The human brain is a physical mechanism for storing, retrieving, and re-storing again, each special-case experience. The experience is often a packaged concept. Such packages consist of complexedly interrelated and not as-yet differentially analyzed phenomena which, as initially unit cognitions, are potentially re-experience-able. A rose, for instance, grows has thorns, blossoms, and fragrance, but often is stored in the brain only under the single word-rose.
As Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, pointed out, the consequence of its single-tagging is that the rose becomes reflexively considered by man only as a red, white, or pink device for paying tribute to a beautiful girl, a thoughtful hostess, or last night’s deceased acquaintance. The tagging of the complex biological process under the single title rose tends to detour human curiosity from further differentiation of its integral organic operations as well as from consideration of its inter-ecological functionings aboard our planet. We don’t know what a rose is, nor what may be its essential and unique cosmic function. Thus for long have we inadvertently deferred potential discovery of the essential roles in Universe that are performed complementarily by many, if not most, of the phenomena we experience.
But, goaded by youth, we older ones are now taking second looks at almost everything. And that promises many ultimately favorable surprises. The oldsters do have vast experience banks not available to the youth. Their memory banks, integrated and reviewed, may readily disclose generalized principles of eminent importance. The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.
The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization. It makes no difference of what material either the fulcrum or the lever consists – wood, steel, or reinforced concrete. Nor do the special-case sizes of the lever and fulcrum, or of the load pried at one end, or the work applied at the lever’s other end in any way alter either the principle or the mathematical regularity of the ratios of physical work advantage that are provided at progressive fulcrum-to-load increments of distance outward from the fulcrum in the opposite direction along the lever’s arm at which the operating effort is applied.
Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever larger inventory of special-case experiences stored in the brain bank and, seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running consistently through all the relevant experience set. The thoughts that discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be eternal. They suggest eternity but do not prove it, even though there have been no experiences thus far that imply exceptions to their persistence. It seems also to follow that the more experiences we have, the more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that disqualify one or another of the already catalogued principles that, having heretofore held “true” without contradiction for a long time, had been tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. Mind’s relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank’s storage of all our special-case experiences tends both to progressive enlargement and definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe. It follows that the more specialized society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind, which are intuitively beamed toward the brain, there to be received only if the switches are “on.” Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all powerful generalized principles. Again we see how society’s perverse fixation on specialization leads to its extinction. We are so specialized that one man discovers empirically how to release the energy of the atom, while another, unbeknownst to him, is ordered by his political factotum to make an atomic bomb by use of the secretly and anonymously published data. That gives much expedient employment, which solves the politician’s momentary problem, but requires that the politicians keep on preparing for further warring with other political states to keep their respective peoples employed. It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which humans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life support for all. Thus humanity’s specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians. Only a comprehensive switch from the narrowing specialization and toward an ever more inclusive and refining comprehension by all humanity-regarding all the factors governing omni-continuing life aboard our spaceship Earth-can bring about reorientation from the self-extinction-bound human trending, and do so within the critical time remaining before we have passed the point of chemical process irretrievability.
Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviours that will avoid extinction.
Living upon the threshold between yesterday and tomorrow, which threshold we reflexively assumed in some long ago yesterday to constitute an eternal now, we are aware of the daily-occurring, vast multiplication of experience generated information by which we potentially may improve our understanding of our yesterdays’ experiences and there from derive our most farsighted preparedness for successive tomorrows.
Anticipating, cooperating with, and employing the forces of nature can be accomplished only by the mind. The wisdom manifest in the Omni-inter-orderliness of the family of generalized principles operative in Universe can be employed only by the highest integrity of engagement of the mind’s metaphysical intuiting and formulating capabilities.
We are able to assert that this rationally coordinating system bridge has been established between science and the humanities because we have made adequate experimental testing of it in a computerized world-resource-use-exploration system, which by virtue of the proper inclusion of all the parameters-as guaranteed by the synergetic start with Universe and the progressive differentiation out of all the partshas demonstrated a number of alternate ways in which it is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all humans but also to permit all humans’ individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals interfering with others.
While it takes but meager search to discover that many well-known concepts are false, it takes considerable search and even more careful examination of one’s own personal experiences and inadvertently spontaneous reflexing to discover that there are many popularly and even professionally unknown, yet nonetheless fundamental, concepts to hold true in all cases and that already have been discovered by other as yet obscure individuals. That is to say that many scientific generalizations have been discovered but have not come to the attention of what we call the educated world at large, thereafter to be incorporated tardily within the formal education processes, and even more tardily, in the ongoing political-economic affairs of everyday life. Knowledge of the existence and comprehensive significance of these as yet popularly unrecognized natural laws often is requisite to the solution of many of the as yet unsolved problems now confronting society. Lack of knowledge of the solution’s existence often leaves humanity confounded when it need not be.
Intellectually advantaged with no more than the child’s facile, lucid eagerness to understand constructively and usefully the major transformational events of our own times, it probably is synergetically advantageous to review swiftly the most comprehensive inventory of the most powerful human environment transforming events of our totally known and reasonably extended history. This is especially useful in winnowing out and understanding the most significant of the metaphysical revolutions now recognized as swiftly tending to reconstitute history. By such a comprehensively schematic review, we might identify also the unprecedented and possibly heretofore overlooked pivotal revolutionary events not only of today but also of those trending to be central to tomorrow’s most cataclysmic changes.
It is synergetically reasonable to assume that relativistic evaluation of any of the separate drives of art, science, education, economics, and ideology, and their complexedly interacting trends within our own times, may be had only through the most comprehensive historical sweep of which we are capable.
There could be produced a synergetic understanding of humanity’s cosmic functioning, which, until now, had been both undiscovered and unpredictable due to our deliberate and exclusive preoccupation only with the separate statistics of separate events. As a typical consequence of the latter, we observe our society’s persistent increase of educational and employment specialization despite the already mentioned, well-documented scientific disclosure that the extinctions of biological species are always occasioned by overspecialization. Specialization’s preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy.
Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. The insistence by reporters upon having advance “releases” of what, for instance, convocation speakers are supposedly going to say but in fact have not yet said, automatically discredits the value of the largely prefabricated news. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for purposes either of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.
Synergetics Introduction: The Wellspring of Reality – R. Buckminster Fuller
Tags: Aggregate reaggregate, brain, bucky fuller, critical path, Extinction, Future Of Humanity, generalized principle, inadequacy, life support, life sustenance, Malthusian principle, metaphysical, mind, overspecialization, special case, specialization, storage retreival, synergy, The Bucky Call, Tune in tune out, war
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