[FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Robert Wall]

>
> It's a mistake to infer that the complicated spaces (the deluded people's
> minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just because their projections
> (the things they say and do) are the same.


Yeah, and that is not the same as what I meant for a society being *in the
zone* as a whole, though Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does initiate his talk
with examples of a kind of mass hysteria brought about by cataclysmic
events when introducing a topic he calls the Optimal Experience.
Presumably, he used mass hysteria for contrast, but I think clumsily
because he doesn't relate an Optimal Experience at the level of society.
The examples of folks who demonstrate the phenomenon he is relating are
individuals like Albert Einstein.  So what is he talking about?  What am I
talking about?  What are y' all talking about?  The symbols seem the same,
but we seem to be talking past one another. It happens ...

Trying to be a bit clearer here and not at all retaliating with any
backhand strike😊, the idea I am nudging forth is one that seems to be rare
even among individuals, nevermind societies. We recognize its occurrence in
the works of others we often describe as geniuses, but that may belie its
true rate of occurrence. It is metaphorically called "Flow."  It's a *positive
*effect and not a hysterical one, which perhaps is the opposite of the
"flow" that Vladimyr describes through historical accounts. I see Flow as
the place to find wisdom, understanding, craft, art, poetry ... not
mayhem.  In his essay *The Question Concerning Technology*, Martin
Heidegger effectively sees Flow as the way to save us from what he calls
technological enframement ... the ultimate sociological delivery system of
debilitating symbolic references. [not saying technology is bad, but that
enframement is a danger].

In a recent discussion about Henri Bergson, the preeminent French
philosopher of the early twentieth century, I came to dwell on some writing
about Bergson's comparing intuition to intellect:

Science promises us well-being, or, at the most, pleasure, but philosophy,
through the Intuition to which it leads us, is capable of bestowing upon us
Joy. The future belongs to such an intuitive philosophy, Bergson holds, for
he considers that the whole progress of Evolution is towards the creation
of a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence.
Finally, by Intuition we shall find ourselves in—to invent a
word—"intunation" with the *élan vital*, with the Evolution of the whole
universe, and this absolute feeling of "at- one-ment" with the universe
will result in that emotional synthesis which is deep Joy, which Wordsworth
* [* *Lines "composed above Tintern Abbey, 1798.**]* describes as:

"that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things."

"... a type of being whose Intuition will be equal to his Intelligence."
 This is Heidegger with his *Dasein <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein>*.
Is it also Nietzsche with his *Übermensch*?

Is the problem with societies that they cannot behold the world intuitively
... without symbols? This *may *be impossible even ... because we humans
are led by the rational ... tainted, of course, by self-interest.  The
rational perspective ultimately leads to the conclusion that the universe
is nothing but a bunch of particles, as it has Steven Weinberg. We relate
to each other mostly symbolically.  To relate on an intuitive level, well
that's called empathy, sympathy, understanding, ... love. None of these
properties can be embraced rationally. They are beyond language.

Bergson insists as well, and correctly I think, that we are often misled by
the imprecision of language, something he doesn't trust as getting things
adequately conveyed to others because language is loaded with, well, *symbolic
reference*. And this leads to a "Tower of Babel" phenomenon at the level of
society as manifest in all social media. The quote I used at the beginning
of this post by Glen is tantamount to saying the same thing ... *complicated
spaces* presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references
we would call worldviews.  Islamaphobia, for one, is not a what I would
call an Optimal Experience. Nor does it approach wisdom on any level.

*A parable*: In concert with the roots of this thread--is *being in the
zone* delusional?--Bergsonian view of this situation may see society as
multiple billion organic simulators crawling the planet, who have evolved
far enough to loosely self-organized into tribes and set up a system of
patterned utterances to communicate within tribal sets of other such
simulators. For each simulator, this provides a comforting feeling of not
being alone and so, safe. What emerges, though, is a dependency on the
rule-based axioms [or grammar] that underlie the pattern of utterances and
concepts, and they go about rationalizing everything they come in contact
with in accordance with the ever expanding "knowledgebase."

But they do this at a cost--the proverbial bite from the apple of the Tree
of Knowledge, as it were--because as the world the simulators see now
becomes ever more epistemologically "known," it is also becoming ever more
ontologically meaningless. As this happens, the tribal individual
simulators start to "feel" ever more sociologically alone and unsafe.  Have
we been expelled from the Garden of Eden?

And they begin to wonder about the meaning of it all.  And in Self-defense,
they start to turn to surreal, other-world symbols to help them to *rationalize
*their current state of unhappiness. But, others, more reflective among
them, who have been contemplating this phenomenology--philosophers--are
saying things like "What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his
irrefutable errors." "There are no facts, only interpretations."  "Every
word is a prejudice."  "The most thought-provoking thing in our
thought-provoking time is that we are still not *thinking*."  It's
disturbing ...  What are we missing?!  What was the true cost of this
"emergence," which took root at the same time that language and, perhaps,
intellect and civilization did?

Perhaps, the individual simulators have been *deluded *into thinking that
their worldview is real, immutable, ... and that the everything else in the
world was put there for their exploitation and happiness. They think that
those are just things outside of themselves, objectified things with names
that are wholly unrelated to other things. The only really important thing
is the Self.  Embodied experience. But, is it? ...  And what is really
important at the level of society and how does that thing get
accomplished?  To be sure, it doesn't get accomplished by chaos. It might
happen through *harmony*, but I don't think it will be a harmony of
symbolic references alone ...

This has been a thinker among some of us for some time. It just doesn't
seem resolvable without effective *feedback *at the level of a society.

[image: Inline image 1]  Let's make that great (again?).

And, so, that's why I don't think that society as a whole will likely find
itself *in the zone*.  Now I hope *that's* clear.  😴

Cheers 😎

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 7:52 AM, ┣glen┫ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think I anticipated your backhanded strike. >8^D  I did this with my
> (badly mangled) reference to (and skepticism about) the holographic
> principle ... or behaviorism in psychology ... or hidden markov models ...
> or state space reconstruction methods ... or by any of a huge number of
> other symbols.
>
> A many to one projection from a complicated space to a simple space
> _facilitates_ shared delusion because it makes the complicated things
> _seem_ similar even though they're not.  That is what explains your shared
> delusions like Shazaam.  It's a mistake to infer that the complicated
> spaces (the deluded people's minds/brains/bodies/culture) are the same just
> because their projections (the things they say and do) are the same.
>
> Although you're invocation of Occam's razor seems appropriate, your
> assertion (similarities in the low dimension space are caused by
> similarities in the high dimension space) is not the simplest explanation
> at all.  The simplest explanation is the one identified in that paper about
> the fractal dimension of Rorcshach blots (still on topic!) and that
> identified by Lakoff about Trump's language.  A medium with low dimension
> allows the high dimension participants to "fill in the gaps".
>
>
> On 02/23/2017 06:58 PM, Vladimyr Burachynsky wrote:
> > I think Robert Wall is nudging close to an idea that he failed to
> adequately clarify but you may have nailed it while trying to deny it (this
> I call a backhanded strike). Last week there was a strange article about
> groups of people having the same memory that have no contact with each
> other. That shared memory was in fact  demonstrably false. It was regarding
> a misperceived memory of a TV show called Shazaam and some comedian called
> Sinbad... My mind retains utter garbage sometimes.
> >
> > I never saw it but then it never actually happened. The investigators
> explained that so many of the false memory components overlapped reality
> > that the subjects truly believed some occurrence that was categorically
> disproved. So a society may well share memories of fictional events and act
> on delusions ie mobs.
>
> --
> ␦glen?
>
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