Wednesday, April 21, 2010
In Answer to Another's Question
I posted the following in response to a Tom Rick's post.
Chaos is a higher form of order that our minds have not yet grasped or understood fully yet. The Universe and the local part of it we call our World seem chaotic on the surface, yet there is an order underneath it. The Indian sages call this world, Maya, the dream. Given a long enough period of time, nothing lasts and today's events and people seem as if they were part of a dream. As a thought in one's head has a brief lifespan, so do people and things in this world. The physical Universe in this analogy is the mentation or thoughts of a Universal Consciousness or an intelligent entity. Each individual is more than a mere thought or idea, but just as ephemeral nonetheless.
Rick's pointed out an incident that E. B. Sledge had where a voice told him that he was survive the Pacific Theater and the war. There are moments every human has of a particular clarity and specialness. They are moments of acute perception and awareness without a trace of thought. They can be experienced, but never fully comprehended by analysis or thought afterward. The Zen Buddhists call them satori. Christians call them mystical visions. A variation of satori likely happens quite a bit to soldiers in combat because of the stress and fatigue of combat, and the necessity of being constantly aware of your environment. Both physics and metaphysics are converging on the truth that the Universe is both the observer and the observed. That fact leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is a Universal Consciousness that exists and that everyone and everything in this Universe are part of that "Mind". The existence of such a consciousness would explain instances where people knew their loved ones were in trouble or people being prescient. (There is a story in Halsey's Typhoon of a sailor's father knowing his son was in a life threatening situation. The father could not know his son's destroyer had sunk and his son was threading water in a massive typhoon, but he did know his son's life was in extreme danger. So, he got his wife and they prayed for their son's safety.)
We will likely need new ways of thinking and analysis. Since both Nature and thought are fractal (interactive repetition) as are most human endeavors, our mathematics and behavioral analysis should probably go in that direction. We've seen the limits of Gaussian distributions, economic models, and risk management against the fractal reality (and fraud) of Wall Street. War is no less complex a system as Wall Street, but it is rooted in the fractal nature of the human and natural world as Wall Street is. Any analysis of human endeavors also has to deal with the loss of observational information just as a physicist loses information by the measurements he or she conducts on the object being measured. Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle is not just a quantum law. The ultimate skill is not fighting or analyzing the war, but avoiding the war in the first place. Was not this the first of Sun Tzu's rules? Skill in analyzing and fighting a war is a poor second to the first skill of avoiding the war in the first place through shrewd analysis and diplomacy.
Chaos is a higher form of order that our minds have not yet grasped or understood fully yet. The Universe and the local part of it we call our World seem chaotic on the surface, yet there is an order underneath it. The Indian sages call this world, Maya, the dream. Given a long enough period of time, nothing lasts and today's events and people seem as if they were part of a dream. As a thought in one's head has a brief lifespan, so do people and things in this world. The physical Universe in this analogy is the mentation or thoughts of a Universal Consciousness or an intelligent entity. Each individual is more than a mere thought or idea, but just as ephemeral nonetheless.
Rick's pointed out an incident that E. B. Sledge had where a voice told him that he was survive the Pacific Theater and the war. There are moments every human has of a particular clarity and specialness. They are moments of acute perception and awareness without a trace of thought. They can be experienced, but never fully comprehended by analysis or thought afterward. The Zen Buddhists call them satori. Christians call them mystical visions. A variation of satori likely happens quite a bit to soldiers in combat because of the stress and fatigue of combat, and the necessity of being constantly aware of your environment. Both physics and metaphysics are converging on the truth that the Universe is both the observer and the observed. That fact leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is a Universal Consciousness that exists and that everyone and everything in this Universe are part of that "Mind". The existence of such a consciousness would explain instances where people knew their loved ones were in trouble or people being prescient. (There is a story in Halsey's Typhoon of a sailor's father knowing his son was in a life threatening situation. The father could not know his son's destroyer had sunk and his son was threading water in a massive typhoon, but he did know his son's life was in extreme danger. So, he got his wife and they prayed for their son's safety.)
We will likely need new ways of thinking and analysis. Since both Nature and thought are fractal (interactive repetition) as are most human endeavors, our mathematics and behavioral analysis should probably go in that direction. We've seen the limits of Gaussian distributions, economic models, and risk management against the fractal reality (and fraud) of Wall Street. War is no less complex a system as Wall Street, but it is rooted in the fractal nature of the human and natural world as Wall Street is. Any analysis of human endeavors also has to deal with the loss of observational information just as a physicist loses information by the measurements he or she conducts on the object being measured. Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle is not just a quantum law. The ultimate skill is not fighting or analyzing the war, but avoiding the war in the first place. Was not this the first of Sun Tzu's rules? Skill in analyzing and fighting a war is a poor second to the first skill of avoiding the war in the first place through shrewd analysis and diplomacy.
Labels: Understanding complexity
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I'm in total agreement John.
Wall Street may well have proven as destructive a vector in the last 2 years as al Qaida in 2001 - but hey Wall Street's revolving door alumni filled high (unelected) positions in Bush's Admoin and now Obama's so many of them constitute bin Ladin (without the beard) in respectable, profitable ways.
These guys deserve the efficiency bonuses (out of the public purse, of course) for losing Billions on their watch.
War is good for Defense industry - one needs to recognise - and therefore the Western (incoporating American) Way
Pete
Wall Street may well have proven as destructive a vector in the last 2 years as al Qaida in 2001 - but hey Wall Street's revolving door alumni filled high (unelected) positions in Bush's Admoin and now Obama's so many of them constitute bin Ladin (without the beard) in respectable, profitable ways.
These guys deserve the efficiency bonuses (out of the public purse, of course) for losing Billions on their watch.
War is good for Defense industry - one needs to recognise - and therefore the Western (incoporating American) Way
Pete
I keep coming to the conclusion that we are a clever race, but not necessarily an intelligent one. An intelligent race would not overfish the oceans or create deserts due to poor agricultural practices. An intelligent race would try to live in some sort of harmonious balance with the rest of the living beings on this planet. Fighting against the natural order is folly and the result will be a culling of a third to one half of humanity from disease or starvation alone. The death toll will go higher if wars break out. The small wars in Africa and the former Yugoslavia were over resources. All this barbarity because people can't or won't share. The Earth is basically a global island and humans have poor track records living on islands in sustainable ways if Easter Island is an example.
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