Tuesday, November 06, 2018

Thinking about variation (1)

According to the latest neuroscience, every neuromuscular act utilizes a unique set of neural connections. I wanted to explore this idea in more depth, particularly in the context of my current reading of James Gleick's  "Chaos", and the notions of deep patterns to be found amidst the noise of everyday experience. Unfortunately, I don't own any astronomical or biological instruments. One kind of neuromuscular laboratory is "at hand" however--my own writing-- and a few digital tools that allow me to examine it at varying scales. 



This is a figure 8 on its side, or "infinity", which I attempted to render repeatedly with pencil on paper. As you can see, I had great difficulty performing even this well-practiced gesture exactly the same way over a dozen or so overlapping tries.










A Lesson in Metaphor

Proverbs: (some
fruitless activity) is BEATING A DEAD HORSE,

Deeply embedded in daily use, nearly forgotten (but not "dead")
She felt warmly towards him....
We've cooled on that idea over time...
This was the hard part....

Poems (unique and artistic)
IT IS THE EAST, AND JULIET IS THE SUN
TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD ....DIFFERENCE.

Unconscious and nearly unconscious:
MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY,
ARGUMENT IS BUILDING.
TIME IS SPACE.
VIRTUE IS WELL-BEING


Schema derived from our earliest physical experiences:
seeing
reaching
holding
standing (falling)
walking
eating (voiding, evacuating)
waking, rising
making
fighting
hunting
gathering (foraging)
losing (gaining)





Paraphier, peraphrand
Source, Object
Entailments

Not just a trick of language, but our core conceptual mechanism. 

Number & Math

Science and invention:
Cancer is an infection of the blood.....became "white blood"...or leukemia, which led to a cell-based, then a genetic understanding of cancer.

Earth as the center of the universe...became...sun is the center... became a universe expanding in all directions.

Humours (hydraulic model) replaced by the "germ" based notion of disease, a more functional and specific (machine) model,

Law and Government


Economics



‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’ -John Maynard Keynes