Being a Waveform of Potential as an Experiential Choice
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 16 Sep 2013
Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service
Emergent Dynamic Qualities of Identity and Integrity
Introduction
The variety of disciplines and beliefs suggest a multiplicity of ways through which an individual may choose to be framed and identified — or have experience of life defined. Many take the form of assertions by authorities which deprecate and scorn ways calling their particular belief into question. This dynamic context does little for those born into it and faced with the confusion of how to live a meaningful life. The challenge can itself be variously discussed, as explored separately (Self-reflexive Challenges of Integrative Futures, 2008; Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds, 2011; Paradoxes of Engaging with the Ultimate in any Guise, 2012).
With the explosion of variously available knowledge to which it is only minimally possible to attend, incomprehension and uncertainty become ever more significant experientially (Living with Incomprehension and Uncertainty, 2012; Towards the Dynamic Art of Partial Comprehension, 2012). As suggested there, a degree of “meta-perspective” is offered through metaphor (Towards the Systematic Reframing of Incomprehension through Metaphor, 2012). Of course “metaphor” is deprecated from some perspectives as being significantly inferior to “models” of reality, however alien their articulation may be to experiential reality. As presented, the highly complex insights of the multidimensional theories of fundamental physics are the epitome of disassociation from experientially reality.
This deprecation and disassociation can be fruitfully reframed through two insights:
- Kenneth Boulding: Our consciousness of the unity of the self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of a group, organization, department, discipline, or science. If personification is only a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors — we might be one ourselves. (Ecodynamics; a new theory of societal evolution, 1978, p. 345)
- Gregory Bateson: We are our own metaphor. (as cited by Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor: a personal account of a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation, 1972. p. 304)
If mathematics and physics are together upheld as offering the most adequate insight that humanity has produced for “explaining” reality, it is then fruitful to recognize the origins of such explanations, as in the work of cognitive psychologists George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez (Where Mathematics Comes From: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being, 2001).
The implications for the experience of creativity are also clearly central, as clarified by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (Surfaces and Essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013), as a further development of Hofstadter’s earlier work (Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, 1995). Through the manner in which unquestionable belief is thereby engendered, the argument can be extended to encompass the concerns and consequences of mutually antagonistic faiths, as separately discussed (Mathematical Theology: Future Science of Confidence in Belief, 2011).
The possibility explored here is that of “being a waveform” — as a radical “experiential choice”, consistent with the above arguments and with what might be recognized as the dynamics through which reality is already experienced. This contrasts with the oversimplistic manner in which the natural sciences frame the world through categories, as separately argued (Dynamic Insensitivity of the Natural Sciences, 2013; Dynamic Transformation of Static Reporting of Global Processes, 2013). Aspects of the argument have been presented in speculation on the existence of “extraterrestrials” as waveforms (Sensing Epiterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): Embedding of “extraterrestrials” in episystemic dynamics? 2013).
Given the current “waves” of social unrest, a “wave focus” can be usefully explored as superseding the “network focus” by which such waves are now engendered through (social) networks. These had superseded the focus on conventional organization, whose hierarchical limitations had previously made apparent the need for a new modality.
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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 Sep 2013.
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