[FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[glen ☣]

Perhaps you did not see my previous response where I outlined what I think exhibit societal states (yes, at the societal layer, as a whole) of being in the zone.  If so, could you explain whether you agree or disagree that those are examples of what you discuss below?  If you didn't get the email, which happens to me often enough, the response is here:

  http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2017-February/048807.html

To be clear, my refutation of the claim that low-D spaces are similar because high-D space are similar was not intended as a referent for your society in the zone as a whole.  But I did proffer the examples listed above (e.g. stigmergy) as referents.

And when you say "/complicated spaces/ presumed to be the imperfectly shared sets of symbolic references we would call worldviews", that is definitely not tantamount to the same as what I said.  My refutation was about the _presumption_.  The assertion is if P then Q, where P = lowD spaces are similar and Q = highD spaces are similar.  I'm not really trying to say anything other than not(P=>Q).  If the complicated internal spaces of people do match up or are shared in some way, then we need a different way of showing that they are shared (perhaps fMRI?).

And to be clear that we're still on topic, whether or not the fractality of birds' songs is or can be related to the fractality of their landscapes is a question about the soundness of P=>Q and how/whether the similarity of bird brains can be established.


On 02/24/2017 10:45 AM, Robert Wall wrote:
>     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.
> 
> 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.  😴


-- 
☣ glen