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.

Non-linguistic thinking

 Noticed a pattern in the social sciences. The toolset of the humanities is language and the vocabulary that is available in language. However, reality is far more complex than any language can capture. So, there may be phenomena that are there but they are "invisible" because our languages do not have a word for them. A possible example are Lagrange points. We discovered this phenomenon through mathematics and physics. We have no direct experience of these points. So, if we think of a complex mathematics describing social phenomena, there may be all sorts of phenomena that these maths "show" that we may have no language vocabulary for. However, just as we have not name these points, new names will arise for these patterns.

So, can we begin to be more intentional in thinking beyond a language framework. Perhaps thinking in terms of forces at play, grouping of things, and emergence of features from those forces and groupings. And how scaling modifies the forces and characteristics of a system?

Meta Generators

 The last post on generator functions and processes led to a conversation about how to think more clearly about these - how is a function different from a process. One can think of a function as a "class" as in an object oriented programming model. The usage of that class is the process. The usage of the class is an instantiation of that class in a particular context. So,

Generators

 We are surrounded by overwhelming complexity of form, function, process, .... One way to get some degree of grip on this complexity is to think in terms of generator functions that create this complexity. For example, Daniel Schmactenberger talks about some generator functions that are creating the existential risks to our societies.

So this lead me think about a generator process for another dynamic in our history / societies. Think of our evolution as the universe trying different patterns to form viable organisms. One aspect of the formation of an organism is the modular / functional creation of parts that create a whole organism. We start out as a cell that then differentiates into organs with different functions and capabilities and forming a viable organism as the end result of all that differentiation.

One aspect of this formation process is a generator process that determines which cells go to which function - heart, stomach, blood, brain, .... Similarly, in our societies we have a generator process for determining who ends up being in a "decision making" / "resource allocation" role. This process seems to promote people to these positions who have certain abilities to maneuver the social web. However, by and large, these same people seem to be short sighted non systemic thinkers. Hence leading to the long list of disastrous decisions with which our histories are littered.

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!

Eschatology - ultimate destiny

 One way to consider that is to go schizo and wonder what infinity does? Well infinity does everything that is possible to do. And since infinity has no end, no beginning, there is no ultimate. There is simply infinite unfoldings - all possible paths, all possible forms of existence, ... We / this universe / multiverse is simply a minuscule part of infinity. Worry, don't worry, be happy, be unhappy, take your choice - all paths are taken.

This view can lead to a sense of insignificance - well that leaves out infinite caring up and down the infinite chain - from infinitesimal to the infinity of infinities.