Meaning of Meaning

How does one arrive at what something means? Is it

• the end of a causal chain
• is it a sensation, a sense of understanding, a neurochemistry
• an assignment of value / importance / cause to a phenomenon
• a gestalt that is a combination of the above items

There are reports that moments of great insight, mushroom experiences generate this great sense of meaningfulness to existence. That meaningfulness seems to be an upper left quadrant experience. And does that imply that even though we cognitively tend to think of meaning as being absolute, it is almost always relative - to us, our neurochemistry, our ontologies, .... ??

Geometry of Mind

Our "minds" live in a "spatial" geometry with multiple dimensions. Here are some possible dimensions that need to be narrowed down to a smaller subset which are orthogonal to each other.

• Time dimension - whether the past, present, or future are focal point
• Sense of Humanity - are humans part of nature or outside of nature. An aspect of that is the specialness scale - how special does one think one is. An example is the gorilla beating his chest proclaiming  is special status in the nature of things.
• Meaning / meaningless scale - how much meaning does existence have ?
• Identity dimension / circle - what is included self, family, tribe, ethnicity, nation, planet, consciousness, existence.
• Belief binding strength, e.g., binding strength to a meaning.
• Optimism / pessimism

Add to these dimensions the four quadrants from Wilber's model to begin to capture some more of the complexity of geometry of mind. For example, deep meaning is an upper left quadrant experience. The value of this deep meaning is / can be disputed by the upper right quadrant.

These dimensions are an initial list that needs more pondering as to what are really side effects and what are "real" dimensions. And are there yet other dimensions / factors of which these dimensions are  a side effect. There is Wilber's notion of agency/communion and dissolution/transcendence as four drives of holons. Do these dimensions actually account for the list above as side effects? Needs a bit more thought and perhaps some simulations to verify.

Communication across Ontological Complexity

The general response to complexity beyond the capacity of one's neurology seems to be some degree of discomfort. This may lead to frustration and potentially some degree of anger. The response then is to direct these emotions at the bringer of complexity. So any messenger who brings us a degree of complexity that is beyond our capability is shot ( in a manner of speaking ). Hence, beware of being the messenger of messages that discomfort a neurology.

And of course, one way of coping with any degree of complexity is to have a belief system with an "alpha(s)" who is trusted to take care of any complexity. These alphas can be chosen, self appointed, gurus, or deities of various forms.

A Geometry of Being

A friend sent us an article by Helena Norberg-Hodge on the culture of Ladakh and its evolution from pre exposure to modern culture to the present and its continuing development.

Helena's perspective and work is wonderful both in its spirit and its breadth and depth. It also reminded me of a model about competence. In any context that we survive in, we adapt and develop some level of unconscious competence through that adaptation. As the context changes, we need to adapt again. Now arises the issue of what attributes we keep from our previous adaptation. Specially since we are often not consciously aware of what is truly of value in our adaptation. So, we have the opportunity to become more conscious about our previous adaptation as a way to decide what we need to keep and what we need to change. And in our adaptation to the new context we are also developing unconscious competence to the new environment. This process of adaptation is also evolving for us. We are becoming more conscious and intentional about how we adapt and what we adapt to and in what manner. And, of course, we are limited by our abilities and our capabilities in fully understanding this mystery of which we are a part.

These notions still feel a bit embyronic at this point. They need a bit more development.

Community - Up the Spiral

With the current set of political movements and voices, it seems like large, vocal, and visible groups form around simplistic, divisive, religious, selfish, ... models of "reality". These criteria tend to be mostly from the lower levels of the spiral dynamics model. There don't seem to be such groupings arising around criteria from the "higher" levels of development. Criteria from the higher levels would be items like sustainability, fairness, equity, justice, diversity, balance, ...   What is going on?

One aspect of development is an increasing capability to handle and deal with more complexity. As a metaphorical example, more complex life forms are more fragile and fall apart more easily. At the simpler levels of complexity capability, simple criteria are strong attractors ( grouping principle ). At more developed levels, there are more attractors and perspectives about the precedence of those attractors. In addition, the more complex criteria tend to be further away in time. And they tend not to have easily perceivable and tangible correlates. And that makes it difficult to get groups to coalesce around these attractors.

Minimum Wage vs Living Wage

Who gets first dibs on the food? The alphas, generally.  The rest of the troupe gets the scraps. And depending on the contextual mode (feast / famine), the troupe is kept hungry (and in thrall to the alphas) and awaiting the next set of left overs. Minimum wage is the same pattern to keep the troupe in thrall and working hard for the left overs. This has the added benefit of keeping them too busy to cause problems for the alphas. Good design (from the alpha perspective).

There is also a grouping dynamic that arises with this strategy. The non-alphas group around the alphas for the next left overs. This is probably a much safer mode than going out on their own for a potentially dangerous activity of gathering food.

Patterns - the easy and the hard

Our neurologies are, in one perspective, categorizers. We categorize all our our perceptions / stimuli - good, bad, tree, apple, ....  We code these categories somehow in our representational systems. The way we encode then allows / disallows the perception of patterns in our perceptual field. For example, if we encode objects by color, then we may see "reds" as a pattern. Group dress codes can be by color, form, function, ...  And we see the patterns of dress and then associate other attributes and criteria with those patterns.

It seems like a number of people encode behaviors with their feelings / emotions about the behavior. And if that same feeling is not present, they don't see the pattern in the behavior. For example, a number of people say that they would not repeat the behaviors of their parents. However, that is exactly what  they do and at the same time deny that is what they are doing. To the external observer, the pattern may be obvious. Why is it not so to the perpetrator of that behavior?  It seems like the dynamic may be that they have encoded the feelings associated with the behavior and that is what they are basing their denial on.  The feelings that they had when the parents did that behavior are very different from the feelings that they have when they are doing that behavior. Obviously the feelings of the receiver are different from those of the transmitter of the behavior.

This then leads us to the more general observation that  the encoding of experience is critical in whether  or not we are able to perceive patterns in our experience. The ability to detect patterns is probably critical both to our development / evolution as well as our continuing survival. Here we can see  that the  famous adage: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it", or its original version: "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it", are only part of the dynamic. How we encode what we experience and learn can obscure or allow us to see the patterns. And whether we can perceive these patterns or not can then determine whether we repeat them or not.

I guess I need to review all my learnings and perhaps recode them?

Lying - a different perspective

In a number of instances where one notices that a person is lying and he/she would have to be mentally deficient not to know that they are lying - what is going on? One sees similar behavior with children. They will  deny what they have just done - like eat chocolate. Seems like a similar pattern. And the question again arises what is going on? The dominant model so far has been that "lying" is happening and the person needs to be corrected, shown the light, punished, ....

However, this accepted model assumes that there is clear logical cognition going on and there is deliberate misstatement of the fact.

Another way to think about what is going on is that a person is maintaining a certain "state of being" in their neurochemistry. Facts and truth are irrelevant. The neurochemistry will process the situation and state whatever would  maintain that state of being. Issues of truth or falsity are not relevant to that neurochemistry.

In the situation with a child denying having eaten chocolate with chocolate  on their face, the child may see the response on the questioners face or the expected response and then generate the statement that would keep them "safe" / "right" with the questioner.

The question then arises, what percentage of lying incidents are deliberate misstatements and what are neurochemical set point maintenance strategies?

Clash of Civilizations or Speciation ?

There is an ongoing discussion about a Clash of Civilizations as  an explanatory model of what is happening on the planet. I was  sent this Wall Street Journal article on the topic authored by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I would suggest that there  is something far more basic going on. There is an active process of speciation happening.

Some contextual  ontology may be useful before we get into the dynamics. The underlying model being applied is one "simple rules generate complex behavior" ala Conway's game of life. What  simple rules can one hypothesize that could show this behavior we are seeing that is being classified as a clash of civilizations. I propose speciation.

With our evolutionary development, both in the physical domain as well as the noosphere, we have created a new level / degree of complexity that we have to contend with / survive in. A certain (significant) proportion of the civilization find that complexity overwhelming. It is adjusting to that complexity by binding to simpler models of the world ( fundamentalism, in religion, philosophy, politics, ethnocentrism, and various other ontologies). This is the beginning of speciation. Can you imagine a person with a universal world view being able to mate with a paragon of ethnocentrism, e.g., a white  supremacist? Over generations, if this continues, you may develop separate species that actually can not mate anymore.

This ontology also explains the rise of fundamentalism ( in religion,  politics, philosophy, ethnocentrism, ...) in the west that the clash model does not. The species bifurcation is happening across the globe, not just in a given ethnicity, "civilization", or philosophy.

The problem of course arises with the level of technology we have achieved. At our current bifurcation point, the diverging sides have  access  to  a destructive power that can eliminate the "aberrant" (from their perspective) emerging species from existence.

Which way this bifurcation goes is the undiscovered country we are now traveling through!

Distinctions, Assumptions, and Categories

In  previous posts there has been some conflation of distinction, assumption, and categorization. To clarify the matter in our minds, Reba and I dialogued about it a while. And what we came to is that

• Distinctions are primal. They have to do with boundaries / edges. They put into foreground that which was part of the background. And part of that process involves perceptions of a boundary between what is put in the foreground and the background. And as Spencer Brown notes in Laws of Form that the reason for making a distinction is for a value.
• Assumptions seem to be about what is distinguished - its attributes, capabilities, implications, ...
• Categorization happens when you have an ecology (group) of distinctions. It is a way of organizing those distinctions into some structure.

Thought I'd put  these peregrinations down before they got lost in the mists of time.

Distinctions and Recursion

Laws of Form talks about the notion of distinctions.

It seems to me it is an issue of recursion. Whatever distinction you make is an assumption about the context we are in. There is a tendency to start with too much beginning framework. We are already far removed from the "first" distinction. As carbon based life forms with  the evolutionary architecture we have, the universe has already made a number of distinctions for us that are often invisible to us. We perceive with senses that provide a particular kind of window into "reality". It is very difficult for us to see that window frame through which  we are looking. And even more, we don't perceive what is not perceptible  through that  window frame of ours.

So given that we are far removed from the first distinction, then we have a problem of recursion. How do we get to that first distinction? I am not sure we can get to that first distinction. It is more like an asymptotic approach. What ever distinctions ( assumptions ) we make, we can go meta to those distinctions and try to uncover what assumptions are built  into those distinctions. And then do that again and again. In some sense, is that not part of our evolutionary journey ? To keep realizing that  whatever distinctions we have made are not absolute and we keep discovering deeper (?) levels of distinctions.  I expect we'll have a great awakening to our own distinctions when we first come across an extra-terrestrial civilization.

Computer languages  like XML are very early attempts to start the recursive process by allowing meta data to guide the interpretation. And in addition to be able to change  the meta data to see the  same source from a different perspective. I expect that we'll make much better multilayered languages. There are general patterns that  XML provides, however the syntax seems to be rather cumbersome.  And part of that it seems to me derives from our limited capacity to handle complexity.

Pacifism and other steadfast principles

A friend sent me this article on "A Quaker in the Military". I really like the article. He has a clear expression of his models and thoughts on the matter. And it got me to thinking about the principle of pacifism and other such principles. There is the rationalist's dilemma about when is it right not to be pacific, i.e., if one can stop violence or harm to another, should one not step  in and do what it takes? Very confusing at that level of thinking. So I escalated the thinking to the next level of abstraction to see if I could find a way out of this dilemma.


There is a saying in NLP that Every behaviour is appropriate in some context. Then there is the example of "reality". Even what we consider as the "fundamental forces" of nature break down in certain contexts and / or combine to become a different / unified force. So, when we make up principles that we want to hold in all contexts, e.g., non-violence, we are in direct contradiction with the nature of  this particular universe. And is that why we encounter the "dilemma" at a particular level of thinking? Being one with the Way, is there no dilemma there? One adjusts to the context and does what the context requires? Does this presume a certain level of thinking / development?


Another issue in the article is the intentional direction to improve different societies and situations. It seems to me that there is something else going on in that context. We have spent billions / trillions across the world. And in many cases made the situation worse by these attempts at control and management. For example, the elimination of Allende in Chile, the support of sociopathic dictators in various countries. Seems to me that the underlying ontologies in the command and control attempts are rather fundamentally flawed. The people doing these interventions may have the best of intentions or be caught up in institutional forces. And the results of these actions seem to me to be in the large rather detrimental. So, I see these new proposals of "now we are doing the right thing, we have learned our lessons" as being more of the same. The place of being / spirit that generate these command and control systems are part or the whole of the problem. And I think that is in part my objection to some of Barnett's perspectives in the Pentagon's new map.

Ecology of Mind Article and Thoughts on it

A friend sent me this article on "Ecology of Mind". I found the article to be in a similar vein to a number of thoughts / articles floating around on the web. I found something disquieting about the article as it seemed to be  missing a "completion" of perspective. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

I liked  their articulations and pattern consolidation - infodiversity, erosion of empathy, fragmentation, ...  There are a number  of threads along these lines  on the web and in conversations. While what they are saying makes sense from within a certain perspective, it leaves out the meta context and its interpretation. And of course that interpretation is dependent on one's base ontology, which is often invisible to the articulator or designed to be so in the interest of telling a particular story / articulating a perspective.

We have a feature to hold on to the familiar. When that familiar is changing (rather rapidly), then we are at a loss in a very direct sense in many dimensions. We don't yet have a new robust ontology to maneuver this complexity. And our ontologies are often grounded in the experience path we have taken through life than anything absolute or real.

That said, my take on what is happening is that we are in the midst of a shift akin to the cambrian explosion. Most life forms did not survive that shift. And I expect a number of life forms went extinct (that could have been quite viable) simply by being at the wrong place at the wrong time or being not quite ready for the degree of shift that happened or by the swing of the dragon's tail as it died. The swish of the dragon tail is what I expect we are about to experience. I am not sure how many of us will make it. My sense is also that a good proportion of the human population is not viable in the new context that is being created.

Another aspect of the situation is that we are in a situation of great imbalance. Finding healthy ways of being, integrating these new contexts that are arising into  our lives in healthful ways is a process that is very much in flux.  There are no crystal clear directions or examples that I can see of these integrations yet. There are samples / models here and there of people who are using various aspects of the emerging contexts in healthy ways. In such turmoil, it is easily to lose track of what, how and why we are doing what we are doing. Addictions, information/internet/gadget/porn/drugs/... are imbalances - too much or too little of what is necessary for a healthy modality. Life on the  edge of chaos - we are always on the edge of falling over as when riding a bike. And sometimes we don't realize we have fallen over since the effect is delayed in time.

Another issue with the article is that there is a decidedly negative interpretation of the current context. For example, the erosion of empathy. We have been watching (via netflix) an HBO series called Rome where  they try to depict what day to day life was like in Rome around the time of Julius Caesar. There is certainly a lack of empathy there for slaves and conquered peoples depicted there. I also recall from my early childhood growing up in a culture with servants the attitudes towards servants were definitely not very empathic. I  expect the same was true here for blacks and other minorities. "Empathy" is a feature that is not always present and has not always been present in human history / development. What the current context is doing is bringing out "diff"s between our articulated story of who and what we are with the reality of who and what we "really" are in much more direct and stark contrast with the diff color coded and in bold. However, the nature of how the diff is done is with what we are experiencing / is happening now rather than a balanced diff across the base architecture versus the present instance only.

So, there are a lot of things that are problematic in our current context. In addition, those problems are much larger than they have ever been in our history simply due to the level of development we are at. We are impacting the planet and all other life forms on it in a much more direct way than we have ever been able to do before. My sense is that we do have enough intelligence available to find a path through this in an "optimal scenario" kind of way. However, I  also sense that that is very unlikely. What is far more likely is that the new cambrian explosion will happen with its concomitant extinction of the "old". What emerges may well wonder about what went before and why those that went before did not take the "optimal" path that will be so obvious in hindsight but is shrouded in mists for us now.

Communication Confusion and Language

In conversation with some friends, I remarked that people with strong alpha drives tended to  be on the sociopathic side of the spectrum. This can be derived from first principles - to be a strong alpha, you basically have to beat down anybody and everybody who stands in your way to be top dog. This indicates a much lower degree of compassion in the alpha ( by nature ). This lack of compassion can be taken as a direct measure of degree of sociopathy. The counter argument was made that people like Gandhi and Martin Luther were strong leaders with quite the  opposite traits. They were "moral" leaders. They had no authority in the civic sense of any coercive power through a police or other arm of an organization. This led to the realization that the word leader can point to two very different phenomena - a leader with civic authority and a "leader" with moral authority. Because the word is the  same, people conflate two very different dynamics as being equal. This then led to the realization, that we do this in a number of different contexts with language. The same word can point to two (or more) very different things. And people may argue endlessly when one party is taking the word as pointing to a different dynamic than the other person.

Science, Religion, Beliefs, and Confusion

Science is often touted as an opposite to religion. There are confused arguments that science's models change over time. So, Einstein superceded Newton. Godel redirected a lot of mathematical work on a "complete system" with his incompleteness theorem. There are also examples of models that were shown to be totally wrong, e.g., 1, 2, 3. With these examples, science is equated with religion. There are several dynamics at play here.

• The artifacts of science are confused with the process of science. The artifacts are all temporary and may be superceded at any time.
• Any belief system practiced by humans will have their imprint on them. There is a spectrum of human behavior on how tightly a human binds to their belief system - ideologue / fundamentalist to liberal (?) (with leaky margins on absoluteness). One can have ideologues in science, just as in religion. This behavior can be conflated with the endeavor and the two endeavors can be equated. This pattern of equating behavior with identity leads to confusion in a number of different areas, e.g.,  saying a child is stupid when they have done something from lack of understanding or emotion. The "to be" verb equates the child's identity to a behavior.

So, there are similarities in behavior in all human endeavors even if the identity / character of them is different.

Perspective on Belief Systems

After reading The Dark Side of the Buddha, a thought occurred to me about the nature of belief systems. All belief systems are based on a perspective on reality, on its nature, direction, structure. Which of course is accounted for by the nature of this context: space, time, and entities in that space time. However, each perspective is based on a set of givens ( assumptions, presuppositions, axioms, ... ). Then these givens are generalized to all contexts and situations. Which of course simply cannot be because there is far too much diversity to be covered by a single lens. Take for example Buddhism. There is the notion of the four noble truths. This perspective takes as a given that there is suffering. However, there is not suffering all the time in all contexts. Similarly, one can take the basic perspective of any philosophy / religion and find the givens in it and also the problems with those givens in different contexts.

Critique of Critiques

A friend sent me a link on The Dark Side of the Buddha. The video was really funny and insightful as humor can be in an oblique way. As I started reading the page and thinking about what was being said and how it was said, it occurred to me that there was a certain pattern at work in the critique of Buddhism. Here is my deconstruction:

Humans / primates have a certain set of characteristics (behavior rules / patterns). These behaviors / patterns occur in all contexts that humans are involved in: politics, religion, coops, corporations, .... These behaviors have to do with dominance, sex,  and emerging consciousness, among other factors. Different philosophies / religions originate as aspects of this emerging consciousness trying to understand the who, what, why, where, and how of this context we are in. The limits of this consciousness are reflected in the articulation of theses philosophies and religions. And the practice of these philosophies are subject to dominance and sexual behaviors since they  are part of our makeup. How could it be otherwise other than in our fantasies?

What this web page does is a common pattern in critiques. There is an unarticulated presupposition of "perfection" in an undefined way of how it should be. Then examples are provided where that perfection is not present, and in particular, examples where its opposite is present ( in the view of the author ). The examples pointed out have generally to do with the dominance and sexual characteristics of humans. There is a strange sort self dislike / hatred of our own nature and its various manifestations in these types of critiques. A side effect of the critique can be a damning of a glimpse of this emerging consciousness and this attempt to articulate, understand, or experience this context we are in. If there is value in that glimpse to  our own emerging consciousness, we can miss that value or turn away from that which may be valuable.

A useful way to look at these philosophies, e.g., Buddhism,  is to evaluate what aspects help our own emerging consciousness. It is sometimes difficult to ignore the enticing characteristics of gurus and attribute dominance of understanding to them in lieu of our own consciousness. We are geared to look for dominant alphas ( or be one ) and give up our own emerging consciousness in subservience to an alpha ( or our own "alpha ego" ).

Thoughts on Structure ala System Dynamics

There is a certain ontology in System Dynamics that looks at reality / phenomena as composed of events which we perceive. These events sometimes come in patterns. Over time we can see these recurring patterns of behavior, e.g., the seasons, i.e., summer comes year after year and we know to expect it. These patterns of behavior arise from yet another (deeper) level - structure. Structure is a perspective on what forces, values, geometries, ... are causing the patterns of behavior being seen and the events being experienced. This layered perspective can be described in many ways: 1, 2, 3. Structure is thought of in terms of physical structure, belief systems, organizational values, ... However, if we take a different ontology, ala Conway's Game of Life or Wolfram's New Kind of Science. In this ontology, simple rules generate all the complexity that we perceive. For example, with primates we can hypothesize that there is a simple "alpha" grouping rule. Primates are born with various levels of "alpha"ness. All the group member gather around the one with the highest alpha. Letting this simple rule run over time shows complex behavior such as schismogenesis, wars, hierarchical organizations, .... Taking on this ontology, then structure becomes these rules. The previous notion of structure - belief systems, values, become patterns of behavior arising out of this deeper structure of simple rules.

Came across some papers (1, 2, 3, 4, ) on potential synergies between Systems Dynamics and Agent Based Modeling. Also came across the potential for abductive fallacies in modeling.

Panarchy - An interesting complex model

Came across the panarchic model through one of those serendipitous link perusals on the web. There are appealing characteristics of this model:

• It is layered
• Layers operate at different time scales
• It is cyclical. Going through repeating cycles of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization.

These characteristics give it a fractal nature which has deep resonance with the nature of the universe we happen to inhabit. Here is an abstract of these ideas from the source:

Panarchy focuses on ecological and social systems that change abruptly. Panarchy is the process by which they grow, adapt, transform, and, in the end, collapse. These stages occur at different scales. The back loop of such changes is a critical time and presents critical opportunities for experiment and learning. It is when uncertainties arise and when resilience is tested and established. We now see changes on a global scale that suggest that we are in such a back loop. This article assesses the possibility of using the ideas that are central to panarchy, developed on a regional scale, to help explain the changes that are being brought about on a global scale by the Internet and by climate, economic, and geopolitical changes.

There is of course a book on the topic. There is also a paper applying this model to the global situation.

Gnosticism, Orthodoxy, and Personality Types

We attended a couple of lectures on the Gnostic Gospels by a local preacher at UW, Richland as part of their Love of Learning Lecture series. As we were talking about the gnostic approach versus the orthodox perspective on religion, in particular, Christianity, it occurred to us that one could look at that bifurcation simply as the variation between the Myers-Briggs type of iNtuition vs. Sensing. The gnostic approach focuses on an inner experience / knowing. The orthodox approach focuses on externally sensed feedback: going to church, good deeds, tithing, ....

In a more general sense, one could say that there is a spectrum of types. And that to these different types, different forms of belief are appealing. What often seems to happen in culture and religion is that the dominant type / person in / of that religion coerces in various ways those whose type is a mismatch to theirs to get in line. When this does not happen, you get schism / bifurcations of the belief system.

Thoughts on Dialogue

We have been reading David Bohm's "On Dialogue" and also came across this very interesting article on "Wholeness Regained".  It is interesting to note that from very different perspectives, many people at the boundaries of thought and understanding point to a very similar description of what is. And there are also differences in the descriptions since the history and metaphor through which "this place" is described are clearly different. It reminds me of a PBS special we saw on chimps that were using sticks put into termite holes to capture termites for eating. The females were better and quicker at this activity. The younger one who had not yet learned the technique would get the stick and wave it around and then look for termites on it. When there were none to be found, they would look at the "experts" who were getting termites and then the young ones would wave their sticks again and look again. It took several / many repeats of this process before the skill would be learned. And it seems to me that at the boundaries of understanding we wave our sticks around and then wonder why we are not catching termites. We don't have a basic understanding of the nature / structure of the situation and consequently are often flailing in "the dark" hoping to and a termite, as in the search for happiness or enlightenment or ....