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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Mind as a general term for the emerging internal analog language

Whether one calls it "world-modeling", or laying out the emerging paradigm or the next trial theory in the "science of consciousness", one of the nice things about happening onto and scribbling out a working approximation of the underlying analog math and language that we are all using to fashion together our expressions is, as it emerges the new model explains things that are very puzzling in the prior, less differentiated model or trial theory.


Take "qualia", for instance, or "mind". In the absence of a clear picture, or ANY visualization on the emerging internal analog math/language -- stuck in the subject-object regions of Old Cartesia, qualia and mind are seemingly rock-hard and fundamental. No one can really say clearly WHAT they are, but we are generally all pretty much convinced that thoughts "feel like something", and that each of us have and know about and think we know what we all mean by the term "mind".

Yet, skip through the crack in the paradigm boundary and go out into the new open region.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Step 1 in the paradigm transition: Start with magnetic tetrahedron.

Dial back about 350 years and one of Descartes' messages was, "Start with the cube".  From there flows a lot of abstract math that turns out to have uncanny connections to features in physical reality.  Why? So far, we don't have a clear understanding why that is. 


Dial back about 100 years and we notice that Descartes' classical start is straining under the load.  Time has gone from being absolute to relative, and the mechanistic world turns out to be composed of  inner fundamentals of shimmering multiple states.


Dial back, say, 50 to  70 years and a person named R. Buckminster Fuller,  among other things, said, "Start with tetrahedron" and he went on to develop geodesic domes, the dymaxion map, and to predict the structure and existence of what have since become known as  "fullerenes" which are important in chemistry and nano-technology.


Dial back about 25 years and this author idly differentiated  Fuller's structural perspective by asking "What  do you get when you build a tetrahedron out of magnets. In effect  saying, "Start with a magnetic tetrahedron".


The outcome unfolds in an interesting manner.  There are five ways  to align four rod magnets along the radii of a tetrahedron. That is, immediately, one is dealing  directly with structurally  similar but energetically different multiple states.  Moreover, there are two ways to form states which have the same look and feel locally, but which differ in their  relative function within the enfolding field. As well, some of the states exhibit variable mass-density.  And these features are ALL   expressed in haptic, analog mathematically  "terms" which deliver physical intuition with absolutely NO abstract math pre-requisite. 


"Why is this?", one may  wonder.