Showing posts with label Parks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parks. Show all posts

Balance




An excess of anything is pathological.




Essential to Jung's conception of personality is the idea of unity or wholeness.

For Jung this wholeness is represented by the psyche, which includes all thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, both conscious and unconscious. Throughout their lives, individuals strive to develop their own wholeness.

Jung viewed the self as both the center and totality of the whole personality.

[Richard S. Scharf]
Theories of Psychotherapy and Counseling: Concepts and Cases (2nd Edition), p.90






Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right, is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

This Principle embodies the truth that in everything there is manifested a measured motion, to and fro; a flow and inflow; a swing backward and forward; a pendulum-like movement; a tide-like ebb and flow; a high-tide and low-tide; between the two poles which exist in accordance with the Principle of Polarity [...]

There is always an action and a reaction; an advance and a retreat a rising and a sinking. This is in the affairs of the Universe, suns, worlds, men, animals, mind, energy, and matter. This law is manifest in the creation and destruction of worlds; in the rise and fall of nations; in the life of all things; and finally in the mental states of Man [...]

It will be noticed that one generally "pays the price" of anything he possesses or lacks. If he has one thing, he lacks another the balance is struck. No one can "keep his penny and have the bit of cake" at the same time.

Everything has its pleasant and unpleasant sides. The things that one gains are always paid for by the things that one loses. The rich possess much that the poor lack, while the poor often possess things that are beyond the reach of the rich.

The Law of Compensation is ever in operation, striving to balance and counter-balance, and always succeeding in time, even though several lives may be required for the return swing of the Pendulum of Rhythm.

 The Kybalion, Chapter XI: "Rhythm" Chapter 2: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"




'[...] any extreme is liable to produce a violent reaction; this is as true of the weather and plants and animals as of political societies.'

'Yes, I have noticed that,' he broke in; 'excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.'

'It is the energy and initiative in their nature that may make them uncivilized,' I said; 'if you treat it properly it should make them brave, but if you overstrain it it turns them tough and uncouth, as you would expect.

[...] The philosophic temperament, on the other hand, is gentle; too much relaxation may produce an excessive softness, but if it is treated properly the result should be humane and civilized.

[...] must not these two elements be harmoniously adjusted?

[...] What I should say therefore is that these two branches of education seem to have been given by some god to men to train these two parts of us - the one to train our philosophic part the other our energy and initiative. They are not intended the one to train body, the other mind, except incidentally, but to ensure a proper harmony between energy and initiative on the one hand and reason on the other, by tuning each to the right pitch.

And so we may venture to assert that anyone who can produce the perfect blend of the physical and intellectual sides of education and apply them to the training of character, is producing music and harmony of far more importance than any mere musician tuning strings.'

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.109-10, 301




'Healthy activities produce health, and unhealthy activities produce sickness.

[...] [and] don't just actions produce justice, and unjust actions injustice?

[...] And health is produced by establishing a natural relation of control and subordination among the constituents of the body, disease by establishing an unnatural relation.

[...] So justice is produced by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents, and injustice by establishing an unnatural one.'

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.154




[...] as soon as you make a clear unequivocal statement doubts rush in, and the opposite begins to seem appealing.

[Momus]
Conversation from Click Opera, see here.




Tinku is a form of ritual conflict practiced by local people in Potosí, Bolivia.

Tinkus occur "between different communities, moieties, or kin groups." They are prearranged and usually take place in the small towns of southern Bolivia. Tinkus are very festive, with an audience of men, women, and children, who bring food and drink. Alcohol is also brought and sold along with food during the tinku.

The tinkus can become very violent, and people do get injured and even die. But, the deaths can be seen as good omens for good harvests.

Tinkus have been a tradition of Andean culture since before they first had contact with Europeans. Some anthropologists hypothesize that Ancient Andes culture would have tinkus instead of battles.

This would help curb aggression between different groups, and allow for entertainment, similar to football games in the United States.

There are some anthropologists that believe the tradition of the Tinku dates back to the time of the Moche culture, where neighboring tribes would annually fight one another.

Taken from the Wikipedia entry on Tinku.





In New Guinea, Bateson had been observing the different behaviour patterns of men and women among the local people.

The more the men were exhibitionist and boastful, the more the women became quiet and contemplative. It was clear that this reciprocal process was potentially dangerous: competing with each other to show off, the men became extremely aggressive, while it sometimes seemed that the women risked sinking into catatonia.

Bateson called his book Naven after the series of bizarre rituals that he came to see as "correcting" this behavioural process and guaranteeing stability.

In these complex ceremonies men dressed up as women and vice versa. The women assumed the traditional behaviour of the men while the men were abject and passive, even submitting to simulated rape.

Crucially, Bateson observed, no one was conscious of what the social function of the ceremonies might be. For the participants, the rituals had religious significance and that was that.  

Where competing behaviour patterns could push people to extremes, Bateson concluded - and he mentioned such things as the arms race and sadomasochism - corrective influences would very probably be doing their work unacknowledged. 

It might in fact be important that people remained unaware of what was happening.

[Tim Parks]
Everything is connected, article about Gregory Bateson published in The Guardian. Can be found here.




Q: I thought that sound was the opposite of stillness - that unbalance is the opposite of balance and that discomfort is the opposite of comfort. Am I wrong?

A: Yes, you are wrong, but the whole world thinks that way also. Balance, equilibrium, love, truth, rest, stillness, silence and zero belong to the unchanging and indivisible CAUSE, and cause of motion is not motion.

Motion is effect of cause, and effect alone is changing and divisible. Effect springs from cause in pairs of opposite effects - such as male and female, hot and cold, compression and expansion or positive and negative. These effects are wave levers of changing motion which swing upon their unchanging fulcrums.

The universal fulcrum of creation cannot be divided, but it can be extended into pairs of opposite unbalance effects which can void their unbalances in each other, but the fulcrum of CAUSE is as indivisible as it is unchanging.

[...] Stillness has no opposite, not has comfort, nor balance. Stillness belongs to the unchanging universe of the spirit, which is vibrationless.

[Walter Russell]
The Message of the Divine Iliad, Vol. II, p. 80




The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal govenor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident;

and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction sure to follow.

[Alfred Russel Wallace]
'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type', Darwin, A Norton Critical Edition, p. 97



In medical terms, studies have long shown more unequal societies have higher mortality rates than more equal ones.

[Rose Hackman]
'A poor brain is as worthy as a rich brain: psychotherapy faces a privilege problem'
For the nonorganic, noncomplex, say, an object on the table , equilibrium (as traditionally defined) happens in a state of inertia. So for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.

Consider an example used by Kaufman: in your bathtub, a vortex starts forming and will keep going after that. Such type of situation is permanently “far from equilibrium” - and it looks like organisms and dynamic systems exist in such a a state.

For them a state of normalcy requires a certain degree of volatility, randomness, the continuous swapping of information, and stress, which explains the harm they may be subjected to when deprived of volatility. 

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 60




Perhaps the most striking of his complementary color examples is the peculiar afterimage that occurred when Goethe, Germany's most celebrated womanizer, stared too long at a comely serving wench who was standing in the sunlit doorway of a rathskeller (¶52-¶53 of Theory of Colours). 

In the afterimage that appeared when he looked at a dark wall, he saw her emerald bodice turn scarlet, her black hair become luminous, and her pale skin turn dark (Goethe's faded watercolor, right). Though amusing, the anecdote illustrates Goethe's method of finding analogous patterns or phenomena in the experience of desire as itself the expression of deeper life impulses.

Goethe's infers, from the opposing change in the afterimage colors, a "desire" or effort toward compensation, balance or "filling in the blank" that is induced when a strong color stimulus is encountered by the eye in a situation where color is missing (shadow) or has been withdrawn (afterimage). 

[Bruce MacEvoy]
'j.w. von goethe's "zur farbenlehre"'




The capacity for and the duty of protracted gratitude and protracted revenge - both only among one's equals - subtlety in requittal, a refined conception of friendship, a certain need to have enemies (as conduit systems, as it were, for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance - fundamentally so as to be able to be a good friend): all these are typical marks of noble morality which, as previously indicated, is not the morality of modern ideas and is therefore hard to enter into today, also hard to unearth and uncover.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 260




From our Western point of view we speak of a people as vanishing, or a civilization as breaking apart, being overwhelmed by barbarians, or replaced by some other culture. Such descriptions do not seem to work when it comes to the Americas.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Olmecs were not attacked or destroyed from within, neither did the population die out. Rather, The People seem to have made the deliberate choice to lead their lives in a new way. To this end their great statues were first mutilated, then laid in long lines and buried; in addition, fires were lit and pottery broken.

Again and again a similar pattern can be seen within the Americas, as The People apparently decide that the end to a particular cycle had come and they must voluntarily withdraw from the cities and from the alliance that was their former society in order to partake in a new cycle of being.

And so the mystery of the waxing and waning of societies and civilizations in the Americas is tied to the mystery of spirit and time.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.185




Difference in quantity is the essence of force and of the relation of force to force. To dream of two equal forces, even if they are said to be of opposite senses is a coarse and approximate dream, a statistical dream in which the living is submerged but which chemistry dispels.

Nietzsche's reproach to every purely quantitative determination of forces is that it annuls, equalises or compensates for differences in quantity. On the other hand, each time he criticises quality we should take it to mean that qualities are nothing but the corresponding difference in quantity between two forces whose relationship is pre- supposed.

[...] differences in quantity cannot be reduced to equality. Quality is distinct from quantity but only because it is that aspect of quantity that cannot be equalised, that cannot be equalised out in the difference between quantities.

Difference in quantity is therefore, in one sense, the irreducible element of quantity and in another sense the element which is irreducible to quantity itself. Quality is nothing but difference in quantity and corresponds to it each time forces enter into relation.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.43-4




[...] Nietzsche believes that science, in the way it handles quantities always tends to equalise them, to make up for inequalities.

Nietzsche, as critic of science, never invokes the rights of quality against quantity; he invokes the rights of difference in quantity against equality, of inequality against equalisation of quantities [...] What he attacks in science is precisely the scientific mania for seeking balances, the utilitarianism and egalitarianism proper to science.

The attempt to deny differences is a part of the more general enterprise of denying life, depreciating existence and promising it a death ("heat" or otherwise) where the universe sinks into the undifferentiated.

It is in this sense that Nietzsche shows that science is part of the ascetic ideal and serves it in its own way.

But we must also look for the instrument of nihilistic thought in science. The answer is that science, by inclination, understands phenomena in terms of reactive forces and interprets them from this standpoint. Physics is reactive in the same way as biology; things are always seen from the petty side, from the side of reactions. The instrument of nihilistic thought is the triumph of reactive forces.

[...] the mechanist affirmation of the eternal return and its thermodynamic negation have something in common: the conservation of energy which is always interpreted so that quantities of energy not only have a constant sum but also cancel out their differences.

In both cases we pass from a principle of finitude (the constancy of a sum) to a "nihilistic" principle (the cancelling out of differences in quantities, the sum of which is constant).

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.45




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Constellating




Order                         -           Chaos
Simple                      -            Complex
Few                           -           Many
Life                           -           Death
Known                      -           Unknown
Complete                   -          Incomplete
Conscious                 -           Unconscious
Light                          -          Dark
Procedural                 -          Creative
Conventional             -          Novel
Data                           -          Information
Literal                        -          Metaphorical
Global                        -          Local




At the centre things are known, the ground is firm. Data points have been firmly connected, woven into enduring stories that are continually repeated. Procedures are accepted and followed without question. Code is run, not created. In the centre we accept what is known and we help it endure by repeating the requisite forms and patterns.

The periphery edges onto an infinite roiling sea of chaos. We are confronted by an infinity of unconnected points, units, data. At the periphery our role is creative - we must make connections, join dots, weave parts into wholes. We create new stories, and if they are good enough, useful enough, then these stories may one day become embedded at the centre.





Dreams, religious experience, art, love - these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind.

Of these four, art enjoyed the special role of fusing different "levels of mind" together:

there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely schematic and transparent.

Discussing a Balinese painting that at the most immediate level shows a cremation procession, but can also be read as a phallic symbol (the tall cremation tower in the centre has an elephant on each side at the base) or as an account of Balinese social organisation (the etiquette and gaiety of the funeral crowd smoothing the turbulence of grief), Bateson remarks that the painting is profound because not "really" about one or the other, or even all three, but about their connectedness. "In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata."

Similarly, a novel whose characters develop in a mutually defining play of identities, each changing in response to the others, expressing together a collective ethos of which none is fully representative - one thinks of the Karamazov brothers and their appalling father - undermines the notion that anyone can grasp the overall pattern of which they are a part.

So, quite apart from any political content, narrative can induce a contemplative respect for the mysterious interconnectedness of the world, something that, hopefully, might lead to more cautious behaviour and a little less enthusiasm for dramatic intervention.

[Tim Parks]
Everything is connected, article about Gregory Bateson published in The Guardian. Can be found here.




The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them.

Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. 

Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb] 
The Black Swan
 


Such is the power of the Narrative Fallacy — the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernable cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past.

[...] there is a deep biological basis to the problem: we are inundated with so much sensory information that our brains have no other choice; we must put things in order so we can process the world around us. It’s implicit in how we understand the world. 

What might we be missing?

It is very difficult to understand cause-and-effect chains, and this is a simple example compared to a complex case like a war or an economic crisis, which would have had multiple causes working in a variety of directions and enough red herrings to make a proper analysis difficult.

Stories of how businesses rise and fall strike a chord with readers by offering what the human mind needs: a simple message of triumph and failure that identifies clear causes and ignores the determinative power of luck and the inevitability of regression.

'The Narrative Fallacy and What You Can Do About It'



Simple facts are meaningless out of some context. [They] tell us nothing intrinsically useful, and we always need to weave them in some kind of story to make sense of them. 

There can be good stories and bad stories, valid stories and invalid stories, stories we like and stories we dislike, and there is certainly a hyuge market in the political world for spinning simple facts into ridiculous stories that satisfy agendas. Even physics is a way of wrapping physical observations into sophisticated mathematical stories about the behavior of materials. 

One can have a fallacious narrative, but one must have a narrative of some sort to make reasoning possible.

[Ted Wrigley]
'What is the narrative fallacy?'






Another important characteristic of perception is the tendency towards closure, that is, towards identifying a comprehensible figure.

Provided data, we will instinctively try to make meaning of it or to create some sense of understanding or familiarity. 

A circle of unconnected dots, for example, will become a complete, bounded image when the perceiver mentally fills in the gaps.

[Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'





The ability to make or spot analogies has long been of interest to people who try to judge intelligence. Candidates for graduate work in certain fields, for instance, must take an exam called the Miller Analogies Test, which contains multiple-choice questions such as the following:

Lion is to Pride as Horse is to:

Vanity
Herd
Corral

In making an analogy, we apply a concept learned in one context to another one. Such a mental operation is in itself mindful. Architects who can see how one setting, say, a hospital, resembles another, say, a hotel, can come up with designs more responsive to complex needs.

Intentionally mixing metaphors with an eye toward finding similarities can spark new insights. Comparing people, businesses, and religions, across and within categories, for example, can lead to a greater understanding of both sides of the comparison.

Jean Piaget wrote that his work on the child's conception of time, motion, and speed was inspired by Albert Einstein's work in the domain of physics and relativity. According to the physicist Gerald Horton, one of Einstein's many contributions was to generate ideas that lent themselves to "further adaptation and transformation in the imagination of similarly exalted spirits who live on the other side of disciplinary boundaries."

This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.130, 131




The Principle of Correspondence

This principle embodies the truth that there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life. The old Hermetic axiom ran in these words: "As above, so below; as below, so above."

The Kybalion, Chapter 2: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"




On the same great agility and power of transmission of their brains depends precisely the fact that, with them, every thought so readily evokes all those that are analogous or related to it.

In this way the similarities, analogies, and relations of things in general come so rapidly and readily into their minds, that the same occasion that millions of ordinary people had before them brings them to the thought, to the discovery.

Other men are subsequently surprised at not having made the discovery, because they are certainly able to think afterwards, but not before.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.29




We chose to know more about less and less. We may have expanded what we as a society know - but it was at the price of no single individual being able to truly know it all.

Now we obviously require specialized experts (as opposed to dilettantes) to solve specific problems [...] Even though the information storage capacity in our brains is vast, we eventually bump up against what we can truly understand - or we just can’t hold all the relevant knowledge in our heads.

[...] machines can help, acting as partners in generalism [...] 

As knowledge grows, we must increasingly rely on computers. This is not a new insight; in 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote the seminal “As We May Think” essay in The Atlantic describing the need for a machine:

But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. 

The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial…

The difficulty seems to be… not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.  

The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

The problem of hidden knowledge continues to grow. And now we have the Internet, and search, and big data which both surface, and hide, knowledge. As a way of addressing this problem of growing knowledge, Bush proposed a “memex” device, a type of rudimentary web browser.

[Samuel Arbesman]
Let’s Bring The Polymath — and the Dabblers — Back 





I have my own problems with 'hidden knowledge'.

Take my music collection. Because it has become so easy to amass large quantities of music I now have a (digital) record collection that extends beyond my ability to interact with it effectively. I find myself having to come up with 'ways in' to it; methods by which I can access those songs that otherwise will never get played. These include playlists, shuffle mode, and limiting my access through arbitrarily defined boundaries (such as only playing artists that begin with the letter 'A'). It is too big; too complex.

This blog offers another example. As I write, there are a total of 526 posts on foreverbecoming. I do my best to link posts up to one another; and in so doing create threads - or constellations - that make (to my mind) greater sense out of the information.

These threads act in much the same way as a playlist in itunes. By linking things up - gathering separate elements together to make larger wholes - we create a higher, more abstract layer on top of that which already exists. I see this as akin to building a pyramid, where every subsequent layer of blocks gets larger and fewer in number.

It culminates in a single block at the top - the capstone - which is akin to a universal binding truth (such as the golden rule, "harm no one, help others as much as you can"). A true capstone is something that can in some way encapsulate everything beneath it, albeit in a very general way. It contains no details. I'm not sure what the capstone of foreverbecoming is, although I think the golden rule is as good as any. Maybe it is something like "L O V E."

The process of linking posts to each other is very similar to the process of creating constellations. It is also similar to a dot-the-dot puzzle, albeit one with many dots and no numbers. Essentially, I am using specifics to get at generalities. Every star is a picture - a constellation - in itself; but by joining stars to one another we gain access to a new level of understanding.

But inevitably posts get lost. Many of the posts on this blog will have no "Related posts:-" They are 'hidden knowledge', lost until they can be weaved into a bigger picture. They are like those towns and villages that haven't yet been linked up to the arteries of the modern world; those that aren't near a motorway, and don't have a train station. They get no traffic, and have terrible hit-counts. Advertisers go nowhere near them.

Looked at from that angle, perhaps they would prefer to stay hidden after all ...

 



This is artificial general intelligence (AGI), with the emphasis on “general”. In his vision of the future, super-smart machines will work in tandem with human experts to potentially solve anything.

“Cancer, climate change, energy, genomics, macroeconomics, financial systems, physics: many of the systems we would like to master are getting so complex,” he argues.

“There’s such an information overload that it’s becoming difficult for even the smartest humans to master it in their lifetimes. How do we sift through this deluge of data to find the right insights? 

One way of thinking of AGI is as a process that will automatically convert unstructured information into actionable knowledge. What we’re working on is potentially a meta-solution to any problem.”

[Demis Hassabis]
The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?




When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere diversion. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. 

When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. “Well, I don't know' you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set - or, shall we say, a tool-box - of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange land without any signs of civilisation, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind. Nothing has any meaning to him; nothing can hold his vital interest; he has no means of making anything intelligible to himself. 

All traditional philosophy is an attempt to create an orderly system of ideas by which to live and to interpret the world. 

‘Philosophy as the Greeks conceived it,' writes Professor Kuhn, 'is one single effort of the human mind to interpret the system of signs and so to relate man to the world as a comprehensive order within which a place is assigned to him.' 

The classical-Christian culture of the late Middle Ages supplied man with a very complete and astonishingly coherent interpretation of signs, i.e. a system of vital ideas giving a most detailed picture of man, the universe, and man's place in the universe. This system, however, has been shattered and fragmented, and the result is bewilderment and estrangement […]

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. Even the greatest ideas of science are nothing more than working hypotheses, useful for purposes of special research but completely inapplicable to the conduct of our lives or the interpretation of the world. 

If, therefore, a man seeks education because he feels estranged and bewildered, because his life seems to him empty and meaningless, he cannot get what he is seeking by studying any of the natural sciences, i.e. by acquiring ‘know-how'. That study has its own value which I am not inclined to belittle; it tells him a great deal about how things work in nature or in engineering: but it tells him nothing about the meaning of life and can in no way cure his estrangement and secret despair.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Small is Beautiful, p.68-9, 71





Fresh analogies allow all of us, not just jurors and judges, to understand, if not quite sympathize with, different contexts and experiences. 

If grounded in the particular and concrete, unfamiliar analogies also allow us to see connections among things ordinarily conceived as different. Unexpected analogies, especially those making connections across contexts, "scrape off barnacles of thought" and "challenge views so settled that they are not thought to be views" (Minow 1987, 87). Metaphors can make an obvious contribution to this process because metaphors are like compasses: one leg is anchored in the familiar, the other free to float and connect with the unfamiliar (Hayles 1990). 

In each of these cases the purpose of using concrete imagery and metaphors is to induce the explainer or interpreter to "see it fresh" by recognizing that criteria used to identify "similar" and "different” reflect the particular shared experience from which they are formulated. 

Metaphors and analogies become specially necessary when explainer and explained do not share a common tradition. Far from abstracting from context, the aim of vivid, detailed narrative is precisely to bring the background of a forum - its context - to the fore and make it the issue being explored.

Once we recognize the astronomical multidimensionality of human experience and the context-dependence of dynamical self-organization, we can use vivid detail and fresh analogies to explain action. Doing so highlights the complexity of human behavior instead of abstracting it away to simplicity.

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p.239




The orderly context in which the components are unified and embedded constrains them. Constraints are therefore relational properties that parts acquire in virtue of being unified - not just aggregated - into a systematic whole.

For example, the physical link between the tibia and the peronei on the one hand and the knee joint on the other systematically constrains the movement of the lower leg [...] In this example, a constraint represents a contraction of the lower leg's potential range of behavior: the lower leg has less freedom of movement, given its connection with the knee, than it would have otherwise. Limiting or closing off alternatives is the most common understanding of the term "constraint."

But if all constraints restricted a thing's degrees of freedom in this way, organisms (whether phylogenetically or developmentally) would progressively do less and less. However, precisely the opposite is empirically observed. 

Some constraints must therefore not only reduce the number of alternatives: they must simultaneously create new possibilities. 

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p.133



Within the category delineated by turlku there are, of course, more precise words for different kinds of objects, but Pintupi usage emphasizes the underlying commonality of the referents as manifestations of a story, The Dreaming.

This view expresses a fundamental feature of Western Desert thought [...]: Sacred objects, country, or songs become the embodiment of events, of activity that has, in a sense, turned into these objects.

Second, Pintupi mythology consists mainly of narratives of beings traveling from place to place. Consequently, all the places visited may be part of one larger story or myth. Each place is discrete and separate, but also is part of a continuous series of places linked by the one story.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.59




Human memory is a narrative, an account; forgetting forms a necessary component. In contrast, digital memory is a matter of seamless addition and accumulation. Stored data admit counting, but they cannot be recounted.

Storage and retrieval are fundamentally different from remembering, which is a narrative process.

Likewise, autobiography constitutes a narrative: it is memorial writing. A timeline, on the other hand, recounts nothing. It simply enumerates and adds up events or information.

Memory constitutes a dynamic, living process; here, different levels of time intersect and influence each other. Memory is subject to constant rewriting and rearrangement […] the past - as something that remains self- identical and is always to be retrieved in the same form - does not exist.

Digital memory consists of indifferent - as it were, undead - points of presence. It lacks the extended horizon constituting the temporality of the living. This means that digitalized life lacks animacy. Digital temporality belongs to the undead.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.67-8




Big Data opens up the prospect of absolute knowledge. Everything can be measured and quantified; the things of the world reveal correlations that were previously hidden. Even human behaviour is supposed to admit exact prediction. A new age of insight is being announced.

Correlations are replacing causality. That's-how-it-is stands where How so? once wavered. The data-driven quantification of reality is driving Spirit from the realm of knowledge.

A strong correlation between A and B means that if A changes, a change also occurs in B. But when a correlation holds - however strong it may be - one still does not know why this is the case. It just is that way. Correlation represents a relation of probability, not of necessity. It declares: A often occurs together with B. That is the difference between correlation and causation, which is distinguished by necessity: A causes B.

But causality does not stand at the highest level of knowledge. Reciprocity represents a more complex relation than causal relation. It declares: A and B condition each other mutually.

The concept is the higher context surrounding A and B, which provides the foundation for the relationship between A and B. Thus, A and B stand as 'moments of a third, higher [whole]'. Knowledge becomes possible only at the level of the Concept […] Only from the all-comprehending Concept C is complete comprehension of the correlation between A and B possible.

In contrast, Big Data affords only extremely rudimentary knowledge, that is, correlations in which nothing is comprehended. Big Data lacks comprehension - it lacks the Concept - and thus it lacks Spirit. The absolute knowledge intimated by Big Data coincides with absolute ignorance.

The Concept is a unity that in-cludes and com-prises the elements of the whole that it is. It takes the form of a conclusion in which everything is comprised and comprehended. 'Everything is a syllogism' means 'Everything is a concept."

Absolute knowledge is an absolute syllogism: everything takes conclusive form within it.

The 'definition of the Absolute' is 'that it is the syllogism' - i.e., the conclusion. But constant addition yields no conclusion, no syllogism, no 'putting-together'. Syllogism is not addition, but narration. The absolute con-clusion ex-cludes any further addition. As narration, syllogism represents the opposite of addition. Big Data is purely additive; it never comes to an end, to a conclusion.

In contrast to the correlations and additions that Big Data generates, theoretical thinking represents a narrative form of knowledge.

Ultimately, the 'end of theory' that Chris Anderson has trumpeted means taking leave of Spirit. Big Data makes Spirit - that is, thinking and thought - wither and die. Human science - Geisteswissenschaft - that is purely data-driven is, in fact, no longer human; it has no Geist, or Spirit.

Totalized data-knowledge amounts to absolute ignorance: the absolute zero of Spirit.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.68-70




The asymmetry of linguistic relationships is also a precondition for the development of metaphor. To say that A is a B (he is a pig) does not imply that B is an A. However, most terms are primarily constituted by their relationships to their immediate neighbours (‘red’ by its relationships to ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘green’ ‘purple’, etc.).

Long-range interactions are mediated by intermediaries, often resulting in metaphors.

When the metaphor has become fixed, it means that the network has altered its structure to such an extent that the words have become neighbours (in the sense of network topology).

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.124




[Mary Hesse] argues that metaphor is a ‘fundamental form of language, and prior (historically and logically) to the literal.’

An emphasis on metaphor and analogical reasoning shifts the focus of the philosophy of science from deductive reasoning to the problems of categorisation and clustering.

Using Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances, she argues that we gain cognitive knowledge not by exhaustively calculating all the logical relations at stake in a particular instance, but rather by finding enough analogies to place this instance relative to others we are already happy with. Clustering together things with related characteristics is of course exactly what a self-organising neural network does.

Although Hesse does not explicitly use connectionist terms, she does work with the concept of a ‘resemblance network’, and many of the points she makes are commensurable with a connectionist model of complexity. That much is clear from her advocation of a moderate scientific realism, of knowledge that ‘turns out to be particular rather than general, local rather than universal, approximate rather than exact, immediately describable and verifiable rather than theoretically deep and reductive.’

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.131



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