[FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[Robert Wall]

>
> Anyway, so I disagree with the idea that society, as a group, can't be "in
> the zone". But I believe that the thoughts inside the members of the
> society are not really _shared_ thoughts. The societal groove does not
> depend on isomorphic relationships between the insides of the members'
> heads. (holography again) And the extent to which individuals' grooves map
> to societal grooves is unclear (and probably complex).


I did get your email, and my takeaway of what you said seems to be
summarized in your concluding paragraph above from that post.  Then, to be
constructive at seeking understanding, couple that with the quote I used to
introduce my last post and perhaps we can examine where there is a better
meeting of the minds on the topic of* being in the groove* at the level of
a society.

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.


The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in,
say the way an individual in that group would, does *not *imply that the
"symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align
or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this.
And I don't think that I disagreed.  Our symbolic references are only how
we have objectified the world since birth.  Even if aligned--highly
unlikely--we have individual free will and intentionality to determine out
behavior.  This can explain how folks sometimes come across knowing how to
appear moral and how to game morality at the same time toward less moral
goals. The Pope recently implied it is better to be an atheist than a a
crappy Christian <http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/>.
I think he was referring to being committed in mind and action. Apparently,
in his view, this doesn't seem to be happening at the level of society as a
whole.

And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act
as if with "one mind" and even benevolently.  Market-oriented co-ops are
such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with
Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged
enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure.  My
company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was
eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred
organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what
the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate
behavior.  Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots,
it was enything but a co-operative.  It was a vehicle to enrich the
corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have
been derailed here about what we each mean concerning *being in the zone*"
at a level of society.  And I fault myself for this in joining the
underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the
distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole."  I will use
market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit
more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country
[e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme:
"a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been
forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest
being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics.  What have been
the results?

Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and
I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal
Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven
coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism?  First off, I am
exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good
for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an
egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such
direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at
Standing Rock.  But, what happened?  The pipe got laid anyway and the
planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I
think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give
the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so
pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

What this comes down to is this. To be *in the zone* at the level of a
society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an
individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an
Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of
symbolic references.  Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the
thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise.
What we would expect instead is the *supersession* of our language-based
symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ...
something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society
[and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see
this as being not only possible, but not evident.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that being in the zone seems to occur when an
individual has both great skill and great challenge in a particular area.
When Flow happens, it is when the Self tends to evaporate from
consciousness and there is only the task. The individual is said to be
empathically connected with [in love with] the work: artist of all stripes
"feel" this.  Therefore, I say that this *cannot *happen at the level of a
society as a whole when the majority of individuals are only trying to game
the other players in that society.

We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede
the animal. Nietzsche was not hopeful.  Begson was, sort of, and says this
will be eventually possible when we--presumably as a species--evolve to a
level where the Intuitive matches the Intellect in dominance.

I hope that this is a bit more clear, but to address you question directly
now, I am not in disagreement with you--never was--but also I stand firm on
what I meant, with which you said you are dubious. But maybe that was a
matter of talking past one another.  A language-based phenomenon.
*Intent *distinguishes
the phenomena of *being in the zone*.   *Scale *distinguishes the level of
its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to
do with the kind of* being in the zone* to which I was referring. It's kind
of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book *The Inner
Game of Tennis*.  Thinking is gone.


On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:13 PM, glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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