Square Soap Bubbles

I have suggested the image of a square soap bubble to help in understanding how one can appear to be discrete, autonomous, separate, and yet be part of all that exists, unified with world and all that happens within it.  I find it helpful. The bubble is discrete, separate, has a distinct identity, yet at the same time, no part of it has an independent existence.

Here is Maturana on a similar theme:

Systems as composite entities have a dual existence, namely, they exist as singularities that operate as simple unities in the domain in which they arise as totalities, and at the same time they exist as composite entities in the domain of the operation of their components.  The relation between these two domains is not causal; these two domains do not intersect, nor do the phenomena which pertain to one occur in the other” (2002, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 9:5–34)

 

 

Dreams and narrative

Sometimes, when we dream, but are close to waking, a bodily process, like a full bladder, or indigestion, makes itself obvious in the dream.  When recounted, it has a narrative form.  Here, we see the construction, from the raw, non-linguistic material of the P-world, a story, an autobiography.  We might attend more closely to that border in individuals, and take note of how they each individually understand their own bodies to work.  What does the spleen mean to X, the heart to Y?  This is akin to trying to map from the observer’s story about glucose and metabolisms, to the cell’s story about a direction.

 

I am this poem

 

More on farming

Farming humans.  You can. We are a natural process, like a bean plant. You can count on us developing the best possible causal account of the R-world. The internet is a human farm. The infrastructure is ‘for free’. People do what they do best: they try to make sense of things. Are the ideas our farmers?

 

Scared of death?

Of course I’m not frightened of death. I see through time. I realize that I, or my P-world, is/am necessarily finite. My job, always, is to try and make this finite grape thing the best thing it can be. My only point of reference therein is right here. Where I am. My coordinates. From there, you have to figure out what is human and what not.  I’m scared. Its dangerous at the margins.

 

Defining self, seeing self

I am getting better at seeing things. But all I see better is myself. (self: definition: The extended R-world region that corresponds to one P-world. We [seem to ] insist it have a definition!) That’s all one can do.

 

Farming humans

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress: they farm humans!  Provide the nutrients, the boundary conditions, and trust in the stock to do what it does naturally: communicating and showing off and yapping. That’s the immediate effect of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

 

Visibility within a P-world

Here’s a question we might ask about P-worlds: which bits are ‘visible’ from where? (In the current sorry jargon, we call that ‘memory’ sometimes).  But it also captures ruptures (multiple personalities). ‘Visible’ plays off a spatial metaphor.  That will, as it has before, prove to be a suitably pliant metaphor.

 

Goals, and a scientific/humanist agenda

As macroscopic structure matches, mostly, between brains, so we really ought to find the common structure of the P-world, so that we can understand the residual variation.

 

What it is like to be a bat….

We are very many P-worlds. Six billion human-centered ones. But there may be an infinity of p’, p” worlds of which we know nothing. That’s what it is like to be a bat.

[Should we regard arbitrary complex processes as worthy of moral consideration, as we do our own P-worlds?  Seems like the only perspective we can possibly take is the one which has our human POV as a reference point.  This is the pickle we are in, and this is the only way forward.]