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Corollary file pg1 (pg2 coming soon)[Directory] Unsorted
read more for the relationship
between the corollary generator concept and 19th century "idealism"
see first chapter of the Ant and the Peacock ________ Indeed it does. Here's the beginning of a Fibonacci sequence: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144... Now let's take this
out of the mystic realm of religion, numerology, superstition and back
to science. We know mathaematical patterns underlie the unfolding of
this universe. Fibonnacci's series shows up in numerous plants which
develop in the spiral pattern dictated by the numbers above and their
extensions (corollaries generated from a simple axiomatic question;
Why math reflects
the unverse's structure, we don't know, but much of science is based
on the by now trustworthy fact that it does. hb There is a Fibonacci Society, headed by a priest, who regard the Fibonacci numbers as evidence of divine planning. >> As an atheist, gods don't seem like very useful explanations. But there is numerical inherency in everything we look it. No matter what it is, fractals, algebra, geometry, calculus, or some other as-yet-possibly-uninvented math seems to apply. Pythagoras may have done some strange things (Michael Grant, the historian calls the guy "weird," "occultist," "irrational," and just plain "crack-brained"), but he was on to something. Aristotle sums up one Pythagorean view thusly: once a single "eternal" "had been constructed, whether out of planes or of surface or of seed or of elements which they cannot express, immediately the nearest part of the unlimited began to be constrained and limited by the limit." This pretty well sums up corollary generator theory, for which I've not had any takers so far. However the theory says that once a universe has been burped out of Guth's vacuum, the axioms implicit in that vacuum and its burp constrain the new cosmos'* development, which proceeds from that point onward. For reasons we don't know, the system churns onward working out the corollaries of its initial premises. Hence such things as Fibonacci series in nature, and as a physical world best explained by mathematics, since mathematical systems map out the paths or phase spaces implied in the magic beans of a few initial corollaries. If Pythagoras was the total loony Grant seems to think he was, then the current structure of modern physics should be blown away like a sneeze. After all, physics is science's most mathematized discipline. However physics seems to get a heck of a lot of things right. Satellites slingshotted 'round the moon and through the planetary system, follow the trajectories mapped out by formulae pretty precisely. Light curves around a heavenly body just as Einstein's even more incomprehensible equations say it should. Granted, math has frequently not been applied with sufficient wisdom in the social and behavioral sciences to make it work without distorting the empirical facts beyond belief. However just because we are still playing blind man's bluff with statistics and Hamiltonian equations and such in our generation doesn't mean that someone wiser won't get it right some day. Especially as math's tools become more capable of handling complexity. Meanwhile, frequently even Hamiltonianism produces predictions which prove valid, though not as frequently as many of the members of HBES believe. The bottom line comes down to this: there is, as Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Einstein, and Hamilton all either knew or took for granted, a mathematical template underlying this universe. It long precedes biology. Our task it to figure out why it is there. I've proposed corollary generator theory. Any other suggestions? Howard *the word "kosmos"
comes to us courtesy of Pythagoras, as does the word "philosophy."
In a message dated 98?04?24 12:12:44 EDT, dberreby writes: << Subj: the balance of cooperation and competition Date: 98?04?24 12:12:44 EDT From: DB <<The first
task is that of defining and monitoring the continuity of a group.>>
This is the very nub of the gist, as John Cleese says in one Monty Python
routine or other. Hamilton remarks somewhere that the unity we see in
ourselves and in one another is false. Within the skin groups and individual
genes cooperate and compete. OTOH there are the obvious constraints;
we don't all fly apart because our livers decide they're going to try
all living together in one skin. Going up the ladder, groups behave
now like unified organisms, now like scatterings of individuals. If
we're going to take the complex adaptive systems approach then we're
going to have to see the same phenomenon at many different scales. YUP.
ACCORDING TO COROLLARY GENERATOR THEORY, THE UNIVERSE UNFOLDS VERY MUCH
LIKE A FRACTAL PATTERN, REPEATING ITS INITIAL ALGORITHMS, ITS STARTING
AXIOMS, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THE ACCUMULATION OF REPETITIONS FIRST APPEARS
AS A NEW AND HIGHLY COMPLEX FORM BUT EVENTUALLY REVEALS ITS BASIC PATTERN
AT A HIGHER LEVEL OF COMPLEXITY. THIS HYPOTHESIS IS SUPPORTED BY THE
NUMEROUS PARALLELS I KEEP UNEARTHING IN MY WORK ON ESHEL BEN JACOB'S
WORK. THESE LABORS REVEAL IN EVER MORE DETAIL THE PARALLELS BETWEEN
HUMAN AND BACTERIAL GROUP BEHAVIOR. FOR ANOTHER REPETITION OF PATTERN
ON VARIOUS SCALES OF COMPLEXITY, TRY THIS: In the first nanoseconds
of the Big Bang two kinds of forces revealed themselves??attraction
and repulsion. the energy of explosion began a rush apart which hasn't
ended to this day. we ride a former dot of matter hurled outward at
a speed whose unmeasurable momentum is still repelling us away from
other stars and galaxies at breakneck speed as it continues to expand
the universe. That explosion has endowed us with a twelve?billion year?old
repulsive force. Then there are the forces of attraction??those which
pulled together quarks in threesomes to make protons and electrons,
which coupled leptons (electrons) with protons in the circle dance we
know as atoms, which linked atomic shells to produce the minuets we
know as molecules, then sucked masses of these interlocked promenaders
into the swirls we see as galaxies, stars, and even you and me. Physicists
are still debating whether attraction or repulsion will have the final
word. But the fact is, repulsion and attraction are not snarled in a
battle to the death, but in a continuing tango. The success of a society
depends on the dance between its repulsors?? diversity generators??
and its attractors?? conformity enforcers, between its huddle and its
squabble, its elements of competition and of cooperation. THIS APPLIES
TO SOCIETIES AT ALL LEVELS OF COMPLEXITY, FROM BACTERIA ON UP. I suspect the "box of comparison" is fluid in its form. Indeed, I suspect that at the level of mechanism many of these "boxes" dissolve and reform in variable (but bounded) ways as circumstances dictate. They are not just waiting frozen in their form and location. Thus neural elements that form a "template" may vary from time to time, and some of these same elements may participate in other constellations of form and function. They dissolve and reform. hb: sounds about right to me. The literature on central motor patterns ("central pattern generators"), even in invertebrates, suggests circuits that are modulated, dissolving, reforming, and so on. hb: sounds interesting. can you sum some of this up? But, if this is true, one must - in some sense of what we might call a "sub-template" rules - find dynamic trajectories that allow the circuits to reconfigure as needed. So my little scheme simply pushes the problem one step away. If this makes any sense then our challenge is to see how constellations of activity can emerge (then dissolve) in functionally consistent ways: fluid rules of final form (better, final function). hb: aha, an excellent question, a good goal for pursuit--it brings us back to hurricanes. Their patterns are easily recongnized fom the air, yet each is different and constantly changing the details of its form. Some of the major alterations occur as it grows from a bit of wind here and there to an integrated swirl spanning several hundred miles--in other words in its developmental phases. An easy out would be to refer to basins of attraction and let them account for the wild variation around a highly repetitive core form. I wonder if there are more enlightening ways of explaining this wedded opposite of consistency and variation in archetypal patterns? jf: Indeed its the FUNCTION of these circuits that seems to have a reliability. The participating elements that allow this function to function, so to speak, shuffle about by rules that, as far as I know, have thus far defied precise analysis....or even precise conceptualization. At least in my head! hb: more good sense here. jf: The locust does jump or fly. The bat does find its insect. We recognize friend from foe. hb: then there's homology. I've just been watching footage of Madagascar lemurs. Though they're primates, they walk like cats, are cat-sized, groom their fur like cats, etc. How did the hurricane or constellation of cat behaviors descend upon them when they have been evolutionarily isolated for quite some time and are not by any stretch of the imaginaion pusses? How did Australia evolve marsupial equivalents of wolves? Corollary generator theory talks of contrained pathways available because of the handful of axioms from which this universe unfolds. It also speaks of the fractal repetition of the algorithms these axioms represented. But there must be richer forms of explanation as well. By the way, this brings us back to the strange synchroncities in history John Skoyles and I have been batting about--forms which crop up isolated from each other, forms which dance with difference but follow a choreography and music which is, at heart, the same. jf:The behavioral functions work. But UNDERNEATH the circuits that allow this are often variable. Now how do we deal with that? This is not a trivial question. We have fluid forms that are also bounded, and it is here that template and archetype ideas seem to move underground, so to speak. They are like Cheshire cats, there but not there, grinning at us in our ignorance. hb: do you have examples for neural circuitry which we could add to the accumulating catalog? jf: Perhaps I am throwing in an irrelevant concern, one that is indeed off base. I don't think so. I think that the search for behavioral boxes hb: how about thinking bubbles not boxes? A bubble flexes, bends, alters in shape, yet retains a distinct and coherent pattern. jf: is not going to work, at least in the more simple ways of thinking about boxes as unitary, static and localized [cf. earlier discussions on oscillations]. There are dynamic rules that guide our actions, bat actions, and locust actions. There are relative invariances at higher levels, even though the elements (not a great word in itself) shift their form and rules of connectivity in time, with circumstance, etc. Perhaps I have just reached a personal conceptual stumbling block, but I think this is a problem of considerable significance for each of us to struggle with. Am I wrong? [Could be, of course.] hb: nope, you have chosen a good one to chew on--called in the Bloom notes "the stuttering of the hungry forms" jf: I have been sensitized to this in part by the early ethologists use of "instinct", and the linguists use of "innate". Neither allowed for developmental rules, nor for rules of reforming once previous structures had melted away because they were not needed at the moment. I have been further sensitized by the recent literature which makes older "central motor program" concepts appear much too simple, too unitary, and too static. In my own work I have been impressed by how changes in context (surrounding activities) can modify the actions of animals, and their reactions to extrinsic events. And so on. hb: aha, more worthwhile stuff. can you tell a few stories from your experience? hb: I'm very intrigued to see if Harry has a mathematical model which can handle this form stuff. It's a Himalaya awaiting conquest, but one whose time, I think has come. Howard ------------------------------
<< <FONT
COLOR="#000000" SIZE=3> Combine Kelly's beginning of speciation via behavior with Joe Daniel's leopard frogs separating gradually and eventually you can get to speciation from a genetically heterogenous but behaviorally sort of homogenous population. Two qualifiers: because the group formation process behind this budding or group splitting involves assortative mating along behavioral lines, it also involves a certain amount of genetic similarity, but not that of brothers and sisters; within a population marked off by homogeneous badges of difference??physical and behavioral??there are wide behavioral differences...these, in fact, are vital to the survival of the group. Wheels within wheels, as Ezekiel said. Or in this case, diversity generators within conformity enforcers within diversity generators within conformity enforcers and so on and so forth. Or, to put it in De Landa's terms, meshworks within hierarchies, hierarchies of meshworks, meshworks within the upper?level hierarchies, etc. Which brings us back to the fractal nature of the universe??simple algorithms repeating themselves over and over and over. Howard P.S. Even cloned bacteria differentiate morphologically and behaviorally within the structure of a colony. -------------------------- Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. John Maynard Smith gives an excellent description of the leopard frog situation in his book, "The theory of evolution," on pages 236?237 of the third edition, circa 1975. He mentions that an individual named Moore did the work on it but failed to provide the original reference. I found that same situation everywhere I looked, which is why I haven't gotten back to you before now. Everyplace I looked was a secondary reference, albeit by very reliable people, but no primary source. Sorry about that. There are many examples of this sort of thing, however. The textbook, "Evolution," by Mark Ripley (1993, Blackwell Publishing) gives a good example involving some European crows. You might also try 'Molecular markers, natural history and evolution' (J.C. Avise 1994) and 'Biology of amphibians' (1994) by W.E. Duellman et al. These books should give you plenty of examples of hybrid zones, subspecies, superspecies, clines, and an interesting situation of ring species. Hope this helps. Joe Daniel John and David??This
is eerily close to the concept of classification Joe Daniel was implying
with his leopard frog example. He showed us a continuum of minor alterations
of leopard frogs from one end of the U.S. to the other leading to extreme
poles. The frogs along the line somewhere could be mated. Those at polar
opposite ends of the continuum could not be mated to produce fertile
offspring and thus had passed a mysterious phase shift point into speciation.
Meaning that in at least one natural instance, a certain number of jumps
of n from a starting point DOES lead to more than a mere arbitrary change
of state. It produces a kind of irreversible biological transition.
Which is very much what you'd expect from a non?linear universe operating
through processes similar to fractal unfolding. In other words, an accumulation
of iterations eventually leads to a phase shift??the emergence of a
new form, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call a new part made up
of and existing in addition to the agglomeration of previously existing
parts. Howard Edward O. Wilson's latest book is reviewed in the current issue of American Scientist. The review can be found at http://www.amsci.org/amsci/bookshelf/Leads98/gillispie.html or see the following. Scott G. Beach gigantea American Scientist, May?June 1998 E. O. Wilson's Consilience: A Noble Unifying Vision, Grandly Expressed Charles C. Gillispie Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Edward O. Wilson. 322 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. $26. Like his hero Francis Bacon, Edward O. Wilson here takes all knowledge for his province and composes an eloquent summons to the reform of learning. He draws the arresting word ôconsilienceö from WhewellÆs usage in Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, where it has the sense of the accordance of two or more lines of induction drawn from different sets of phenomena. Knowledge, Wilson argues, is one at bottom. Science consists of strictly causal explanations of empirically established laws. Investigation encounters no fundamental boundary between the history of the physical universe and of humanity, nor between science and the humanities. The goal of consilience is to achieve progressive unification of all strands of knowledge in service to the indefinite betterment of the human condition. This is a noble vision. Wilson sees its origin in the Ionian Greek belief that the cosmos is an orderly whole running by laws discoverable in thought. His own inspiration is the commitment of the 18th?century Enlightenment to enlisting secular knowledge in the advancement of human welfare and rights. What opened the prospect for modernity was the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The success of science in Europe then, and thereafter throughout the world, was owing to the fortunate concatenation of three features in the capacity of fine minds: insatiable curiosity, the power of abstraction, mathematical reasoning applied to natural phenomena. All phenomena, finally, are reducible to laws of physics that transcend cultural differences.Put baldly, this sounds like arid monistic materialism. Wilson does not put it baldly. He brings to his subject a disarming mixture of personal modesty and intellectual rigor. His reading is wide and his learning extensive. He writes as well of arts and letters as he does of science. It is difficult to think of a finer evocation of Milton's genius than WilsonÆs passage on SatanÆs invasion of the garden of Eden. There is no question in his mind but that conveying the essence of truth and beauty pertains to the arts. The part of science is only to explain the possibility. C. P. SnowÆs division between the two cultures is better envisioned as a little?known terrain to be explored with good will from both sides. Wilson attributes the failure of the Enlightenment to carry the day to inattention to emotion and inability to establish secular grounds for ethics. He understands the turn toward Romanticism and admires the sensibility of a Goethe, who, bad though his science was, filled the void of feeling. Equally tolerant of religious fundamentalists, among whom he was brought up, Wilson expresses personal empathy for their aversion to an evolutionary theory that has, however, become the only credible mode of understanding living nature. He even suggests that the blackest of his bÙtes?noires, such theorists of postmodernism as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, whom he has read carefully, may have inadvertently performed science a service by forcing it to defend itself in a cultural debate. He admits, finally, that the argument for a scientifically based explanation of society and culture may be wrong ?? although if so, or if it is right and not put into effect, he sees no way out of the abyss into which unthinking plundering of our habitat is plunging us. Wilson would now extend the reach of Darwinian evolutionary theory beyond the problem of explaining altruism, the centerpiece of his Sociobiology (1975). It here embraces all phenomena of culture and behavior. The bridge is a genetic account of the brain, the physical locus of the operations of mind and hence the seat of knowledge. For me at least, quite ignorant until now of the work he adduces in neurophysiology and cognitive psychology, this subject is the most fascinating in a generally engrossing book. Evolution of the brain occurred over the three million years between our simian ancestors and the advent of Homo sapiens about a million years ago. The strangest feature of the process is that the capacity of the brain should far exceed the needs of mere survival. A further curiosity is that, once the brain was fully formed, the enormous differentiation of cultures occupied mere millennia, while only the twinkling of an evolutionary eye separates us from the earliest records of any civilization. The time is orders of magnitude too brief for genetic evolution alone to have been the operative factor. The structure of the brain is determined by more than 3,000 of the 50,000 to 100,000 genes composing the human genome. The mind is the brain at work, and culture is the creation of manifold individual minds composing a civilization wherein the legacy is handed on from one generation to the next. Genes and cultures must be linked, as are the distant genetic history of the species and the recent cultural evolution of humanity. The great puzzle is how these complexes were, and are still, connected. As a start toward resolving it, Wilson adduces the notion of gene?cultural coevolution. Among paleolithic peoples, the genes imprinted upon individual minds certain pathways for mental development, certain epigenetic rules which, taken together, compose the complex that is human nature. Examples are the nearly universal human fear of snakes, the general taboo on incest and the transcultural uniformity of facial expressions. At this early stage in the evolution of humanity, these traits and others like them had obvious survival value while the individuals not so endowed were penalized and left an ever?diminishing posterity. The genes prescribing such rules thus spread throughout the species. Different peoples incorporated them into myth or religious prescription in accordance with local circumstance and behaved accordingly. Cultural norms, for their part, are passed on through generations, some proving more adaptive than others. Cultural evolution has been far speedier than was its background, or than is the accompanying genetic evolution. Nevertheless, the linkage is unbreakable. The right?hand side of the gene?culture hyphenation is never independent of the left, and the two are driven by the same law. The difficulty with the social sciences, and notably with anthropology, sociology and economics, is that their adepts proceed as if tribal activity, social organization and economic exchange are entirely governed by their respective sets of rules. Wilson admires the great scholars who formed those disciplines. His account of their findings is sympathetic and interesting. Economics in particular has all the trappings of a scientific discipline, including regular recourse to mathematical modeling. But kinship patterns on the one hand and the functioning of the market on the other are solipsistic systems. Only when explanation of cultural and economic behaviors is carried back, largely by way of cognitive psychology, to their causal basis in biology will an analysis be scientific. The false boundary separating the social from the natural sciences will then be exorcised. All roads to the truth will be scientific. Evocation of the meaning and quality of life and experience will continue to be the province of the arts, their appreciation enhanced by an informed criticism newly aware of the cultural and genetic basis. The choice between a transcendental and an empirical foundation for ethics will vanish, leaving only the latter, while religion will be a vehicle for incorporating the highest values of humanity in the poetic form of myths consistent with reality. This is a grand prophecy beautifully expressed. I can only hope that it comes to pass. Historian though I am, I share the authorÆs predilection for both the Enlightenment and science and his distaste for postmodernism, a term that has all the appeal but none of the clarity of posthumous. Still, one has certain reservations. WilsonÆs most unsatisfactory discussion may be his attempt to rescue free will from the overall determinism of biological necessity. In his perception, our sense of making choices for which we are responsible is an adaptive illusion depending on our inevitable ignorance of the totality of material factors involved. More generally, an air of reverse Panglossianism hangs about the overarching competence of natural selection. To ordinary good sense, the proposition that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is no more persuasive when it is adduced as an outcome than it was when derived from LeibnizÆs principle of pre?established harmony. Its rejection by WilsonÆs favorite philosophes, Voltaire at their head, opened the program he would complete of enlisting science in improvement of the world. For them the nascent social sciences were to be the instruments, as in a scientifically based form they are to be for him. Is that realistic? The stretch between the examples he cites of epigenetically determined behaviors and the complexities of contemporary society seems inordinate. Can we expect it to be narrowed anytime soon to the degree that will admit of developing socioeconomic programs cogently constructed on biological underpinnings? Can we really suppose that, having understood the full range of natural selection, humanity is about to outlive the process that has produced us and engineer its future by manipulation of the genome? Wilson himself cites the spectre of eugenics as a warning of what may go wrong. He also alludes in several passages to the problem of complexity as the greatest challenge facing all science. One has the impression that even in physics it is being met by the search for intermediate levels of explanation that may be put into effect in appropriate applications. How much more is that likely to be true, say, of economics. One would not wish, and Wilson does not wish, the Federal Reserve Board to be denied the guidance of monetary theory until its consilience with natural selection can be demonstrated. To my way of thinking, the weakest feature of WilsonÆs splendid essay is (what was not true of Bacon) the lack of any political dimension. His theory of scientific knowledge is exclusively intellectual. With respect to cognitive aspects, that is, I agree, entirely correct. Wilson gets it exactly right when he dismisses the so?called sociological strong program that would politicize and socialize the content of science. Nevertheless, science is anything but apolitical in its application, practice and very possibility. What else but politics decided the fate of the Superconducting Supercollider, which might indeed have fortified the laws of physics? More to the immediate point, Wilson hails the guidelines adopted at the June 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, and merely mentions in passing his regret that political quarrels have limited its implementation to lip service. His concluding pages are a powerful argument in favor of responsible environmental policies. We will have to hope that finding the will to enforce them is not contingent on widespread acceptance of the premise that knowledge is consilient. The rain forest cannot wait. Charles C. Gillispie
is professor emeritus of history of science at Princeton University.
He was awarded the Balzan Prize in history and philosophy of science
in 1997. His most recent book is Pierre?Simon Laplace, 1749 ? 1827,
A TAA30633 Sender: owner?paleopsych Precedence: bulk This is from an e?list I subscribed to for one day. My ISP kept returning messages and so the list czar (tsar) unsubscribed me. But the signal/noise ratio, I found, was too high, so I won't be rejoining. I encourage some of you to try the list, since you may find more signal than I do. (Subscription instructions at the end.) But this one message is, I think, of interest to the group. Frank Forman "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the perilled seas of thought." ??Galbraith Forwarded message Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:18:46 EDT From: Roads EndReply?To: Conspiracy Theory Research List <CTRLTo: CTRL Subject: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global Society Caveat Lector! an excerpt from: American Patriotism in a Global Society Betty Jean Craige Stat University of New York_1996 State University on New York Press Albany, NY ISBN 0?7914?2960?1 ????? Allegiance to Men The range of responses to [Oliver]North reveals a tension that characterizes the politics of all democratic nations, between allegiance to the group, which is tribalism, and allegiance to a set of laws and principles, which is the foundation for political holism. When Senator Inouye declared, "Our government is not a government of men. It is still a government of laws," he was chiding North for having ignored the law in his eagerness to position the United States advantageously in the international competition between communist countries and the "free world." But he was also pointing out that in a democracy allegiance to a particular group?whether it be a family, an ethnic group, a political party, or the individuals occupying government posts??is transcended by agreement to abide by the law, which is the social contract that the diverse constituents of the society make for their mutual long?term benefit. In the metaphor suggested by E. 0. Wilson, allegiance to one's society's laws is "soft?core altruism," which is much less emotionally appealing than "hard? core altruism," the kind of allegiance celebrated in traditional patriotic song and verse. Allegiance to men, to the group, which North ostensibly exhibited when he claimed that he had had to deceive Congress and the American people in order to deceive the nation's enemies, is appreciated most highly by those who believe that the group's greatest threat is external. To many Americans fearful of Soviet?sponsored communism, North was more patriotic than Inouye, Hamilton, and all those who wished to prosecute him for breaking the law, because North had done what Congress had been unwilling to do to advance American interests in "a dangerous world" (Taking the Stand 12). In their eyes, North's illegal actions were excusable, even commendable, for he was helping "freedom fighters."[7] In the political dualism of the Reagan administration, the world was divided between freedom fighters and communists. Political dualism, arising out of allegiance to men, produces a continuum between martyrdom, or "hard?core altruism," acclaimed as the highest form of patriotism, and treason. During the cold war, when opposition to communism was superimposed upon the ethnocentric allegiance to the group, anticommunism became an indicator of patriotism. Because patriotism, in this model, is defined as love of the group, criticism of the group, whether expressed as criticism of the government's policies or criticism of the nation's social values, is understood to indicate lack of patriotism and softness on the enemy. Individuals who do not display the "hard?core" loyalty that manifests itself as unmitigated opposition to the enemy are not considered by patriots to be real members of the group. The slogan "Love It or Leave It," appearing on bumper stickers during the Vietnam War, was directed at war protesters, whose disagreement with the government's foreign policy was taken as dislike of the nation. The same tribalist sentiment appeared in another slogan of the times: "My country, right or wrong. "[8] Peace advocates throughout our history have been ostracized or punished by political dualists for not sharing the hostility to the enemy that marks the loyalist. From the perspective of the loyalist to the group, the advocacy of peace, of compromise with the enemy, looks like treason; and the refusal to fight seems likewise cause for punishment. During the Civil War, a Quaker refusing service in the Confederate Army was sentenced to six months of unloading railroad cars of ordnance while fastened to a ball and chain; other Quaker resisters were tortured (Conlin 4). During World War I, some 500 conscientious objectors were court?martialed and imprisoned, 17 received death sentences though were never executed, and 142 were given life terms but were released in 1921. During World War II, 12,662 draft resisters were imprisoned, most of them because they could not meet the requirements for conscientious objector status established by the Selective Service Act of 1940 (Howlett and Zeitzer 27, 32). To those who give loyalty to the group the highest priority, conscientious objectors and draft resisters are all traitors, endangering the group's survival by declining to protect it against its enemies. So are war protesters, who by demonstrating against the government in wartime appear to be aiding the enemy. They do not appear to love the group, and so they are not considered part of the group. The good soldier, in this model, is the individual who enhances the group's military competitiveness, who follows orders, and who does not challenge his or her superiors. When North testified, "I never carried out a single act, not one, Mr. Nields, in which I did not have authority from my superiors. I haven't in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed Services of the United States of America ever violated an order; not one," he was calling attention to himself as a good soldier (Taking the Stand 106). He had supplied aid to the Contras in violation of the law in order to implement the wishes of the president of the United States, his commander in chief. North had to be reminded by Senator Inouye, on the last day of his testimony, that the Uniform Code of Military Justice "makes it abundantly clear, that orders of a superior officer must be obeyed by subordinate members?but it is lawful orders." Senator Inouye continued, "In fact, it says, members of the military have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders" (Taking the Stand 750). Allegiance to men yields authoritarianism, ethnocentric priorities, and political dualism. Because the group's well?being is presumed to depend upon its ability to defeat competing groups, obedience to authority is a patriotic virtue, as is unremitting hostility to the enemy. The group, in this model, is defined by those in power. Allegiance to men excludes individuals who differ in appearance, behavior, or ideology from members of the group, preserves the existing dominance order within the group, and produces oppositional relationships with other groups. Betrayal of comrades and cause, according to Pat Buchanan, is a greater evil than deception of members of Congress, who, in the opinion of Buchanan, North, and other ideological conservatives, had passed laws restricting the nation's ability to advance its interests abroad. Oliver North is a hero because he supported freedom fighters when Congress failed to do so. What becomes evident is that the function of laws and institutions is to constrain the previously advantageous trait of group loyalty?both within nations and among nations. The fact that the United States Constitution, which establishes government by law, is the oldest written national constitution in service today suggests that allegiance to law leads to greater long?term political stability than allegiance to men. Allegiance to Law When allegiance to law supersedes allegiance to men, disagreement with authority is viewed not as detrimental to the welfare of the group, but rather as potentially beneficial. Senator Inouye quoted Thomas Jefferson's remark: "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so, than not be exercised at all" (Taking the Stand 752). Criticism of powerful individuals who are violating the law protects the rights of individuals who do not enjoy positions of power; it protects the whole group. Protection of all of a group's diverse members is the purpose of law, as Senator George Mitchell (D?Maine) explained: Most nations derive from a single tribe, a single race. They practice a single religion. Common racial, ethnic, religious heritages are the glue of nationhood for many. The United States is different. We have all races, all religions. We have a limited common heritage. The glue of nationhood for us is the American ideal of individual liberty and equal justice. The rule of law is critical in our society. It's the great equalizer, because in America everybody is equal before the law. (Taking the Stand 536) It was only by the rule of law, Representative Stokes (D?Ohio) pointed out, that black Americans were finally obtaining the rights and privileges that white Americans have long enjoyed. Since throughout much of our nation's existence black Americans were excluded from the group?that is, the dominant culture out of which the nation's leaders came?black Americans did not and could not benefit from government officials' allegiance to the group. When the group was assumed to be originally white, allegiance to the group meant protection of its original composition and social structure. In the 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered Martin Luther King, who demanded that black Americans be granted full membership in the nation, to be a national threat. From Hoover's perspective, the 1963 march on Washington was an invasion. Allegiance to men and allegiance to law thus engender profoundly different political values. Whereas allegiance to men produces relationships of opposition to groups perceived to be alien, allegiance to law allows for cooperation between the group and other groups in the world, even the group's historical enemies. Since the law?governed group is defined not by those individuals in power, nor by common descent, but by laws and principles, it is??at least theoretically??receptive to individuals of different cultural origins. Thus it can easily become culturally and ideologically heterogeneous. By allegiance to law, by the establishment of social contracts, the group's culturally and ideologically diverse members may enjoy harmonious interaction. The tension between allegiance to law and allegiance to men arises not only among the citizens of a democracy but also within them. Allegiance to law is accomplished in individuals by resistance to the instinct of allegiance to men. And allegiance to law is more easily achieved by individuals when the group remains relatively homogeneous than when the group's identity is threatened by integration. When the group is expanded to include individuals previously belonging to very different groups, individuals of the original group will experience internal tension between their loyalty to those they view as similar to themselves and their civic responsibility to obey the law. Allegiance to law, not subordination to one's superiors, is the foundation for democracy, in which all citizens are considered valuable components of the whole, including those who disagree with the policies of the government. Ideally, in a society ruled by law, patriotism is measured not by obedience to the government, fidelity to the group, or hostility to the enemy, but by efforts to make the nation a better nation. In a democracy, as Senator Mitchell said to North, "disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism" (Taking the Stand 537). Although the United States officially has a government of laws and not a government of men, the two conceptions of order form a continuum. When hostilities between the United States and another nation erupt, as in the Persian Gulf War, the ethos of group loyalty predominates in the intensified nationalism. Behaviors in the citizenry that facilitate military success, such as gestures of patriotism and support for the nation's military action, are appreciated by all those who feel that the nation's well?being is at stake. The nation's ideological unity is deemed more important than the free exchange of ideas. In such times, the nation's governmental leaders are likely to justify secrecy and deception of the American people by reference to the need for military advantage over the enemy. And the majority of Americans are likely to trust the leaders in the assumption that the leaders know best how to achieve military victory. When the United States is not perceived by its citizens to be significantly threatened militarily, the degree of group identification diminishes. Without the suppression of dissent that occurs frequently during wartime, the ideological diversity of the population becomes more apparent, as groups struggle with one another for resources. pp. 26?31 ????? Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL(Conspiracy Theory Research List) is a public list. There are various subjects discussed that may be objectionable to some, these are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', itself, is used politically many ways by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought with many social and cultural consequences. 'Suspension of belief' in 'conventional' histories allow for the acceptance of many half?truths, misdirections and outright frauds. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.========== ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] LISTSERV To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] LISTSERV Om In a message dated 98?05?19 10:50:54 EDT, checker writes: Subj: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global Society (fwd) Date: 98?05?19 10:50:54 EDT From: checker (Premise Checker) To: hbe(Human Behavior and Evolution Society) CC: paleopsych Sender: owner?paleopsych Precedence: bulkThis is from an e?list I subscribed to for one day. My ISP kept returning messages and so the list czar (tsar) unsubscribed me. But the signal/noise ratio, I found, was too high, so I won't be rejoining. I encourage some of you to try the list, since you may find more signal than I do. (Subscription instructions at the end.) But this one message is, I think, of interest to the group.Frank Forman"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the perilled seas of thought." ??Galbraith Forwarded message ?????????? Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 20:18:46 EDT From: Roads End <RoadsEnd> Reply?To: Conspiracy Theory Research List <CTRL> To: CTRL Subject: [CTRL] American Patriotism in a Global SocietyCaveat Lector!an excerpt from: American Patriotism in a Global Society Betty Jean Craige Stat University of New York_1996 State University on New York Press Albany, NY ISBN 0?7914?2960?1 ?????Allegiance to MenThe range of responses to [Oliver]North reveals a tension that characterizes the politics of all democratic nations, between allegiance to the group, which is tribalism, and allegiance to a set of laws and principles, which is the foundation for political holism. THIS IS ANALOGOUS TO MARY DOUGLAS DISTINCTION BETWEEN GRID AND GROUP??ALLEGIANCE TO THE LARGER ABSTRACT GROUP VS. ALLEGIANCE TO A SMALL, PERSONAL GROUP. IT'S A MAJOR ISSUE IN CURRENT RESEARCH ON CROSS?CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY, WHICH PROBES THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GROUP AND GRID?ORIENTED CULTURES USING A DIFFERENT TERMINOLOGY. AND MIGUEL DE LANDA EXPLORES THE RELATIONSHIP OF THIS SORT OF THING TO HIS CONCEPTS OF HIERARCHY VS. MESHWORK AS PARTS OF WHAT I WOULD CALL AN EVOLVING COMPLEX DYNAMICAL SYSTEM. DE LANDA'S ANALYSIS IS IN HIS _THOUSAND YEARS OF NONLINEAR HISTORY_. DOUGLAS' IS IN HER Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. When Senator Inouye
declared, "Our government is not a government of men. It is still
a government of laws," he was chiding North for having ignored
the law in his eagerness to position the United States advantageously
in the international competition between communist countries and the
"free world." But he was also pointing out that in a democracy
allegiance to a particular group?whether it be a family, an ethnic group,
a political party, or the individuals occupying government posts??is
transcended by agreement to abide by the law, which is the social contract
that the diverse constituents of the society make for their mutual long?term
benefit.In the metaphor suggested by E. 0. Wilson, allegiance to one's
society's laws is "soft?core altruism," which is much less
emotionally appealing than "hard? core altruism," the kind
of allegiance celebrated in traditional patriotic song and verse. Allegiance
to men, to the group, which North ostensibly exhibited when he claimed
that he had had to deceive Congress and the American people in order
to deceive the nation's enemies, is appreciated most highly by those
who believe that the group's greatest threat is external. HMMM, VERY
INTERESTING IN TERMS OF THE CONCEPTS OF VARIOUS GROUP MEMBERS ON THE
IMPACT OF EXTERNAL THREAT AND ITS ALLEVIATION ON GROUP AND INDIVIDUAL
PSYCHOLOGY. MY MATERIAL, FAIRLY EXTENSIVE, ON THIS SUBJECT IS IN _THE
LUCIFER PRINCIPLE_. TO COOPT DE LANDA'S VOCABULAR, THE SWING BETWEEN
THE STATES OF THREAT?COHESION AND NON?THREAT?DECOHESION IS ONE OF THE
WAYS IN WHICH THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM OR SUPERORGANISM OF A SOCIAL
GROUP "BREATHES." OR PULSATES LIKE THE BODY OF A SNAIL ADVANCING
ON A PATH, THIS ONE THE PATH OF GENERATION OF ALL IT'S IMPLICIT COROLLARIES
(BLOOM'S INFAMOUSLY UNPOPULAR COROLLARY GENERATOR ONTOLOGY) UNTIL IT
REACHES THE POINT OF GODELIAN PARADOX COVERED IN KOEN DE PRYCK'S _KNOWLEDGE,
EVOLUTION AND PARADOX_ (ALBANY: STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1993) AND IS
FORCED TO JUMP TO (OR CREATE, OR FIND) THE NEXT PHASE STATE. We have discussed this before, and generally, I think, agreed that religion was adaptive in the EEA for fairly obvious reasons. It is interesting that a recent study(I'm sure there are others) indicate that this adaptivity still exists. A group of Christian(Xian) college students who had undergone additional spiritual conversion were studied. "When compared to a group of religious believers who had not experienced a change in their religiousness,the convert group did report more preconversion perceived stress, a greater sense of personl inadequacy and limitation before the conversion, greater pre?post improvement in sense of adequacy and competence, and a greater increase in post?conversion spiritual experiences....spiritual converts reported positive life tranformation and significant improvements in their sense of self, self esteem, self confidence, and self identity following the conversion experience." Women benefited more than men from the experience, and we have discussed the greater importance of religion to women. I give my usual caveat?because it gives sustenance doesn't mean it is Truth?that would be what you guys call the "naturalistic fallacy", no? All subjects were students in elementary psychology?hey, does that matter:?) I have a feeling that a conversion experience to a non?supernaturally based religion would give equal benefits, but have only anecdotal evidence from some of the ex?Catholics in my UU church. However, I doubt this was a viable option in the pre?scientific age, although I can quote skeptics from Hindu and Moslem cultures a millenium ago. Cheers, Irving Ref:Spiritual Conversion:
A Study of Religious Change Among College Students. Journ. for the Scientific
Study of Religion Vol. 37 pp 161?180. Clare Graves summarized his theory in this manner: "Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower?order behavior systems to newer, higher?order systems as man's existential problems change." >> Interestingly, this is a good description of the process of evolution??human or otherwise?? as Eshel Ben Jacob, Koen de Pryck, Bill Tillier, Ilya Prigogine, and some of the nonlinear systems folks have envisioned it. The definition contains the oscillation between wedded opposites??thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that I always natter on about. It also can be seen to encompass the notion (as Ben Jacob and de Pryck put it and i've violently rephrased it) that a system works its way through the corollaries of its axioms until it reaches the point of Godelian paradox, then is sent into a state of disorder from whose ashes it resurrects itself as a new structure based on higher level axioms derived from past experience. It then works its way through the corollaries implicit in the new system, steadily marching forward until once again it encounters Godelian paradox and seemingly disintegrates??the first step in regeneration on yet a higher level of complexity. To top it all off, it incorporates the notion that one element forcing the system to disgorge its corollaries is the constant progression through corollaries of competing systems. This phenomenon confronts a given system with an environment in which it has to run hard to stay in place and run even harder to get anywhere. Howard P.S. Manuel de Landa's
_Thousand Years of Nonlinear History_ is an effort to find what he calls
a basic machine, a consistent underlying algorithm, underlying all forms
of evolution??both inanimate and animate. Graves has summarized such
a machine. I'd call it the corollary generating operator, the mechanism
which keeps new corollaries (and their eventual Godelian crises) pumping
forth. _________ "I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity, and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life." Wilbur Wright, 1900 It is not in the
premise that reality If you unite the primitive animals of the limbic system with the sunny rational master workers of the human neocortex, the animals turn to gods and through the writhing human brain they sing. This is the source of ecstasy--in art, onstage performance, scientific vision, sexual orgasm, and in prophecy. Howard Bloom Die ganzen Zahlen
hat der liebe Gott ermacht; alles andere is Menschwerk. (Usually translated
"God created the integers; the rest is the work of man.") Two geniuses of the late 14th-early 15th centuries, the Dominican monk Meister Eckhart and the Spanish Sufi philosopher-theologian Ibn Arabi, spoke of "creator and created giving rise to each other." Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jesus and my Prefrontal Lobes A biology of the transcendent for nonbelievers, ms intro p. 6 "One of the gnostic gospels concerning Jesus has him saying "I am always becoming as you have need of me to be."" Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jesus and my Prefrontal Lobes A biology of the transcendent for nonbelievers "If there is one overriding lesson that physicists have learned in the past two hundred years, it is that there is usually an underlying simplicity beneath apparent and often bewildering diversity. Thus, in the nineteenth century, investigators determined that electricity and magnets were complementary aspects of the same phenomenon; and in the twentieth, they found that electromagnetism was a manifestation of the same process that produces the weak force governing radioactive decay. "Those and similar revelations lead naturally to the suspicion that there may be a single principle that governs and generates all the forces--and all the different kinds of particles--as it acts in different environments and circumstances. Such a principle may have been manifest in the early moments of the Big Bang, but may now be visible only in secondary forms, including the four forces and twelve particles that it devolved into as the universe cooled." (Curt Suplee. Physics in the 20th Century. NY: Abrams, 1999: 214-215) "It is strange also to attribute generation to things that are eternal, or rather this is one of the things that are impossible. There need be no doubt whether the Pythagoreans attribute generation to them or not; for they say plainly that when the one had been constructed, whether out of planes or of surface or of seed or of elements which they cannot express, immediately the nearest part of the unlimited began to be constrained and limited by the limit." (Aristotle. Metaphysics. Library of the Future.In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CDRom) "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly peristent illusion." Albert Einstein (quoted in Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: 232)
Monarch butterflies have an internal four-dimensional guidance mechanism that is extremely complex. It hooks together biological changes made by internal clocks and the position of the sun to squeeze meaning from a constantly shifting relationship between time and space, between time of day, the movement of the sun in the sky, and a sense of geography. It does this by coupling at least two different clocks-one that works on ultraviolet light and operates a "sun compass"; and the other that works on an entirely different wavelength, a photon-sampling at a different frequency, to keep a body-clock entrained to the time of day. And this day-and-minute timing, in turn, has to take into account that the sun changes position each day, changes position each minute, and changes its length of time in the sky each day. That's a lot of variables to sum. And it's apparently done by an interlocked group of analog mechanisms. Time, space, photons, and linguistics. Fractals and genomes. Moods that reset the brain and behavior. How do they all fit? The butterflies are decoding their environment in an extraordinary way. They are parsing the second-to-second changes around them into components that are the rough equivalent of nouns and verbs, subjects, predicates, objects, and adjectives. This parsing is far more linguistic than it is numeric. Again, it's analog computation, not digital computation. Yet the monarch does things that most formulae can't. One part of what the butterflies decode-the information they strain from daylight and night, from dawn, noon, and dusk-is the equivalent of one segment of a sentence. Another-the information they squeeze from the position of the sun, is another sentence part. Yet another, what they may distill from landscape markers or from stars, is yet another sentence part. Put them all together and you get a sentence. You get an immediate meaning. You also get a translation-from sensory input to motor output, from perception to behavior. What does this have to do with Pavel Kurakin's photons querying their environment and being queried by it? What does it have to do with the decision a Kurakin photon makes about where to go next in its flit across the chasm of Planck time? What does it have to do with the nearly infinite series of decisions that photon makes as it travels thirteen billion light years from a nova at the edge of the cosmos to your eye? The photon's first form of long-range navigation is based, if Kurakin is right, on instant-by-instant decisions, more of them than any number we can count. How does that primal quark mega-range navigation iterate? How does it repeat? How does it fold over upon itself and become the butterfly's flight from Canada to Mexico? What has the butterfly inherited from the photon that makes this journey possible? How does the basic vocabulary of time, space, matter, and motion express itself in the photon? And what elements of that vocabulary remain alive in the butterfly? I suspect that the chain of connections is fascinating, and tells a tale of the cosmos' entire history, leaving out only a few tiny things, mammals, large brains, consciousness, and human beings. Howard Ps remember that even a tale is a linguistic pattern with a ceremonial shape that's similar to that of a sentence-subject, verb, adverb, predicate, adjectives, object. Here's how a saga or story is parsed: · Introduction
of characters (quarks, leptons, and bosons), Retrieved from the
World Wide Web May 26, 2003 You are a nautilus shell deciding where to put your next calcium carbonate deposit. Stack your last two moves on top of each other. Calciferate. Stack your last two moves on top of each other. Calciferate. You are a flower
putting out petals. You have to decide where your next petal grows.
Take your last two moves and glue them together. Make a petal. Then
take your last two moves and layer them. Make a petal. And do it all
over again. You are a pine cone deciding where to place your next seed.
Pile your last two moves together. Make a seed. Then pile your next
two moves together again. But a child with
Leggos would get these rules in minutes--stack a group of leggos. Here's the proof of math's incredible limitations. Getting this stuff is so hard that it took me decades to comprehend it. And I, allegedly, have a brain. But horns, pine cones, and sunflower seed-heads have no trouble following the basic rule of the fibonnaci series. They do the Fibonacci without a single neuron, without a single equation, without a single mathematician uttering incomprehensibilities. Which means we need a new math, a math that is intuitive, a math that allows us stupid humans with our self-promoting but rather dumb big brains to get it....to comprehend with ease what a simple branch can calculate and implement without the luxury of consciousness, the luxury of a decade or two of mathematics courses, and the somewhat overplayed advantage of thought. No, I'm not against
thinking. I'm saying that our math is an olduwan stone tool of consciousness.
It needs an acheulian revolution...not to mention a bronze age, an iron
age, and an age of steel. Howard ----- Original
Message ----- From: howlbloom To: kurakin Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003
8:49 PM Subject: Re: bacterial linguistics and the Big Bang Tango (For
those I've copied on this who may not know--Pavel Kurakin, who's been
energizing my brain tremendously and whose words appear below, is with
the Keldysh Intitute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Moscow. He is a mathematician and a quantum mechanics theorist.
hb) In a message dated 5/22/2003 8:59:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin
writes: At last I've finished reading "Reflections on Bacterial
Linguistics" and find it extremely interesting and important. hb:
hooray!!!!! ") pk: 1) Now I catch, I hope - deep enough, what are
You talking about with Your "Global Brain", Your Paleopsychology
Project, etc. That's all so great that I, to be true, underestimated
it all first. But now I can see, that it's New Science Paradigm indeed.
I have caught what do You mean when saying of mass mood since Big Bang.
hb: another huge smile. pk: Even if to put all physics You and me dance
around aside, to put society aside, and leave single biology, it's great.
It is indeed a new look at Darwinism. It is... SUPER! I fail to find
true words. pk: Pavel, you are making my heart glow. You may well be
the first person on the planet to have gotten the big picture. I'm enclosing
a copy of what I wrote for the Wired proposal. It has all the members
of this discussion in it. I apologize if I've gotten any details wrong...but
I had to do this in enormous haste...in 2.5 days. pk: Evolution of SPIECES
gets new deeper insight, but not only spieces! These are new SYSTEMS
we even don't know or/and SEE yet, new untrivial collectives that DO
EXIST and evolve being unseen by us, blind lookers in the vicinity.
hb: yes, yes, yes. pk: Things like bacterial gel are some living creatures
THEMSELVES! They are a kind of ghosts, that live unseen. hb; they are
emergent ripples, emergent properties of great complexity. But they
only function as part of a larger system--a system of readers and writers
--individual bacteria who leave their collective mark in the shifting
manuscript of the gel, in the shifting pulsation, the OSCILLITORY flow
of mass mood. Sounds very much like photons, doesn't it? And within
that system are systems of electrons, protons, and neutrons doing highly
complex things. There are systems of macromolecules operating in ways
so intricate that we are just beginning to comprehend them. But none
of this works at all without the entire system--from the big bang to
time to photons, electrons, protons, atoms, gravity, galaxies, stars,
star deaths, the new atomic nuclei star deaths make, moleculogenesis
(a field that scarcely exists in cosmology but must), macromolecular
self-assembly, the infinite, interconnected snips of weave we call cell
membranes, replication, the seemingly fractal elaboration of dna, multicellularity,
emotions or their equivalent from the bacterial level on up, then the
variations and accessorizations of dna that we call species. pk: Wow.
These are CIVILIZATIONS hb: yup. pk: that live, love, battle, win and
loose each day of our gray life. Wow. Great. Bacterial cultures. Bacterial
Civizations. Not to say of synergetic systems of more complicated animals.
To be true, what Richard Dawkins says of being "memes" is
something like this "gel cultures" but I could not imagine
that this can be so bright and dramatical systems. Wow. Why did I hate
biology at school?... hb: LOL. Because it was fragmented and didn't
make sense. But it DOES make sense when you look at the whole thing--from
the big bang to tomorrow, from physics to psychology. The whole shebang
is a process I call the Big Bang Tango. A cosmos blipping like a single
photon. Galaxies battling to gobble the most matter. Then exploding
in the form of stars and light. Cultures flipping back and forth in
oscillitory modes, acting creatively as they go. All of this fractal,
growing the way a fibonacci series or a mandelbrot set grows. Why does
it grow? And why does it do it so breathtakingly creatively? That's
what we still don't know. And that is the nut of the matter--the next
puzzle to solve. Eshel Ben-Jacob learned that from his bacteria. I learned
it from everything from cosmology, biology, psychology, and religion,
to geopolitics and rock and roll. Let the band chime in and let the
games begin. -- "Our line is right. The victory will be ours".
(c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin mailto:kurakin It starts with a ripple in a vacuum, according to Guth. According to Bloom, there are two basic principles implicit in that vacuum and its ripple, attraction and repulsion. From that point on, it's all corollary generation in action. Of course one thing to remember is that the path splits many a time when you're generating corollaries. You've got this bunch of givens and there are numerous corollaries which can be spun from them. These are the bifurcations of nonlinear math and Chaos theory. They're the choice points which allow for free will and for diversity generation instead of a universe in which every sun, every planet, and every human is identical. Howard Corollary generator theory is the kissing cousin of the theory of natural selection. Or perhaps it's the half of natural selection we ordinarily never see-the side that accounts a bit more fully for how the things which nature selected from first came to be. It touches on the realm of the possible, a realm of infinite, but limited possibilities. Limited but infinite-a paradox. Not all things are possible. But corollary generator theory says that some impossibilities are more impossible than others. It shows how we, as nature's incarnations, sense the things that never were but itch to be. Then we bring those whispering nothings from the silence (darkness) of non-existence into the realm of reality. In the world of
natural selection some things are selected against long before they
even reach the darkness from which we hear the beckonings. Some things,
in other words, are so heavily selected against that they simply never
in this universe will ever come to be. Yet this negative shapes the
very form of opportunity. (Like a Higgs field, positives are molded
in the casts of negativities.) David Pincus 5/7/2003 Indeed they are. But only as whispers and shadows, potentials, becomings. It takes particular weather patterns, anomolous contingencies, for them to take shape and become clear to the subject. Are the shadows, in the neoplatonic David Boehm sense, o |
