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To the Group:

In Paul’s posting (Evolving systems: July to August (PG), Monday, 08/10/2009 - 4:19pm), he ended with a series of bullet-points, summing up some recent questions in our group’s discussions.  Since I’ve been remiss in writing recently (again, largely due to broken hand), I will try to make up for that here with some comments on some of those bullet-points, just to add to the discussion...

1. Paul noted: * Does productive change always depend on dissatisfaction?  "What about opportunity? Harmonic association? Aspiration?"

As I recall, in our July group meeting, we looked at this question through the framework of academia. But what about art? Art would seem to support the idea that things like “harmonic association” (nice term!) drive productive change in human beings. Look at Kandinsky’s book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”... As for “aspiration”, well, that’s Plato’s whole bag, no? I think that Plato would, in fact, reject the idea of “productive change always depending on dissatisfaction”; the Greeks had a model more based on a “aspiration”, the term Paul uses above. I would further argue that the idea of “productive change always depending on dissatisfaction” is really an artifact of modernity. In Existentialism, it’s all about that dissatisfaction -- you can see it in Kafka, and then right on through Satre, etc. While probably the most dissatisfied and irritable member of our group (!), I would also argue that this model -- of dissatisfaction driving change -- is very corrosive. I teach Existentialism, and this is something I’ve noticed over the past several years. People like Paul Tillich try to paste over this corrosive quality in Existentialism, but it’s there...

2. Paul noted: * How useful is the distinction between "provisional/immediate" and "directed/deliberative"? For individuals?  For cultures?  Can it be made sense of in terms of the brain? 

As we noted to the group, Paul and I are working (I hope he’s working on it!) on a series of papers on this topic; perhaps we could post a passage or two from these papers on this for clarification? I’ll let Paul decide... Regardless, this is an interesting question. Since I am one of the co-writers of these papers, I have a (reasonably) set viewpoint on the question. But I am open to discussion... As I recall, in our last group meeting, my comments on this topic were a bit misunderstood, insofar as (as Paul knows) my views on this subject come less from academic investigation and more from on-the-ground experience with other cultures. I think the distinction between "provisional/immediate" and "directed/deliberative" is very useful for everything from geopolitics to marriage... in my experience, of course.

3. Paul noted: * "Can thinking and acting happen independently of commitments and power structures.  I think the answer is no."  

I would love to see this topic discussed in our next (August) meeting...

4. Paul noted: * Can all, or any, of this help to better understand (make less wrong stories about) physics, geology, biology, the brain, interpersonal relations, history, art, culture, philosophy  ... form, meaning, and aesthetics? Understanding itself? 

I also think this idea of “stories” is worth discussing. It’s a favorite idea of Paul’s, and I have been intrigued by it, but let’s either critique it or see if we can indeed answer question 4 above with the “stories” idea. From my perspective (and note that that very phrase implies that I have my own story-construction), the answer is “yes”. Of course, I also think that the story our society has written already is a deeply wrong one. I gave Paul some time ago a passage from a play called Robert Anton Wilson’s entertaining play, “Wilhelm Reich in Hell” -- we are using it in our paper, in fact. It presents the same idea -- that we need a healthier story. We need a “less wrong” story about interpersonal relations, etc., certainly, and that is a long and complex discussion we can have. To be on safer ground for now (I don’t want to talk about personal interests!), I will make a quick comment about physics, which Paul includes in his list above. Physics is written on the basis of a very particular story -- one which could be quite different. As I’ve argued to Paul, our “story” in physics, if one reflects, is entirely a spatio-temporal one, which means that it has an inherent bias. It is a story which uses hierarchies, both in space and time -- big and small, non-quantum and quantum, past and future, inner and outer. What kind of physics might we articulate if we rejected such a spatio-temporal story framework?