Symbol Thinking

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Solving the Chicken or Egg Causality Dilemma

(or: Why the egg came first)

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered on the question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" If one follows the idea of Fractal Pantheism answering this question is quite easy: The egg came first.

Why?

Fractal Pantheism assumes that life is a recursive process. Douglas Hofstäder described the key-property of life as a strange loop--a loop, however, with feedback, meaning: being of recursive nature. So there is not one egg that creates, but life itself is always some kind of egg (so to speak).

And the picture gets a lot clearer when we begin to assume that humans are also some kind of egg. If we further reframe our orginal question as "which came first, the human or the Internet?" We know that the human came first and created the Internet, indicating that the egg had to evolve as organism in order to create the chicken. Many people, however, seem to believe that human inventions are not part of nature, but I disagree, simply for the reason that human beings are as alien to biological cells and DNA as the Internet or any other human invention is to us.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

A Modeling Language for Psychic Transformations

For some time I have been wondering how one could combine Beebe's Archetypes with alchemical operations (represented here in form of Edinger's Operations [Edinger 1985]), as the roles laid out by Jungian Archetypes seem to be orthogonal to alchemical operations, which revolve around transformations.

Beebe has given elaborate accounts for how one can imagine the developments of characters in films as differentiating consciousness in an individuating psyche. For illustrating my idea, I will use his full-blown essay on the characters' interactions and developments in the The Wizard of OZ [Beebe 2000] and map them to Edinger's alchemical operations.

This is how Beebe ordered the characters in the film according to their archetypes [Beebe 2000, p80]:

The Wizard of OZ is about a vauntingly empathic heroine, Dorothy, learning to take care of her own heart. Initially she cannot understand why Aunt Em wants to send away Toto for biting their neighbor, but by the time she becomes aware of the Ruby slippers' power to fulfill her own wishes, she also realizes that she needs to keep her own home in order too ("There is no place like home"). According to Beebe this stands for Dorothy (the Heroine) initially killing her Opposing Personality by falling into coma and gradually coming to terms with in the film. [p76:2]

Here I attempt to chart out the psychic developments mathematically by specifying alchemical transformations as coordinates in the charts that Edinger supplied for each of his operations [Edinger 1985]. Mapping transformations this way raises questions as to which level of detail should be attained to or what operations represent certain interactions correctly. Still, while I am not exactly thrilled about some of the mappings I also believe that modeling this way can be valuable.

Heroine

Mortificatio

Opposing Personality

Mother

Coniunctio

Solutio

Hero

Heroine

Coniunctio

Animus

Trickster

Coagulatio

Puer Aeternus

Heroine

Separatio

Puer Aeternus

Witch

Mortificatio

Calcinatio

Heroine

Demonic

Mortificatio

Heroine

Solutio

Witch

Trickster

Coagulatio

Puer Aeternus

Heroine

Sublimatio

Opposing Personality

Bibliography

Beebe, John (2000) "The Wizard of OZ -- A vision of development in the American political psyche", The Vision Thing -- Myth, Politics and the Psyche in the World: 62-83.
Edinger, Edward F. (1985) Anatomy of the Psyche -- Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

A Notation for Edinger's Alchemical Operations

I find it handy to have a symbolic notation for alchemical processes. According to The Philsopher's Stone Dom Pernety first associated processes with signs of the zodiac in the eighteenth century. Alas his twelve alchemical operations are in no way compatible with the seven which Edward F. Edinger applied to Jungian Psychology in Anatomy of the Psyche. Hence I've made my own notation for Edinger's processes:

	Calcinatio: Intense heating of a solid in order to drive off water and all other constituents that will volatilize. Only fine, dry powder remains.
	Solutio: Turns a solid into a liquid. The solid seems to disappear into the solvent as if it had been swallowed up.
	Coagulatio: Turns something into earth.
	Sublimatio: Transforms earth into air; a fixed body is volatilized.
	Mortificatio: Killing, experience of death. (Synonymous with Putrefactio.)
	Separatio: Discriminates composite mixtures of its component parts.
	Coniunctio: Two substances come together and create a third with different properties.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Our Unconscious Religion: Fractal Pantheism

If we weren't to unconsciously believe in Fractal Pantheism, some movies wouldn't be more popular than others because we wouldn't see ourselves in them. We would not be intrigued by some of our dreams. We would not be interested in Astrology. Eastern medicine would not assume that our body somehow represents our soul. Youngsters wouldn't pick flower leaves to find out if the person they desire is in love with them as well. There would be only pictures; no art.

Stories like Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or The Matrix would not be fascinating at all.

Many people are probably aware that life goes on on different levels. In superstring theory, after all an attempt to understand the world, they defined ten physical dimensions for describing the world.

But why should there be only ten dimensions?

Well, just judge yourself which of these pictures you find a more attractive image for understanding the world:

The Calabi-Yau Manifold

or the Mandelbrot set:

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Questions to Ponder

Is it true that people think great ideas in parallel, whereas misunderstandings are individual?

Do chimpanzees also believe that human beings are smarter than them?

Mosquitoes' metabolism dissolves HIV, how does it do this?

Is logic really a universal value or rather cultural?

Is there a Big Bang theory in terms of thought processes?

Why isn't there a popular religion that could be classed as fractal pantheism?

Do nuclear bombs feel guilt?

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Holacracy

Ideas taken from: Agile Methods + Ken Wilber + InterStrength(tm) = Holacracy

I've found this interview illuminating, listed here.

The World According to Cultural Orientation

External Information

Likely to accept world views different from their own.

Information Processing

Associative: Rote learning teached in schools

Focus

Matters may be viewed from a universal or particular level.

Evidence

Either subjective feelings, scientific facts, or religious faith are accepted as evidence in negotiations.

Data are based on Conway and Morrison: "Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands", 2nd edition

Sunday, April 29, 2007

The Myth of Communication Systems

In this posting I try to combine Scott Adams' critique of communication with the concept of Jungian Archetypes.

In "God's Debris" Scott Adams notes that humans can be differentiated from other living organism by having elaborate communication structures, that, by this day and age, allow us to communicate with each other regardless where we are.

One could assume that our increased ability to communicate also helps us to protect ourselves better than other organisms, but yet at times it seems as if all this even gets in our way. For example, animals don't have artificial communication systems, and yet they are better than us to recognize environmental threats like earth quakes or tsunamis. Each year many scientists work together hard on a new vaccination against seasonal flu viruses, but still many times those simple creatures are smarter to recognize how they can avoid termination.

I would say that our communication systems are a little too inefficient to be just for exchanging information, and yet very few people question communication, begging the question whether we just perceive communication systems to be a great idea. Or, saying it in Jungian terms: Communication systems are cultural complexes that are most attractive to our psyches rather than giving us a real benefit.

This all leads to concepts related of the Jungian Archetypes which argue that there is a raw, unconscious, and unstructured way of communication. On top of this I would add that for most living organisms archetypal communication is probably quite natural and only for us humans it is not easy to perceive. Maybe this is one of the reasons humans had to invent communication systems in the first place.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

49 Killing Fantasies

Some pictures of this worthwhile exhibit.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Mindmap of Beebe Archetypes

Clare Howard has kindly made a mind map based on my notes of John Beebe's Memphis workshop and also extended them a little.

(You need the OpenSource software FreeMind to view the file.)

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Imagination v Synesthesia

Both aesthetics and psychology have tried to deal with the confusion of the two senses in terms of "synesthesia" and the relation between poetry and painting (ut pictura poesis). Synesthesia is not only a puzzling quirk in certain sensitive persons for whom numbers are colors, colors tastes on the tongue, or musical tones present sculptural forms. Synesthesia--confusion, interpenetration of one sense with another--goes on all the time in our common speech when we talk imaginatively, or of imagining. Evidently, synesthesia is how imagination imagines. What this does is transform the singleness of any one sense out of its literalness. It brings us to new sense of the senses, making metaphor of sense perception itself. Consequently, synesthesia plays a special role in the arts because it helps art's own intention--metaphorical insight, awakening of sensibility--freeing it from depiction and representation.

(Excerpt from James Hillman: Image Sense, 1979)