☰. unfolding expression

HOME — CONTEXT & CONTENT

expansions

9 Apr.2024, choice — snooker balls v. butterflies.

Einstein's gestalt — the delusion of consciousness.

meta-expression — the metalanguage of life.

ontogeny — the origin of self.

expression — the universal language.

misc.

speakers corner — Burke's internet.

algorithms of cupidity — the mother of AI.

inclosure — of new towns and mass eviction.

awoken — the revisionist history of Whigs.

our kingdom — in a world of domains.

copy left — on new cabals and subtle designs.

Ξ	unfolding expression

Words have ancestors, Deeds have masters.

framing stories

context

I set-out to describe the assumptions that cripple projects, and the way that phoenix change avoids doing this. But in grappling with the words (as if for the first time) I found they depend on assumptions, providing only a context for a primitive circuit of embodied meaning that is our deeds and hides their masters.

Whosoever fights with monsters must take care, through this, not to become a monster; when you stare long into an abyss the abyss also stares into you.

Naively, I stared, and it seemed there was hope. Beings and societies are not like packs of snooker balls, scattered along their fated paths by the Big Bang, nor is their evolution steered by men with beards on fluffy clouds. If the immortal soul is ineffable, we are conceived not incarnated and psychology and sociology are accounts of ontogeny; evolution itself unfolding then through a metalanguage of expression.

content

Below are preambles to four outline perspectives on this metalanguage of expression — accessible too from the four icons to the right of the index icon at the top of your screen. Some of the content they link to is also available from the index icon itself.

λ literal error — language and meaning

The word is not the thing. The map is not the territory. Literalist faiths confuse different frames of meaning, muddling ideas, prejudicing understandings, and misdirecting choices. There may be an epidemic in our minds, and one too in our souls, but even if so these would not be the same.^..more-

Ψ being heard — perception and expression

As beings perceive the patterns and signs they make and represent to each other, societies and languages emerge and develop. Life is coextensive with meaning — it was on being heard that the environment gave birth. In the beginning was the word, just not a word that we recognize.^..more-

Δ making sense — experience and expression

From the beginning, the environments that determine which beings survive have been social as much as material. Communicative competence is fundamental to beings benefiting from the protection and empowerment of social integration; mental well-being is coextensive with fluency.^..more-

θ incorporation — expression and self

As a society grows, its individuals become more dependent upon it and their roles increasingly specialize. Cohesion and growth are achieved through a shared cultural narrative. This competes with others in the thoughts and behaviours of individuals and replicates on being believed.^..more-

Expression is intuitive, words narcotize as we are transformed through their dreams, their technology offers convenience, like a mousetrap offering cheese.

from: Tao Te Ching, 70, Lao Tzu, 300 BCE, translated by Stephen Aldiss and Stanley Lombardo, 1993, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Linked to from: A-Content.php, {A2_intro}.

.. words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain.

Rudyard Kipling; in a speech to the Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1923.

What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language.

Niels Bohr, in 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists', 1963.

Phoenix change refers to developmental change — change steered by the intrinsic characteristics of its stakeholders more than by external agendas. This is the focus of phoenix change consultancy, which applies mediation and facilitation methodologies, such as those used in Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology, to individual, organisational, and community projects.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Aphorism 146, Chapter IV: Maxims and Interludes, from Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886.

The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? Albert Einstein, 1931.

The soul, conceived as the essence of ourselves yet inconstant and unavailable, exists independent of physics and biology. Immortal and eternal, a personal belief, it is beyond words and definition. Ineffable, its place in the causation of biological phenomena is a kind of 'magical thinking'. Generally abandoned in science and medicine, twinned with determinism it remains rooted in much of our thinking, often leading to gross error and injustice.

From Cosmic Religion: with Other Opinions and Aphorisms, Albert Einstein, 1931, pub. Covici-Friede, available from Amazon.

For more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing to-day. —If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine,— I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property. I make them public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another —but, of course, it is not likely. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge, January 1945. From his preface to 'Philosophical Investigations'.

No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Edmund Burke, Thoughts On The Present Discontents, published by Cassell & Company Limited, 1886.

beings here include those that are unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae); and those that are both unicellular and multicellular (e.g. slime molds) as well as those that are multicellular and, therefore, societies —cellular metasystems (e.g. humans, ants, jellyfish).

Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction.

Ruppert, Edward E.; Fox, Richard, S.; Barnes, Robert D. (2004). Invertebrate Zoology, 7th edition. Cengage Learning. pp. 148-174; cited in Jellyfish, Taxonomy (list item: Staurozoa), Wikipedia..

Fautin, Daphne G. and Sandra L. Romano. 1997. Cnidaria. Sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, sea pens, hydra. Version 24 April 1997. http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria/2461/1997.04.24 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/.

Anthropocentrism is the anthropocentric belief that our species is the central fact and final aim of the universe, and should be understood therefore in terms of human experience, needs, and values.

scientism

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. Albert Einstein.

from: Physics and Reality, published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, Issue 3, March 1936, pp. 349-382.

Science is an elementary practice; scientism is a belief. Perhaps the starkest consequence of not recognizing this distinction has been eugenics and the Holocaust.

Assumptions are the fundamental premises of reason and argument, and so inevitably steer the conclusions these reach; however, as they are provided by the cultural context that obtains, and are encoded in its language, generally they are hidden or appear self-evident.

Racism, also called racialism, is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races"; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. Encyclopaedia Britannica, rtvd 14/3 2024.

All psychological constructs must have a biological correlate, and all biological constructs must have a psychological correlate, but this relationship is not fixed. Biological structures simply provide the foundational substrate that enables experience to be stored, and to be processed through environmental and cultural feeback. It is this feedback that directs and develops primordial inherited behaviour to satisfy the individual, and social drive to survive.

Eugenics claims to be the science of racialism; it is actually a scientism, founded and dependant on racist assumption. Scientifically it is baseless.

from: "The Great Chain of Semiosis, Investigating the Steps in the Evolution of Semiotic Competence." p.8, Jesper Hoffmeyer & Frederik Stjernfelt, September 2015, Biosemiotics 9(1) DOI:10.1007/s12304-015-9247-y (Emphasis added).