What is life? While any definition is problematic, I’ll go along with the usual one: something that exhibits growth, metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimulus, is alive. Now, I know that viruses don’t grow, and can be crystallized. Obviously, any hard and fast line is going to be arbitrary in some way. But wherever we draw the boundary, rocks are well on the nonliving side of it.
I’ll agree that the universe is “alive”, if by that you mean “having life in it” or “providing conditions amenable to abiogenesis”. But to say that the universe itself was alive before living things evolved is a peculiar stretch of the word, rendering it pretty useless. I hardly wince if someone says “the hills are alive with the sound of music”, but I want to save the technical meaning of “alive” for people, ants, and tardigrades, etc.
As far as SD goes, my problem with what I’ve read so far is that it claims that human history can be mapped onto a simple geometric form- in this case, the spiral. This seems to me a vast oversimplification at best, and like many such overarching social schemes- Marxism and Christianity come to mind- is short on facts and long on playing around with buzzwords and analogies. Of course, all of our worldviews are inescapably formed of analogies and buzzwords, but SD seems, like many of its brethren, to be in love with structures far simpler than the seething frothing broth of human relations. As Sirius said, the world is not split into good people and Death Eaters; nor can it be nicely mapped onto a helix, even if little bits of it are helical.
More later- cheers, zilch
Here’s another analogy, Bodi. If you say that the universe is alive, because life is “implicit in the beginning”, you might as well say that the universe is a binary star, since there are binary stars (more of them than single stars, apparently). Or, to go a bit further, you could say that the universe is a golfer. Or that the universe is Tiger Woods. How can we know what is “implicit” and what is not?
Interesting to see this thread come back to life after a period of dormancy. But all mysticism aside, I just have one question: will meditation help me shut down the damn pop music tune that keeps playing in my head?
(I won’t refer to it here lest it be contageous)
I’m subscribing to this just to read it.. it’s good, relaxing, imaginative reading. Keep it up, Bodi and Zilch (nice touch with the Bruce Lee quote).
Concerts? Are you a musician, Zilch? Do you work with a band? I have some musical tendencies myself. In fact, I think music is one of the keys to understanding the universe…
Incoherent rant on life, rocks, and spirals…
Simple syllogism –
There is nothing here but the Universe.
There is life here.
The Universe is alive.
Longer rhetoric…
(After a brief tangent on the luminous being thing)
Every electron, in every atom, in every molecule, in every cell, in every organ of your body is a resonator, which absorbs and emits photons across the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. All electrons undergo a process whereby energy flows through them via the absorption/emission process. This is a well-known and reasonably understood physical principle. (Here’s a prediction from my theory by the way. Before too long you are going to see medical devices which diagnose illness by analyzing the light emitted by the body.)
Lasers take advantage of the fact that electrons do this to produce coherent light. It’s a quantum effect. Your body’s luminescence is not coherent and focused, but no less real than a laser’s. Right now, as you read this, there are countless energetic interactions taking place at the most basic level of your being, with the entire universe. Right now, as you read this, a photon of energy from a dying star is completing a journey of billions of light years from the other side of the universe to interact with an electron in an atom in your hand, or your leg, or somewhere else in your body. This electron in turn starts a whole chain of further energetic reactions and absorption/emission cycles, many of which will go on to influence and interact with matter a considerable physical distance from you, both directly and indirectly. Electrons don’t always absorb and emit photons. This is true. In the cases where they do not, there are other interactions and processes we could describe and correlate.
It’s not just the electromagnetic field either. You are influencing and being influenced by every atom in the universe through the gravitational field as well. There are many other ways in which you interact and flow with everything else.
How, then, are we not luminous beings? We vibrate to the frequency of the universe. We glow with its energy. We are coals in the cosmic fire.
You are connected to every other thing in the universe in such an intimate way that there are no really clear boundaries on where you end and the universe begins. You are the flow of the universe. The process of the universe flowing through you is there on every level, in every way, every time. Lets look at ‘mere’ matter. Your physical body is not something that exists separately from the rest of the matter in the universe. You literally ARE the food you eat. Think about this. Every breath you take is a flow between you and all living things. Your very being is the flow of that matter in one highly defined, highly evolved way, because flowing matter (which is really just condensed energy equal to the mass of the matter times the velocity of light squared) evolves, and this evolving flow of matter/energy can manifest in infinite varieties and ways.
The universe is alive. It doesn’t just ‘contain’ life. Its not just the box that life comes in. It’s the source and the being of life. We are sentient stardust. Because its built into the nature of stardust to become sentient. We are little pieces of something bigger. Just as there are little, smaller pieces that make up us. We are holons.
More info on holons and Ken Wilber – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber
You are certainly correct when you say it’s problematic, Zilch. I think any definition, yours, mine, or whomever’s, is going to be, at best, a vague model to consider, at this point.
You say that rocks are not alive. Ok, I certainly know what you mean, but think about this for a moment. Maybe life is not limited to organic matrices. There are certainly arguments, which could be made for the case of rocks exhibiting those characteristics.
You defined life in terms of metabolism, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli (which I would call choice). My definition is very compatible with yours except that I would simplify it thus: Life is flow. As energy moves towards equilibrium, there is flow between a high side and a low side, an area of high potential and an area of low potential. It seems to me that these four characteristics you describe are natural aspects of the push of this flow towards higher complexity. Every event in the universe, ultimately, takes place as this flow between potentials. You, yourself, are flow, in many different ways, on many different levels. What I’m trying to say is that life is not a thing. It’s an event. It’s a process. Coincidentally, all matter could be said to be the same. Even rocks are flow on almost every level. Don’t be blinded by time and perspective. I think the difference between your ‘life’ and that of a rock is not so much qualitative as quantitative.
Whatever life is, it must be there in the rocks (i.e. the ‘mere’ matter that we are made up of) to begin with. Some of you happens to be rock as a matter of fact. Various minerals are included in your composition. Is an atom of iron in a red blood cell not alive? Is a molecule of calcium in your femur not alive? Is the water that makes up most of you not alive? Are all the other elemental constituents of your body not alive? Then are you saying that a living being is made up of nonliving elements? What is the extra thing, then, added to this nonliving machine, that makes it alive? Where did it come from? There is no ghost in the machine, remember? If you say that you are nothing but the matter/energy making you up (which I agree with, by the way), then I don’t see how you can say that matter/energy is not alive. If you say that only once matter reaches a certain degree of complexity does it become alive, then what is it causing it to reach that level of complexity? If you say that this was random chance, then why do we see the process of material evolution occurring in energy to become matter that can ‘come alive’ in the first place? Evolution, being a process that reverses entropy (locally), by its very nature, cannot be random. If you say that there is no guiding Force behind life, I ask, once again, what are the basic laws that physics has and is discovering, and what is their significance? (I betcha this gets into multiple universe theories before too long…)
There are many examples of life which is not organic, per se. Countries are living things, for example. They grow. They have a metabolism. They ingest. They excrete. They reproduce. They exhibit the ability to make choices. They are collective organisms is a very real sense. (This goes back to Ilya Prigogine and the concept of dissipative structures we discussed briefly in another post on evolution.)
You said regarding SD (Spiral Dynamics) that:
.
Spiral Dynamics is a scientific theory, is not short on facts, and in fact is being taken quite seriously by many scientists and theorists (I’m one), and being used across many different fields and disciplines. Memetics is becoming quite closely associated with SD.
Another SD link, on memes and Vmemes: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/caleb.html
Think about spirals for a moment. Does it occur to you there is something very strange about the nature of the spiral in the universe? Does it occur to you that the spiral is the dominant universal shape?
Memes, remember, are the mental equivalent of genes. Physical DNA partakes of a spiral structure. Why then is so unreasonable to suppose that our mental and cultural DNA would also be spiral in nature? It certainly appears to be.
We know that the pattern of the spiral tends to repeat. The spiral is the dominant universal fractal in a very holographic universe. There are spirals everywhere, on all levels. Look at subatomic particle tracks in bubble chambers. Spirals. Look at the structure of DNA – spirals. Look at basic proportions and shapes of all living things – spirals. Clearly, among the most efficient shapes for life is the spiral. You yourself are proportioned spirally. The relationships among your different parts consist mostly of fibonicci (a certain mathematical spiral progression ref. – Phi) proportions and spiral relationships. Look at the nature of light, which propagates in a spiral fashion from several different points of view. Look at weather patterns. Look at galaxies. Look at your fingertips.
Look at spirals, Zilch. They are everywhere. In everything. Because energy under the direction of the universal DNA (the basic Laws, which we are just beginning to discover and understand) has a tendency to propagate spirally, as it flows. I think it does this because the spiral is the most efficient shape to propagate along, and this is sought as water seeks a level. Plants grow their leaves in a spiral way, go out and look. Almost any plant will do. Trees branches spiral around the trunk as they go up, the same as leaves on plants. Not every single one, of course, there are exceptions. The point is that the spiral is the most common shape seen in living things; ALL living things, and this is so for the efficiency reason. If you start looking for spirals, you will see them in everything. I conclude that life is in everything. Even rocks. Our physical development occurs along a spiral. So does our mental development. I am not suggesting that spirals = life. I am suggesting that there is a very significant relationship between spirals and life, one that deserves very serious consideration.
After posting the above, I went and did a little searching on light and illness and found this:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050905/handlight.html
Also, sorry the above is clumped. I forgot to go back and separate the paragraphs after pasting from word.
DOF – yes, I think meditation could help solve your problem… lol
Arc – thanks for the positive comment!
Bodi- I too am awed at the universe of electromagnetic radiation, and that we are made of starstuff, and I love rocks. I am amazed that inanimate matter is able to organize itself into hippos and people, and that we can create science and art and all kinds of other wonderful things. This is my religion, or as close as I get to religion.
And if you want to say the universe is alive, because its flows of matter and energy make life possible, I won’t argue with that as poetry. But that won’t do as science, and sometimes science is appropriate. If you want to know how life evolves, reproduces, metabolises, you have to differentiate- you won’t get far just saying “it’s all alive”.
About those spirals. I read some more, and I’ll stick to my opinion- it’s an unmotivated mapping of a very complex structure (human relations) onto a simple geometric figure. Yes, I know about Fibonacci spirals and double helices. It’s great stuff, but what does it have to do with human societies? Nothing that I can see.
This reminds me of a column in Scientific American years ago, by Douglas Hofstadter, in which he described some crackpot ideas sent to him by self-styled universal theorists. One was the concept that the whole world is organized in threes- positive, negative, zero; masculine, feminine, neuter; the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost; Huey, Duey, and Louie; etc. Now, Spiral Dynamics is not so obviously laughable as this, and it looks to me to be a congenial indication of the general direction we should try to mold societies. But that “spiral” stuff, the naive correlation of memes to genes (they act very differently), and the total ignoring of our genetic heritage, render it more religious than scientific.
About the light and illness link. Sorry- ho hum. We give off photons, more of them when we’re warm. Not really surprising, and the amounts of light detected…
…don’t qualify us as”luminous” in my book. But then, everyone is free to draw lines where they want.
Another analogy. Back when I was in school, I found the book The Forty Knot Sailboat by Bernard Smith (1963) in the library, and was so taken by his ideas, that I built my own model hydrofoil sailboat and entered it in the school Science Fair. It was very fast, and seemed to support Smith’s claim that a full-sized hydrofoil sailboat could easily achieve forty knots.
Alas, I learned some hydrodynamics later. Smith’s, and my, models worked well because they were small, and the hydrofoils were functioning in the regime of laminar flow, which has a very efficient lift to drag ratio. Unfortunately, because of the scale effect, hydrofoils large enough to support full-size boats are well within the realm of complex turbulent flow. This has a lot more drag, which renders the results for the models inapplicable to full-size boats.
The lesson? What seems to work, or makes sense, in a simplified toy world, may not necessarily be applicable to the big bad complex world. Imho, this misapprehension is responsible for a lot of our woes: we construct a model of the world, nicely packaged in precise concepts and definitions, and watch what happens when we wind up the model and let it play its tune. Of course, that’s all we can do, limited as we are. But we often fall in love with models that are palpably imperfect, and forget to be humble.
Sorry for the triple dip. Armchair sailors like myself (alas, no SF Bay here in Vienna…) might be interested to know that the current all-out speed record for a sailboat is 46.52 knots (53.53 mph), set twelve years ago by the “Yellow Pages Endeavour” in Australia. The configuration of the rather unromantically named vessel (what happened to names like “Mysty” and “Sunset”?) is similar to Bernard Smith’s models, but with planing hulls, not hydrofoils.
This is probably a pretty exciting ride- the fastest I’ve ever been under sail was on a catamaran doing about sixteen knots, which felt like a hundred miles an hour to me.
Bodi, I fixed up your comment a bit for you. Turned the quotes into proper quotes and put in paragraph breaks where it seemed likely they should go.
As to the content I’ll concede that it’s a very poetic viewpoint, but not entirely convincing. Zilch pretty much says what I would’ve said, though, so there’s not too much point in my repeating it.
Les, thank you for tidying up for me. I’ll try to be less of a slob!
Zilch,
I will certainly admit to a poetical bent in self-expression. This is almost impossible for me to avoid, given my nature. Also, I think its important to keep in mind that there are certain aspects of what constitute ‘proof’ to me that are inadmissible to our conversation. I mean, if I were to say – “but I know that this is a certain way, because I have seen it, experienced it, had a revelation, enlightenment,
Bodi- I’m pretty poetical myself, and I love flights of fancy in many modes. I think poetry is an essential part of being human, and to deny it in oneself or others is crippling. It has its place in science too. But we have to be careful that we don’t get carried away, and attribute our poems to Nature, when we’re trying to figure out how She works. This spiral dynamics stuff is a good example of that.
I have nothing against intuition, and if meditation can help you develop it, more power to you. But I don’t believe that intuition is qualitatively different from ratiocination- it may involve more right brain activity, and its workings may not be as accessible to consciousness as those of more epiphenomenal, “linear” thinking are, but both are composed of the same stuff: patterns of neural impulses. It’s quite possible that we will never understand intuition perfectly. But it has evolved, just as conscious thinking has evolved, up from matter and energy that had no thoughts, conscious or unconscious. And while Kelkulé may have been inspired by a daydream of an ouroboros to propose a ring structure for benzene, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of hard linear thought behind the discovery too.
Oh? What does it produce that’s scientifically useful? Maxwell didn’t discovery the relationship of electricity and magnetism by believing that inanimate matter is alive, as far as I know. Life is special, and saying that “everything is alive” obfusticates rather that illuminates what makes it special.
To get to those spirals: you say
Uh, what do you mean by “asymptotically”? There are several mathematical meanings. I will guess you mean the behavior of functions such as y=1/x, which produces two hyperbolas which approach, but never reach, the x and y axes, which are the “asymptotes” in this case. When you say “life is asymptotic”, I assume you mean something like “life evolves ever more rapidly, but never reaches a goal”. I’ll agree with that, as far as it goes. But using “asymptotically” thus to describe the evolution of life, and societies, is only very marginally related to the mathematical meaning, so that mapping cultural development onto a logarithmic spiral is stretching a metaphor to the snapping point. Why not a hyperbola, or (my candidate for a better fit) an asymptotic drunken walk? If you want to regard human societies poetically as spirals, fine; but don’t seriously expect that the structure of a spiral will tell you any more about our future than, say, examining chicken entrails.
So far, all I see is dirt. Healing hands probably work, when they do at all, because of the placebo effect, plus the general feeling of well-being caused by human care and concern. I don’t know of any successful controlled experiments with auras.
While I agree in a very general way with the “waves of existence” as mapping the evolution of societies, I still don’t see anything spirallike about the progression. The lines drawn between the “waves” are arbitrary- in real life, these features coexist and coevolve, and cannot so neatly be teased apart. And while I am generally in favor of the trend from self to social, some of the movements in the last, “green”, wave, seem pretty silly to me. For instance, Derrida (and postmodernism in general) is the young earth creationism of the hip left, imho. But that’s just me.
The basic problem with SD, though, is the same problem all religions have: the assumption of a simple structure or framework that explains human behavior. We cannot do without beliefs of some kind to structure our lives, religious or not. But predicting the future of human affairs is very difficult at best, and there is no a priori reason to believe that there is some simple pattern- a book, a spiral- that will help us see what is to come.
sorry, I seem to be having a javascript problem with the ‘quote’ button.
(quote)But I don’t believe that intuition is qualitatively different from ratiocination-(/quote)
Then housecats are some of the greatest practical mathematician/physicists on earth, performing amazing feats of incredible computational skill regarding speed, inertia, force, timing, vectors in general etc, in a few fractions of a second…
Baseball players must then have greater immediate, practical, mathematical skills than many a hoary, gray, University Professor.
Ever research savant syndrome? Seen Rain Man? It’s a rewarding field of inquiry.
Even better: http://www.drawright.com/ Study the work of Betty Edwards (read Theory first) for a good intro to right brain/left brain study and application.
(quote) both are composed of the same stuff: patterns of neural impulses. (/quote)
Being composed of the same ‘stuff’ does not automatically mean they are the same thing. As seen in countless examples in the material world, the same stuff can manifest in infinite ways… If you want to go that route, then carry it out to its inevitable conclusion – Everything, ultimately, is composed of the same stuff. This, of course, is true…from a certain point of view…
The difference is in how those impulses operate to model the world. Linear thinking is different, in kind, than holistic thinking. That the mind operates and shifts between these modes is well established in modern psychology and neurology.
(quote)“You have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists now know that your left-brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words… Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain; it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things,’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words.” – The Fabric of Mind, Richard Bergland (/quote)
(quote) …intuition… has evolved, just as conscious thinking has evolved, up from matter and energy that had no thoughts, conscious or unconscious.(/quote)
Now, the Big One!
Ok. What, then, is consciousness?
(quote)And while Kelkulé may have been inspired by a daydream of an ouroboros to propose a ring structure for benzene, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of hard linear thought behind the discovery too. (/quote)
I AM advocating both as being indispensable. (Intuition and Logic). Two halves of a whole brain.
(quote)Oh? What does it produce that’s scientifically useful?(/quote)
(quote)This powerful conceptual system has been field-tested in some of the most complex environments on the planet, from inner-city Chicago to racially plagued South Africa. Since the focus is on the deeper vMemetic foundations, Spiral Dynamics suggests ways to move more quickly in the direction of deep dialogue and comprehensive, integral solutions.
MICRO applications of Spiral Dynamics are found around the world in a variety of developmental, counseling and coaching projects. For example, leaders in a growing number of local, national and international youth development projects are currently using Spiral Dynamics Integral concepts.
MESO applications of Spiral Dynamics look through a wider lens between and among groups of people in large corporations, within local communities, and even as distinctive cultures in city-states and entire countries. As our world is now moving into the next stage of cultural pluralism and diversity programs, Spiral Dynamics offers a point of view that looks at the evolutionary dynamic of the deep underlying values systems.
MACRO applications of Spiral Dynamics re-examine the whole globalization issue through an entirely new lens. The focus is on the underlying vMeme currents and contours of the diverse, competing economic, political, health care, education, religious, and community-based models.
Spiral Dynamics connects everything to everything else. For example: The work shows clearly why attempts to deal with the HIV pandemic only through medical solutions fail dismally unless equal time and resources are spent on the interior, cultural dynamics that contribute to the spread of the virus. It also demonstrates why simplistic, fragmented approaches to international and domestic terrorism, crime and drug-related problems, education, economic and social development – the list is endless – and the complexity of challenges in the Middle East and other hot spots around the globe will continue to confound us unless we integrate, align and synergize the efforts of all these stakeholders.(/quote)
http://spiraldynamics.net/index.shtml
(quote)Maxwell didn’t discovery the relationship of electricity and magnetism by believing that inanimate matter is alive, as far as I know.(/quote)
I think I misled you on this point. I did not mean that the two were related in that way. I meant to use the electromagnetic as an example of interphenomenonal (I don’t know if that’s really a word, or not, but I like it.) investigation and reductionism.
To avoid misleading in another way. It’s important to remember that although I draw a great deal from Spiral Dynamics to build my own theories, a lot of what I express as my opinion is not what the model of SD necessarily says. SD does not, to the best of my knowledge, postulate that everything is alive, as I am saying. That part comes from me. Same with the luminous being thing. SD has a great deal to say about religion and spirituality, but SD is NOT a religion. It’s a tool. A scientific and practical tool for investigation of human relationships and worldviews, among just about everything else, because it gets to the heart of HOW we think about WHAT we think.
(quote)Life is special, and saying that “everything is alive
Also, this is Bodi, why did it post as theocrat1?
cute
Bodi and Zilch,
Great discussion. May I offer a book both of you might find illuminating: “Choose Life”, a dialogue between Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda, Oxford University Press, 1976 & 1989. Other great thinkers have pondered these very threads. “There are more things on heaven and earth that are dreampt of in your petty philosophies.” Very refreshing to see contemporary thinkers pondering these in a blog. Looks like the communication revolution may be mankinds best hope of survival.
Bodi- about left/right brain duality: I don’t want to get into it too far, because there are still too many unknowns. Suffice it to say that the nice picture of left=linear/right=holistic is way oversimplified. To quote John McCrone at The New Scientist:
Spirals again. You say:
The metaphor I was referring to was not mathematics itself, or the logarithmic spiral, but rather the mapping of human events onto a spiral, and that’s what I find unmotivated. I do not observe that human events fit a spiral, except in the trivial sense that many things, such as technology, are becoming more complex. Where is the spiral?
Uh, what do you mean by an “unhealthy meme”? With memes, one must always ask, cui bono, that is, who benefits? Lots of memes survive because they aid all of us humans, and are thus valued and passed on: the wheel, the arch, farming… Other memes help hold groups together, but often at the expense of outsiders: racism, patriotism, religion… Still others are harmful or even fatal to those who hold them, but are still attractive for some reason: suicide bombing, for instance. But memes are not concerned with our survival. They either succeed or fail to be passed on in the biosphere for whatever reasons- how well their temporary hosts do is secondary. At the moment, suicide bombing is a healthy meme. If memes are unhealthy for us (not always easy to acertain), they will show this by their fruits, not by seeing how well they fit an abstract pattern such as a constitution, a book, or a mathematical figure.
To say that “the expressions of the Vmeme are not the meme itself” sounds like essentialist, religious thinking to me, as though there were some structure (a spiral perhaps?) which somehow informs cultural evolution, over and above the sinful expressions produced by imperfect (non-spiral) humans.
This is an attractive idea, certainly, like Platonic figures; but since we are evolving culture, creating future, based on genes that prepared us well for living in small tribal groups, it’s like Laurie Anderson’s metaphor for the gift of life: “it’s the big wheel, the big ride”: we don’t really know where we’re going. Our past has not prepared us for computers and bombs. The delicate balance between individualism and socialism that we must dance to have culture is wobbly in the extreme, and many of society’s manifestations, for instance fashion and politics, are intractably complex and chaotic. To claim that any simple figure can explain anything further than, say, supply and demand, is quixotic.
When science is working correctly, it “makes everything as simple as possible, but no simpler”, as Einstein (alledgedly) said. The clue here is “no simpler”. When my kids were small, we put marks on the wall on their birthdays, marking their height. But I never theorized “Hey, I understand how people grow- it goes in a line upward from the floor!” A logrithmic spiral tells us just as much about cultural growth as our marks on the wall did about human growth.
It works if I grant that God is absurd and in some cases not confined to the law of noncontradiction.
A possible answer, one that I wouldn’t choose to believe, is that you go through the motions for the sake of going through the motions. Does everything you do have a purpose? Do you do anything for the sake of doing it?
God has the freest of wills.
Your question has been phrased to presuppose God is confined to linear time. Supposing God exists as granted, that is a question that cannot be asked.
Name one thing that does not have a nature.
I’m baffled too becuase I can’t imagine how existence works without the four dimensions we are used to. That’s why it’s impossible for me to describe.
Some paradoxes are good. I’m growing in respect for Kierkegaard’s claim that religion must be believed in “by virtue of the absurd.”
The spirituality tangent bores me so if I missed anything else let me know.
So do you grant it?
I guess so. I often feel both free and determined and am not sure how that works only that it does.
In which case you have excused yourself from this conversation.
Hello again, Zilch.
I apologize for my lengthly and unannounced absence from our conversation.
I have had some serious life issues that arose suddenly and needed to be worked out (still working…)
I would very much like to continue if you are open to doing so.
The last response I wrote (and never posted) led me to rethink my whole approach to the topic.
Most of that reply was a long, in depth, severe criticism of the John McCrone article. I really thought his arguments were rambling, inconsistent, contradictory, and full of logical and rhetorical fallacies.
Be that as it may or may not, I felt it was just taking me farther away from what I feel are the really important topics, such as how to practically understand, use, and improve the function of the duality(?) of intuition and logic, and not just a clinical study of where they may or may not reside physically in the brain. Or the body.
So I ended up trashing it and never wrote the reply I wanted to. If you would like to resume our discussion, I would be more than happy to do so now.
Hey Bodi! No need to apologize- we all come and go as we please, or must, here. I hope your serious life issues are resolving satisfactorily.
I’m quite willing to continue our conversation, but I can’t promise quick replies. I have lots to do before I leave for California in ten days, so my time is a bit pinched. But sure, let’s have at it.
cheers from Vienna, zilch
Leguru,
I wanted to thank you for turning me on to Daisaku Ikeda. Thanks!
Zilch,
Not as a working model. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I practice Wing Chun kung fu, and as an instructor I can tell you that there is a huge difference between a student understanding a technique from a logical point of view vs understanding it in his gut. There is a big difference between knowing and feeling. There is a big difference between knowing and doing. There are some very important, in fact key, pieces of knowledge in the art that cannot be completely communicated in words.
I want to get away from memes and SD for a bit, although will probably come back to it. It’s just that it’s too much of a tangent to argue about it when there are more important fundamental issues.
The real topic here is spirituality.
To me spirituality is about the relationship between us as single ‘entities’ to the whole cosmic mishmash of it all, and about the realization that ultimately, it’s the same thing.
Whatever the bigger picture is, spirituality is any quest to come to terms with it.
Some paths are better than others. Some wider, some narrower, some going off the edge of a precipice…
Anyway, they all lead the same place – nowhere.
The only important question is whether or not they have heart, as Don Juan would say.
Having heart is concerned with the here and now, not what comes after, because there is no ‘after’.
There is only Now.
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/
Sorry, the link was changed.
I’m curious as to why the mind is as it is and why there should be any barrier to understanding if there need not be one.
I also ask myself what’s the point in trying, if all it counts for is nothing (either in terms of fundamental reasoning or final effect when facing possible oblivion). How important can it be if we mess up? There is a limit as to how much one person has the capacity to suffer from their own mistakes or incompetance, so it might be the easier route – there is no shame in that as long as there is an understanding and acceptance of possible consequence between all concerned parties
saying that all these path lead nowhere is not the same thing as saying that it all counts for nothing.
I can only talk for me because I am unique … just like everybody else.
My only barrier is me and self-imposed limitations, and yours are yours, etc.
Many of these limitations are bound up with what I ‘know’ when all that I know has been filtered through or by other things I know … all going back to my earliest lessons learnt between the ages of zero and 6 or 7 when all my truths were learned.
No matter how enlightened (or free) I become from myself (my ego?) there is always (usually) gonna be some residual essence of the original left to ‘muddy the waters’.
There is none.
upon me – for fear it’ll be taken away. It’s the optimistic pessimist in me.
I attach as much importance as I have leaned to attach to success or failure and I am usually my worst and most unfair critic in the case of failure.
For some weird reason I am not comfortable with (my) successes although they do make me smile.
I think I’ve leaned (incorrectly it seems) not to treat any success as success of my own making although I know it is – right place right time – there’s no god to organise it although the Goddess of Fortune does occasionally smile
I am trying to be constantly aware, to learn the lesson of, Shakespeare’s “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
Although ‘nothing matters’ is a good place to start.
And when I say ‘nothing matters’ I don’t need someone to say: what about murder? However, and still, nothing matters.
Homo Sapien will continue to replicate itself, eventually to fall back into some sort of barbarism from which we will, once again, emerge.
The breath of Brahman is infinite … all we can do is try to connect with ALL things.
Cool. I was able to get back on track.
A zen poem I wrote a few years ago…
We see with our mind, not with our eye
So many crawl, so few fly
Because they fail to see, and so fail to See
All that they are, and all they could be
Understanding everything, realizing nothing
Can you see past duality and reach for totality?
Realizing Nothing, understanding Everything
Nothing matters.
It certainly does…
Bodi, you didn’t say anything I really disagree with. As a musician, I understand perfectly well that you won’t get very far just by understanding the theory- you gotta play. I don’t object to using the left/right differences in the brain, or holism/reductionism, as a working model, or symbol, for some ways of looking at the world. This is very interesting and important stuff: how is the way we perceive the world colored by the evolutionary pressures our brains developed under? How can we Pleistocene savanna dwellers survive in the modern world without killing ourselves? Looking at things like the difference between left and right hemisphere modes of cognition could give us clues on how to deal with things evolution didn’t design us for.
What I do object to- and this is part and parcel of my problems with SD and its kin, and indeed with all religions (and most of politics, philosophy, and sociology) is when some genuinely important and complicated phenomenon is thrust rudely into a mold that it doesn’t fit, usually some relatively simple structure that purportedly explains the relationships of many such phenomena. Examples of such molds are the Bible, Spiral Dynamics, Marxism, Freudianism…
Of course, there’s no hard and fast line that can be drawn between such attempts to explain the world (or some part of it) and any science: all descriptions and models we make are, of course, doomed to incompleteness. And it’s also true that we have to choose some way of modeling the world to live by- that is, if we don’t want to end up dead or sedated.
If people are inspired to make the planet a better place because of their belief in Spiral Dynamics, or the Bible, more power to ‘em. But if they believe the all-but-intractably complex world of human interactions can really be described by spirals, or sins, they’re mistaken.
I don’t really understand all this – I analyse but I don’t analyse analysis, too restrictive to order thought, that’s why I don’t like regimented scientific method – I at least can’t be creative when my mind isn’t allowed to roam.
In some ways incomplete thought might be part of why we can innovate in ways computers can’t, thinking a little more outside the box – we need to make mistakes and need incomplete thought in order to develop something new – you can build up an increasingly complete idea from lots of incomplete scraps from the environment – because what we take in isn’t really complete anyway
Also if nothing matters, I really struggle to see any point in doing anything other than short term self serving options all the time – that would be if my thought was complete – however my reason breaks down somewhere before then and I sometimes make illogical choices knowingly, and I can’t figure out why. Indeed if everyone did follow short term self-serving logic many fewer people would be alive today – it might be an evolutanary adaption to break down the reason as a safeguard but, even if you can see past that, few people will put 100% determination behind it; somehow the psychological inhibitions (ie to killing to survive for some) can be a high ‘wall’, and yet one you could walk straight through