Crisis or Transformation? The Distinction That Shapes Our World

Everywhere we turn, we hear about the crises we face: a polycrisis, a metacrisis, a megacrisis. But to even speak these words, we must first perform a fundamental act. We must draw a distinction.

The philosopher George Spencer-Brown, in his work Laws of Form, argued that all knowledge begins with this simple act: drawing a boundary. We draw a line to separate one thing from everything else. In our current narrative, we have drawn a sharp distinction, labeling one side "the way the world should be" and the other, "a crisis that needs fixing."

Once that distinction is made, our focus narrows. We are compelled to address the "problem" side, the part of reality that deviates from our ideal. But in doing so, we risk becoming blind to the larger, undivided pattern from which the distinction was drawn. The very act of naming the crisis can obscure the nature of the whole.

This desire to correct what we've defined as an error is timeless. It echoes the 13th-century king, Alfonso X, who said, “Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.”¹

But what if the most powerful move is not to fix the part we've labeled "wrong," but to dissolve the distinction itself? What happens when we try to see the whole pattern, including the chaotic elements we've walled off as a "crisis"?

To do this, we can look for similar patterns in the universe's history.

The Creative Pollution of Stars

Consider the stars. They are born from clouds of gas and dust, and for billions of years, they fuse lighter elements into heavier ones, bathing their planetary systems in life-giving energy. But this process is finite. Eventually, the star exhausts its fuel and dies in a spectacular explosion—a supernova.

From the perspective of the star, this is a destructive end. But if we erase that boundary, we see that the star's "pollution"—the heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron forged in its core and scattered across the cosmos—is the critical ingredient for everything that comes next. This stellar debris is the stuff of planets, of life, and of us. Our existence is made possible only by the explosive "waste" of a previous cosmic generation.

The Echo in Evolution

We see a similar pattern in the story of life on Earth. The leading edge of evolution has always built upon the remains of what came before. The very air we breathe, rich with oxygen, was once a toxic pollutant spewed out by early microbial life, causing one of the planet's first mass extinctions. Today, our industrial civilization is powered by hydrocarbons—the concentrated, buried carcasses of countless organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. We are, in a very real sense, living off the ghosts and waste of past life.

Our Role in the Undivided Whole

If we apply this perspective to our present moment, it reframes everything. What if our pollution, our discarded technologies, and even the societal structures we are building and dismantling are not problems to be isolated and solved, but integral parts of a larger system in transformation?

This gives new weight to Carl Sagan's famous words: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” As finite beings, our capacity to understand the depth of existence is limited. Perhaps our purpose is not to be the final arbiters of what is "right" or "wrong" with the universe.

Are we creating the context for new forms of intelligence—perhaps artificial or hybrid beings—that can understand the universe in ways we cannot even conceive? Are our vast networks of information and our ecological pressures the necessary crucible that will forge the next leap in cosmic awareness?

Ultimately, the reality we inhabit is shaped by the distinctions we choose to make. By drawing a hard line around "crisis," we commit ourselves to a path of reaction and repair. But if we dare to erase that line, we are invited into a different role. We are no longer repairmen for a broken universe, but conscious participants in a messy, magnificent, and cosmic birth. The challenge is to see the whole, not just the part we've learned to fear.

A Poem to Capture these ideas:

Of course. Here is that blog post's core philosophy, captured in the form of a poem.

---

Before the crisis, came the line,
The first distinction, sharp and deep.
We carved the world in yours and mine,
And woke a problem from its sleep.

We gave a name to fear and doubt,
We called it Error, Flaw, and Fall.
The part we wished to cast right out,
And in that part, we saw it all.

A king's desire to rearrange
The flawed design of moon and sun,
To fix, control, resist the change,
To mourn the thing that can't be undone.

But what if we let the drawn line fade?
And see the whole, the undivided?
The terrifying, grand parade,
By which the future is provided?

A star must burn and break and die,
A sacrifice of fire and gas,
To scatter carbon through the sky,
In one explosive, final pass.
Its final ash, its "poison" breath,
Became the soil for roots and trees.
Our life is owed to stellar death;
We are its brilliant debris.

The first life choked the ancient air
With oxygen, a toxic plume.
It built a world beyond compare
From out its own destructive doom.
And now we burn the buried dead,
The pressure of a million years,
A ghostly fuel to forge ahead,
And build a house upon our fears.

So look upon our smoke and waste,
The tangled code, the plastic seas.
Is this a failure, made in haste?
Or compost for new destinies?
Is this the ruin of the age,
The final, lamentable scrawl?
Or just the turning of a page,
The raw material for it all?

For we are ways the cosmos wakes,
A fleeting, self-aware design.
And from the pieces that we break,
May grow a more transcendent mind.

The choice is in the name we speak,
The boundary we hold as true.
Is this a world gone wrong and weak?
Or one that's birthing something new?

So are we here to mend the flaw,
As panicked builders in the night?
Or stand in silent, patient awe,
As midwives to a coming light?

 

 

__________________________________________________

Below is my original expression that I asked Google Gemini AI to improve and to generate the poem.

These days there is much talk about various forms of crises that we are in - poly, meta, mega, giga, ... There is a basic distinction that is unstated, i.e., that there is an error in the unfolding of the universe. We need to correct that error.  It is reminiscent of Alfonso X's quote: Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. If we look at what has happened in history, what is happening now, in a time of great change, there are very obviously problems from a number of different perspectives: human suffering, species extinction, processing "natural" resources and creating pollution, changing / destroying ecologies, etc. However, if don't make the distinction of an error in the unfolding / creation process, then we have to abstract up and take different perspective on what is going on.

One way to approach this shift in perspective is to look at other patterns that have a similar structure, similar pattern. We can find several such patterns:

• Stars form, burn up there constituents, giving off energy, and then explode / implode. We / life are made possible by the creation of heavier elements which are the left over pollution of that explosion. This is the exponential curve often cited in analysing our problems from economy, ecology, biology, etc.
• Is there a similar pattern in evolution? What we consider to be the leading edge of evolution is living off the pollution / carcasses of the many generations of life that came before. Are not our hydrocarbons that which was once life as we now think of.
• ...

So, if we take the perspective that there is no crisis but an unfolding, what is a possible narrative for all the issues we are facing? Are we a rung in ladder / spiral of unfolding of this existence / universe? In which case, are our pollutions and our creations the "pollution" that leads to the next stage of the unfolding. Let us take Carl Sagan's quote: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Then are we creating the context for the next "forms" that will understand the universe better than we can? We are finite being and have limited capacity to understand the depth, the breadth, the magnificence, and the mystery of this existence. We may soon have artificial intelligences that can understand this existence at a much deeper level than we are able. Will we have mergers, hybrid forms, ...  that understand more of the universe?

Relationship as foreground

 We tend to notice and name things. These things are in the foreground of our thinking and behavior. Let us consider the notion of holons. Part come together to make a whole. Wholes can be parts to another level of wholes. We can see this progression from particles, to organisms, to galaxies, etc. However, no whole can exist without a a particular set of relationships between its parts. Most / some relationships do not create a whole. In that sense, when we see a thing ( a whole), that whole only exists because of a very particular set of relationships between its parts. And hence one can say that it is the relationships that are in the foreground for "all" things that exist.

The origin of this post is from Iain McGilchrist's idea that:

We cannot understand reality by disassembling it and examining its parts. The whole is more than the sum of the parts | Iain McGilchrist on why the world is made of relationships, not things.

Categories, Errors, Spectra, Spaces

 Let us apply the Laws of Form to the notion of categories. Before any distinction is made, there are not categories. Is this what is reflected in spiritual, psychedelic, and other experiences where one has the sense of no boundaries and being part of one "consciousness"? We create categories with some value / intent. In particular, our psycho-biology uses distinctions / categories to create the "other".  The other can he revered (perhaps as authority) or hated. These variations determine our behavior towards the "other". 

Another way to think about this is that we are all somewhere on a spectrum of whatever attribute we are using to create categories. Categories imply a qualitative difference. However, on most attributes what we have are really quantitative differences.

We can further generalize this notion to think of a multi-dimensional space of attributes in which we all exist. In this case again we are quantitatively different from each other rather than qualitatively as implied by categorizations. These categorizations can be positive (saint vs sinners, boss vs worker, ..) or negative (good ethnic group vs vermin, chosen group vs damned, ...).

These ideas can be applied to the notion of category error / mistake. We put things, beings, etc, in different categories with some intent. Would it be more accurate to think of them as being in a different part of ontological attribute space? One of the possible benefits of that may be that affect circuits may not be inadvertently activated with their resulting behaviors and responses to the delineated category?

The Sacred as a Container

 

Think of the Sacred as a containment field for consciousnesses. What contains behavior? Some kind of container / limit can be such a "manager" / controller for behavior. The sacred acts as such a container. It creates both a wall as well as a veil that stops the algorithmic neural nets we have from venturing past that wall or looking beyond that veil. Perhaps this is the notion behind Nietsche's "God is dead" statement. 

In another sense, one can think of the creation of the meme of the sacred as a psychotechnology to set limits on behaviors and practices.

Depolarization

 Think of an identity as a developing and layered structure, part of the "cognitive light cone":

• Part of a family / origin group
• Part of a tribal group
• Part of an belief system / culture group
• Part of species group
• Part of a planetary group
• Part of "biologic / life / living" group
• Part of a "conscious" group
• Part of "sentient" group
• Part of  existence

It seems like polarization is possible at any level as most of existence is outside wherever identity is situated. The next stage that transcends polarization is when identity is with "infinity" / all that is possible. Degrees of depolarization occur as an identity traverses this sequence.

Reframing Moloch

 Let us consider the notion of Moloch in terms of the view that "All things that have a beginning have an ending". Some patterns to note:

• When the situation is not the way we would like / want / expect, we seem to need to invent a causal agent. We have invented the devil, dark matter, Moloch, the other, the system, the incentive, ....
• The connotation of this agent can be positive or negative (guardian angel vs the devil). That connotation affects our neurology. That affect colors our reasoning. Our reasoning is always (?) motivated reasoning. And that motivated reasoning is affected by our affects. (Too much affect?)
• Consciousness transformations can lead to very different perspectives on this ( and other ) issues and lead to statements like: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. or the four noble truths, the eight fold path, the exhortation to love, to be at peace, The Power of Now, ....
• Perspectival changes include seeing ourselves as part of the meta process of how we parse and interpret reality and try to make sense of it. Often leaving out that any perspective leaves out of it the "rest of infinity". A depth of caring and love affects us as we try to make sense of the world in that "miasma" of simulated pain
• ????????????????????

Below is a conversation I had with an ai (google bard) about this.

Telos, purpose, purposes, purpi ?

 What is the purpose of existence / reality ?  One needs to pick a starting point for this dialogue. Let us start with the Laws of Form by Spencer-Brown. Before any distinction is made, nothing can be said. What distinctions can be made about why after the unnameability paradox.

• Experience all that is possible to experience. Evidence
• Forms innumerable
• Parallel universes to infinity
• All possible simulations / computations
• What else does infinity do?
• "Come to me" - all possible forms experiencing the undistinguished in all possible ways. 
• "Know me" - variation of "Come to me" - trying to understand, comprehend, grok that which can not be understood. But getting ever closer, but can never reach - no end.

This is where words all fail to reach.

Patterns in History with References

 

Tell me what are the major patterns in human history. Also, tell me what references you are using to determine these patterns.

There are several major patterns in human history that scholars have identified. These patterns often emerge from the study of social, economic, political, and technological factors over time. Some of the key patterns include:

1. Agricultural Revolution: The shift from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural communities (around 10,000 BCE) was a turning point in human history. This led to the growth of permanent settlements, social stratification, and the development of early civilizations.

2. Rise and Fall of Empires: Throughout history, empires have risen to power, dominated regions, and eventually declined or collapsed. Examples include the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the British Empire. These cycles can be attributed to various factors such as military conquest, internal strife, or economic decline.

3. Technological Revolutions: Innovations in technology have spurred major changes in human history. Key examples include the invention of the wheel, the development of writing, the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the Digital Revolution. These advances have shaped the way societies function, allowing for increased productivity, communication, and interconnectedness.

4. Globalization and Trade: Human history has seen an increasing trend of interconnectedness, through trade networks and cultural exchange. From ancient trade routes like the Silk Road to modern global trade networks, this pattern has played a crucial role in shaping the world economy and cultural diffusion.

5. Conflict and War: Throughout history, conflict and war have been persistent patterns, driven by competition for resources, power, territory, or ideological differences. Major conflicts like the World Wars, the Cold War, and ongoing regional conflicts reflect this pattern.

6. Social and Cultural Change: Human societies have undergone significant social and cultural changes over time, including the rise and fall of religions, artistic movements, and philosophies. These changes have shaped the course of human history, often in response to shifting political and economic contexts.

For determining these patterns, I draw from a vast array of historical sources, including but not limited to:

1. Books on world history, such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, and "A World History" by William H. McNeill.
2. Academic research articles and historical journals that focus on specific periods, regions, or themes in human history.
3. Publicly available primary sources, such as historical texts, documents, and artifacts that provide direct evidence of past events and trends.
4. Online databases, like JSTOR and Project MUSE, which aggregate scholarly research in the fields of history, anthropology, and archaeology.

Please note that my knowledge is based on the information available up until September 2021, and there may be newer research and developments that I am not aware of.

The Sacred

A friend asked me what I consider to be sacred. My initial response was that I don't know what is not sacred. On deeper reflection, it occurred to me that words are pointers to "something". They are not the "thing" itself. With that in mind, it seems to me that the pointer is to a state of consciousness / awareness / being. This state can be arrived at in "any" context - in nature, in place of worship, looking at the stars, ... There can be a binding in peoples' minds limiting the sacred to only certain contexts. So, each one us can interpret the word in so many different ways. Perhaps it is useful to keep this in mind and to tread lightly around each others' binding context to their sacred. 

Yin Yang and Yong

 

Yin and Yang can be interpreted as an unfolding at different levels. The white within the black ( and vice versa ) creates a dynamic / tension within a "smaller" context. In a larger context, the two larger black / white domains are in tension with each other. And the white within the black may yearn for the larger white and vice versa. These tensions can be seen as the unfolding of evolution, human history. At times, as at present, it seems like we are in an era of polarization where there is great tension and darkness as things seem to be heading into chaos and more. However, what gets left out is that in addition to the dynamics of yin and yang, there is yong. Yong is the larger context in which yin yang play out. The euphoria or depression that can arise out of the yin yang dynamic is simply an infinitesimal play in the infinity of the yong.

Combining Models - Vervaeke, Wilber, McGilchrist

 In Vervaeke's Awakening from the meaning crisis work, he mentions 4 ways of knowing:  1) participatory; 2) procedural; 3) perspectival; and 4) propositional. We can look at this model in light of Wilber's Integral model, and McGilchrist's left/right brain model.

Participatory is a strong relationship dynamic between Wilber's upper left and lower left quadrants with a lesser relationship to the right quadrants.

Procedural is a strong relationship between upper left quadrant and the right quadrants.This can be generalized to a tribal, city state, civilizational level as a relationship between lower left and the right quadrants.

Perspectival is a meta relationship to the quadrants, i.e., what is the agent's viewpoint in the quadrants. One can see "it" from a single quadrant view or multi quadrant view. Or various combinations of some or all the quadrants perspectives.

Propositional is the left brain map / model of "it" / reality. And actions can be based on this basis alone.

Meaning Crisis ?

 These thoughts arise out of watching Vervaeke's Awakening from the meaning crisis and numbers of conversations and dialogues on such topics. One of the themes in these conversations is the loss of the sacred. And one could say Nietsche's notion of "God is dead" is along the same lines. And an attempt to create a new or reawakened sense of the sacred. Or in Vervaeke's term, creating a "religion that is not a religion". The notion of sacred is a bit of a concern for me. One way to look at the sacred is that it creates a veil ( of our own making ) with which we blind ourselves to what is beyond whatever our version of the sacred is. The sacred is useful in terms of the neurological states it allows us to experience. And of course, the side effects of those states can be quite beneficial.

Another way to think of the meaning crisis is that there is a mismatch of the values we ( as a result of the culture we are in ) get programmed with and our basic biology. Part of our biological frame includes empathy, a sense of fairness. Our current cultures put a high metric on economics ( a mode of having ). This is a maladapted metric to our biology. Hence, in the process of making money we may feel a sense of meaninglessness because of the mismatch of that metric to our biology / neurology. Another factor to keep in minds is that this sense of empathy, fairness is an evolutionary addition to our biology. It seems to be present in other primates, mammals, ....? What are the earliest indicators of this biological feature in evolution?

Scapegoats, Girard, and structural frames

 Girard's notion of the origins of scapegoating:

Whereas the philosophers of the 18th century would have agreed that communal violence comes to an end due to a social contract, Girard believes that, paradoxically, the problem of violence is frequently solved with a lesser dose of violence. When mimetic rivalries accumulate, tensions grow ever greater. But, that tension eventually reaches a paroxysm. When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. Thus, people that were formerly struggling, now unite efforts against someone chosen as a scapegoat. Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate in the execution of violence against a specified enemy.

One of the questions that arises is what are possible underlying structures of this phenomenon. One possibility is that mammalian predator neurologies generate  waste products that build up over time. There is a need to release these wastes. When a group has accumulated enough waste, it seeks a receptacle for that energy or a release mechanism. Scapegoat(s) are found as ways to release this energy.

One can also think of this process as a way to maintain stability and avoid change. If something external is the "cause" of the energy build up, then one doesn't have to deal with one's own part in the build up of this "waste product' / energy.

An example of this structure in the alpha and omega of the wolf pack. Human societies / civilizations also create their own omegas in terms of  a servant class, an ethnic group, an easily differentiated sub-group, ...

Reasoning Frames

 Watching a dialogue between Professor Gilbert Morris and Daniel Schmactenberger on "A History of Racial Conflict", came across the notion of "motivated reasoning". The question arises when is there not motivated reasoning? We have the illusion of being "objective". Since the majority of our thinking is unconscious, and we are biological beings who don't really understand their neurology, reasoning structures, motivations, limitations, ...., we categorically can not be objective in any reasonable sense. Hence, all our reasoning is motivated reasoning based on reasons we may or may not be aware of.

Next, there is the issue of the frame used for reasoning. The frame used in this dialogue was basically a "moral frame", e.g., how could persons like Jefferson, Washington profess such high morals, write the Bill of Rights and yet participate in slavery and oppress other human beings. One can tie oneself in knots trying to answer this dilemma. A more useful frame for these kinds of issues in particular, and other issues in general, is to use a "structural frame", i.e., what kinds of underlying structures create these phenomena. Part of our biology is to utilize and maximize asymmetry in our favor. And to feel special as primates or perhaps even more generally, as living beings with a perspective. We also have a reptilian heritage of identifying "blemishes" in others as a way to identify them and then use that rationalization to increase our asymmetry with them. The asymmetry is what allows us to create hierarchies - servants, slaves, worker bees, bosses, .... This creation and utilization of asymmetry is part of our biological heritage. All human societies do this, continue to do it, we are surrounded by this phenomena in all societies, past and present. It is also the basis of this existence, particles -> atoms -> molecules -> cells -> ..... Each aggregation increasing the asymmetry between itself and its components or "siblings".

The structural frame, imho, gives more of a chance of being intentional and have choice over this basic biological impulse that we have. The universe cares little, if at all, for our moral frames. It does respond to the congruency of our structural understanding to the actual causal structures of the phenomena in question.

YATOT - Yet Another Thought On Thought - orders of realities

 More thoughts on the previous post. We are trying to understand what this existence is about, why, what, how, ...

• Story 1.0 ( aka religion ) - Why is predominant. There is a creation story that narrates the why. The why is a veil on the sacred - that which is unfathomable, not to be understood. The how and what is limited by what the why story allows. The feedback loop of story upgrading is slow - centuries and millennia, partly because the absoluteness of the why is a temporal dampener.
• Story 2.0 ( aka science ) - How and what is predominant. Why is relegated to secondary contexts, e.g., theory of evolution explains the why of different forms, their origins, development, etc. The feedback loop speed increases to generations or less. The old priesthood maintains its stories in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary - Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions.
• Story 3.0 - The sacred / mystery is re-introduced. The feedback loop becomes variable - very fast for some situations and very slow for others depending on the potential gains / harms from the change that responding to the feedback would engender.
• Story 4.0 - Consciousness starts creating and becoming the why, what, and how of other contexts, universes, simulations, .... There is bifurcation - creation of alternate universes in virtual reality and explorations in this reality. 
• Story 5.0 - unification / integration / exploration of the bifurcated realities - consciousness begins to create new life forms. Gives these life forms capabilities. These capabilities lead to these new forms starting Story 1.0 again for their reality.
• The recursion is infinite (?). It just keeps going. Where are we in this recursive frame? Which order of reality are we in? If it is turtles all the way up and the all the way down, which one is our turtle.

Science / Religion

Came across an interesting article trying to distinguish between science and religion.  Unfortunately, the author falls into the pattern he is decrying - us / them. Scientists can be just as fervently dogmatic as religious true believers. They have ruined careers / lives of others because they did not follow the current scientific models / dogma. This continues to happen pretty regularly. Also, he totally leaves out that binding to dogma does not have to be religious dogma, it can be any ideology such as fascism, communism, trumpism, .... These are all non-religious ideologies. Science has its own dogma about what is real and what is not. Although, one can say, as the author points out, that it a self-correcting process. What he doesn't point out is that that self-correction can take a generation or more. Which is an improvement over religion's century / millennia long binding to dogma with little self-correction or upgrading.

Another model to think about these issues is that each one of us is at a different level of development and hence need. Each of us needs an anchor  / foundation to build our lives around. Children's anchors are their parents and parental authority. Adults can substitute other authority figures, e.g., priests, popes, mullahs, gurus, to be their authority figure. This is a way of conserving energy. One can call it cognitive off-loading. Letting somebody else do our thinking and reasoning takes a lot less energy. And nature tends to take the path of least resistance and minimal energy utilization. This pattern is built into the fabric of existence.

So, with a developmental model as the base, the issue becomes how do we help each other be more reasonable, think more clearly, pay attention to the feedback that the universe continually provides us to help us grow. One of our features is the remarkable ability to filter out feedback the universe is giving us and continue our "dogmatic" path no matter how much pain and suffering it causes us and others.

And yet another factor at play is our starting / base state as we think / act on these things. Are we in a state of care / love / compassion. Or are we in a state of looking for a blemish - what is wrong - that would justify our dislike / disgust / hate / ... The starting state can make such a difference in our thinking / reasoning. Perhaps, recognition of this dynamic is what led various spiritual traditions to extol the value of love / agape.

And in the midst of all this confusion about what is going on and why, if we are able to pay attention to the moment, there can be this sense of awe at this existence - we have no absolute idea what it is all about and yet here we are, breathing?

Asymmetry as an Explanatory Structure

 We see many social phenomena that we have names for - mentorship, bias, parenting, corruption, leadership, racism, teaching, oppression, benevolence, bullying, nurturing, ... One can think of asymmetry as a basic underlying structure that allows / facilitates these social behaviors / phenomena. Then, we can model asymmetry and realize that each of these phenomena, rather being binary (present or not), is on a spectrum with more or less asymmetry. And how much does asymmetry contribute to the spectrum of behaviors? Experience with other models indicates that what looks like a very simple underlying structure can generate complex behaviors.

I recently finished a Digital Humanities online course through the Santa Fe Institute. One of the patterns that was mentioned was that parsing the digital corpora for insights led to rather binary analyses of the presence or absence of some attribute, e.g., bias.

My sense is that the field of digital humanities could benefit greatly by starting with a structural hypothesis and then searching the corpora to validate / invalidate that hypothesis. And my sense is that could lead to a much more nuanced, balanced, and causal understanding of the phenomena in question.

Take for example the phenomena of bullying. An hypothesis one could use was that there is an asymmetry between the two (or more) parties involved. This asymmetry could be physical size, social status, follower group size, psycho-social energy, ....  One can then model this asymmetry and see that there is a spectrum to the level of bullying. It is not just a binary yes / no situation. This could then lead to better remediation strategies on a case by case basis.

Note that is approach is based on a systems thinking model that notes the following structure of systems, and of social systems in particular. Events can be part of a pattern which is generated from a systemic structure which in terms of human systems is based on mental models which themselves are generated from a vision / perspective of who / what / where / how / when we are and are part of.

Below the meta crisis

 I have been listening to various conversations about the meta crises we are in. An interesting metaphor I heard from Jordan Hall was that we are on a train on tracks that are leading us straight for a waterfall / cliff. The tracks / train being our biologies, our cultures, and our environment. Other conversations have talked about the meta crises issue from an energy perspective, multi polar traps, biological / evolutionary drivers. What I have not yet heard about is a perspective from a basic time / space perspective.

• Time - each one of us has a certain tempo to our being. As a species, we operate in a certain range of frequencies as far as information processing, sense making, .... go. Our neo paleolithic time frequencies have not kept up with the pace of development of our technologies. In particular, our modern industrial and digital environment.
• Space - we are being of a certain size. We operate, sense reality at that scale. We are mostly sensorily unaware of the micro, meso scopic structures that make our reality possible. Similarly, we are most unaware of the large scale patterns that guide our existence - solar weather, galactic orbit, climate patterns, ...

Some simple thoughts on the weighty matter.

Meta-crisis and Metaphor

 The metaphor / model one uses determines in some measure how one understands and how one tries to resolve an issue. Let us take our situation, the anthropocene. One can look at it as the "reality" trying to form a complex, adaptive structure. Our societies and civilizations are all attempts of this endeavor. So, far they have come and gone. An organism ( super organism ) requires some basic functions such as decision making. Part of this task is relegated to what we call the "neurology" of an organism. When an organism is forming, certain cells migrate / morph into becoming part of the neurology - the modular part of the neurology that makes the "higher" level decision for the organism. Our tribes, societies, civilization have selected certain types of cells (individuals, groups) to be part of the neurology that makes decision for the organism. At this point in our develop, that selection process is inappropriate to the context. The context requires a more caring, systemic, holistic, ... perspective / cells / individuals / groups for good / wise decision making. We don't yet have a way to change the selection / formation process for our super organism to select cells / individuals / groups better suited for our current situation.

Layers, Structure, and Semantics

 Layers of narrative structure:

• Story
• Story as a design object of author
• Genre of stories as possible designs
• Cultures in which such stories aris
• Biologies in which such cultures arise
• Chemistries in which such biologies arise
• Physics in which such chemistries arise

If you accept any layer of the structure as the final layer, the bottom turtle, then that becomes your dogma.

Narratives as evokers:

• what the story evokes in the reader
• what the author intended the story to evoke
• what the culture evoked in the author that is reflected in the story
• what the biology made salient in the culture to create stories to amplify that salience
• what the chemistry allowed the biology to experience
• what the physics allowed the chemistry to form

Layers of semantics:

• story as stopping point (sp) - dogma
• possible story lines as sp - dogma
• possible stories as sp - dogma
• possible cultures as sp - dogma
• possible biologies as sp - dogma
• possible chemistries as sp - dogma
• possible physics as sp - dogma

How does one get beyond these layers, when there is no final turtle in turtles all the way down:

Bathe in infinity -> dogma