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)

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.