(Those who think in threes)
http://threesology.org
I believe that there are thousands, if not millions who experience some level of developmental cognitive change beyond the ordinary senses of fads and fashions or basic developmental maturity, and intermesh their perceptions as best they can within the social contexts to which they inhabit. No doubt many have come across the "threes" reality but had no ready available context to place it, nor had any experience that helped them to further an inquiry into their perceptions. Instead, patterns-of-three became transformed into patterns-of-two or, if threes experiences became overwhelming, they sought some means of dulling their mind such as drugs, drink, or some activity which absorbed them enough to distract them. I say this because I have encountered those who have reacted extremely negatively when I have presented them with a list of patterns-of-three. It's not that they aren't aware of many of the examples, it's just that the quantity in such a format is out of their typical mental realm of considering vast quantities of information. Whereas possessing a large amount of information about different subjects in the context of making money such as playing on the television show Jeopardy is appropriate because of their familiarity with the show, but to do provide a long list of information from different sources without a recognizable frame around it, makes some feel as if they have ventured into an episode of the old twilight zone or outer limits television productions.
Very often, ideas are valued only if they provide a means or suggestion about making money, monetary decisions, monetary obsessions, etc... and if associated with money, are somehow to be interpreted as having greater value (then if the same idea was not attached to money)... for example, here's an excerpt (From Let's Talk Seriously about Peace page 18):
There are numerous models of dichotomy which can be used to at least suggest the existence of an underlying thinking pattern that continues to crop up and has done so for centuries, albeit with different labels and applications. One of these is represented in the book entitled "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (2011) by Daniel Kahneman which was an intended lay-person's outline of the article "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decisions Under Risk" (1979), which he and Amos Tversky had worked on. Since the book is focused on the application of psychology to thinking in terms of economic decisions and the Peace/War (conflict) dichotomy does revolve around many economic questions (costs, funding procurement, political stratifications of diplomacy, etc...); a closer look at the model is needed to see if it can render any useful insights into our serious look at Peace.
Kahneman and Tversky did not produce an altogether new, that is... original idea. The dichotomy of "fast and slow" is an old "Dick and Jane see spot run" type of illustration representing more complex terms and ideas, and yet omits the inclusion of more basic and simple ideas such as might be described as up/down, in/out, here/there, hot/cold, yes/no, etc..., with a particular emphasis to denote the overlooked regurgitation of a good/bad or good/evil theme. Hence, there is some value in pointing out that the "2-system" formula is not new, and the Wikipedia article on "Dual Process Theory" describing William James as the originator of the the foundations of dual process theory... is a Western bias, when the belief system of Yin and Yang clearly represents a dual process theory though other perspectives involving simpler dualities no doubt predate the Yin and Yang formulation since physiology influences the construction of extreme points of referencing (such as hot and cold), though the "middle ground or middle way" may not be an articulated nor assigned a "happy medium" label, though the position is highly sought after. However, Western minds like to lace and embellish basic ideas to give the impression of having created something original and monumental.
The Nobel prize committee "bought into the idea" of combining antiquated psychology notions with economics and awarded Kahneman a Nobel Prize for economics! So if you want a Nobel prize in economics you have got to attach it to some other mainstream academics practicing their own antiquated notions, in order to give the impression of having come up with an original idea... only because so many current business, government and religious institutions have a backward perspective to begin with and won't recognize an amalgamation akin to trying to turn lead into gold (resurrect a dead subject as if it were something new and original).
If we look back upon the history of developmental biology and note various physical adaptations to different environments, we must make note of the fact that there was not as much amalgamation as some portraits of ancient ideas suggest, such as when the head of a bird on a human body (frame) or the body of a lion attached with a human head were viewed as original creations to the effect they were provided a royal and religious seal of approval— such as in the case of ancient Egypt. No less the story about the bull-headed man called the Minotaur, 3 snake-haired and winged women called gorgons, or Satyrs who were men with the tail and legs of an animal such as a horse or goat.
It would be of interest to determine if early myths, legends and later... fairytales, amalgamated one body part difference (such as the head or body of an animal) and whether a later history of humanity (someplace) shows the usage of two structural differences (such as the head and tail of an animal), followed by visualizations where three or more different body parts (or perspectives) were associated to a single person, single group, culture, or nation. In other words, does myth or legend or fairytales give an indication of a cognitive change expressed by the application of more animal parts to humans or the other way around? If we have occasions for the usage of one animal body part being used for a period of time followed by the usage of two body parts followed by three, etc..., we eventually come to a moment in time where this is not longer the case... but... humans are then provided with one super power, or two super powers, or three.... etc... Different ages appear to be using the same type of underlying cognitive formula without recognizing its fundamental quantitative structure, and that there is a limitation in all cases. No culture seems to progress from the usage of one to a usage of say a hundred separate amalgamations or a single creature with an enormous array of different animal, insect or plant parts. In other words, there too is a limitation to human imagination. We don't have comic book super-heroes or super-villains with ten thousand super-powers or an I.Q. of a million. For all his super powers, the intelligence of Superman was pretty average. There are constraints and this constraint may well be an expression of the effects the deteriorating environment is having on humanity.
We must also wonder if such creatures of myth were due to unrecognized states of being subjected to some hallucinogenic drug or as well due in part to a terrible diet, disease, etc... Or were they expressions of a brain that was evolving and searching for a means to express a quantitatively larger formula of integrating different perceptions such as when comparing the heads of different animals an switching them, or viewing the matted hair of an unkempt woman to a pit of snakes, or the club foot of a person with that of a hoofed animal, etc... Then again, does the prevailency of multiple myths in a given culture suggest a wide-spread disease or malnutrition affecting everyone's perception to experience similar types of distortions such as auditory sounds (interpreted as voices of gods), natural movements as actions or "signs" of gods? No less, what if the so-called reality of today is one big hallucination brought about an unrecognized poison in the air, water, food, or pollutions transmitted via television, radio, telephone, newspapers, magazines, books, and internet? And let us not forget to include having to separate those examples which displayed some human-related form and those that were merely amalgamations of different animals such as in the case of the griffin (part eagle and part lion).
In our examination of a lineage of different life forms from different ages, where the presence of different cognitive structures is easily identifiable, what we do not see being represented (clearly)... is the occasion of amalgamations where one creature has some recognizable similarity to some other animal, both of which are distinct from one another, such as in the case of Archaeopteryx which had both bird and reptile characteristics. In other words, we do not have lions with human heads nor people with wings, but we do have the image of a fish with human-like teeth. Hence, while there is a wide variety of life forms, the underlying body plans are few.
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 (Somebody lost their dentures) |
Another way of looking at the previous number chart is to view it in a colloquially identified as an alpha-numeric filing system. Instead of letters of a 26 letter limited alphabet, we are using numbers sometimes displayed in words. And like items filed under an alphabet system, we find variations of usage in that some filing systems used for one or another company in a given population— there may be a need to have multiple cabinets for one, two, or three letters. For example, if you live in the population of a State/City/Country in which the name Smith is the dominant last name, the filing system for most companies may require multiple cabinets for the letter "S". Other places may require additional cabinets for another letter because some other letter is that which is dominant in a last name such as Jones, or they begin with the letter A, or B, or C... etc... However, very often, in most instances we find some letters being seldom used because there are few people with the letter Z, or Y, or some other letter. Nonetheless, the overall limit is 26 letters for the western type of alphabet. If we were to encounter a system with more letters, it too would be an example of the limitation(s) in human cognition and there might well be limitations of usage within its range of letters.
If we use the analogy of a set of Dresser drawers used in a bedroom, we find that the top drawers may be most often used and that there may be a need for some to have multiple dressers because many people use them to file away other-than-clothing stuff. Nonetheless, we assign such stuff with some level of importance... whether they are used daily, should be kept secret, or placed away in some sort of "corner of nostalgia" that we can return to... so long as our memory holds out as we grow older. With respect to drawers, the contents we place into them may be associated with the idea of how we value the overall containment area (such as placing a high-priced value on the human mind, as if it were some lavish antique). However, those who don't place much value on the human brain and its contents may well use theirs (or ascribe to others), as a toy box, junk drawer, toilet, item for target practice, a throw-away dime-a-dozen use & abuse item, dirty garage, in-laws shed, etc... In short, not everyone views the human mind as being some special organ to be proud of because they view all technology and industry as little more than nest building, dam construction and using sticks to get at insects in a hole... seen respectively in birds, beavers and chimpanzees.
In a moment of digressive thinking my mind wanders over to thoughts concerning the filing system being used to categorize social theories and theorists to which the scanning system in usage for the moment's memorization trek uncovers the limitations of thinking being applied. In other words, we have only a few ideas such as Anarchism, Communism, Democracy, Libertarianism, and Socialism... though one or another reader might want to add the references of Monarchy, Dictatorship, as well as Philosopher King as alternatives; yet overall, there is a mental conservation taking place. In other words, we don't have fifty theories. And if we then look at economic theories and display the list of Traditional (Monarchy/dictatorship), Market (Capitalism), Mixed (market/planned), State (command/planned); we again note a limitation... and the limitations fall within the parameters of the first few number designators. In other words we don't have 10, 17 or 1,000 types of government or economic systems being thought of because the human mind is forced to exist in a world that expects a constrained perspective to coincide with an incrementally deteriorating environment with diminishing returns in all presumed renewable resources.
All in all, what we are surmising in our efforts to uncode (itemize) the basic patterns of thinking available to humanity under the present incrementally deteriorating environmental conditions... causing us to make adjustments to our many rationalizations; is that we are creating a type of inventory system which will help us to better track gains and losses in our thinking repertoire... despite all the efforts employed to create illusions and delusions which conceal the reality of the deteriorating situation. It will help us to identify the complete product line of human thought... how it is produced, the quantity and quality, the distribution network, what substitutions are being made, who is buying (into) what type of product, what packaging is needed, who the salespeople are, resource losses, overhead costs, product refurbishments, needed upgrades, design parameters, etc... For example, while we denote alterations in religious beliefs and science development having occurred over the centuries, historical representations provide a simplistic account and inventory thereof... often based on some biased scale of interpretation. The amount and types of changes as well as substitutions have not been definitively catalogued to provide a correct estimation of the production and distribution thereof as a viable product that can be sustained. For example, implements once used on rural farms are no longer viable products because rural farm life has deteriorated to the point of almost non-existence in some countries. The same goes for land-line telephone usage, riding in horse-drawn carriages, deterioration in penmanship due to fewer people exchanging letters, etc... Incremental changes in beliefs due to deteriorations concealed by alternatives designated as progress can not conceal the fact that rationalizations are taking place to validate an acceptance of a given deterioration and thereby supply a rational reason that we accept and most people do not customarily question reflectively about.
Because we can recognize such limitations of thought, thought processing may also exhibit an underlying conservation... a conservation that may be directly tied to the incremental deterioration of the planet... a planet we can not save, and only temporarily intervene in the deteriorations caused by human activity. This has profound implications for computer and other designs as well as every single philosophy and belief system. In fact, this correlates well with what we find in physics as denoted in the rest of the Conservation Law article that was begun above (I continue the article after the above paragraph):
Conservation of energy implies that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, although it can be changed from one form (mechanical, kinetic, chemical, etc.) into another. In an isolated system the sum of all forms of energy therefore remains constant. For example, a falling body has a constant amount of energy, but the form of the energy changes from potential to kinetic. According to the theory of relativity, energy and mass are equivalent. Thus, the rest mass of a body may be considered a form of potential energy, part of which can be converted into other forms of energy. Conservation of linear momentum expresses the fact that a body or system of bodies in motion retains its total momentum, the product of mass and vector velocity, unless an external force is applied to it. In an isolated system (such as the universe), there are no external forces, so momentum is always conserved. Because momentum is conserved, its components in any direction will also be conserved. Application of the law of conservation of momentum is important in the solution of collision problems. The operation of rockets exemplifies the conservation of momentum: the increased forward momentum of the rocket is equal but opposite in sign to the momentum of the ejected exhaust gases. Conservation of angular momentum of rotating bodies is analogous to the conservation of linear momentum. Angular momentum is a vector quantity whose conservation expresses the law that a body or system that is rotating continues to rotate at the same rate unless a twisting force, called a torque, is applied to it. The angular momentum of each bit of matter consists of the product of its mass, its distance from the axis of rotation, and the component of its velocity perpendicular to the line from the axis. Conservation of mass implies that matter can be neither created nor destroyed—i.e., processes that change the physical or chemical properties of substances within an isolated system (such as conversion of a liquid to a gas) leave the total mass unchanged. Strictly speaking, mass is not a conserved quantity. However, except in nuclear reactions, the conversion of rest mass into other forms of mass-energy is so small that, to a high degree of precision, rest mass may be thought of as conserved. Conservation of charge states that the total amount of electric charge in a system does not change with time. At a subatomic level, charged particles can be created, but always in pairs with equal positive and negative charge so that the total amount of charge always remains constant. In particle physics, other conservation laws apply to certain properties of nuclear particles, such as baryon number, lepton number, and strangeness. Such laws apply in addition to those of mass, energy, and momentum encountered in everyday life and may be thought of as analogous to the conservation of electric charge. The laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum are all derived from classical mechanics. Nevertheless, all remain true in quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics, which have replaced classical mechanics as the most fundamental of all laws. In the deepest sense, the three conservation laws express the facts, respectively, that physics does not change with passing time, with displacement in space, or with rotation in space. Source: "Conservation Law." Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2013. |
All the aforementioned laws are part of the inter-laced network of human rationalization that we back up with money, intellectualisms, institutionalized belief systems, professional ceremonies and awards, etc... It is like trying to profess an alternative religious belief when having to confront those whose livelihood is wrapped up in such perspectives. Calling their laws a system of rationalizations is tantamount to calling god a "she" or an "it" though they insist god is a "he"... to whom they identify best with. Whereas it was once believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth and all the experts forcefully argued with this rationale as a universal truth, and despite the fact this view was later counter-manded; their world was the result of a given set of rationalizations just as is ours today... and if you are one whose brain is more suited for a distant future, you may well already see the ridiculousness of their ideology... though even proof would be no proof in the eyes of those whose perspective can not see beyond a simplified grasp of reality... though it be construed as having been derived by a profession.
With respect to a "conservation of thought" (if not overall thought processing), within an isolated (planetary) system (environment), we can witness a force acting on it to cause alterations. This force is the deterioration of the environment which creates the conditions for requiring increased practices of conservation that we already see taking place in efforts to conserve water quality and quantity, air quality, arable (plantable) land, recycling, etc... (even though neither the government nor banks are emphasizing the need for conserving money in savings accounts... because they make more money off of credit from the little guy and gal than they would off the money such people would make available to them through savings accounts. The banks like to be in the position of being like that of drug pusher and dealer than accountant). The business environment of the U.S. as it is in other countries is being dominated by those who want the majority to spend, and not save their money... and the government is supporting such a self-serving business ethic.
If a person has one book, you can file it away just about any place within sight and never misplace it, unless of course one is particularly absent-minded or buries it beneath an habitual practice of being unkempt... such as throwing one's clothes about, using one's kitchen as a garage, using one's bedroom as a storage shed, etc... For some, disorder gives them the impression of some sort of creativity or genius because they may have encountered someone whose title or activities were viewed as a desirable exception to those they were familiar with and may have kept an orderly life but were not particularly intelligent or creative... and may have been quite unpleasant to be around.
However, if you have multiple books or more to the point— have a curiosity about multiple subjects, you need a means of filing the information. As in the case of books with respect to someone who reads voraciously but lives a rather unkempt lifestyle, their books may be here and there... though they know "just about" where a given book is... or at least they may say they do... but still have to engage in some form of rummaging through different book piles. Others, in an attempt to file their books away in a more methodical manner may use a subject or author type of indexing, unless they set up their own type of Dewey decimal (number) filing system. Yet, my experience is that even with a small personal library of one or two thousand books, a numbering system is not typically used because there may be some other undisclosed criteria being used as a filing system. In any respect, the idea of a deterioration in one's collection taking place is far removed from most peoples' minds... even though a deterioration in usage of one or another (or even most) of the books does takes place. For some reason or other, the sight of a personal library tends to be interpreted with great respect by many people as if something of considerable value has been accomplished... even if they don't actually make much use of the available information.
While it generally is understood that it is impossible for any single person to know everything or even be able to know where to find desirable information even if it were at one's fingertips such as through a computer... and that as one ages there is a deterioration in memory and thus accessibility to stored information in one's biological brain configuration; the idea about the existence of a conservation of thought and thought processing does not come to mind unless one is working in the area of computer and computer programming design. In such instances, the usage of the word "power" is applied as an extension of the electricity-oriented jargon and thus promotes an incorrect perception since both designs are presently limited to the same forces of deterioration as humans are. In other words, if we were to design computers that were exempt from the conservation of thought and thought processing as well as associated deteriorations of the planet; the functionality (ideas and self-replications) of the computers would become quite strange to us as we continue on a course of increased conservation due to the incrementally increasing deteriorations of an environment which demands that all biological forms engage in incremental adjustments of design and function (such as thinking) in order to maintain some semblance of equilibrium.
Our presumptions about being advanced in our thinking when compared to earlier eras may simply be the expressions of conserved thoughts arising from conserved mechanisms of thought processing as a survival reflex to a deteriorating environment. While some might thus conclude that deprivation is the means to influence more advanced thinking, the process may require a period of development under incrementally changing environmental (and thus social) conditions like the extended processes involved in the growth of a seed such as one from an apple. In other words, like the birth of a child or moth, or butterfly that undergoes growth according to a series of incubated changes; human "smartness" may not be so easily increased by an artificial means of inducement unless the underlying requirements of gestation are altered accordingly. The same goes for computer design. Unless one can identify the underlying steps of gestation in the developmental process which at its present pace in several areas has taken decades to mature; basic designs will remain the same and superficially "advance" only in terms of embellishments... like adding leather bucket seats, or a radio, or sound proofing, etc., to the underlying chassis of primitive design.
In terms of other subject areas, the application of different labels to older ideas may persuade some to feel that they have made some sort of intellectual break-through by having come up with an idea equivalent to inventing the wheel, usage of fire (for cooking/lighting/protection ), smelting (to remove the "sword from the stone"), developing the first apparel/shoes, performing the first surgery (such as trephination), harnessing electricity (or discovering its existence so that someone else can come up with a working model), etc... Yet, their action would be little more than a repetition of something earlier, with modification, like a person in one era receiving the Nobel prize for peace and then others receiving the same in different eras... with each thinking that their efforts are original; yet overlook the fact that peace is not sustained, the definition and application of peace is lousy, and no one is actually taking a serious look at what the presence of the peace/war means in terms of human cognition as part of a series of other similarly designed ideas.
Page initially created: Sunday, 01-Jan-2017... 12:28 PM
Initial Posting: Sunday, 01-Jan-2017... 02:06 PM
Updated Posting (split off from Threenkers page 1): Friday, 21-April-2017... 10:21 AM