Occupy Movements as a Symptom

When there is a problem in an organism, it may respond with various symptoms - fever, inflammation, chills, shaking, .... One can look at the occupy movements as symptoms indicating that there is something wrong at both the national as well as the global level. The organism's response to the malaise is not a direct cure for the issue. It may help it tolerate the malaise in some measure while the organism's other systems attempt to actually cure the malaise.

Science vs Religion and Context

There are lots of groups dialoguing about science in religion. A lot these conversations seem to me to miss some rather basic contextual points:

Opinions and Certainty

Our book club got into an interesting dialogue about having definite opinions on matters. And some people were rather surprised at how one could exist (?) without having definite opinions on matters that were rather obvious.

Spectral Thinking

Got into various conversations with friends about "Apologies Forthcoming".  And this brought out some ideas about how one thinks about phenomena and human events in particular.

Reinterpreting Stupidity

One of the common patterns in humans is calling people who don't perceive what is obvious to us as being "stupid". That seems to end the causal chain of thinking and no more energy needs to be expended in trying to understand what is going on. One is simply left with some degree of frustration at that "stupidity". This was one of my common modes of thinking till a fateful moment that started a shift in interpretation. That fateful moment was riding in the car with my wife and listening to The Moody Blues. On a whim, she asked my how many voices I heard in the song. I said what do you mean? There is one voice. She said no, there are 4 voices. Try as I might, I could not hear 4 voices, just one.

So, I could call myself stupid for not hearing what was obviously there and for all "smart" people to hear. This epithet being a bit unsavory to apply to oneself, I had to rethink my mental models of what stupid meant. With this motivation in hand, it became "obvious" that these auditory distinctions that I was not perceiving pointed to a larger meta pattern. Our various neurologies have different capabilities as to the distinctions that they can perceive. For example:

• We have different visual capacities. Some of us who are not visually oriented don't see details and relationships among things in the visual field that are obvious to others.
• We have different time and causal strategies. Some people are very good at distinguishing the effects of an action / decision. For others that causal chain is simply absent in their perceptual field. They can't see the implications of their own or others actions down stream in time.
• We have different taste distinctions. If someone can't appreciate the fine tastes of a particular food or beverage, they may be considered "less than" by those with finer gustatory distinctions.

One can see from these different distinctive capabilities, that one may inappropriately label another as less than, stupid, or other pejorative adjective. However their neurological structure simply may not have the capability one is expecting of them. Take the example of a baby. One does not expect a young child to drive a car. It is not because the child is stupid. He / she just doesn't have the fine motor distinctions and integration to do that. Is that child / baby stupid? 

Numbers and Quantizing

A friend sent me this link to an application of the laws of form. It refers to imaginary numbers, quaternions, and octonions. I have been thinking about imaginary numbers and quaternions and octonions for a bit. And have been confused by what they all mean. The names of things sometimes can confuse us from understanding what it is that they are pointing to. A case in point is imaginary numbers. Are they really imaginary, a fantasy? So I did a bit of web searching to try and understand these odd named numbers in a metaphorical sense. And I came across a great web page with a clear perspective / explanation of these imaginary numbers.  And of course this led to some more cognitive wanderings and another way to think about these numbers. Those more mathematically and metaphorically gifted may see this as obvious.

Numbers are about quantizing entities (things). However, if we are really in a multidimensional universe (more than 4), then a simple (real) number is not enough to quantize a multidimensional thing. A real number only gets the quantity in the dimensions directly tangible / perceptible to us. Multidimensional things have quantities in other dimensions. Hence the a + bi, or a +bi + cj + dk in quaternion space and so on for octonion elements.

Our minds are limited by the complexity they can handle. So, it occurs to me that greater multidimensional minds would do their basic arithmetic with quaternions and octonions. A vista of a complexity I glimpse in pieces!

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. (Coleridge)