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dear alan, karl and all, alan, your exchange with karl seems to me to be an embodiment of the general problem in share-based communication of 'inclusionality'. that is, 'inclusionality' cannot be 'communicated' in the standard manner of an explicit transmission, since it deals with the basic incompleteness of assertive dynamics. karl, your persistent insistence in reducing alan's remarks to their 'assertive component' is akin to reducing the complex signal in holographic communications, as developed by dennis gabor, to the 'real component'. using gabor's own analogy for 'complex communications', this is like explaining the movement of the rotor in a dynamic in the purely assertive terms of 'what the rotor is doing' without mentioning the reciprocal complementarity of the invaginating (self-enfolding) E/M field-flow in which the rotor and its dynamic is included. in the hologram, the 'invaginating' of space and the 'asserting' of a form are one and the same dynamic. that's the way it has to be in 'fluid dynamics' (energy-field-flow dynamics). dynamics do not start from 'independent objects' and some central behavioural governing authority that resides within them. that is an absolute (abstract) notion foreign to our experience, that has been 'aided and abetted' by western religious myth which a growing minority of religious scholars maintain results from misinterpretation of what was intended by prophets such as jesus. if one reads the opinion of the re-translators of jesus words from the original aramaic spoken by jesus, one can find this same reductive association as between alan's words and karl's interpretation; 'And when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female (shall not) be female, then shall you enter (the Kingdom)." --- Jesus (per the Gospel of Thomas) as the re-translators point out, 'the Kingdom' would have been conceived of as something which is, at the same time, inside and outside the individual, in the manner that the evolutionary dynamic relates to the ghostly world of 'objects' and 'what they do'. that is, our lives are shaped by the spatial-relational flow we are included in, and the forms that persist within the flow continue to inductively shape our life behaviours generation after generation, ... this 'shape' being inherently beyond the descriptive capability of mental models founded on 'independent objects/organisms' with central governing agencies and endowed with 'internal first cause'. for example, 'the university'; * * * * 'the university' * * * * imagine a dynamical living space, ... the UK for example, ... where seasons come and go and where generations of people emerge, live their lives and rejoin the flow of nature, ... a dynamical continuum.. imagine any particular 'organization' within this continuing spatial-relational flow, ... for example, 'oxford university', ... as characteristc #8 in alan's 'ten characteristics of wisdom enquiry' says, ... "[wise enquiry] recognises that all form is a dynamic inclusion of space - not an occupier of space - and so is not definable in absolute terms." if we use this way of understanding 'oxford university', ... we will observe, within the dynamical living space of britain, the emergence of 'learning spot' in about 1096, ... a dynamical form of organization not unlike the Great Red Spot' on Jupiter, ... and if we listen in to what people were saying about it, we would find that 'by 1201, the University was headed by a magister scolarum Oxonie, on whom the title of Chancellor was conferred in 1214, and in 1231 the masters were recognized as a universitas or corporation'. without taking our eyes off of the unbroken continuum of the relational dynamics of the british living space, ... we see 'learning spot' becoming more intense in its activities and signs of material structures being precipitated - In the 13th century, rioting between townspeople and students hastened the establishment of primitive halls of residence. These were succeeded by the first of Oxford's colleges, which began as medieval 'halls of residence' or endowed houses under the supervision of a Master. University, Balliol and Merton Colleges, established between 1249 and 1264, are the oldest. within the following century, 'oxford university' became a 'known entity' - 'Less than a century later, Oxford had achieved eminence above every other seat of learning, and won the praises of popes, kings and sages by virtue of its antiquity, curriculum, doctrine and privileges.' using language as the basis for 'mimesis', for imitating reality, we began to understand 'oxford university' less as a 'learning spot' or dynamical inclusion of the continuing british living space dynamic, and more in the sense of a self-standing assertive agency, with internal structure and components that was performing a service to the community. what happened to oxford as a 'learning spot', ... 'a dynamical inclusion of space'? it is still there, but dynamic forms of organization that are included within a dynamical hostspace cannot be isolated from the dynamics of the hostspace they are included in (since their motion is relative). it is 'easier' to describe the 'learning spot' as if it were an entity endowed with self-standing 'existence'; i.e. 'the university of oxford', and as if it had a behaviour whose authorship source was internal to its 'existential self' and which drove and directed its assertive actions. this alternative way of describing 'dynamical forms of organizations' or 'dynamical inclusions of nature-space', ... and self-standing entities whose behaviours are driven and directed from their interiors is entirely general and is enabled by our 'implicit' imposing of Euclidian space to allow the entity's motion to be seen as 'absolute' (it's own motion), rather than as relative to the continuum of the hostspace dynamic it is included in. * * * * end of 'the university' * * * * my point is this, that karl's reduction of alan's commentary parallels the claimed reduction, by too-literal translations, of jesus' commentary (i.e. of those who were citing what jesus said, such as thomas). i am not speaking here of 'beliefs' but of attempts to resolve different interpreted understandings of the same commentary. as ian reminded me, in an offline thread, ... robert pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, makes this same point, also using the example of the university (perhaps this was the seed for my using it, although my memory of russell ackoff using it to expose the manner of incompleteness of analytical inquiry sticks most in my mind), ... in ZAMM, pirsig refers to the 'ghostly' physical aspect of the university as 'the Church of Reason', ... because by stripping the physical aspect out of the evolutionary (continuous learning) flow, it becomes rigid and ghostly, like hexagonal honeycomb cells in an abandoned bee hive, the flow of activity having precipitated something explicit, in the case of the university, 'explicit reason' (rationality). 'rationality' and 'the university', looking like eggs laid by a chicken that is no longer visible, are now elevated by 'rationalists' to a status whereby we can regard them to 'speak for themselves'. that is we regard them as having the wherewithal within them to give up their value in a purely assertive manner, ... so that we no longer have any need to hold in our minds the understanding that these things, rather than being stand-alone and internally driven, are the precipitates of a common spatial-relational flow, called it the 'evolutionary dynamic' or call it 'the Kingdom' or whatever. rationality comes into being together with the abandonment of an understanding wherein the spatial-relational flow is the generative source and the tangible-assertive is purely (ghostly) inference, as in gabor's holodynamical imaging, ... yet it is the invaginating (self-enfolding) of the field-flow that gives rise to the spinning rotor, not some internal sensing equipment within the rotor that, it is purported, responds to the forces of 'attraction' and 'repulsion' that the rotor 'feels' coming from the outside world. pirsig's dual understanding of 'university' is described as follows; "The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself. In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process. But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist. Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations. They see the second university, but fail to see the first. " the true university professor, then, cannot speak squarely and solidly from his explicit knowledge or from 'what he knows' but must convey that knowledge is the ghost-child of the learning flow and in the manner of Heraclitus', who, in giving counsel, puts it in the terms of ; 'listening not to me but to the Logos', ... otherwise, we revert to the 'ghost-precipitate' version of the university as described by pirsig; "The school was what could euphemistically be called a "teaching college." At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education." all of the above examples etc. point to our cultural tendency to rebuild our understanding of the world dynamic, starting from reduced 'ghostly' precipitates, ... re-animating these precipitates, such as 'explicit knowledge', physical structures such as 'the human organism', and 'the nation-state' (the ghostly precipitate of the ongoing flow of community) by attributing to them their own internally centered source of assertive expression and assertive behaviour. for example, we attribute a 'central governing authority' to the individual human organism and point to a part of the physical structure, 'the brain' as being where this central drive and direction is located. some kind of internal activity within the 'brain' is thus credited with this absolute capability of 'internal first cause', and by these assumptions we make the behaviour of an organism into 'its own behaviour' (absolute behaviour) and no longer have to concern ourselves with the evolutionary flow that the organism is included in. instead, we shall proceed on to re-invent evolution in terms of the behaviours of its own precipitate organisms and their internal 'genetics' to which we also impute 'internal first cause'. we do the same in reducing the evolutionary flow of community down to the 'nation-state' as we did in reducing the university to the 'teaching college'; i.e. a 'nation' is precipitated from the evolving flow of community and we proceed to 'absolutize' it by endowing it with existence as a self-standing object (bounded by imaginary lines imposed by us) and imputing to it, its own internally sourced behaviour that is driven and directed from a notional 'central governing authority' gifted with 'internal first cause'. this allows us to 'declare' the 'nation-state' to be 'independent' and to be fully responsible for its own behaviour, ... when we are all aware, from our natural experience, that the natural dynamical hostspace we all share inclusion in, takes precedence over the synthetic 'independent' behaviours we impute to these 'nation-states', ... 'nation-states' that exist only in our minds and certainly not in nature (just watch the fish, animals, insects, bacteria ignore those imaginary line political boundaries). as the natives say, 'canada' and 'the united states' are no more than artefacts of how europeans fought over how to divide up what they stole. but these synthetic notions of 'the existence of the nation-state' and 'the independent, fully-responsible, self-center-driven behaviour of the nation-state', ... however artificial they are, take on a physical reality when many people start believing in them. we may believe in them because they were offered to a co-ownership interest in them provided they swore an oath to bear arms and give their lives, if necessary, in defending their synthetic existence', ... or we may feign belief in them because we are beaten about the head every time we refuse to obey their laws, ... but in all of these cases, the existence of the political nation-state can only be assured by the force of violence, since they are entirely unnatural entities. it runs counter to our acculturated 'intuition' that the tangible, physical and explicit are the GHOST reality, and this is the problem that pirsig runs into in trying to share his essentially 'inclusional' ideas, and it is the same problem that alan runs into in his trying to share 'inclusionality'; i.e. the reader has difficulty in suspending his belief in the foundational role of the explicit as is necessary to come to an understanding that natural dynamics are 'implicit' and that there are no 'explicit' objects in the dynamical hostspace of nature (there is only an evolving energy-field-flow). in conclusion, where karl says; "Hence my reservation with a theory [note:. 'inclusionality' is not a 'theory' but a 'condition of awareness'] that as a matter of principle suppresses all discussion of ends and goals and how to develop society rationally." karl's use of 'suppression' is misplaced since alan, like robert pirsig, is 'opening up the discussion' to included what is being left out and forgotten (that which gives the most fundamental meaning to our understanding of the world dynamic). where alan is trying to go, is to 'transcendently inflate' our 'society as teaching college' over top of itself, so that we recognize our 'teaching college society' as the ghostly precipitate of the real university; "The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. that is, 'the universe is a state of mind' and the specific locations, and objects within it are ghostly precipitates that back-speak (through our intuition) of a greater reality that is continually on-the-move and purely relational as in the energy-field-flow of the natural hostspace we all share inclusion in. no-one is forcing anyone to believe this, unlike the politics of our current culture which forces us to believe in the existence of fixed location nation-states and their central governing authorities, ... the 'argument' at hand is simply in terms of; 'do you not believe that the social and natural dynamics we are included in might not enjoy more sustained coherency and harmony if we take the stuff about behaviours being absolute and driven from the centers of independent object-organisms, ... with a grain of salt?'. that is, we don't need to 'suppress' such mental models, all that is being suggested is that it may be better for us all to acknowledge that they are synthetic and over-simplified, otherwise we shall become the 'absolutists' as in pirsig's 'teaching college' who simply regurgitate old 'knowledge' and simple-mindedly apply it to the escalating problems that are arising from its simple-minded application. regards, ted p.s. to close the loop on my comments on the different interpreted understandings of jesus' comments, jesus could be seeing himself as a professor in God's university (divine state of mind) rather than (as in the most common western interpretation) as a teacher in God's teaching college. _____ From: A.D.M.Rayner [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:16 AM To: Ted Lumley Cc: Jack Whitehead Subject: Fw: Ten Characteristics of Wisdom Enquiry ----- Original Message ----- From: A.D.M.Rayner <mailto:[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: 29 September 2006 07:36 Subject: Re: Ten Characteristics of Wisdom Enquiry Dear Karl, "Hence my reservation with a theory that as a matter of principle suppresses all discussion of ends and goals and how to develop society rationally." As I hope may be transparent to others if not you, this is a misrepresentation of what I have said, removing all context and qualification. It is one of many examples of the way you have seemingly paid very selective attention, perhaps to suit your own definitive goals, to what I have tried to communicate, not to mention the accusations about putting theory before people. Damn! I've broken my silence. Best Alan ----- Original Message ----- From: Karl <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Rogers To: [log in to unmask] Sent: 28 September 2006 19:38 Subject: Re: Ten Characteristics of Wisdom Enquiry Ian, If you find that Alan's ideas or your interpretation of them is of any help to you then that is great. Really, man, try whatever works for you. For my purposes, it is because of the catch-22, as you put it, that we simply cannot know whether Alan's ideas are wise or not. It is an experiment! Hence my reservation with a theory that as a matter of principle suppresses all discussion of ends and goals and how to develop society rationally. Especially if that theory does not permit one to define things, such as poverty, and the minimum conditions for alleviating it. And, it may well be the case that its proponents would also prevent people from stopping others abuse children. It does seem very wise to me. By, hey, what do I know? Karl. _____ Now you can scan <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail/uk/taglines/default/nowyoucan/reading_pane/*htt p:/us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=40565/*http:/uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html> emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail/uk/taglines/default/nowyoucan/reading_pane/*htt p:/us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=40565/*http:/uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html> Mail.