Monday, February 11, 2019

MASSIVE CHANGE IN THE THOUGHT WORLD.

Right now what is most pure and interesting intellectually, logically, scientifically is thought about people thinking -- the architectures and patterns in, outside, beyond people.  There is so much!  I discovered that the "reality tunnel" belongs to a whole point of view and system that I never knew about before.  It never occurred to me that RAW might be someone's initials!  Let alone a whole system of thought.  Interesting but irrelevant.

We are hard at work eliminating much that was "first guess" categories and labels developed in the 19th century.  Or earlier, like Indians.  The use of the genome has changed everything.  Did you know that when scientists analyzed parrot genes, they turned out to be evolved from hawks?  

Whole disciplines, made up centuries ago, are disappearing.  Look at this description of change in thought about "therapy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muDW2RO89uw   It starts at about 20 minutes and compares physics (pretty much Sam's home ground) to the "helping professions," a much softer and more slippery enterprise, easily distorted by money and the internet.  (Grannon DOES therapy and works with schematics -- not so much fancy stuff.)

Sam Vaknin describes how today's therapies will keep writhing.  (I think he is wrong about some of this,  Oppositional Defiance Disorder for instance, which is now considered a child's behavior and not respected.)  He still misunderstands embodied thought.  He would sort the problems as 1) biochemical neurological problems that are properly medical, 2) social disorders requiring negotiation between the person and the community.  But he says outright that often the problem is in the society -- not the person.  Think about the present American stigmas like racism, when race is an invented category in the first place.  The madness is in the community.

But anyway I'm "over" systems -- of doctrines.  As well as disciplines, siloes, and lanes.  I see us as being in the midst of a great and productive chaos.  I've never liked the idea of tunnel vision.  The idea of boxes with boundaries became even more transparently game material when universities realized that by re-labelling, conflating, and redefining they could drop those troublesome departments like women, indigenous or LGBT.  It had been too troublesome to dismiss individuals.  But my old BS degree from 1961 was in the NUSchool of Speech, which evolved from "elocution"and went on changing into cutting edge categories I barely understand.  They were careful to include science because arts and humanities don't get no respect.

One thing that has never lost its value was an NU 1957 class taught by Dean Barnlund in which the binaries of debate were replaced by the open and process-based practise of discussion. I remember the student who was stunned and offended by the loss of right v wrong, in v. out, male v. female as mutually exclusive.  His reaction was so totally physical that he turned red and shook.  He could have killed -- well, raped anyway.

I spend so much time turning this over and over  because the biggest change in "English" white thought is invisible to most people.  The deeper issues were bigger than the modernity creeping around the edges, barely kept at bay by corporate money.  One of the biggest went back to the Greeks and their love of binaries which they engaged in logical duels.  They assigned this to the brain and only the brain.  But the scientific methods of today show us "embodied cognition" and brain plasticity,

"Embodiment is the surprisingly radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole cognitive resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies and their perceptually guided motions through the world do much of the work required to achieve our goals, replacing the need for complex internal mental representations. This simple fact utterly changes our idea of what “cognition” involves, and thus embodiment is not simply another factor acting on an otherwise disembodied cognitive processes."

Here where I am it has been double-digits below zero for two weeks with enough snow to close the roads now and then.  I'm not safe to drive yet anyway. The nearest hospital is thirty miles away.  My shoulder was dislocated by a fall, tearing and bruising a lot of tissue.  I'm taking handfuls of Advil.  And the cat had kittens.  


Screw your algorithms.  This is a reality I made for myself and inhabit alone.  In a few months it will be only a story.  Sometimes even funny.  It's neither architecture nor schematics -- just anecdote.

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