DeCentSee: August 2008

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Duality: Binary Semantics

Good & Evil. God & Satan. Life & Death. Flesh & Stone. Ideal & Real. Isn't every culture filled with dualities?

One, two, three ... Every human culture can count to three. Ancient Chinese artists knew that if you subdivide larger groups into smaller groups, the viewer's eye/mind system can take it in. Put three geese here, four nearby. The viewer will see three-geese plus slightly more than three: 3 + (3+1) = 7!

(Don't tell me that few ancient Chinese took algebra. Stone age children learned that much algebra just by being what they were and looking around. It's easily established that simple calculations go faster than counting. Besides, counting can miscount past three. Simple calculations are much faster and infinitely more reliable. We all do it. Even the kid who's failing algebra does so only after making a few simple calculations that assure him that he's safe to do so, and perhaps better off.)

The first group of geese in our Chinese scroll forms a triangle no matter how the geese are clumped. Ditto for the second — only there the polygon has four angles and four edges. See the two together: it's another triangle.

A painting with seven geese can't be taken in; a painting where the seven form a triangle of two unequal components can be "seen" by a six year old. Artists don't waste their time with eight. It's too much for the human mind. Maybe God could see it, but few of our representations are ever really for Him.

(We're told of Eight Wonders of the Ancient World. There's an eight. So what am I talking about? Seven is the minimum number greater than the two threes we can see. Eight is the minimum number greater than that. Therefore, each of our primitive minds automatically understands:
an astounding number.
It's like raining for forty days and forty nights. Or fasting for forty days and nights in the desert (or wandering or praying). What the "forty" means is a number greater than you can reliably count, calculate, or comprehend. The Romans said a thousand. We say millions. It means the same thing. It's nothing but a linguistic form of inflation.

The experienced backgammon player doesn't have to count his moves. Odd numbers go to an opposite color point; even rolls stay on the same color. Six is a single quadrant away: just go to the same relative point. The novice chess player soon sees how the queen's power radiates over the board; only the experienced chess player sees how the knight can feint here, only to suddenly appear there! The chess player is still sub-dividing his world into manipulable components.

Now: is reality divided into triangles and lines and the little inversible-Ls of the chess knight? Are numbers "true"? Is there an identity between how we see and how the "laws" of the universe actually function?

If not, might there at least be an analogy?

It's my position that we can't know altogether what's true, but that we can know some part of how we perceive and understand things. Monists are forever seeing things as One. In general, the religious impulse is an urge to unify. It's certainly my urge (or has been most of my life) (though not always).

But unification can only go so far. If you make everything the same, then you can't tell anything apart. Information, as Gregory Bateson teaches, is perceived difference. No difference would be the thermodynamic heat death cosmologists have been frightening us with. Total entropy. The end of information.

Monists, like the Scholastic Realists are annoyed by people who see more difference than they, the Monists, like.

One / Many. Continuity / Discontinuity.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw "chair"; Abelard saw this chair and that chair. Aquinas saw "Man"; Abelard saw Alison, Geoffrey, and John. But Aquinas too could address John when he walked into the room. Bertrand Russell was one modern nominalist who annoyed twentieth-century monists by emphasizing the discontinuities of the universe.

Drivers-training vehicles have dual controls. On the road, the public is in the least danger with vehicles having only one set of controls: no matter how drunk a particular driver may be. Even democracies assign one captain to a ship. Even democracies have one executive "at the top." Even modern democracies don't want two hundred and fifty million people all talking at once. You couldn't hear anybody.

I don't doubt that in the earliest days of religion (My piece on Magic argues that) man first invented only one god. But then he found more than one trouble. And the one god wasn't always handling it satisfactorily. By one or two thousand BC who could blame the Jews for wanting a Chief Executive? By then even the Chinese had come to believe that all their gods were merely facets of Hung Ti. From a polynomial standpoint, the Trinity of Christianity is a clear evolutionary advance over the simple monotheism of Judaism. Humans will never be emotionally or perceptually ready for George Gamow's 1, 2, 3 ... Infinity. Lao Tsu was as wise as Homo sapiens can (as a group) get when he wrote:
From One comes Two
From Two comes Three
From Three comes Many.
I've long taken the title of Gamow's book to be a translation of those words from the Tao Te Ching. Though, for myself, I Christianize them: From Unity comes Duality. From Duality comes Trinity. From Trinity comes Infinity.

But let's leave unity, trinity, and infinity alone for a moment. I mount this piece today because I suddenly saw a pedagogically graphic use for duality, one custom suited to my current teaching here.

I've been writing here and there about definition, about ambiguity. Take justice for instance. On the one hand, everyone has his own imagined ideal of justice: your enemies under thumb-screws; your daughter married to Prince Somebody; Palestine back in the hands of ... name your group. On the other hand, we have OJ Not Guilty; the mass murder legally insane and not responsible, therefore Not Guilty of Counts 1, 2, & 3; your wife with a new boyfriend so now she gets the Rolls, the Steinway, both the house in Vermont and the condo in Monaco, plus $8,000 per month ...

Justice
What you want versus what you get
Your ideal versus what the judge says.

To chart an ambiguity I TRY an example I've already discussed elsewhere:

Work
The physicists' specialized meaning versus The Common Language
force through distance versus Monday to Friday
... what you do in the garden, what you do in your work shop, what you're doing when you push against a wall (even if the wall doesn't move) ...Duality: Binary Semantics

Good & Evil. God & Satan. Life & Death. Flesh & Stone. Ideal & Real. Isn't every culture filled with dualities?

One, two, three ... Every human culture can count to three. Ancient Chinese artists knew that if you subdivide larger groups into smaller groups, the viewer's eye/mind system can take it in. Put three geese here, four nearby. The viewer will see three-geese plus slightly more than three: 3 + (3+1) = 7!

(Don't tell me that few ancient Chinese took algebra. Stone age children learned that much algebra just by being what they were and looking around. It's easily established that simple calculations go faster than counting. Besides, counting can miscount past three. Simple calculations are much faster and infinitely more reliable. We all do it. Even the kid who's failing algebra does so only after making a few simple calculations that assure him that he's safe to do so, and perhaps better off.)

The first group of geese in our Chinese scroll forms a triangle no matter how the geese are clumped. Ditto for the second — only there the polygon has four angles and four edges. See the two together: it's another triangle.

A painting with seven geese can't be taken in; a painting where the seven form a triangle of two unequal components can be "seen" by a six year old. Artists don't waste their time with eight. It's too much for the human mind. Maybe God could see it, but few of our representations are ever really for Him.

(We're told of Eight Wonders of the Ancient World. There's an eight. So what am I talking about? Seven is the minimum number greater than the two threes we can see. Eight is the minimum number greater than that. Therefore, each of our primitive minds automatically understands:
an astounding number.
It's like raining for forty days and forty nights. Or fasting for forty days and nights in the desert (or wandering or praying). What the "forty" means is a number greater than you can reliably count, calculate, or comprehend. The Romans said a thousand. We say millions. It means the same thing. It's nothing but a linguistic form of inflation.

The experienced backgammon player doesn't have to count his moves. Odd numbers go to an opposite color point; even rolls stay on the same color. Six is a single quadrant away: just go to the same relative point. The novice chess player soon sees how the queen's power radiates over the board; only the experienced chess player sees how the knight can feint here, only to suddenly appear there! The chess player is still sub-dividing his world into manipulable components.

Now: is reality divided into triangles and lines and the little inverted-Ls of the chess knight? Are numbers "true"? Is there an identity between how we see and how the "laws" of the universe actually function?

If not, might there at least be an analogy?

It's my position that we can't know altogether what's true, but that we can know some part of how we perceive and understand things. Monists are forever seeing things as One. In general, the religious impulse is an urge to unify. It's certainly my urge (or has been most of my life) (though not always).

But unification can only go so far. If you make everything the same, then you can't tell anything apart. Information, as Gregory Bateson teaches, is perceived difference. No difference would be the thermodynamic heat death cosmologists have been frightening us with. Total entropy. The end of information.

Monists, like the Scholastic Realists are annoyed by people who see more difference than they, the Monists, like.

One / Many. Continuity / Discontinuity.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw "chair"; Abelard saw this chair and that chair. Aquinas saw "Man"; Abelard saw Alison, Geoffrey, and John. But Aquinas too could address John when he walked into the room. Bertrand Russell was one modern nominalist who annoyed twentieth-century monists by emphasizing the discontinuities of the universe.

Drivers-training vehicles have dual controls. On the road, the public is in the least danger with vehicles having only one set of controls: no matter how drunk a particular driver may be. Even democracies assign one captain to a ship. Even democracies have one executive "at the top." Even modern democracies don't want two hundred and fifty million people all talking at once. You couldn't hear anybody.

I don't doubt that in the earliest days of religion (My piece on Magic argues that) man first invented only one god. But then he found more than one trouble. And the one god wasn't always handling it satisfactorily. By one or two thousand BC who could blame the Jews for wanting a Chief Executive? By then even the Chinese had come to believe that all their gods were merely facets of Hung Ti. From a polynomial standpoint, the Trinity of Christianity is a clear evolutionary advance over the simple monotheism of Judaism. Humans will never be emotionally or perceptually ready for George Gamow's 1, 2, 3 ... Infinity. Lao Tsu was as wise as Homo sapiens can (as a group) get when he wrote:
From One comes Two
From Two comes Three
From Three comes Many.
I've long taken the title of Gamow's book to be a translation of those words from the Tao Te Ching. Though, for myself, I Christianize them: From Unity comes Duality. From Duality comes Trinity. From Trinity comes Infinity.

Learning

Hard Learning, Soft Learning

2000 10 14

I'm afraid this file will have to be a place-marker till I can make time to develop it properly. The goal is first to distinguish between hard learning and soft learning: then to review Gregory Bateson's meta levels of learning: learning₀, learning₁,learning₂ ... [Waterman has access to lots of material on the latter meta levels: keep watching, it will be readded. Meantime, curse the forces that knocked it offline in the first place.]

You see the toddler near the stove. "No, no. Hot, hot." If the kid backs off, that's soft learning. Much of the mind's computing for it is done in the fore-brain.

You're talking on the phone. The kid is left to his own devices. He burns his hand off. He never goes near the stove again, won't even come into the kitchen. That's hard learning. The fore-brain isn't needed in the computations.

Some things simply cannot be taught;
they can only be learned.
Robert Anton Wilson

Hard learning may well be fatal. Fatal or not, it may still be effective. Monitor the biosphere: if the same error kills enough species, over time you'll see fewer new species with that error. Nature is not stupid, however "unconscious."

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally.
Frederic Bastiat

If we crash but some few survive, maybe those few will avoid overpopulation, surplus food, environmental degradation, kleptocracy ... in future. If not (but there's a biosphere left), other species will evolve. Maybe there will be some other monitor noticing the degree to which they learn the lesson.

The illiterate of the 21^st century
will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Toffler

Notes

Toddler Near the Stove:
I was sixty-three and a half before I discovered a wonderful antecedent to my own example. See Relations Between Parents and Children by Clara Dixon Davidson [from Liberty #235, pp.3-4]. You'll find it at a site for Benjamin R. Tucker.

Learning Scrapbook

Existing learning limits new learning.

2005 12 14 I repeat from the file (not yet mounted) on Aptitude:Bucky Fuller told me a story I’ll repeat here. He told me that the Army had some committee that had some slush fund, a few extra million dollars beyond anything needed for payroll, tanks, or ammo. The army committee wanted to use its extra cash benefit genius: the army recognizing that success was somehow correlated to intelligence, and "genius" we all know is some super form of intelligence. Now the military had already influenced millions and millions being donated to MIT, to Stanford RI, etc. This time they wanted to try something different. So the Army used part of its millions to hire consultants to advise them on the disposal of their surplus. The consultants researched the problem. The consultants went to recognized geniuses, people with patents the Army respected for example — maybe some guy with a better transistor — and asked outright: "how come you’re so smart?"
The consultants concluded that the common thread seemed to have something to do with small Liberal Arts colleges and with anonymous instructors, not with tenured faculty. In other words, the Army got more than one answer that went something like, Well, I went to Hamilton College, and I remember one day in Freshman English the instructor, reading Frost’s poem about snow in the woods, said ...
So what did the Army do? They gave another couple of million to MIT and SRI!
Bucky grinned. "They refused to learn what they had learned."

2002 03 03Does "God" learn?
Does evolution learn? Do species?
(See how much easier the question is if it’s phrased in lower-case?)
If God is perfect, then what is there for him to learn? Ditto the biosphere, ditto the universe.
Lacking a sophisticated sense of topology as well as cosmology, theology has hitherto been a profession for dimwits (i.e., some of the smartest people in (ahem) civilization).
The idea that learning may be appropriate (and possible) for more than babies undercuts Manichean-Christian dualism more deeply than even Bishop Wilberforce (or Huxley), even William Jennings Bryan (or Darrow), realized.

Now, very fast. Learning₀ is learning that the genome has accomplished: the female bird knows how and when to make an egg; the male mosquito knows how and when to find a female ...
Learning₁ is accomplished by the phenotype: how to tie your shoelaces, how to read ...
Learning₂ is as different from Learning₁ as depth is from length. Meta levels are mutually orthogonal. Learning₂ is learning-to-learn. No, it’s not what you do in school: that’s 99.99% Learning₁.
Gregory Bateson’s example is exquisite. Animal handlers had taught a female cetacean a bevy of tricks. Accomplishment, and thereafter, repetitions, were rewarded with fish. One day the handlers wondered if they could get the porpoise to do something new. They signaled for the tricks, got them, but gave no reward. The porpoise got so agitated (wouldn’t you?), they put her back in her pen. After a time her agitation there increased dangerously: they let her back into the big tank: where she performed a series of new behaviors including behaviors never before observed. That porpoise was a Newton.
I attribute Learning₂ to Newton, to Shakespeare: on occasion. Mostly I see such geniuses as having been exceptionally good at Learning₁. I attribute Learning₂ to myself on occasion. (You of course may have your own opinion.) I certainly attribute Learning₂ to Gregory Bateson.
Learning₃ would be learning-to learn-to learn. Who or what does that? "god"! Evolution! (Perhaps.) Perhaps the biosphere itself. Jesus? Jehovah? I doubt it.
I agree with Bateson that schools harm us and themselves by imagining that Learning₂ is what they engage in. Jared Diamond spends his career in Borneo. He has a post at the University of California. He publishes scintillating new theories. Who should take credit? UCA? Or god? Or Diamond (and Darwin) alone?

Bateson’s levels of learning and Bateson’s soft vs. hard learning also get mentioned at Macroinformation. [links not yet added] I’ll be giving them more and better treatment there before I return to make many improvements here, much of the two sites destined eventually to merge.

There’s always one important question in evolution:Will learning take place in time?

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Thinking Tools Primer

Reason & Knowledge

A primer on thinking and the tools of thought was long my cherished goal: till 1998 when I mounted my first draft of this file. My work to date is a couple of steps, not the goal accomplished. Mainly, I've tried to highlight key parts, especially if I find that the majority has missed those keys. This is another step. In this endeavor I stand (or kneel) on the shoulders of others.

In the second chapter of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, 1979, this reader found a more complete (and wise) coverage of the subject than he'd ever dreamed of. "My" primer would be good if I did no more than list the subject headings of his chapter:

Science Never Proves Anything.
The Map is Not the Territory, and the Name is Not the Thing Named.
There is No Objective Experience.
The Processes of Image Formation are Unconscious.
The Division of the Perceived Universe into Parts and Wholes Is Convenient and May Be Necessary, But No Necessity Determines How It Shall Be Done.
Divergent Sequences Are Unpredictable.
Convergent Sequences Are Predictable.
"Nothing Will Come of Nothing."
Number Is Different from Quantity.
Quantity Does Not determine Pattern.
There Are No Monotone "Values" in Biology.
Sometimes Small is Beautiful.
Logic Is a Poor Model of Cause and Effect.
Causality Does Not Work Backward.
Language Commonly Stresses Only One Side of Any Interaction.
"Stability" and "Change" Describe Parts of Our Descriptions.

Rudy Rucker's Mind Tools would be better if it showed knowledge of that earlier work.

Bateson refers (as do I regularly) to Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity, Lancaster PA, 1933.

My preparedness to read these books comes not from my college or graduate training nearly so much as from an adulthood of reading the great science teachers: Isaac Asimov, Nigel Calder, Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowsky, Timothy Ferris, Stephen J. Gould ... That's a step beyond my youthful reading of science fiction, especially that fiction which has real science and real philosophy in it: Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke ...

Some science journalism is very good. James Gleick's Chaos and M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity are examples. Sir David Attenborough and James Burke have shown how great TV can be.

More and more scientists are joining the effort to communicate to the general public. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar, Michio Kaku's Hyperspace, Donald Johanson's Lucy ... (By no means is this in chronological order) Fred Hoyle's The Intelligent Universe, Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo ... Heinz Pagels had several readable books on physics. All of the Leakeys communicated their physical anthropology responsibly, right down to son Richard. Brian Greene joins the parade with The Elegant Universe.

... systems of interactions coupled to a medium
Denis Wood

Architects and planners can know and teach scientific wisdom as Ian McHarg's Design with Nature proves. (He cites Loren Eisley whose science is so spiritual this spiritualist can't read him.)

Timothy Ferris edited The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, 1991, giving easy access to writings by Richard Feynman, George Gamow, Turing, Mandelbrot, von Neumann, Einstein, Dirac, Dyson, Curie, Popper ...

Nothing in my experience however is more complete than Viscount Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty. I've started to extract some basic aspects of it, but unless you've read a good part of what I have, I can't imagine what you'll make of the original.

How do you know he loves you?
I just know it.

Personal Background

I was probably nineteen, possibly twenty, before I first heard the word epistemology. But I had an inkling of the concept since childhood. No, not from my lawyer father. Certainly not from pubic school. At church summer camp the apprentice minister asked us teenagers, "Why are we Presbyterians?"

"Because our parents are," immediately answered a healthy looking girl from New Rochelle. The apprentice had gotten off on the wrong foot. (Because that's the church that was a block and a half walking distance, I thought silently. Our real church, the Episcopal, would have required my parents to get up an hour earlier to drive us to Sunday School. Then wait around for an hour. This one's down the block and we kids can walk there on our own.)

My early Sunday School teacher had asked it right:Why are we Christians?
Nguh? Wide-eyed expectation from the snakes-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails celebrants.

"Because we have witnesses!" Mr. Dade had all of my attention. (He was introducing us to the concept of Witness.) "Because the disciples saw Christ resurrected. Jesus even invited them to examine his wounds. Thomas doubted till he put his finger into the holes in his flesh." The sum of the rest was that they told others, who told their children, who told their children, etc., to his Sunday School teacher telling him: and now he was telling us. Two thousand years of tellings sounded a little strained even to my childish mind, but I swallowed it.

(Gregory Bateson reports that Catholics in particular have a greater than average awareness of epistemology. He also reports the extraordinary oddity that many people, encountering epistemological questions, mistake them for authoritarianism!)

People have been mutilated if not burned at the stake for having too nice a sense of reasoning to suit the powerful. Reasoning has never been brought to a higher state than by the heirs of the Medieval heretics who founded modern epistemology and its close relative, science.

Epistemology is that branch of philosophy which investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. Alfred Korzybski suggested that philosophy should be sub-divided and then fenced: epistemology itself should be studied with all diligence; the rest should be reclassified amid the history of human pathology! (I've long seconded his view.)

Next, I'll review some of the non-common sense aspects of the scientific method: principally, falsifiability; but also, the steps from hypothesis to theory, the nature of evidence, data, fact ... the difference between fact and theory ...
(See also Heinrich Scholz.)

Before taking a break I wish to emphasize the public, open-air nature of science. There's a limit to one's social utility if one doesn't know reason. Modern reason is open: no back rooms, no sub-rosa decisions allowed. The liability of limited social utility skyrockets in a crisis. (And I am convinced that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to crisis.)

Everyone has some epistemological awareness. Why do you think the stage illusionist makes such a point of inviting people from the audience to examine some property? The illusionist himself will firmly, audibly rap some solid part of his rigged apparatus: knowing that the audience, though it has some epistemological awareness, has a very low epistemological awareness. Of course the magicians are beginners compared to the ad men. We are predators. Our prey includes each other: especially in the area of influence (economics, politics, etc.)

Wilson, Robert Anton, Quantum Psychology, Tempe AZ, 1990 is the best epistemological primer I've encountered since Gregory Bateson knocked my socks off with the opening questions of Mind and Nature. I'm embarrassed that this my Thinking Tools directory is not yet that simple or comprehensive. Then again, I presume Wilson can pay his rent, isn't publicly shunned to the degree I am, doesn't have to scramble and dissemble to get medication for simple, known, disorders ... On the other hand, the Wilson work would be better still if it knew of my work: particularly Macroinformation.

from 1998

For a few years now I've been aware of titles like The Third Chimpanzee and Why Is Sex Fun? without having registered the name Jared Diamond. It was my son's reading a blurb on Guns, Germs, and Steel that brought the name to my attention, my son emailing me that someone else seemed to be making points very parallel to many of my own and that he was getting published.

By the time my son was ten or so I was explaining to him the relationship between the development of navigation in the north and the accident of it being the north that has a pole star. I further speculated that that focus would have aided northern imaginations in other astronomical pursuits including the invention of the sun dial (since northerners can more readily imagine a "focus" in the sky, an axle). Nigel Calder's syntheses, for example, had helped me formulate other imaginings about origins. But I never ever saw Diamond's latitudinal correlations. That is, Eurasia's ample breadth fostered the colonization of techniques such as agriculture, animal husbandry, warfare ... more readily than the longitudinal layout of Africa and the Americas. Changing climates is a barrier to cultural propagation. Wow.

Now I find great hypotheses per chapter. His relating gazelle stotting to chemical abuse to mating strategies — both dangerous, one misguided — is just one example of a fabulous series I'll die happy if I never reach the end of. (2004 07 11 Leonard Shlain has inspired me to think of an alternative explanation which I'll post soon.)

I give myself a rhetorical (at least attitudinal) edge; but he's an actual scientist. I inherit what data I don't live; he goes out and gets it. (Of course he must have the carfare.) Not that we're in competition — we converge.

I'm way overdue to continue the top part of this piece, but if you browse Waterman's domains, you'll see what I've been busy doing. So many great teachers belong here I haven't gotten around to including. Bucky Fuller has a(n incomplete) module of his own. That, I'm proud to say, was a personal contact. One exhilarating, however bewildering, three-day-weekend with Gordon Pask was unforgettable. I'm only now discovering Heinz von Foerster's influence on me (through Illich).

My work I keep emphasizing flows from Korzybski. My connection to Korzybski was made through Gregory Bateson. Now I discover that others have been doing excellent work on semiotics and epistemology: Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the folks at deoxy.org ...

Notes

Gregory Bateson: Mind & Nature
Quoting from the Introduction of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature:... It became monstrously evident that schooling in this country and in England and, I suppose, in the entire Occident was ... careful to avoid all crucial issues ... Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and the plains. Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?

If you haven't already read, digested, and reread that great book, what business have you here? Go. Find it. Try to understand everything in Chapters One and Two before proceeding to Chapter Three. Or read it any way you want. Just read it.

Epistemology

the pattern that connects
Gregory Bateson

Epistemology:a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature,
methods, and limits of human knowledge

Random House Unabridged

Epistemology has been my hobby ever since my Sunday School teacher offered us "reasons" for our beliefs.We know that Jesus is our Savior because of all the Witnesses: Thomas put his finger through the hole in Jesus' hand. "Doubting" Thomas told so-and-so who told so-and-so et cetera: who told the pope ... who told Luther ... who told the king ... who told my grandfather, who told my father, who told me ...
As a note to my biographical narrative states, it's not very sound epistemology, but it is epistemology.

I know he loves me because he told me so.

Epistemology is not popular. It's rarely taught or even mentioned under that name. My Sunday School teacher certainly didn't mention the word. I doubt that he knew the word. At sixty, still trying to save us from ourselves, still utterly without any discernible success, popularity is the last thing I can worry about. I call it by it's name because I see our chances of continuing to survive without a conscious and critical apprehension of epistemology as vanishing toward zero.

Philosophy should be divided in two:
epistemology and all else.
Epistemology should be studied
with all diligence.
The rest should be classified with
the history of human pathology.

Alfred Korzybski (paraphrase)

Development of this most important directory (Epistemology, Thinking Tools ...) has been scanted while I simultaneously develop the rest of my home page, my writing, my biography, and my commentaries making one picture. The whole of the home page has been in turn scanted while I've concentrated on developing my Theory of Macroinformation. You'll find epistemological concerns and comments throughout my work.

The system's not in the parts, it's in the pattern.
Denis Wood

Epistemology is very hard to think or write about directly. Yet anyone with a developed epistemological sense will readily see that it is the core subject underlying this home page. Yet I didn't mount so much as a scrap of this module till a few months ago after scribbling a few words to my son via email. Today isn't the day either except to note a point the proper essay will eventually develop:

Epistemology isn't a subject to be learned and then you've got it, then you have authority. There's no simple "answer" that once you've got it, you've got it. Epistemology offers no algorithm that can be learned mechanically. Epistemology studies ways of "knowing." That is, it studies ways of believing about knowledge. Epistemology can show how some ways are primitive, inadequate, immature. Epistemology can not say: this way is right. Now you'll be infallible.

As my Truth and Reason module argues, epistemology, like science, like reason, can expose faulty reasoning but cannot prove its own reasoning to be valid. Epistemology is not a tautology. Tautologies like geometry have methods of reasoning. The scientific process offers methods of procedure, methods of reasoning. The methods of both are part of epistemology. Epistemology is not a sub-set of science; science is a sub-set of epistemology.

Epistemology is thought of as a sub-set of philosophy. I follow Korzybski: all philosophy which is not epistemology is so much cant.

There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

Epistemologies can be compared the way Gamow infinities can be compared. We can say one is "stronger" but cannot specify the entire contents of either. Unlike infinities, what can be estimated with confidence about epistemologies are their comparative limits. Jean Piaget showed that children "know" their world differently than do adults. People who have studied biology know the world differently than do people who haven't. Jared Diamond points out that physiologists know biology differently than do evolutionary theorists. People who have studied Korzybskian semantics know semantics differently than do people who use the word only to wriggle away from responsible speech.

Do we want a child's way of knowing while supervising a white water raft trip on the Colorado? Do we want a physiologist's expertise on cellular mechanisms when tying to explain the evolutionary function of death? Do we want the "wisdom" of the marketplace (a place which includes the White House as well as Madison Avenue) to determine the fate of the biosphere?

My work I keep emphasizing flows from Korzybski. My connection to Korzybski was made through Gregory Bateson. Now I discover that others have been doing excellent work on semiotics and epistemology: Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the folks at
deoxy.org ...

from 1996

Notes

Epistemology not Popular:
My lawyer recently told me with regard to a civil suit that if I mentioned epistemology, the jury would see to it that I didn't get any money. How else was I to establish my character? The bully had attacked me, left me in my blood and broken teeth, then called the police to say I had attacked him. The philosopher, saint, and reformer attacks the redneck? Physically?

Wholes / Parts

A member of a set is not the set. A set cannot be a member of itself.

I don't know formal math or formal logic, so I don't know how it's usually phrased, but I know there are such rules.

I mean these modules to be components of a world view. Some have developed far enough to be independent essays. Others are hardly more than notes: work in progress: mini-modules toward a module, toward an essay, the essays all structuring a system, an epistemological system. Some of the parts I believe are good enough to be fractal. That is, the part — through self-similarity across scale — hints of the whole.

Well, for today a fractal part is as far as I expect to get. I don't start at a beginning: I just sketch one middling part of such an essay.

Umpires can't expect to see every detail on a field of action: they just have to make a call. Science knows it can't have all the evidence: that's why the highest state of its knowledge will always be theory, never proof. The law is recent, shallowly evolved, still mostly feudal in its epistemology. The law talks freely about "proof." Religious don't need proof; not even good evidence: they know.

A Greek (as in ancient Greece) has had wisdom attributed to him for saying count no man happy until he's dead. No subsequent experience with the man can then refute you. My "explanation" of the comment relates the view to the (ongoing) evolution of reason.

In contrast, the religious of the familiar monotheism say that God is good.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1,10

My glossary initiates the argument that good and bad are neither things nor places, but rather directions along a spectrum. If a thing is called good, it can only be in relation to some other thing or things that the speaker is judging to belong further back on the negative side of the spectrum. Good can have meaning only in relation to something else being compared: either implicitly or explicitly.

I say ... we say Beethoven is a great composer. We say Beethoven's Symphony #7 is a great symphony. We are moved by it. Transported. We feel strong emotions, some of them identifiable. We feel profound, alternately tranquil and exalted ... We know that other symphonies do not move us so.

But what if Beethoven's 7^th were the only symphony, the only music, that we knew? What sense would it make to call it great? Whether of not it made us feel profound, whether or not Beethoven wrote it, whatever name we called it, it would really be the music.

So what is God seeing as "good" in his creation? The whole of it? Wouldn't that be like saying I'll put waves in the ocean and they'll be all crests, no troughs? Or is God seeing the Earth and the Seas to be good in relation to what he'd done a verse of two earlier? The Seas and the Earth are good compared to what I did with the Earth and the Heaven. Or might he be saying The Earth, with its Earth and Seas, is good compared to what I did with Mars: just Mars and those stupid Mars canals. Or is he saying This whole creation: light/dark, Heaven/Earth, Earth/Seas, is better than that Creation I made last week?

How can work be "good" if there is no other work for comparison? Unfortunately for our familiar monotheism, the same problem applies to God Himself. We say that God is good. Compared to what? To what other God that is. Surely he wasn't comparing Himself to us: at the time to which the utterance is attributed, He hadn't made any creatures yet, let alone man.

The God of the early Old Testament presents Himself as Chairman of a committee, not the only entity of pre- ... Pre-what? Pre-existence? How can you have an entity before the possibility of entity? No, Heaven and Earth cannot have been the start of the cosmos, perhaps not even the start of the universe. (Forget astronomy-based cosmology: this criticism is strictly internal: based on reading the text itself.) The later Bible presents Him as the only God. Then how can he be "good"?

Other latter day theology has it that God is as it were the definition of good. So killing everything except Noah and some representative pairs was good. Telling Abraham to kill his only son with his own hands, tormenting Job, watching John beheaded ... are all good. Did He enjoy the crucifixion? Sure, and by definition it was good. (If he didn't "do" it, he still planned it.) Then why aren't we good too? It was good for the Jews to kill Canaanite and Philistine. So why wasn't it good for the Nazis to kill the Jews and the fags?

Well, this hasn't taken the direction I'd thought when I typed the title an hour ago. I'll fix it later. For now I'll just hook back to our wise Greek and his saw. The Greeks were beginning to see the importance of evidence. Can there have been any Cro-Magnon at Lasceaux who didn't see the importance of evidence? I believe that civilized man invented blindness to evidence. Otherwise, how could the parasites rule the food producers? What civilized institution could withstand a consciousness of evidence? Catholics honor the "honesty" of Jesus at the Temple: then repress any further honesty. Protestants honor the "honesty" of Luther's reading: then ditto. Scientists honor the honesty of Galileo while themselves looking an awful lot like a Catholic or Lutheran Church to me. Sure they have "honest" readings: their own. How well do they countenance challenging readings? "Galileo" isn't just in the past. Look beyond the whitewashed stories of Srinivasa Ramanujian in Good Will Hunting and TIME's recent paragraph. Soon I'll report my own experience with scientists in relation to my Macroinformation.

But back to God and the wise Greek:
We say that God is good. But he's not dead. So how can we tell? OK, Nietzsche says he's dead. The religious say He Liveth. If He liveth, then the evidence isn't all in yet. If what He does is good by definition, and if He did all the things the Bible says He did, then why isn't it good when we do the same things: commit genocide, specicide (not all the millions of species can have been gathered by Noah), break promises ...? Why are we so hard on nest parasitism, birds that lay their eggs in another's nest to gain free and unwitting foster care? Didn't God do the same with poor Mary? Wasn't it his kid he put there, not hers?

If God planned Jesus' actions, or even so much as knew what would happen, and Jesus said he was coming right back with an emphasis such that early Christians didn't believe they even had to reproduce any more, and two thousand years later, we're still waiting, still waiting ... Imagine a divorce case: OK, the husband says, I'll pay alimony. Two thousand years later the kids are barefoot, the woman went into an inanition coma 1999.9 years ago. Before the judge, she'd been so grateful: Oh, thank you, Your Honor. Thank you, dear ex-husband. How thankful should she be now in her coma with all her barefoot kids? All she got was a promise. So where's the actual money?

I started with these very examples in mind but somehow didn't marshal them to my (I insist) very important title very well. I'll make the connections better next time. Meantime, why not make them yourself?

from 1998

Understanding

Trying to understand
Beckett's Watt

Understanding: Can There Be a Consensus?

Anyone reading this has probably been in a school environment. So you know: the decision of whether the student understands the math is up to the teacher, not the student: or the student's parents. The test doesn't go:"Bobby, do you know the sum of two and two?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I do."
"Fine, Bobby. Your word is good enough for me. There's no need to demonstrate."
No. It goes"Bobby, show me your calculation for the sum of two and two."
"2 + 2 = 4."
"Very good, Bobby. That's correct."

Whether or not Bobby understands arithmetic, the teacher takes that answer as a demonstration that Bobby "knows" at least that
formula.

Now: Is that pattern generally true throughout the society? Not at all. Certainly not in my experience. In our version of kleptocracy it's the certified "expert" who decides what you understand and also what he understands. The relationship is not symmetrical. The testing is never two way. The sergeant can "make" you understand him;
there's no way for you to make the sergeant understand
you.

The sergeant can "make" you understand him; there's no way for you to make the sergeant understand
you.

Notes

Bobby & Math Teacher:
Neither does the test go, "Bobby, do you know the sum of two and two?" with Bobby's parents interrupting, "Yes, he does." Neither would the teacher say, "Oh, thank you Bobby's father and Bobby's mother: I'll take your word for it too." No: public education assigns ignorance to the parents: the parents' ignorance no more verified than the teacher's expertise: or the state's to judge either.

Make the sergeant understand you:
Unless you carry your own nuclear deterrent: another area where the state monopolies remain unbroken. We now have that private-nuclear-deterent concept however thanks to novelist Ken MacLeod.

Lex Lingus Elasticus

When one concept in a natural language tightens its meaning other concepts compensate by loosening.

Back in the early days of Mad and Panic comics, one of them had a page lampooning comic book ads. One of the ads was illustrated by a pair of cartoons of a fat lady before and after donning the product: a corset. The "before" lady was as fat as only the illustrators of those great graphic originals could make her: she was ringed with fat rolls something like the Michelin tire man. The same fat "lady" — same cartoon lips, eyes, jowls and rolls of fat, in the "after" illustration, was as svelte as any of the belles in Gone with the Wind from her pubis to her bosom, but all that didn't fit had ballooned horribly. Fifteen chins had become thirty-six. Her belly was redistributed down to her already frightening thighs. The rest of her torso oozed up and out from her bodice like oatmeal cooked in too small a pan.

I asked Ann Gaines of EC Publications if I could get a scan of it to share with you here. She didn't recognize it to be from Mad. So it must have been Panic. Or Cracked. One of the imitators. (I'd kept my old Mads for decades through dozens of moves, many of them from one elevatorless sixth-floor walk-up to another. (Ah, student days. Mine have never ended.) But I finally yielded to my wife's importuning, shuttling from Maine back to New York in 1969 or 1970, and recycled them.)

The linguistic illustration I'd had in mind was Thomas Jefferson's declaration that all men were created equal, made while he kept slaves. How do we scan that, Jeff? by making it all the more arbitrary who qualifies as "man." What tyrant couldn't make the same claim so long as he controlled the definition of the terms? All men were equal in bad King John's day so long as you exempt the king on the one side (as being divine) and the peasants on the other side (as being animals).

This piece spun off from one of my 1997 Thinking as Mental Modeling pieces though the thoughts were worked out in the 1960s. The universities didn't understand a word I said then, and they haven't since.
The context in the Mental Modeling piece was credit: the government and the banks can define your "credit" as whatever they've written down about you. The terms are neither fixed nor necessarily true.

Cybernetics

Cybernetics: As Floatation, As Navigation ...

1998 06 10

The word cybernetics is derived from the old Greek word for navigation. Thus, etymologically (by a backwards etymology since the modern term is recent) cybernetics is the science of navigation; more important (I say):

Cybernetics is the Science of Staying Afloat.
Preface

At any given time there will be those in the world who think that beauty is blond; others brunette, others black. That's good: a sustainable population needs genetic diversity.

There are those who think God has a beard and speaks Hebrew; others Arabic (or some other language). That was OK so long as we couldn't get at each others' throats too easily. The last several hundred years, we've had to calm down a bit.

Once Galileo was arrested because he found satellites circling Jupiter. The Church had said that everything circles the Earth, that the Earth was the only center. They had their authority from the God with the beard, so Galileo and his empirical observation had to be wrong. I've never heard of the Church arresting anyone who thought our own moon was made of green cheese.

The American Revolution went yards toward promoting tolerance. Not that we tolerated the Cheyenne. Or the Jews. Or Catholics. But we did tolerate the Baptists. That was a step.

Now we have five billion people, all standing in each other's face. Covering a tennis match for the tube, England's Virginia Wade observed, "Chris throws up so beautifully." Everet wasn't competing publicly at puking; she was tossing the tennis ball above her head for the serve. That chasm between English-English and American-English just got a chuckle. But now we can fly to Addis or Sri Lanka or Azerbaijani without knowing dick about local manners. (If they need our money, they won't stone us. We don't even know how far we tempt them.)

England & US
divided by a common language
GBS

If we care about any real possibility of having a future, I think it's long past time to upgrade our maps of reality. My first novel opened with a young girl suffering an experience all too common to the gifted: she found herself agreeing with her teachers that she was stupid. They all understood how the sun rose; she thought the earth turned. They talked about seven seas; her satellite views showed her continuous ocean. They talked about Europe and Asia as separate continents; how? Why where North and South America thought of as separate? Because we dug a canal? The step to asking how a history of slavery and genocide equals a history of lawful liberty is a bit steeper: but let's stay simple. Why was Greenland thought of as connected?

Because our thoughts are based largely on our language and our language is based largely on reality maps outdated long ago. The Greeks sailed to Asia; scholars have long revered the Greeks, attributing everything to them except sliced bread; therefore we still say it's a separate continent. The schools, like parents, like churches, like governments, teach things known to be wrong for centuries. If not millennia. They show you an updated map, but teach it with outdated words (and worse: outdated concepts). You'll do best (in the short-run) if you don't notice, if you don't mind.

How about being right for a change?

Sorry. That's not an option. The law still talks about "proving" things. Scientists, at least the best of them, gave up that dream long ago. Ilya Prigogine demonstrates that probability is a higher, potentially more accurate, state of "truth" than "certainty." The churches are all certain. Political parties are typically certain. They're certainly wrong. (Forgive me: English is a "natural" language: you can't
tell the truth in a natural language. And perhaps not in any artificial language either.)

Well what can we do? We can approach
the truth. Ever and ever closer.

Cybernetics
People hear the word cybernetics and think of computers. They're not coextensive, not synonyms. Computers developed rapidly because of cybernetics and information theory as developed in the early 'Forties.

I'll start with my teacher, Gregory Bateson's example. You set the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees. You monitor the room with a sensitive thermometer. The furnace goes on. The temperature rises to sixty-nine or seventy! The furnace goes off. The temperature falls to sixty-seven or sixty-six. The furnace goes on.

Why can't it get it right? The furnace salesman told you it would hold the temperature at your setting: what Bateson calls, "a small epistemological lie." The truth is, the thermostat is designed to hover around your setting. That's the best it can do. And that it does.

The example I had my Dr. Pickering use in my first novel, comes from the golf I learned to love after reading Bateson. I'll update it here. You're playing golf with Tiger Woods. You're on your course. You arrive at a par four, 375 yards, dogleg left. He has the honor. With his driver he can whack the ball past the green. He takes his 2 iron and draws the ball 312 yards in line with the narrow little entrance to the green between the two big sand traps. You take your driver and slice your ball 180 yards into the scrub between your fairway and the one adjoining to your right. His was nearly as good as he could do. But perhaps so was yours. He might chip or pitch in for an eagle. You'll do well to get onto the fairway even only 60 or 75 yards closer to the hole.

Tossing out bad theories
and zeroing in on the truth ...
David Brin

It is only by exploring the extremes
that we learn to locate the center.
Yehudi Menuhin

And that's the point. Even in the scrub, you've gotten closer to the hole. Not 180 yards closer, because your ball curved the wrong way. But closer nevertheless. On you next shot you'll be closer still (unless you ricochet the ball off the tree in front of you). Even if you never break 100, you'll get better at it. But you have to persist.

Being right would be like never shooting anything but a hole-in-one. Darwin's Theory of Evolution wasn't right. But it was like the "drive" I imagine for Tiger Woods (one of many who've actually hit plenty just like it.) Darwin handed the pitching iron to his successors. OK, we botched a couple of chips. I'm not sure we've even putted in yet. But we've been around the hole.

A man walking is never in balance
but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson

Once we get the ball into the hole, it's still not a perfect fit. Science, like golf, would be impossible if that were the requirement.

Your church tells you it has the Truth. Here it is. (How come that Truth can't be verified?) The judge says the jury will find the truth. The foreman should announce it within a few hours. (How would you verify that truth? You don't: you stick him in the chair.) Three months, or six years, or twelve decades after a discovery, your news anchor announces that scientists have found some cure, some sure-thing, some certainly or other. But did the scientists say that? Not likely. Check the actual literature.

The drowned don't make landfall.

I've already started to say a few things about the nature of hypotheses, theories, and evidence. Waterman will remount them shortly.

2005 02 01 Richard Wall responded:Cybernetics describes what it takes for "requisite variety" to be generated. That is to say, you have a state or condition of things tending to disequilibrium (for example: too hot, too cold, too turbulent, too still). Cybernetics offers to measure what 'variety ' is requisite (required) for balancing or counteracting the existing 'variety ' - what it will take, and how fast and what obstacles that process will encounter, in order for the equilibrium to be restored. The thermostat is going through an inanimate process of generating the requisite variety to get the temperature back up or down again. As an inanimate (mindless, conscience-less) object, it has no idea of whether it is 'doing its best. '

That equilibrium is similar to your notion of "staying afloat" - if you do not generate the requisite force to stay afloat, you will drown.

By the same token invasions and occupations will eventually generate what are **euphemistically** called "insurgencies". So we see and hear government-speak of "insurgents" and "terrorists" all the time. This blinds the sheeple to any understanding or awareness of process. The insurgency is nothing less, nothing more than a rising up of the indigenous people against the invader. But it may take a while for that rising up to happen. You have the shock of invasion first, the 'magnified wave ' if you like. The initial reaction is to be stunned. Only when the initial shock is lifted (a certain frequency is reached, perhaps) can the process of generation/regeneration begin.Mr. Wall has also responded to Waterman 's nonconfinement by normal boundaries. Notice his step from cybernetics to insurgency! No passports should be required for patterns that connect.
I'm glad I added that last comment, not just because it quotes Bateson, but because to it Richard responded:... in a typical example of Illichian corruption of what is good and free, human beings move from the legitimate endeavor of detecting, understanding and appreciating patterns to controlling them by means of things like passports and gates (which in turn give employment to gatekeepers), and even of provoking new patterns by means of coercion and force ...1999 07 21 I just scribbled something on cybernetics in my biography section. Rather than add a link, I'll just repeat here:It's all so cybernetic. Long before the word was coined in English, sailors used cybernetics in navigating: port tack past your target; starboard tack past your target: landfall at your target. Columbus didn't have a compass point much more specific than "west" when he embarked. We've never finished correcting his mislabelings. He connected, for good and ill, two worlds just the same. No one else.

One more relevant "digression" on cybernetics: what's hardest of all to understand is that before you can have a port to tack toward, you first and foremost have to use cybernetics to learn to stay afloat. Where your nostrils can find air.2003 04 23 Everything I've been touting and iterating about cybernetics since 1979 comes from Gregory Bateson. I'm now reading The Mechanization of the Mind On the Origins of Cognitive Science by Jean-Pierre Dupuy which gives a history of the term much closer to the (loathed) popular understanding. I don't doubt that I'll have to return to this file and revise some of what I've said above before developing the topic further. Nevertheless, I insist (in my admitted ignorance (to other ignorances, whether admitted or not)) that the above is a good view: the valuable view: whether its historically representative or not. Screw von Neumann; hail Bateson.

Notes

Local Manners: cultural relativism
Reading Piers Anthony's Isle of Woman, I come upon a fine example from the British India of the 1860's. A young Englishman, raised in India, befriends a newcomer. He informs his friend that cultural astonishment and disgust is mutual on the part of the natives:"... They view some of our customs with similar disdain."
"Oh? What —"
"We don't regard the cow as sacred, or the pig as unclean."
"Oh, yes. That triggered the Sepoy Mutiny eight years ago. Because the grease of the cartridges for the Enfield rifle contained tallow which was said to come from a number of animals, including pigs and cows, and they had to bite into it to open the end and release the powder. No one at the time clarified that the source was actually mutton fat. That was certainly a mistake."
"It was more than a mistake," Wood said. "Suppose you had to bite into a cartridge heavily smeared with polluted sewage and excrement? So that you feared dysentery as well as being absolutely disgusted? To a Muslin pig's fat is similarly disgusting, and to a Hindu the touch of cow's fat on the lips would be worse. In fact it would be an abomination for which we have no parallel, because of the sacredness of the animal. Imagine eating fat rendered from your own deceased father, perhaps. I would damn a person spiritually. Our disregard for such sensitivities brought much mischief."

Not an Option: semantic laziness vs. deliberate falsehood
The piece on cybernetics concentrates on the impossibility of man ever achieving pure truth as the map can never be the same thing as the territory. It isn't that the truth is imperfect; it's just that our symbol systems are just that: symbol systems.
Institutions, like parents, are semantically lazy, especially if they think things are going well. They have to be goaded to do better. Teaching deliberate falsehoods is another matter which I deal with
separately at Waterman's domains.
Lazy falsehoods also get their own treatment. All of it is still just getting started. Regard anything you see as on an important track but hardly more than a first draft.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Communication

1998 07 18

For starters, I repeat my 1963 statement on the subject.
I feel — both instinctively and rationally — that communication has been and will be the triumph of our race: communication with oneself, others, with one’s culture, past fact and future possible, communication sympathy with the universe — that joy is the coming to consciousness of living reality — that my own joy is maintained most intensively by a proximity with literature and by writing what and when I must. This proximity must be maintained by reading, teaching, writing, publishing — whatever. I feel that I have learned a great deal and one of the most joyful responsibilities of wisdom is education. Thus, education it will be, in any or all of its forms.I add merely that by 1982 my novel By the Hair of the Comet was dramatizing communications as not at all reliable but partly illusory.

Whether communication is possible or impossible
depends on the message
(and on the culture)
(and only a tiny bit on the messenger).

Bibliography:

Communication by Gregory Bateson & Jurgen Ruesch, Norton, 1968.

Some communications are easy.Whee! Whew!

Hey, gorgeous. Nice day!

Whoa, man: nice car!These examples represent the highly phatic nature of much human discourse. They're primarily emotional and concern basics common to most — sex, lust, admiration, creature comfort — relationships.
Hey Joe: you got gum?This is an example of how a language as complex as English can be adapted into a simple creo that even children of unrelated language groups can master quickly. A vocabulary of a few hundred words and any highly truncated grammar will do.

American GIs learned this around the world, especially during and following WWII. Here the "Joe" is generic: the ragamuffin means any GI. Even the "gum" isn't necessarily specific. The kid will be happy if he gets a coin instead or perhaps a proposition for his sister.

Other communications are more problematical.Ooo, that's beautiful!If a woman is the subject, it's easy to agree. But what specifically has been communicated? Perhaps the speaker is referring primarily to her shape. One listener, agreeing, might understand the reference to be to the whole package and how it's put together: style, including fashion, as well as shape. Another might agree based solely on her auburn hair.

If the subject is a painting by Cézanne, the speaker still might find agreement. One listener might agree based solely on the matter of the painting: it's a still life with fruit, glass vessels, fabric ... he likes fruit. Another might agree solely out of fear of appearing crass: it's a painting — paintings are supposed to be beautiful. What does he know? Another might agree based solely on how many shades of color are gotten from a strictly limited palette. Still another might be considering nothing more than the flattening of the space, taking it to be a witty contribution to the dialogue about perspective that's been going great guns since the Renaissance. His buddy, thinking they're one, may merely recognize twentieth-century orthodoxy, started by Cézanne. The listener whose aesthetics have developed no further (in relation to the chronological "development" of Western painting) than Poussin or David may merely wrinkle his nose.

If the subject is a mathematical formula, most listeners will close their ears (if they hadn't already fled before the comment was made).
Scalpel.There's nothing phatic about that instruction. Now the content is specific and unambiguous. Not only must the nurse know the scalpel from the other operating room instruments; she must know that it must be sterile, that it must be handed to the surgeon immediately, not once she feels like it, that it must be handed to the surgeon in a certain way, handle first, into his reaching hand like a relay runner passing the baton. She won't be around long if she just holds it up any old way as she waits for him to look up and reach for it.
We're #1.This statement is wholly phatic. It has no other content whatsoever. The "we" has meaning. So does the contraction of "are." The "number" has nothing to do with arithmetic or number theory. Neither does the "one." It has to do with the imagined place of the group in the universe. It has to do with God's favor. All unverifiable in any objective way.
Jesus loves me.

Americans are generous.

Happy Mother's Day.Now we're in the Gordian Knot. If you need an explanation, I'll offer several when I come back. Meantime, Gregory Bateson's book of the same title covers the subject with awesome completeness: from the chemical and electrical communications of biology to the high level kind I'll continue to deal with.

Communication Scrapbook
WARNING:
Post-Larval Must Be Very Cautious in Communicating with Larval humans.

deoxy.org

1999 09 09 Several places here now have already introduced some basic points about communication. Namely, it is not single-purposed, but is minimally dual-purposed: and thus ambiguous. To survive, predators must deceive their prey. Prey, to survive, may also deceive their predators. Camouflage is a tactic chosen by both predator and prey.
Social organization complicates the tactic. Large scale social organization complicates it enormously. Human civilization, kleptocratic in all literate examples, elevates, complicates the biosphere-wide tactic of camouflage in new ways: kleptocracy camouflages the camouflage. That is, we screen our true nature not just from our prey, but from ourselves. (Does the politician, disguised as a humanitarian, know of his deception? May he not believe his disguise himself? May not the priest too believe that he is a man of God?) (What could that possibly mean? Man of God? That’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?)
Why not? We’ve become our own prey. (Oh, we’ve always killed each other. Not like now! Civilization has found ever new methods: including military, social, and economic parasitism.)
I copy in a bit written yesterday to make the same points in another context [link to be added]:The hunter pretends to be a duck: or a moose or a bush. The bush-which-is-one-hunter doesn’t want to be shot by the bush-which-is-another-hunter, so communications develop in which identification is almost as important as mis-identification.
The same points initiated development here in Deception in Evolution [link to be added]. It’s important for members of a group to know friend from foe. Hence, we homogenize ourselves within the group. Language, dialect, costume, uniform, habits, religion ... these are some of the ways in which we identify ourselves to ourselves. It’s important for friends practicing expansion, offensive defense, etc., to infiltrate the foe undetected, whether for conquest, subversion, or seduction. I read in a bit more of yesterday’s piece:Hamlet opens with the line "who’s there?" What’s the probability that the answer will be a lie? Well, in your own castle, the probability for the truth is very high: friend (Oh, it’s you Francisco). But if Francisco is actually a Nazi trying out his Brooklyn accent, your cave, home, castle, corporation may soon belong to his Nazis. (If your home is a castle or corporation, then you too are a kleptocrat. (Hamlet certainly was.) You probably have a deed saying that the castle is yours. The deed may be signed by the king who’s supposed to have a deed signed by God. Don’t worry: Francisco’s Nazis will soon have their own deed signed by their king. You won’t get to see where God signed their king’s deed either, but you can bet they’ll claim that the divine signature they don’t have is more authentic than any that you don’t have ever was.Shakespeare’s Francisco was, despite his name (Hamlet is a very complex play), a guard in the castle of Elsinore. The play shows us the castle’s exterior defenses at the outset. Immediately following, the play shows us that the castle has been subverted from within. The castle has been taken not by foe, but by "friend." The castle was taken by deceit, by secret assassination. (Objectively true? The audience knows no more than Hamlet.) Shakespeare is nothing but realistic: no one knows they’ve been captured. The citizens carry on in delusion. Only Hamlet, thanks to a supernatural communication he can’t know whether to trust, suspects. He develops a personality problem to go with his many others. "Who’s there" indeed.
(Soon after writing this, I developed the point far more thoroughly at Macroinformation [see Information].)
"Francisco’s" presence on the Danish castle wall already tells us that Hamlet’s Denmark was far from homogeneous. What kind of a Danish name is that? Hamlet has been to Wittenberg to study. Another country. Another language. Different customs. (All Germanic, but "friends" sub-divide as their population grows, expands. See also my Tower of Babel. [link to be added]) His school fellows visit. Hamlet can’t decide whether they’re friend or foe. Quite right: they too are seduced by the deceiver. Modern life.
The bushman knows his friend from his food. We don’t. Expanding populations deceive themselves in every possible way. We deceive ourselves in our cosmology, our theology ... We have a kleptocrat for a God, hierarchically, magically, ruling a universe by arbitrary laws. And we say it’s the Truth. Everything we know with any degree of objectivity is incompatible with this cosmology and this theology. Expanding populations are ruled by magicians who turn the world into a theater. Shakespeare used theater correctly to identify us. Our political magi use theater to control the lighting, to control information, to choreograph our illusions ...
Human communication is deeply ambiguous: to identify ..., but more, to mis-identify.
Other modules here probe the parallel ambiguity of other core words: truth is it what is?
or what we
say is?

A few of our grossest institutionally abetted self-delusions:That the real truth can be deceived by our fake truths.
That the real truth is illusion and our fake truth is real.
That forty-million Frenchmen thinking something makes it so.
That is doesn’t matter what we do to the real world: God will bail us out.
That the God we created is in charge of real reality.
That we’re the center, the protagonist, the point ... of anything not imaginary.
That we’re neither plant nor animal, but something magically privileged.
That we’re not predators.
How can we be? Predators are something awful.
How can we be? Since it’s all for us, taking what’s ours isn’t predation
Honey, predation is natural. Ubiquitous. At least in the only biosphere we know. We’re the biggest and baddest predator that biosphere has ever seen.

Note that the basic theme of my first novel was communication: specifically, failure of communication. The alien enters the solar system riding on a comet, the comet gets zapped, other aliens millions of years later hear his SOS. The human astronauts never knew what they were dealing with and now they’ve really pissed-off the new arrivals.

2000 08 25

BulletinToday’s news reports the release of a man, a Soviet prisoner of war from W.W.II, from the mental institution where he’d been locked up as a raving madman in the mid-1940s. It seems that a policeman visiting the hospital finally heard his ravings and recognized the language to be Hungarian. For five and one half decades, Russian military and psychiatric specialists, together with staff and so forth, failed to recognize a neighboring language as intelligible in its own right.
My story had been based on that of an anthropologist to Indonesia. That source-story showed its victim-of-a-failure-of-human-communication to be a linguist of sorts, literate, at least minimally, in a minimum of three languages. (See my novel’s own file: By the Hair of the Comet.[link to be added]) I made my "character" literate in at least three galactic languages. The victim of human inflexibility in today’s news, poor bastard, may only have spoken his native tongue. I’m going to get more on the story right now.

I just added an image to my Faith module relevant to several other modules. Till I’m sure how best to develop it for Waterman as a whole, I sprinkle it:Societies are circles of faith. Over-large societies have difficulty agreeing on basic articles of that faith. A lot of cheating and bullying took place before the Nicene Creed (or the US Constitution) could be drafted. Once established, communications are lubricated for articles of the faith. Non-articles, most especially anti-articles, will find resistance.
I must establish the concept of communicational resistance at Macroinformation [see Information].

Robert Anton Wilson, of Illuminatus! fame, has an absolutely delicious point to make about communication, which I will paraphrase until I locate and paste the actual statement. He says that communication is possible only among equals. (If that were strictly true, there could be no communication at all.) If I’m holding a gun (even if my gun is concealed in a silo), I can get you to cringe, perhaps to grovel - maybe you’ll rebel and attack me - but there can be no honest communication between us.
(Ah: now I see: I’d already made the point in my own way under Understanding.)

How well can the occupied French communicate with the occupying Nazis? The problems don’t end with the French speaking French while the Nazis speak German.
How well could the Dachau concentrated communicate with their concentrators? Could they even communicate that they were human?
How well can the Cheyenne on the Trail of Tears communicate with soldiers driving them on to their destruction?
How well can the Chicago protesters communicate with Daly’s cops? or with the Democratic conventioneers? How well with the silent majority?
How civilly could the cultivated Pope discuss theology with the rabid atheist? How about a cultured atheist and a rabid pope? How civilly could a cultivated Pope discuss theology with a cultivated atheist? Would the pope go to the atheist’s coffee shop? How could the atheist get into the Vatican?
How well could an M theorist discuss meta-dimensions with the cosmologist who gave us the turtle holding up Atlas?

I just separated this file from the parent. I’ll try to apportion some of this to independent titles in this subfolder.

The protagonist of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace finds the handbook for the Communications 101 course he unhappily teaches preposterous: Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings an dintentions to each other. [Christmas! shades of Jacques Barzun.] "His own opinion, which he does not air, is the the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."
I like that last part very well. Still, it’s nothing compared with my own views: or with the views of current gender evolution theory as per Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind.

Centers, Edges, and Borders

Centers, Edges, and Borders: Where the Action Is

1998

Whew! What a topic! Overdue here for some time now. Let's see what I can fit into the first draft.

It's prom night. The dance is over. You have a nip of something. You're loose. Where do you all go to lose your cherry? To the beach. To the sea shore, the lake shore ... Water!

Now it's your honeymoon. Generations went to Niagara Falls. Water again. Torrents of it. It was the most spectacular water you could find by train ride from the major eastern cities. Nowadays you can take a cruise, fly to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands ... More water.

The water can't be overemphasized. Life on this planet began in the water. We never crawled out of it till some hundreds of millions of years ago. Yesterday. We're still conceived in liquid. As embryos, we develop in liquid. Out in the air, we're still mostly water. Air and water. We can go without sex for years. We can go without food for weeks. Air and water? Short term. Continuous need.

You're down, you're all but out. Your wife has run off with your best friend: or with his wife. The IRS is on you. The boss (that crook!) says you're an embezzler. You've already been to the bar. Liquids. Now what? This time you're in Pittsburgh. There is no beach. You go to the river. If you're gonna jump, you climb the bridge first. Air and water.

Water, water, everywhere
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Does a fish see water? Do we see air? Does any creature ever really see it's environment? If you see it, maybe it's no longer your environment.

No, the water can't be overemphasized. But there's something else here as well. The one perception masks another, just as ubiquitous. (More subtle?) I'm talking about humans and human perception, but let's consider a few not so near relatives for a moment. Use your imagination: you're an alligator. Compress a few days into a moment or two: where do you spend those days? Well, if it's nice, you're likely to be lounging on the bank. Maybe your head and thorax are on mud and your belly and tail are in the water. You're on the edge of land and water. If it's not so nice, you're under the bank. Even when it's night and you're working, hunting, cruising, you're not far from land.

Living on the Edge

We go to the edge. We come from the edge and we go to the edge. Our sort of life formed at the edge between sea and land. The boundary. The border.

Boundaries separate. Boundaries unite. Which statement is more true? The boundary is the coupling of differences.

Change often begins at the margin.
Jack Miles

There are creatures that live in the ocean depths. I'm not talking about them. The gopher tortoise never needs to drink. I'm not talking about him either.

Try being a sunfish for a moment. Where do you spend your day? (Imagination doesn't get going without at least a little bit of knowledge.) You're in water all the time, so that's not the answer. Are you a fisherman? Do you know where to cast? The blue gill, the bass, is at-or-near the edge of something: you're at the border of the flowing water and the still water, the deep water and the shallow water, the open water and the weed bed. Sometimes you're a few feet into the weeds, sometimes a few feet out into the open. Actually you might spend the whole summer in open water, but you'll winter by the weeds. And when you mate, it's shallow, with cover near by. Multi-edged.

Let's re-evolve back "up" (ha ha) to Homo sapiens for a moment. Say you're female, a woman. Where's your greatest pleasure? On the surface? Mmm, that's nice. Down deep? Ooo, that's nicer. But come-country? That's at the edges: areola and nipple, areola and breast ... Edges. Lips by lips ... Edges curving toward a center. Bulls eye. A center near the surface.

These are modern paradigms. Yesteryear, we were told we were in the middle: half-way between beast and god, devil and angel, good and evil ... Maybe there's something to that metaphor as well. We land at Ellis Island but we grow our bread in Iowa and Kansas. We leave Brooklyn and rush to Oklahoma, destroying everything "alien" in our path (meaning not recognizably from Europe).

Actually, there's a way in which the modern paradigm joins the old metaphor. Reporting on the new science of Complexity, Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann gives an example that weds both: We live at the edge between chaos and order. That's as true for the gopher tortoise as it is for the Nobel Laureate. Take a crystal — a diamond, salt ... — as an example of order. Life as we mean it will never occur there. Take a nuclear furnace, the center of our sun, for example. That's high energy order: energy/order so high we can well call it chaos. Its order is beyond us. Life as we mean it will never occur there.

Chaos is our word for order which is not understood.
Henry Miller

It's at the boundary that life comes into being, thrives. Too much order? Sterility. Too much energy? Too high a mix of orders? Death. It burns.

Any living order must have access to disorder to survive. In politics, those thriving on any given order will hold any competing order at bay so long as they can. To those oppressed by any given order, revolution is the only hope.

Let's take a modern look at the medieval metaphor. We're in the middle. Let's get a little help from George Gamow: mathematician extraordinaire of infinities. What's that? Did I use a plural? Infinities? Yes. Gamow showed that there are an infinite number of infinities. You didn't learn that in school? Not surprising.

Take the series of integers for example:
1, 2, 3 ... 1,155,460,355 ... a googol ...
a googolplex ... ... ... infinity
(Note that infinity, though a "number," is not an integer.) How many integers are in an infinity? An infinite number of them.

Now take the series of even integers:
2, 4, 6 ...
How many even numbers are there? An infinite number of them. Similarly, there will be an infinite number of odd integers.

Now try the number of possible decimals between one and two. An infinite number of them. Now try the number of possible decimals between 1.6175942 and 1.6175943. Again, infinite.

So, which infinity is bigger: the infinity of integers? or the infinity of even numbers? Well, hell: the infinity of integers has to have twice as many, right? How can it? They're both infinite! Gamow said that the one infinity was stronger than the other.

Thus I say that no matter where you are in any infinite series, you're in themiddle!

Let me rephrase that:In any indeterminate series, there is no middle. Just as there is no end at either end.

Let me rephrase that again:Any point in an infinite spectrum is infinitely far from either end.
(But again, there's no "end" in an infinity. Finite ideas don't apply.)

So, are the medievals right after all? Well: god & devil, right & wrong ... are any of those infinite series? The number series the mathematicians find to be infinite are abstractions, wholly intensional. What about the universe we actually exist as part of? Einstein (remodeling Voltaire's joke) said, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." The oldest light we can see with a big telescope is some fourteen billion "years" old. Maybe the universe is big, maybe it's old (compared to what?), but it's hardly infinite. So let's substitute the photographers' meaning of infinity: further away than several feet. Further away than you're up to measuring. (For most people that would be almost anything.) OK, let's just take it to mean "beyond sight."

I say we are in the "middle" of any evolutionary series. I see civilization not as any pinnacle that we've amazingly achieved, but merely as where we are: midway between good (and bad) order and good (and bad) chaos. I see us as "just as" far from significant achievement as we are from being single celled.

I'll come back to this section. Meantime, try some of your own.

(I've plenty more to say about middles, centers ... too: bear with me.)

Let's home in on what I hope you will come to see as the same business from another angle. Gather a bunch of kids, students, adults, CEOs, anybody ... Show them a picture of a robin. (That's an "American trush" in the United Staes. We have no European robins.) Ask them what it is. In less than a second you'll start hearing a chorus of "robin"s. Parts of the chorus may come in a bit past that first second, but by the end of the second second you're likely to have heard, and heard correctly, from everyone in the group, provided they're all native English speaking.

Now hold up a picture of an ostrich. Again, everyone will answer and answer correctly. But both times your audio has been graphing your recording. The time of answer is not equal.

To stick with our two examples, let's restart with another group. Hold up the picture of the robin and ask what kind of animal it is. You'll hear a wave of bird overlapping the sound waves of your question. They'll answer bird with the ostrich too, but the answer will come back more slowly.

This is science. Go. Confirm it. It ain't so if your experiment, properly conducted, doesn't match results. Satisfied?

Now. There is a set of animals we classify as "birds." The robin is deep in the core of that set; the ostrich is in the set but not in its core.

What, you say the "robin" is really an American thrush? I don't care. This isn't avian vertebrate zoology. It isn't math either. It's epistemology. Epistemology bordering on cosmology and theology. And on a bunch of other -ologies. And on maybe an -osophy or two.

Now let's do something with these perceptions. In the core of a culture you're sure you know what that culture is. You're from Kansas. You're an American. You know what an American is. You send your kid to college. Ivy League is what you want for him, the best. The kid gets into Columbia. Columbia College in the City of New York. You drive him for Freshman Orientation. Whoops! Where did these Jews come from? Blacks that speak better than you do? One sounds like Oxford? You actually meet a dissident!

Back home you live in a county that's solid one party or another. Everyone votes whatever. You watch the election returns. Where did all those other votes come from? The people in California or Florida or wherever must be crazy!

You live in Kansas. Smack in the middle of the continent. You know what land is. Solid. Eternal. You're safe from the commies here. You go back to New York for graduation. You go early enough to take in the theater. You even go to the beach. You stand on the shore. Wavelets wash your calves with sand. You feel the undertow erode the sand from between you toes. You're at the edge. Did you really know what land is, what a continent is? No wonder continental drift was such a hard sell.

The lubber is rubber legged at sea. The sailor is rubber legged ashore. At first. Only at first.

This module was Waterman's first online jotting on this subject. Like many of my files, it's grown over the years, still without being "complete" or "finished."

Notes

Major Eastern Cities:
Why is New York the Empire State? Why is New York City the Big Apple? Why are the biggest banks still there rather than in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Boston? Because New York was the first American port to look inward as well as across the sea to Europe. It built the canals. Now it could monopolize financing of the railroads. And practically everything else.
(Asked, Oscar Wilde said that by morning light, Niagara Falls would have to be a bride's "second greatest disappointment."
Very witty, but screw him: what did that Edwardian faggot know?)

Years:
Even astronomy is so geocentric it's ridiculous. A "year" is the length of time it takes our planet to revolve around our star. Our star, this system, is some 4.6 billion years old. Therefore, how can anything older than the sun and earth be measured in "years"?
One more example: we measure the earth's dimensions — diameter, circumference, etc — crust-to-crust. We measure Jupiter visible-atmosphere to visible-atmosphere. What gives? If we ignored the atmosphere both places, and measured just crust, Jupiter would shrink enormously.

Core:
I can't resist throwing in a perception from a conversation with my son of decades ago. It's possible that this business about sets and cores had come up on Johnny Carson. I was pointing out that Carson, from Nebraska, was perceived by the audience to be core American. Indeed, Johnny made it his business, his study, to appear to be core American. But Johnny had a Ph.D. in comedy, rare from any university. Johnny wasn't in the core. Johnny was supervising while milking the core. Johnny was an "ostrich" garbed as a "robin."

I'll also add that however much I acknowledged Carson's genius, I never warmed up to him as a fan. I still loved Steve Allen.

Extension

Extension vs. Intension: that is, Physical versus Abstract (and related, critical, epistemological liabilities)

"Ninety-nine"% of the things in our minds have no physical referent.

99% of reality is invisible.
R. Buckminster Fuller

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today
is that many of us no longer have the sense
that we are surrounded by the unseen.
Karen Armstrong

Many of those things have no intensional (non-physical) referent either (other than that created by our "seeing" them).
It's those things in our minds that have no physical referent but that do have non-pathological intensional referents:

Those are the things that should get 99% of our attention.

The words "intension" and "extension" already have multiple appearances and explanations at Waterman's domains. But they're important enough to deserve their own file, especially now that I want to add a new illustration. (2000 08 03: These important concepts are now getting concentrated attention as part of the Allied Concepts aspect of my theory of complex information: "Macroinformation."

"Extension" is easy. It refers to whatever extends, whatever is quantifiable in space as well as in time. ("Extensional" is the adjective.) Your body is an example.

"Intension" is hard. Note the spelling. It does not refer to will, volition, desire, plan ... Do not confuse it with its homonym "intention."
"Intension" is merely the antonym of "extension." It refers to that class of existence which may be quantifiable in time but not in space. ("Intensional" is the adjective.) Your "self" is an example.
(You were conceived at such and such a time. You were born something like nine months later. When was your "self" born?

Your body changes with each breath. One oxygen atom that was in you twenty years ago may be in you now, but it may also have been in me in the interim. [That same atom may also have once been in Julius Caesar: more than once.] How often has your self been reborn? Is your present self the same one you "had" at puberty?)Different cultures have different handicaps with regard to confusions of logical type. In the "West" we're practically crippled. I know of no one before Count Alfred Korzybski who wasn't utterly confused on this particular issue. Prior to civilization, it didn't matter much. Prior to industrialism, it mattered, was lethal, but not fatally for all. Now it's a matter of extinction: not just for those species draining down the hole mankind has widened (we didn't make it, but we have accelerated the downward flow), but for us as well.

We're crippled in the West because of certain peculiarities of the dominant theology. Hindus, for example, believe that existence is a game that cannot be charted from within. The ground of being is playing hide and seek with itself. Shiva is Vishnu. Or rather, neither is either: both are IT playing roles in the game. Alan Watts has written beautifully on the subject. Check it out.
Information is apparent, not "real." In contrast, the monotheism of Judaism and its sub-sets, Christianity and Islam, posits existence to have a beginning, middle, and end, an inside and an outside, a creator (an owner, law-giver, boss, king ...) ...: all with supposedly objective reality.

One can only see what one observes,
and one observes only things
which are already in the mind.
Alphonse Bertillon

(My story Judgment Day has that awesome event begin with a benign Jesus at the apex of a Mannerist triangle of existence: life at the broad bottom, saints and angels amid clouds, one tier up, and Jesus at the very tip of the top (devils lurking below the bottom). As he hears our confessions, his brow darkens. He is replaced by a fearsome Jehovah. The devils erupt and everyone is tormented. (If I rewrote it, I'd have even the saints cast from the clouds.) In the hubbub, the Chief Tormentor forgets his mask and is revealed as a baboon. It's Satan, having fooled us again.

(Christian theology posits the Devil as being able to fool any human. So why doesn't Christian theology see that he could fool everyone, Pope, Virgin, and all? The "voice" of the true "God" comes in at the end and tells Satan to cool it. At the time of composition, I thought my story was Christian; now I see that it was incipiently Hindu: there is no "real" difference between Satan and God, between Pope and devil: there is no reality but masks. My discovery of science converted me from theology of any flavor.

(How hard should it be to guess why my fiction has been admired but not admitted to print except for my typewriter and this HTML? All my work is religious, but it's also all critical(/satirical) of the prevailing Religions! Success seems reserved for those who notice one flaw (like Luther) but swallow the bulk of them.)

We don't live in the blueprints, we live in the house.

So what's the problem, and how is it crucial? We tend to think that's there's "one" of things. Maybe there's more than one, but only one counts. Jehovah isn't the only god, but He is the
God. Man isn't the only species; but we are the only one that matters. There are thousands of college football teams, but "We're Number One!" ... Awareness of those tendencies is no longer rare: but how about this one? We are inclined to think that there is such a "thing" as reality, and moreover, that there's only one of it! (The problem is with the "thing," not the "reality": and with the simplistic "oneness" of it.) We are inclined to disregard experience to the contrary. (Kurosawa's immortal Roshomon takes the dilemma to a daring extreme, but any of us know that the argument you just had with your wife was two different arguments: the one you experienced and the one she experienced. Bring it before a jury, be as thorough as you care to be: but the jury will soon have its own reality (sub-dividable into six or twelve) of your argument. How can they be so wrong? It's so clear: to you.)
(Even Sino-scholar Donald Ritchie thinks he can figure out for us which "one" version of the "truth" in Roshomon is the "real one.")But what's the truth? The truth is unutterable. (The truth may also be multiple.) Occidentals tend to reject both those statements. We pay for it more than we can see.

Those of us with these habits also abnormally reify the intensional and confuse it with the extensional. Our primitive minds have difficulty with the stark abstraction of Judaism, so we have Jesus to give "body" to the spirit God. Our primitive minds have difficulty reifying what we can't see, hear, and touch. So we imagine that all important "things" have "body" that we could see, hear, and touch in the right circumstances.

Can you see your self? Look in the mirror. That's (a reflection of) your body. Maybe you're smiling. That's evidence of your self, but it's evidence manifested in your flesh: lips, cheeks, what flesh is relaxed, what in tension, the amount of white showing in your eye.

Am I saying that your self is imaginary? Yes, to some extent. Am I saying that what's imaginary isn't "real"? Not at all. I'm saying that the intensional is a distinct class of reality. (Neither am I suggesting that all things in that class have equal status: the moon being green cheese is imaginary and doesn't correspond to anything verifiable; your smiling self does correspond to something verifiable: just not measurable in space.)

(So which religion is "true"? See? You didn't learn the above: you're still looking for one.)

Elsewhere I've already illustrated that North America is extensional, Mexico, Canada, and US, intensional; that the church building is extensional; the "church" itself intensional; the Capital Building extensional, the government intensional ... Christians and most other religious want God to be extensional; I am a religious who insists that god is intensional.

Think of this: God is real in exactly the same way the United States is real. That is, lots of people worship God: lots of people pay taxes as US citizens. Mars is real in exactly the same way the Cathay, Arcady, or Gaul are real. The latter have no citizens though they once had many. The former, if Mars still has any worshippers, do so in hiding or no longer outwardly use that name.

But God and gods are emotional subjects. Let me switch to one you can deal with more objectively. In biology, the phenotype is the individual organism; the genotype is the abstract group. Your blue eyes are in your head: extensional. Your family or tribe's blue eyes are intensional: coded in your genes. Your genes are extensional; their code is intensional. Do you imagine that I'm saying that the code is imaginary? Actually, maybe it is. But do you imagine that I'm saying that blue eyes (as a trait) aren't real? that they don't "exist"?

I'm trying to broaden our acknowledgment of existence and, additionally, trying to get us to exercise care in distinguishing types. Deceits and deceptions got us here; now only honesty can save us. A difficult transformation. Scientists have made it. I've made it. Will enough of the rest of you joins us for us to have a future? I'm not optimistic, but my work is based on belief in the possibility.

We steal and degrade a continent, a world. Then we say we represent law and order. Does that behavior having a past ensure it a future? Open your eyes. Open your mind.

There: mind! Your brain is extensional; your mind is utterly intensional.

The drunk's pink elephants leave no usable fertilizer.

Something I scribbled elsewhere this morning:
Species are sets of new regulations, but only for that species. Each genus encodes sets of new regulations: for those species in that genus. Physics is sets of new regulations for that universe. What regulations are cosmic we can't know until we have commerce with other universes. Imagining that our physics is the physics is like assuming that life originated on Earth.Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
The egg, of course. The question was insoluble only so long as we lacked the concept of "mutation."

Which comes first: extension or intension?
Ah, now we're into theology, cosmology, etiology ... Answers that claim to be final are fraudulent. But we're the kind of species that likes to answer anyway. I'm that kind of phenotype. ("Kind" of "phenotype": there's an oxymoron!) But: I keep doing my homework. I may do it late, I may do it slowly, but I do it. And seriously. Responsibly.
The code has to precede the example.The physical universe could not have come into existence without the code preceding it. The intensional universe has no expression without the material instances. Time may have come first. (That's wrong: time didn't come; time was, is, and will be.) god may have come sometime after, possibly soon after. (Possibly simultaneously?) But what god wants isyou!

I just interjected some points I'd left out. How jumbled I've made it I can't know till more time passes. Second drafts may say more than firsts but seldom read as well. Give me time for a third.

Given time I'll blend in analogies such as extensional as hardware and intensional as software. Humans have aspects of both: wetware.

I've heard a series of churchmen distinguish the church from the church building just as they distinguish God as a "spirit," denying the God is a person. I followed the distinction, differing in that I've come to put huge sets of other "things" into the "spirit" class, calling it intensional, and generally avoiding the word spirit as too misleading, too tied up with superstition. A series of examples just came into my head and I scribble them prior to finding time to blend them above.

You pass your old dentist's office. The dentist retired, eloped, absconded, died ... That office is now Off-Track Betting. So, they changed the rug, put up a couple of posters. But you still see the dentist's office: till gradually it fades: and it's Off-Track Betting. The fade will not occur at the same rate in any two individuals. I still call the neighboring trailers in my park by the names of their 1989 owners, though the titles may have changed hands several times over the decade. The trailer itself is extensional: ownership is wholly intensional, wholly abstract. It's our (abstract) application of "ownership" to extensional objects that confuses us. We think the church is the church.

The dictator lives in the palace. After the coup the usurper lives in the same palace. The communists' buildings are Tsarist. "Democracies" have militaries that are utterly feudal in structure: in epistemology, etc. Maybe the usurper changes the rugs, puts up a few posters ... And the "spirit" has clearly changed: to an insider. How clear is the change to an outsider?

You're baptized, then confirmed into a Church that represents God. Then one day you learn about Galileo: or Luther: or Abelard, Scotus, Francis, Illich ... The building is the "same" (so long as you don't notice the flow of time, the entropy, the oxidation ... or the new wing: whether there's a thousand and fifty termites in it instead of a thousand and thirty ...). But can the "church" be the same?

My fellows look at the DC Mall, the Capital, or "the Presidency" and see something grand, inspiring, awesome; I look and see something shabby, shameful, degraded ... In both cases what we're seeing is in our head. It's macroinformation! As Bateson observed, whether you salute the flag or burn it, it's still a symbol more than a "thing."

No two sentiences live in quite the same macroinformation. I call the neighboring trailers by the names of their owners of a decade ago. My dear Catherine calls them by the names of the owners of two and three decades ago: when she can remember any names at all.

If I play you a recording of Billie Holiday or of Miles Davis, there's no way in hell we can be hearing the same "thing."

The US president is supposed to have a red button in his office that he can press if he doesn't like the political weather, thereby launching nuclear weapons targeted across the world. Those weapons will do extensional damage, rearranging Pleroma: and also harming Creatura. The fear, quite real, is that if he doesn't, some "enemy" may do the same first: or already has done just such a thing two seconds ago. All that is beyond my power to control or even influence.

I wish that I, that every member of Sentiens, had a little button that I could press and destroy some entity intensionally: dissolve the government, turn things back to nature. Waterman's domains are loaded with personal justifications for such an act. Here I'll emphasize one that concerns my son, thus far reported only one place. Brian was teaching at his alma mater, Haverford College. A student of his wanted to practice her journalism with a story on Philadelphia street people. She asked Brian if he'd advise her. He agreed: from his own private time and her own private time. The student was over eighteen: legally "of age." Her parents found out she intended actually to visit Philadelphia, alone, at night. The stink they put up reached the Haverford president's office. He threatened Brian and the student with every totalitarian device he could think of. Brian would be fired. The president masked his threats with a cloth of righteousness. His rhetoric suggested that he the president was the martyr, the revolutionary, under the circumstances. Now, if the president was arrested and lost his presidency for interfering with the private affairs of the pair (in their publicly conscientious roles), I'd have sympathy for both sides. As it was, I would have liked to have pressed my little red button and disestablished Haverford as an institution of learning, under the laws or Pennsylvania and the United States. The campus would have remained. The man who had been president was have remained: disempowered.

How would kleptocratic institutions behave if they knew that any citizen could pull the intensional rug from beneath them? They'd see their doom. And rightly so. Free institutions should depend on 100% support, 100% of the time.

We should learn to distinguish between predation and intensional conflict. Politics are intensional: their conflicts should need no extensional results. It's laws, names, and titles that we are in conflict about; nothing physical. One can gather leaves or berries without killing the source. But not if we eat the root. So: poor potato. We eat; the potato loses. But there are lots of potatoes: normally. How many biospheres are there? If we really liked Russian meat, or German meat, or Japanese meat, maybe the recent wars would have had some justification. But how much meat could we gotten out of Dresden? Out of Hiroshima? Fresh? Preserved? Delivered to our door? It's no accident the "waste" is a preferred jargon for killing. It's bad enough to spill half the champagne: or pour in onto sweaty heads under the TV lights.

I'm not suggesting that man could become sane; I plead for us to be less insane:or — prefering Korzybsy's term — unsane.
1997 February

Yesterday brought an email from someone brought to Waterman's domains by an interest in Korzybski and also in distinguishing between extension and intension. Richard writes:One feels less alone after reading you.

Notes

Decades Ago:
The directions said to bear right at the library. We drove and drove without seeing a library. "Oh, I should have said the Simpson place." Who the hell are the Simpsons? We've never been in this part of the state before. "Oh, I should have said bear right at the airfield."

It was just a country road, forking at a field. At night, in a blizzard. We latter came to learn that the last house on the right before the fork had been owned by the Simpsons. Last Simpson died forty years before. Thirty years ago, the structure had been used as a library: no traces of such a use remaining. Ah, but it had been only fifteen years earlier that a Piper Cub had made an emergency landing in the field! How come we didn't recognize any of these several landmarks?

When I moved to Maine I quickly learned that places, lakes, roads ... had at least three names: the name on the map, the name on the Chamber of Commerce brochure, and what the people actually called it. If it was the state who put the sign up, the name matched the map. If it was a developer, the name matched the brochure. Ask the farmer ... and its was any of a new set of names. Oh, and of course the lakes, no matter the size, were ponds.

You can't put your toe into the same river twice. You can't put your mind into the same meaning twice. It all flows.

Mannerist Universe:
I recently added more on this utterly intensional structure in my piece of Chabrol's Le Boucher. [link not yet added]

Extension Scrapbook

1999 02 08

I just interjected some points I’d left out. How jumbled I’ve made it I can’t know till more time passes. Second drafts may say more than firsts but seldom read as well. Give me time for a third.

1999 03 13

Given time I’ll blend in analogies such as extensional as hardware and intensional as software. Humans have aspects of both: wetware.

2001 08 18

I’ve heard a series of churchmen distinguish the church from the church building just as they distinguish God as a "spirit," denying the God is a person. I followed the distinction, differing in that I’ve come to put huge sets of other "things" into the "spirit" class, calling it intensional, and generally avoiding the word spirit as too misleading, too tied up with superstition. A series of examples just came into my head and I scribble them prior to finding time to blend them above.
You pass your old dentist’s office. The dentist retired, eloped, absconded, died ... That office is now Off-Track Betting. So, they changed the rug, put up a couple of posters. But you still see the dentist’s office: till gradually it fades: and it’s Off-Track Betting. The fade will not occur at the same rate in any two individuals. I still call the neighboring trailers in my park by the names of their 1989 owners, though the titles may have changed hands several times over the decade. The trailer itself is extensional: ownership is wholly intensional, wholly abstract. It’s our (abstract) application of "ownership" to extensional objects that confuses us. We think the church is the church.
The dictator lives in the palace. After the coup the usurper lives in the same palace. The communists’ buildings are Tsarist. "Democracies" have militaries that are utterly feudal in structure: in epistemology, etc. Maybe the usurper changes the rugs, puts up a few posters ... And the "spirit" has clearly changed: to an insider. How clear is the change to an outsider?
You’re baptized, then confirmed into a Church that represents God. Then one day you learn about Galileo: or Luther: or Abelard, Scotus, Francis, Illich ... The building is the "same" (so long as you don’t notice the flow of time, the entropy, the oxidation ... or the new wing: whether there’s a thousand and fifty termites in it instead of a thousand and thirty ...). But can the "church" be the same?
My fellows look at the DC Mall, the Capital, or "the Presidency" and see something grand, inspiring, awesome; I look and see something shabby, shameful, degraded ... In both cases what we’re seeing is in our head. It’s macroinformation! [link not yet added] As Bateson observed, whether you salute the flag or burn it, it’s still a symbol more than a "thing."

No two sentiences live in quite the same macroinformation. I call the neighboring trailers by the names of their owners of a decade ago. My dear Catherine calls them by the names of the owners of two and three decades ago: when she can remember any names at all.

If I play you a recording of Billie Holiday or of Miles Davis, there’s no way in hell we can be hearing the same "thing."

2001 09 05 The US president is supposed to have a red button in his office that he can press if he doesn’t like the political weather, thereby launching nuclear weapons targeted across the world. Those weapons will do extensional damage, rearranging Pleroma: and also harming Creatura. The fear, quite real, is that if he doesn’t, some "enemy" may do the same first: or already has done just such a thing two seconds ago. All that is beyond my power to control or even influence.
I wish that I, that every member of Sentiens, had a little button that I could press and destroy some entity intensionally: dissolve the government, turn things back to nature. Waterman is loaded with personal justifications for such an act. Here I’ll emphasize one that concerns my son, thus far reported only one place [link not yet added]. bk was teaching at his alma mater, Haverford College. A student of his wanted to practice her journalism with a story on Philadelphia street people. She asked bk if he’d advise her. He agreed: from his own private time and her own private time. The student was over eighteen: legally "of age." Her parents found out she intended actually to visit Philadelphia, alone, at night. The stink they put up reached the Haverford president’s office. He threatened bk and the student with every totalitarian device he could think of. bk would be fired. The president masked his threats with a cloth of righteousness. His rhetoric suggested that he the president was the martyr, the revolutionary, under the circumstances. Now, if the president was arrested and lost his presidency for interfering with the private affairs of the pair (in their publicly conscientious roles), I’d have sympathy for both sides. As it was, I would have liked to have pressed my little red button and disestablished Haverford as an institution of learning, under the laws or Pennsylvania and the United States. The campus would have remained. The man who had been president was have remained: disempowered.
How would kleptocratic institutions behave if they knew that any citizen could pull the intensional rug from beneath them? They’d see their doom. And rightly so. Free institutions should depend on 100% support, 100% of the time.
We should learn to distinguish between predation and intensional conflict. Politics are intensional: their conflicts should need no extensional results. It’s laws, names, and titles that we are in conflict about; nothing physical. One can gather leaves or berries without killing the source. But not if we eat the root. So: poor potato. We eat; the potato loses. But there are lots of potatoes: normally. How many biospheres are there? If we really liked Russian meat, or German meat, or Japanese meat, maybe the recent wars would have had some justification. But how much meat could we gotten out of Dresden? Out of Hiroshima? Fresh? Preserved? Delivered to our door? It’s no accident the "waste" is a preferred jargon for killing. It’s bad enough to spill half the champagne: or pour in onto sweaty heads under the TV lights.
I’m not suggesting that man could become sane; I plead for us to be less insane: or, using Korzybski's term, less unsane.

2006 06 29 Yesterday brought an email from someone brought to [Waterman] by an interest in Korzybski and also in distinguishing between extension and intension. Richard writes:One feels less alone after reading you.

A piece on "Extension: Entity" coming soon.

DeCentSee