Dreams and Brainstorms
And it was during these years, when I was still an undergraduate, that this book was conceived. It began with a life changing dream brought on by the happy coincidence of two convergent writing assignments (on Plato’s Republic - one from Philosophy, my home department, and the other from ILS, my hearts home).
Long story short, the task that I took for myself was to answer the question, what is real? by way of ecological systems theory insights, for reductionist Philosophers, who were and are still under the spell of Descartes’ claim that what real is “clear and distinct,” from which it seems to follow that if you can’t kick it, measure it, and see it from outside-looking-in, it’s not ‘real.’ (If we doubt that words are powerful, we need only consider the powerful “physics envy” that most all disciplines have exhibited since.)
Come to find, here in Plato’s own masterwork - which now hit me like a flash of lightening with the collision of these diverse worldviews - that despite our scientific marriage to this conception of objectivity, reality cannot be reduced to the physical and tangible in this way. Indeed, patterns are as real as rocks, and what is “clear and distinct” from one point of view recedes into a system of what is interconnected and complex, when the whole truth is the objective.
As I was saying elsewhere, one need only glance at a fractal zoom to begin to understand intuitively how seriously limited our understanding of reality has been for the last 400 years that we’ve been ignoring the importance of scale, perspective, and interrelationships in our study of ‘reality.’ As Morris Berman once put it, with the onset of the Newtonian Cartesian worldview, the world “went collectively out of its mind.” And it did this by calling ‘objectively real’ only what we humans could look ‘at’ from outside in, which may include (with the development of microscopes and telescopes) the very small and the very large, but did not include what could only be known from the inside looking out, or anything that might exist on scales within the world we had objectified. Indeed, it was probably this video (*put Powers of Ten) that first stretched my mind and started my obsession with looking at the reality in it’s full complexity, which cannot be perceived from only one scale, but rather by way of perceiving the patterns that exist throughout the laws of nature.
As you may know, over the door of Plato’s Academy was written, “He who does not understand geometry need not enter here.” Not to diminish Euclid, but I’d have to argue that that our limited understanding of the geometry of nature had seriously cramped our understanding of how the mind works, not to mention reality itself, and certainly the meaning of Plato’s work. Plato tried to illuminate this parallel relationship by way of analogy between the sun and the good, that is, the physical and the psychological. “The Good is to the invisible world what the Sun is to the visible world…it gives it life, light, and nurtures its growth.”
[*put physical/psychological…]
It follows that, the better we understand nature and the laws of physics, the better we should be able to understand the laws of the psyche and how the mind works too.
[*put Mandelbrot and fractals…]
In fact, our minds are more like trees than machines, and trees that have seen the sun from only one side, no less, and are on the verge of falling over if we don’t get light from other angles soon.
Hence, the importance of applying insights from our ever-advancing understanding of the laws of physical nature (such as relativity, quantum theory, fractal geometry, chaos theory, and ecological systems theory) to help advance our understanding of the laws of psychological nature and the organic technology of the mind.
[*so much more to say on this…]
At any rate, what began as a fruitful dream and a late night brainstorm in the spring of 1986 became the organizing principle for all my work thereafter, both teaching and writing. As Plato said, peaks can become plateaus, but only if we remember them. Those ILS professors who gave my paper the department’s highest award (who themselves come from a wide range of disciplines) seemed to see its potential and reinforced my confidence in all this, since several of them offered me opportunities to work with them on this idea from their various disciplinary perspectives.
However, it also came as no surprise that the same work that won the year’s best paper in ILS was, once again, admonished by my Capital-P advisors (still got an A, to be sure, but not without a scolding). Go figure. Reductionist analysis has long been the norm in academic Philosophy, so what passes for the search for truth these days has no interest in being reminded how much they are ignoring what might be seen by use of other parts of the brain. They also ever mind that ‘to ignore’ is the active root of ‘ignorance.’
And it was during these years, when I was still an undergraduate, that this book was conceived. It began with a life changing dream brought on by the happy coincidence of two convergent writing assignments (on Plato’s Republic - one from Philosophy, my home department, and the other from ILS, my hearts home).
Long story short, the task that I took for myself was to answer the question, what is real? by way of ecological systems theory insights, for reductionist Philosophers, who were and are still under the spell of Descartes’ claim that what real is “clear and distinct,” from which it seems to follow that if you can’t kick it, measure it, and see it from outside-looking-in, it’s not ‘real.’ (If we doubt that words are powerful, we need only consider the powerful “physics envy” that most all disciplines have exhibited since.)
Come to find, here in Plato’s own masterwork - which now hit me like a flash of lightening with the collision of these diverse worldviews - that despite our scientific marriage to this conception of objectivity, reality cannot be reduced to the physical and tangible in this way. Indeed, patterns are as real as rocks, and what is “clear and distinct” from one point of view recedes into a system of what is interconnected and complex, when the whole truth is the objective.
As I was saying elsewhere, one need only glance at a fractal zoom to begin to understand intuitively how seriously limited our understanding of reality has been for the last 400 years that we’ve been ignoring the importance of scale, perspective, and interrelationships in our study of ‘reality.’ As Morris Berman once put it, with the onset of the Newtonian Cartesian worldview, the world “went collectively out of its mind.” And it did this by calling ‘objectively real’ only what we humans could look ‘at’ from outside in, which may include (with the development of microscopes and telescopes) the very small and the very large, but did not include what could only be known from the inside looking out, or anything that might exist on scales within the world we had objectified. Indeed, it was probably this video (*put Powers of Ten) that first stretched my mind and started my obsession with looking at the reality in it’s full complexity, which cannot be perceived from only one scale, but rather by way of perceiving the patterns that exist throughout the laws of nature.
As you may know, over the door of Plato’s Academy was written, “He who does not understand geometry need not enter here.” Not to diminish Euclid, but I’d have to argue that that our limited understanding of the geometry of nature had seriously cramped our understanding of how the mind works, not to mention reality itself, and certainly the meaning of Plato’s work. Plato tried to illuminate this parallel relationship by way of analogy between the sun and the good, that is, the physical and the psychological. “The Good is to the invisible world what the Sun is to the visible world…it gives it life, light, and nurtures its growth.”
[*put physical/psychological…]
It follows that, the better we understand nature and the laws of physics, the better we should be able to understand the laws of the psyche and how the mind works too.
[*put Mandelbrot and fractals…]
In fact, our minds are more like trees than machines, and trees that have seen the sun from only one side, no less, and are on the verge of falling over if we don’t get light from other angles soon.
Hence, the importance of applying insights from our ever-advancing understanding of the laws of physical nature (such as relativity, quantum theory, fractal geometry, chaos theory, and ecological systems theory) to help advance our understanding of the laws of psychological nature and the organic technology of the mind.
[*so much more to say on this…]
At any rate, what began as a fruitful dream and a late night brainstorm in the spring of 1986 became the organizing principle for all my work thereafter, both teaching and writing. As Plato said, peaks can become plateaus, but only if we remember them. Those ILS professors who gave my paper the department’s highest award (who themselves come from a wide range of disciplines) seemed to see its potential and reinforced my confidence in all this, since several of them offered me opportunities to work with them on this idea from their various disciplinary perspectives.
However, it also came as no surprise that the same work that won the year’s best paper in ILS was, once again, admonished by my Capital-P advisors (still got an A, to be sure, but not without a scolding). Go figure. Reductionist analysis has long been the norm in academic Philosophy, so what passes for the search for truth these days has no interest in being reminded how much they are ignoring what might be seen by use of other parts of the brain. They also ever mind that ‘to ignore’ is the active root of ‘ignorance.’