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?

The Non Problem of Consciousness

 There is much conversation about the "Hard problem of consciousness". One perspective on that is that this issue is born out of primate biology of wanting to be / feel special. A rather simple resolution to this is that all that exists is "aware" of its existence by definition. Then there are gradation / spectrum on what that awareness encompasses. Humans are at a particular level on that spectrum. There is no problem of consciousness, rather an excess of primate arrogance.

Should vs Could

 When we use "should", we are in some sense battling reality, i.e., it IS not the way we want it to be. However, if we use "could", then we engage the imaginal to chart possible paths to what could be. It take more energy and is more difficult to find a path of what could be. And what could be may not what we want once we actually get there.

It may be useful to note that should's often arise out of a value system. And our value systems are a story about what is important. What is important to us is not necessarily important to "reality". And hence we are out of sync with the real. The Tao Te Ching talks about being one with the way without specify what that way is. That is the eternal journey - discovering a way to the way.

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?

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.

Artificial Intelligence - a different perspective

 The are various active conversations / perspectives on the current AI capabilities and directions. What I have not seen much / any conversation / discussion on is how AI sheds a light on us (human species). AI is providing a powerful feedback loop / mirror to us of the issues with us as well as the our possibilities.

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.

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.

Hard problem, Egregores, and AGI

 Given a different frame, a hard problem can become an easy / easier problem. Or point to a different way to understand the "problem". One way to think about consciousness or the hard problem of consciousness is to think of it as an egregore. With a certain combination of neural structures with certain features / characteristics, an egregore is created. We identify that as a "self" or our consciousness. Since we have such a direct experience of it, we have so many words for it - self, I, ego, my name, your name, .... There are many egregores which we have no names for, e.g., family egregore, ethnic egregore, national egregore, mob egregore, .... We can be parts of these egregores, however, we don't have a direct experience of them as an entity since we are only a part of that egregore. Our memory, our senses, etc., don't have a sense of their identity as they are parts of our egregore / consciousness.

From this framing arises the question: what are the necessary and sufficient sub-parts for the creation of an egregore? This may be a useful direction in the study / creation of a strong agi. We have early inklings of intentionality in creating egregores, e.g., metanoic teams ( a team that is greater than the sum of its parts). We don't seem to have deterministic processes for creating metanoic teams. However, on occasion we are do create them on occasion with some degree of intentionality. We are also getting inklings of how to do this from synthetic biology, genetic studies, biology, ...

YAT - Yet another thought on religion / science

 Religion and science are generally put into juxtaposition to posit some idea / hypothesis. Another way to think about the difference between the two in terms of simple structural differences that distinguish one from the other. One can think of science is version 2.0 of trying to understand this reality / existence.

• Religion has a narrative of why and how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going.
• Science has a narrative of how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going. The why is demoted to specific contexts, e.g., evolution, creation of life as a process beginning with exploding stars, ....

So, if we see them both as attempts to understand and make sense, then we can say the difference between the two is that science has a faster feedback loop. Science narratives have to be validated by evidence. And new evidence can invalidate accepted narratives. Religion's feedback loop is much slower - centuries / millennia for religion and only a few generations or less for science. 

Since it is humans that are practicing / using both these narratives, the behavior is human behavior. Both try to sideline, eliminate any deviance from the currently accepted narrative. Structurally, both processes have their priesthoods, gatekeepers, fundamentalists, ....

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.

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

Dimensional thinking

I have written a few posts about the notion of spectral thinking, 1, 2, 3. It occurred to me yesterday that that notion may be a bit simplistic. Take, for example, the problem of good and evil / bad. What is good in the short term, may be bad in the long term. What is good for a few may be bad for a larger system. So, in a spectrum there is a line covering the spectrum. However, in the examples above, time, space can also be dimensions that affect the understanding of what is good/bad/evil.

Narrative as psychotechnology

 One can think of a story as a way to manage neurological state. A story can / does change one's state. And it is used as such in everyday life as well as in our mythologies. Part of the issue is how to set up the initial conditions of the receiver so that the story does have a state shift dynamic.

Naming a "thing" and missing the pattern

Sometimes / often we name a phenomenon and get so caught up with the delight of having named it that we don't see how that phenomenon is present in multiple forms in different contexts. Take fundamentalism as an example. It is generally applied to religion. However, atheist and secular people can be just a "fundamentalist" in their beliefs as religious believers. One underlying pattern of the name is the tight binding to a particular / singular perspective and making all other perspectives wrong / incorrect / idiotic / insane / ...  One can see this pattern in secular dictatorships, in totalitarian regimes, in temples, in churches, mosques, synagogues, political gatherings, .... It is a bit of a strange paradox. One is a member of one or more tribes. Implicit in that membership is that one's tribe is "better" than all the other tribes, otherwise, why would one choose this tribe to belong to. How does one give "equality" to all other tribes in such a situation? How can one be a particle or a wave or both simultaneously? Strange existence, this!

Gödel, Should, and the Laws of Form

 

An early articulation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem could be seen in the Tao Te Ching's articulation: The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao. (Got this from a talk by Schmactenberger).

When one uses the word should, there is often an implicit model of "perfection" what is being used to drive behavior / actions. From the incompleteness notion, since there is no "absolute" perfection, one can say that all "should's" are questionable for a deeper understanding of what is at play - mental models, agendas, ....

In Laws of Form Spencer-Brown posits the making of  distinctions in the context of the "background".  Taking the background as infinite / infinity, the attempt to create "perfection" will always fail as there is no way to include infinity in a finite set of distinctions. Perhaps not even in lower orders of infinity. Is there even an ultimate infinity? How can finite form even begin to comprehend  that level of infinity?

Perfection, in a sense, can mean that nothing needs to be added or removed. A "whatever" is complete in and of itself. How can that be? All forms that come into being have their roots in the infinite. Those roots cannot be severed since we don't know all their forms. Hence, no perfection in and of itself. However, with a different perspective, roots and all, each form is a perfect expression of the infinite.

Rethinking racism

There is a lot of focus on racism these days. My sense is that once you make the racism distinction and then the awareness of that distinction and all actions that follow that awareness reinforce and strengthen that distinction and its harmful side effects.

Simple version of my perspective:

There is a lot of talk about racism these days. I think it is useful to think about what exactly is going on. My sense is that there is a great confusion between morality and biology. Biologically, we have had millions of years of evolution that makes us racist. One can think of racism as grouping with our own kind. What is our own kind can be a very narrow view or a wide view. Those with narrow views are often the ones that survived through our evolutionary history. Now, what is arising in us is a new moral sense. This sense seeks to take a broad view of ‘us’. Where, in the broadest view, ‘us’ is all that exists. When we call someone a racist, we are blaming a person for their biology. It is similar to blaming someone for the color of their skin.

Perhaps, a more useful way to think of racism is how do we find practices, education, rituals, etc., that will help us transcend our biology and allow us to be more in alignment with this new feature we are beginning to get - a greater sense of who “we” are and how we belong to this existence.

Slightly more complex version of my perspective:

One can look at the phenomena we are experiencing from a more systemic, historical, biological, and nuanced perspective. Whenever two groups that are at different levels of development, (e.g., a la integral theory, spiral dynamics, or developmental psychology), the more "advanced" group takes advantage of and "oppresses" the less developed group. This is particularly evident when the less developed group is easily identified - by ethnicity, skin color, language, ... This is a fractal pattern in nature and in biology. The "lesser" is "used" by the more "advanced". The lion culls the herd of the weakest, human societies assign less value (pay) to the less powerful ( minorities, women, ....), ... This is part of our biology. Guilt, shame, and other such responses to our biology miss the larger dynamic. Our moral senses / awareness is growing. My sense is that  a more effective use of this new feature (moral sense) arising in our species, we need to use our reason at a level we are not accustomed to. What is a fair, balanced, organic system? How do we go about creating such a system in spite of our biology ?  How do we get past confusing the familiar with the good and the true?  We are programmed /  imprinted in each of our personal development trajectories to prefer certain patterns of behaviors, tastes of foods, .... And if we are not mindful, we deem lesser that which is not familiar. And if the unfamiliar comes from a "lesser" group, we treat them as "lesser" in thought, if not in action. And we may be called "racist" because of this basic biology that we all have. And when we see these behaviors that may conflict with our newly arising "moral" / "ethical" feature set, we feel guilt for the past and perhaps shame for the society we have created that allows these behaviors. These are not useful ways to feel about our biology. If we want to create a different society, we need all our rational / cognitive capabilities. Guilt and shame, like stress, lowers our reasoning and cognitive capabilities. And we need all our rational capabilities to create a society / civilization that is in alignment with this new moral sense that is arising in us. We also need to keep in mind that our current sense of morality is not a final or absolute morality. It too is an evolving feature.

Here are some dynamics to keep in mind while traversing this dynamic:

• path of least resistance - the familiar, habitual pattern is the path of least resistance. However, it may not lead to good outcomes.
• free will / choice vs hacking - we are programmed biologically, culturally, linguistically, ... How do we begin to see past these programs and make better choices for the ecologies we exist in.
• specific instance vs the class of such behaviors / dynamics - we may think that color or ethnic based discrimination is an entity in itself and needs to be eliminated, while we may be discriminating on the basis of gender, economic status, other status, .... The specific arises out of our biology. This is what we do all the time. We don't yet know how to transcend these basic behaviors / patterns that arise out of our biology.
• flat earth (equal) vs 3d (stages of development) - there is a tendency to think that people are equal in the expression of their behaviors. However, the change / process needed for people at different levels of development is different. We are all at different stages of moral / ethical development and understanding. In addition, our precedences ( a la Haidt's Moral Foundations model) for what is important vary. In short, all "racist" behaviors are not equal. However, we may not have the capacity / capability to know how to handle this complexity.
• asymmetric relationships - we need to be careful where asymmetric power / status relationships may account for the behavior rather than "racism".
• 
  

Meaning, Words, Deep Structure

Words, nouns about abstractions, can be considered to have a deeper structure than their surface meaning. Take a word like fundamentalism. It is typically applied to a fervent(?), true believer(?) in some tradition / religion, particularly, some belief that the speaker of the word does not ascribe to.

We can deconstruct the word fundamentalist/ism to a degree of binding between an agent / person and a belief system. This can then be applied across multiple contexts / any context. A scientist can be a fundamentalist. As can an economist, a doctor, a politician, an engineer, a biologist, ..... Different agents can bind to their models of reality to such an extent that they filter out any anomalous data / evidence.

This deep binding to a perspective can be a feature or a bug. It is a feature when one uses it to devote one's full capacity to explore a particular domain. It is a bug when this binding filters out all evidence to the contrary.