Reviews

Today we post our first review on the Shape Blog. I have been feverishly and regularly writing such responses to published materials for some time (mostly of articles in New Scientist Magazine), but what with the short time between consecutive issues of that publication (it's a weekly) and my own experience in writing to such tight schedules that have been the unavoidable case, that in spite of the quality being finally acceptable for publication, the "currency" has slipped much too much. By the time they were finished they were invariably too late to inform possible readers of the original stimuli for these responses.

But clearly until I can produce these reviews in good time and while the source is still "fresh", the increasing pile of offerings has remained in my out tray (but never left it).

It is clear that this apparent waste cannot be allowed to continue, so we are now going to publish most of our reviews even if they are a bit late to be current with the latest issue of New Scientist. And, on thinking about it, they will still be relevant to the issues which have dominated Science News and Comment for very extended periods. In fact some crucial arguments have been going on for many years.

Certainly, this first review will not be rendered passe by unavoidable delays. Pagel's contribution (revealed in yet another New Scientist article and addressed in our first review) has turned out to be an extremely significant contribution to criticising many of our basic assumptions with regards to Evolution. In fact at least four successive papers have already been produced by this author and Pagel's work is definitely undermining many sacred cows in this important area of study.

The paper I have decided to publish here as Review No. 1 is entitled The End of Incrementalist Evolution and it hopefully will get our readers thinking and perhaps get the relevant materials for themselves.

NB: The Special Issue of the Shape Journal on Emergences in Evolution is now at an advanced stage of preparation, and is likely to be the next one published. And in this proposed publication the relevance of Pagel's important contribution will be revealed in full along with a whole series of other related contributions from current publications.

Issue 12 of Shape

Read it here

I will be posting some diagrams on Fuzzy Logic and Dichotomous trees in the next few days, for those interested in the paper on gleaning Coherence from Incomplete Sequences.

Akhenaten Design

The Holism Debate

Four philosophers Tom, Dick, Harry & Bill are in their cups, but instead of going out and painting the town red, they gather closer together in the quietest corner of the pub, and argue about their shared conundrum – What is Holism?

How do they deal coherently with such a self-modifying Reality?

These four contributions are in the order in which they were delivered, each correcting or extending its predecessor, or drawing in evidence or metaphors from their own experiences of Reality. What do YOU think of their conclusions?

1. TOM: The Ascent of Predictive Processes

Our highly commendable efforts to understand Reality nevertheless bear the stamp of our own current stage of development. To jump straight to a full and coherent conception of Everything was, and still is, totally impossible, and, in addition, each stage in the process will be unavoidably limited by our own current capabilities, knowledge and understanding. Indeed, whatever we extract will never be incremental steps in a direct upwards ascent.

All gains will be conditional, simplified, and even rationalised, in our attempt to reveal what we see as the essential driving elements our “conceived of” clearly meaningful World.

And this conditional process is always more of a large-swing zigzag than a ladder, and our greatest difficulties are often involved in shedding our most dearly-held assumptions and principles, which have indubitably been the foundations of our previous gains, rather than the inherent problems of the actual nature of Reality itself.

Nevertheless, progress is definitely made – NOT by descrete morsels of Absolute Truth, but on the contrary, by a series of constructs (didactic models), which contain objective content.

Now the meaning of this described process of development becomes crucial!

Objective Content is NOT the Truth, but it embodies aspects or views of parts of the Truth, in given circumstances, and it is useable! That made each of these, and still does, a considerable gain. But it doesn’t, of itself and necessarily, take us directly forwards towards a fuller understanding. And this is because its main purpose is often and primarily for Prediction.

To be in a position to accurately predict what will happen next, endows the successful predictor with considerable power. With such dependable predictions, plans can be made and instituted. Mankind can begin to control aspects of his World to his evident benefit!

But accurate prediction is not necessarily predicated on real understanding, but on the extraction of dependable Form or Patterns.

For, if such patterns could be reliably revealed, the future could be predicted by a simple forwards extension of the pattern.

The trouble was, and still is, that the World is not wholly or even separable deterministic – always following rigidly pre-ordained patterns to completely predictable outcomes.

Occasionally, such conditions can exist, but they are rarely dependable, and a good dollop of hope, ritual and “added magic” was always considered an essential ingredient in any attempts to predict such outcomes.

Yet such rituals and “added substances” could (though rarely) actually help, and well-defined processes, with “important” substances present were established and retained in that using group’s culture. It was still hocus-pocus, but it could, and sometimes did, contain a sliver of Objective Content, and, the process could be more successful than most such “magic”

The outcome of such methods was that Mankind began to identify necessary substances and even began to add features such as Fire or Water, and occasionally a well-defined, controlled and maintained process would actually begin to deliver the predicted results quite reliably.

The crucial feature in such processes was that a Part of Reality was isolated and maintained as such, and subjected to controlled processes within those steadfastly maintained conditions.

Mankind achieved a measure of predictive success by imposing Plurality upon a given situation.

What is meant here by Plurality is the conception that each and every Whole is composed of separable constituent Parts, and although this was only rarely true in unfettered Reality, it could be made to be the case in limited and controllable localities. Yet the requirements for such impositions upon sections of Reality were initially prodigious in the light of Man’s own current powers and knowledge.

To even start, such methods required a great deal of reliable knowledge, which itself was difficult to come by.

A chicken-and-Egg situation meant that early real gains were dead slow!

But, Mankind did, by partial truth upon partial truth, begin to gather more and more objective content, which in turn empowered him to successfully control situations to he required degree.

Ultimately, there was an ever widening area of situations in which he could impose a strict Plurality upon them, and hence, by holding most things constant and varying only a handful of factors were indeed in a position to both extract and predict!

This was successively refined into what came to be called scientific methodology, and fostered the great developments in the production of required implements, tools and weapons which became Technology.

But it was deterministic and mechanistic in the main, and was therefore NOT applicable in the bulk of questions which Mankind had to constantly address.

It became an aberrant (though very useful) growth in a particular direction, and engendered a general attitude to all endeavours, which was, all too often, entirely inappropriate!

But you can direct your own paths of development.

They may be inadequate, but if they do contain that vital objective content, then you must pursue them, though the more general outcomes will only be “as predicted” in very limited, mechanistic areas, and everywhere else they could produce, and often were, dire results.

2. DICK: How a Holistic World Suggested Plurality

Now in the previous contribution (The Ascent of Prediction), the development of Technology has been outlined, but such an approach to Reality is by no means the only one, or even the most important one, and the reason is that it is wholly predicated upon Plurality, and the World is simply NOT pluralistic.

Yet as with all such characterisations by Mankind, BOTH of our versions of the two categories Plurality and Holism are clearly mistaken oversimplifications, and in spite of their many strengths and successes, can, and in the end always do, mislead us to a remarkable extent.

For example Holism, in its crudest form, insists that absolutely everything affects everything else. All is subject to constant change – absolutely nothing is constant!

Now, if that were “all that there is to it” concerning Reality, we would not get very far it attempting to understand it.

Nothing would be extractable as separable and independent entities or relations, and every attempt at prediction based on some isolated segment of Reality would inevitably fail.

So, such a basic holistic approach inevitably disables our chances of getting to grips with Reality, and ever actually controlling it to direct it to required ends.

It that simplified form Holism becomes a merely passive philosophy, which observes Reality-as-is as it remorselessly pursues its own paths of interaction and change. We cannot intervene! We merely notice its cycles which are regularly repeated, and the trajectories of Life and Death, but we can only sit and contemplate. [Some wags actually say that such a position accurately defines all Philosophy, but that isn’t true!]

And, of course, that version of Holism doesn’t pertain anywhere: it is our own simplification of what does exist in unfettered Reality, but it is a fiction.

That basic view delivers such a complex, multiply-interacting mix, that the result is close to chaos, and totally random and unpredictable in particulars.

Evidently, such a definition is not only useless; it is significantly false as well.

For, in the midst of chaos, we do indeed have Order. Things may well be in constant change, but most such changes are NOT immediately significant, and the entire multiple and contrasting processes are not necessarily either equal in weight or entirely contending. For, if they were we would indeed have ONLY a totally random and chaotic World.

No forms would be evident, and everything would be the same everywhere.

Now, that is clearly NOT the case.

And the ground for the many subscribers to Plurality was that many, many things did indeed persist as the same Form for sometimes considerable periods. Indeed, the belief that all species were permanently constant and unchanging, and had been so ever since God had created them was almost universally believed. And even individual living things, once they had matured into adulthood, tended to remain in that state for long periods of time.

Without any doubt, our real, holistic World could, and did, beget episodes of Stability, wherein certain things persisted as constant – at least for a time.

Now, in all this there is an inherent contradiction!

Either there are NO purposive processes maintaining constant things, or there are ONLY such processes!

Stability implies the presence of such processes and seems to confirm Plurality, whereas constant change and quite evident dissolution and indeed Death, implies contending processes as in a holistic World.

The pluralists among us concentrate upon the essential laws, which “produce” everything in Reality and never themselves change.

While the holists concentrate upon an “infinite” number of contending processes, making nothing eternal and all involved in a constant process of change.

As inferred earlier, BOTH these are incorrect!

But just denouncing the contending alternatives has to be insufficient! We must characterise Reality as it actually is, and that must include both periods of Stability, and periods of dissolution and significant change. And, once again, these are not merely present together,

Indeed, they are interludes in an overall process of change.

There are dissolutory factors constantly attacking any stability, while there are also other factors which tend to erect stable situations, and the remarkable thing is that they “alternate” in dominance, and neither permanently dominate the world.

To make matters even more difficult for Mankind’s purpose of understanding these things, the situations do not just alternate like a permanent oscillation. Indeed, the overall process is one of discernable development – indeed, of Evolution.

Reality is NOT a fixed entity. It is regularly producing the entirely NEW, and creating new and higher stabilities, which themselves never permanently persist. But neither do they merely dissociate into “lesser” noise and chaos (as, it must be pointed out, it is inferred in the Second Law of Thermodynamics - a pluralist belief!), but resolves each cataclysm of dissociation into a new and higher stability.

For Mankind to cope with Reality-as-is, he must make the study of Emergent Change his most important task, for without it, he too will ricochet from one illusion to the next without really understanding what is happening.

3. HARRY: An Evolutionary Conception of Reality

Now, from the two contributions so far, it must be clear that, as usual, it is our conceptions of the inherent Nature of Reality which most often leads us astray. In addition, we have a very mistaken idea of what Truth is, and this has similar deleterious effects.

Reality is neither wholly determined by eternal laws, nor is it constantly deteriorating into ever more total chaos.

On the contrary, it regularly produces Stable Situations, which persist, but which also, in time, will just as inevitably destroy. Reality has a definite propensity for stability, but only produces stable situations which are inevitably undermined and superceded. And that process of Major Qualitative Change has dissolution at its very heart.

The myth of the Phoenix arising from the flames has a real basis in developing Reality!

The Possibility Space of Reality is regularly extended, yet none of these extensions are final and perfect. They can, and always will be, overturned by degeneration and replaced by the wholly new.

Those who support such a conception of Reality consider that the main study must be the trajectory of such changes, including the erection of the new stabilities, their undermining and dissolution, and the subsequent creation of an entirely new Level of stability ON TOP.

Now, this area is complicated not only by the richness of each new Level, but by the (perhaps) surprising continuance of the older Levels too.

The New Levels only replace the Old locally, and indeed, depend upon selected subsets of the older processes internally. So though locally the process is one of dissolution, replacement and selection, that is not the case outwith the aegis of the new Level – i.e. over the rest of Reality.

The various Levels co-exist, but are mutually affected to some degree!

Perhaps my favourite analogy of such a Universe-wide process is delivered by the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter.

The visible (top) of that atmosphere appears to be split into bands (by latitude). There are clear divisions and different movements, speeds, and even directions of cloud movements.

Yet at persisting points, great, stable “storms” occur, and indeed persist for centuries. Clearly the Form of the Great Red Spot is not unlike a hurricane on Earth in the spiralling rotation of the gases involved. But whereas the earthbound storms are always very temporary, the Spot on Jupiter appears semi-permanent – stable?

Around it the other layers continue their dominant movements, but with the regular generation of “eddies” as in an earth-bound stream. Similar things appear within the boundaries of the many layers, and particularly around the boundary of the Great Red Spot.

Clearly, there are important resonances between the general idea of Qualitative Change with Stabilities, and the phenomena on Jupiter.

4. BILL: The Jovian Exemplar

Now, though extremely valuable, it is clear that the inclusion of the image of the atmosphere of Jupiter in the last contribution needs a further explanation, if it is to really deepen our idea of a holistic Universe and its inevitable trajectory of interludes of Stability and Change.

Look closely at this photograph of a section of the atmosphere of Jupiter.

To really grasp the significance, you would ideally have to see it as a long, time-lapse sequence of images over quite long individual intervals of time. For such a sequence, speeded-up to reveal the vast and complex movements involved would greatly amplify what is contained in this breath-taking exemplar of Constant Change.

For though some features persist (indeed the Great Red Spot has been around for hundreds of years), everything else displays a veritable cauldron of constant and unpredictable motions.

The various lateral bands move at quite different speeds and even in opposite directions, and we are constantly presented with stable processes, limited in extent, and everywhere we have active curlicued boundaries between them.

Sub spots peel off the boundary of the Great Red Spot, and persist for a while, and elaborate and turbulent eddies are created everywhere,

Now, we can be, and usually are, transfixed by these phenomena, and imagine that, like the atmosphere of Earth, we could with sufficient data, construct a simulation of the overall process with multiple laws (each (of course) accompanied by its failure thresholds – where it must be replaced by another more appropriate one. And because of recent mathematical researches into “Chaos”, we would undoubtedly bring in that determinism too. Indeed, the very fact that a deterministic equation could produce such seemingly unpredictable stuff would convince us that our earth-bound methods would indeed cope even there, and we would again MISS what Jupiter really has to teach us. For though over our life-length imposed periods, we see Jupiter as in turmoil, but basically the “same”, there can be NO DOUBT that over vast periods of time it has changed to a colossal extent, AND passed through many different “temporary” stable states.

So the suggested movie of the Jovian atmosphere is only an analogy or exemplar for Change in all things, it does not deliver a complete metaphor. The crucial lesson must be about Stability and its overthrow even in limited systems such as this.

In what appears as a prime situation for total chaos, we also have stability and BOTH occur within an overall and continuing process. The activities at the boundaries are vitally important because, though within a stable structure like the Great Red Spot, we have persisting Patterns and Cycles, at the margins we have almost infinite variety AND access to substances from other stable structures elsewhere.

[I am also moved to suggest the paintings of Mark Rothko as delivering similar activities at the boundaries of his wonderful “areas”, though he is concerned with US (Mankind) directly, and not the Universe in general]

It is in those boundary regions where any transport and juxtaposition of materials occurs and guarantees maximum possibilities. Within the major stabilities the opposite is surely true.

So, look again, and imagine the described movies.

You are looking at really existing Holism!

You have Stability within chaos and constant changes. Does not the confidence of our programmed simulations seem more than a little blinkered?

First Special Issue of the Shape Journal

The Theory of Emergence by Jim Schofield

Read it here

Interesting article on viruses in the human genome

Wonders never cease, a decent article in New Scientist!

Coherence from Incomplete Sequences: Introduction

This short paper will appear in Issue 12 of Shape Journal. It is only part of the topic of "informed speculation", which is a vital component of all scientific hypotheses, and of theorising in relatively new areas of study. It is not usually at all pluralistic, but takes reality as it is, and constructs reasonable and well informed explanations where they are sorely needed. The reason for the limited nature of the coming paper is that the more obvious elements involved are already well-covered by many previous papers.

The crucial feature of the relationship of Relative and Absolute Truth, is always treated early on in criticising any demand for Absolute Proof, beloved of all mathematicians, which is only very rarely possible in concrete Reality, so that a "lesser" demand for objective content is the proper aim of all Science. But, we must use Logic where it can be useful. Not in the Absolute Truth sense, but in the elimination of the impossible, and very unlikely scenarios to reveal the most reliable extractions and conclusions.

The paper addresses a couple of ways in which partial evidence can, none-the-less be sufficient, and how ever-available loops of correlation can home us in ever closer to the truth we seek.

Issue 12 will be published in 3 weeks time...

Issue 11 of Shape

Read it here

The Theory of Emergence - Coming Soon!

What is an Emergence? It is a special interlude of major qualitative change, in which a new level of reality is both generated and maintained. Such a Level is not a mere re-organisation, but involves wholly new entities, properties, relations and even Laws which did not exist previously. The template for such an Emergence has to be the Origin of Life on Earth. Only after the creation of the first living things did they inhabit a new Level of Reality, with its own laws. We call this collection of laws Biology, and institute a whole new science with its own scientists. But this, though without doubt the most important Emergence was certainly not the only one. Every science has had its own birth via an Emergence, and indeed from the Big Bang onwards all significant qualitative changes were created within Emergences, as have been all since that event.

As so many of my philosophical ideas revolve around this theory of Emergence, we have decided to publish a special issue of the Shape Journal, dedicated to its explanation and exploration. Watch this space...

Building A Consensus

Nice diagram from New Scientist, but I think it communicates more than the original authors intended. It demonstrates how the consensus in a particular research area is established and maintained. I'm currently writing a paper on this subject, and will post it as soon as it is ready...

Paths to Chaos or Paths to Glory: Introduction

What is the natural trajectory of change in Reality? Do we, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, consider it to be a constant downhill descent into oblivion, or is it "built-in" that it should naturally evolve into ever-more potential-filled and richer forms? Now, for highly constrained subsets of reality, the answer is clear. They will indeed, if left to themselves, deteriorate into chaos. But what of unfettered reality as a whole, with no imposed constraints and added purposes, what will be the natural outcome there? The evidence is all around us. It will evolve!

But why does this remarkable second case happen? What is the engine of such developments, and what determines the trajectory of that process?

In order to address these questions this paper attempts to address reality as it is, without Mankind! But to do so, we must bury our usual methodology, which sees every discovery in terms of how we can exploit it for our own ends. We must instead become observers and interpreters, and never users. We must develop what we are clearly already aware of, but rarely pursue - disinterested Science.

The evidence for the evolution of Reality is undoubtedly legion, but as to what factors drive this development, we do not know. The tempo of such changes when measured with our 'clocks' seems to be zero - that reality is entirely stationary and unchanging.

Now a single tiny and isolated particle of Matter in a completely empty space cannot display, or even have, any properties at all. We have to realise that such things can only appear in aggregates. It is only when many such fragments come together that we not only get bigger pieces, but also qualities begin to be evident: the fragments relate to one another. And these qualities will be different at every stage of the enlarging aggregate. They will not only change in magnitude, but also in properties. Initially, then the property of Gravity - the mutual attraction of particles of Matter for each other, must be the initial drive. But notice, we could extrapolate all the way from the very first tiny aggregations seamlessly to a single all-consuming Black Hole into which the whole Universe could be unremittingly drawn, to vanish completely back up its own Physical Singularity! That is the simplest extrapolation of Gravity. But, of course, we know better. Vast aggregations collapse Matter into ever closer forms, until in the largest aggregations they burst into stars. Millennia of studying the Heavens have revealed a whole series of different forms of stars which clearly form a sequence of phases, and even include cataclysms such as Supernovae.

Clearly, apart from the observable evidence in the sky, there is a more complex and detailed trajectory involving many other modes or phases. And what is crucial about these phases is that they change the game. These natural developments transform their own producing ground every single time! So how do such a variety of very different and indeed new forms get driven into existence merely by Gravity?

Now, one aspect of the forms involved is also crucial. There seems to be an alternation between long periods of relatively slow-moving stability, and very short interludes of radical change. Such a trajectory implies that other forces are also being generated, and grow to such a point that they always undermine, and then overthrow, the current stability, only to, at a later time, surrender to their own, different, stability-enforcing system, thus moving into a new period of stability.

If we had a mechanist, purely bottom-up Universe, such things could never happen! This evidence seems to suggest that Reality is NOT pluralistic (the bottom-up approach), but is, on the contrary, entirely holistic, involving causalities in all directions. This means that the possibilities are increased, because the ground is always changed by its own products. As soon as a product (such as free Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere) is produced in sufficient quantities, it changes future possibilities into features that were impossible previously.

Elements of such a view are already occurring in our thinking about the world, but they are swamped by the stamp of our own purposes for USE!

This series will continue in Issue 11 of the Shape Journal. Watch this space.

Issue 10 of Shape

Read it here

Order Out of Chaos Introduction

This forthcoming series of papers (Issue 10) under the general title of Order Out of Chaos? were commenced in 2008, and bear the stamp of when they were written. They do not represent the developed, current position of the author, but nevertheless, it was decided that they must be included in the journal as a necessary preparation for the continuous stream of rapidly developing contributions that have been produced ever since. Also, it is very clear to me that this is perhaps the most important area in modern science, and will not be delivered by a single theorist, and I'm keen to see other contributions in this area.

Firstly, the erroneous claims of the mathematicians of Chaos that their new area will ultimately contain the explanations for crucial Emergences such as that of the Origin of Life on Earth, must be debunked. Formal Mathematics cannot explain anything: it merely describes, never explains, and hence can never address such an important question. Secondly, these studies must actually investigate what really happens within such events as Emergences - NOT as mathematical forms only, but as Real Science. Since when did we credit our tools with creating the masterpieces by themselves!

The question, which has motivated this author for over 15 years, is considered to be by far the most important one in Science, which is now regularly coming up against the consequences of its own basic assumptions, tenets and even "beliefs". The chaos that is today's sub-Atomic Physics, is finally heading for its ultimate demise at its own hand. The "final proofs" of its current theories expected from the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider, will not be forthcoming. Indeed, by far the most likely outcome from this mammoth experiment will be an evident failure in this regard, causing a general flight from maintaining any trust in these odd believers in Parallel Universes, Physical Singularities, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, time flowing backwards, and even colliding Branes producing our Universe out of precisely Nothing. They will finally, and justifiably, be laughed out of Court.

It was decided, therefore, to include these older papers as an introduction to the studies into Emergence by this author. For though this is an important area, it is very little supported within current research, outside of the denizens of the Santa Fe Institute, who think that Mathematical Chaos will alone provide all the answers necessary. There appear to be very few who agree with this author. Nevertheless, the line of research that will appear ONLY in the Shape Journal, has recently arrived at a new Theory of Emergences, which for the first time goes into the various phases of such an event. At the same time, such vital research cannot be a one-man show, and even hostile criticism will help refine these new ideas. Of course, even better would be the contributions of other like-minded experts, who are not merely mathematical physicists, but true explanatory scientists, who also realise that the study of Emergences is the crucial area in the absolutely imperative re-establishment of Real Science as the only sound path towards Truth.

Don't miss Issue 10 of the Shape Journal to read the first instalment of this paper.

Chinese Stamps for Sale

Not sure if any of my regular readers will be interested, but thought I'd mention it anyway!
I'm currently trying to sell my large collection of Chinese Stamps

Visit www.chinese-stamps.com to find out more

Issue 9 of Shape

Read it here

The Heroic Failure of Mark Rothko

 "...No figurative content is either discerned, or was intended, and though most people “see” windows and doors to somewhere (?) or even nowhere, the real content seems to reside in amazing texture and meaningful “detail”. The substance of the works seems to reside in the almost furry or “blurred” edges of his deceptively simple areas, which seem to articulate directly and sensitively into adjacent “new space”, which is itself packed full of its own colour-based activity.

We seem to be directly discerning real and complex feelings by abstract visual means alone..."

Continue reading...

A Three Dimensional Problem

Introducing the Soma Strand

These images are from a paper forthcoming to the Shape journal, as part of the "A Structure of Diagrams" series. Here diagrams and models were used to solve a complex three dimensional problem based on tessellation.

This case was to do with a self designed form which I had named the Soma Strand (after Piet Hein’s “Soma delicious Soma”).

Long before the tessellation problem outlined above, I had to design the original form. This, in itself, took a great deal of time and model making, but what finally emerged was an infinite strand, with a re-entrant form, and congruent, singly re-entrant hexagonal faces (with 90o and 270o angles only). It soon became clear (after making a bundle of these strands, that they definitely tessellated to fill three dimensional space completely.

Careful model-making had established this exciting property, but, it must be said that cardboard, glue and bits of wooden dowling (without which the strands were impossible to construct) are not the ideal materials to facilitate detailed studies in the area of volume filling stacking, particularly of such difficult (and indeed infinite) strands. Attempts at solving the problem using 3D graphics packages were soon abandoned, as these so-called tools, may deal with three dimensions, but are generally NOT designed for meaningful and revealing visualisations essential to the designer and creator of new things. You just couldn’t see what you were doing, and the figures soon became unintelligible. In addition to the complexity, that package had not helped me to adjust units effectively and lock them into the required precise positionings. Attempts at colouring to get some order out of the chaos only led to an obscuring of one part of the figure by another. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but those facilities were simply not available.

As a last resort, I went all the way back to an ancient (and primitive) 2D drawing package that I had used for many years (De Luxe Paint 2).

Read More

Issue 8 of Shape

Read it here

Domains & Quilts

An early investigation of Man's Abstraction of Reality. See my final definitive Abstraction Diagram

The Superstructure and the Base

This philosophical area is a profoundly difficult, yet at the same time, an extremely crucial one.
It cannot be dealt with by a single paper, or even a series of them. It is about our fundamental assumptions concerning the World about us and our understanding of it. It inevitably therefore will display the unavoidable errors that will occur when one part of Reality (Mankind) attempts to explain either that all-embracing World, their own automatic origin, or finally their current place within that World. Clearly, no straight (or Royal) road to Knowledge can be viewable, or even available from within the continuing process itself. Indeed, Man has to promote himself outside of the process in the position of a God, in his attempts to address it. There is no way that the bulk of his attempts will be anything other than fictions and rationalisations. And from the exact same ground, any condemnations of Mankind’s errors in this area will involve a similarly arrogant super-promotion.
Such a trajectory was, and still is, unavoidable, and every gain made in this gigantic task will, of course, be partial and propped up with many formal inventions. How could it be otherwise?

But, that does not mean that Mankind should, “Give up now, you’ll never do it!”
On the contrary, it is the most important purpose ever generated by this evolving World.
So, any paper commencing the task of looking at our assumptions and methods will have to start somewhere, and wherever we choose will immediately and inevitable reveal contradictions. But, that is still the only way we can remedy our misconceptions and improve our attempts. What else can we do?

This author commenced writing about such questions some 14 years ago, under the title, Levels, and it is clear that the currently existing Universe is NOT a single monolithic structure. Not only is it spatially divided, but it has also generated a whole series of Levels of Existence, each with its own entities, properties, relations and even laws.
Life is just such a Level, as is Consciousness, and the real task will have to be addressing these innovatory changes of Level, as well as explaining the more mundane relations within particular Levels.

Nevertheless, we must make a start, and perhaps the best issue, which cannot but expose the essentials of such a World, must be that of The Superstructure and The Base. The main criticism of Marxism by its conservative opponents was that they could not even explain their own existence, never mind that of the rest of Reality.
So we will start there!

In this current period SHAPE is involved in publishing a series of papers addressing these and related issues. They include:-

The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Formalising the Heavens
Truly Natural Selection
The Superstructure and the Base
Order Out of Chaos
Paths to Chaos or Paths to Glory?

These papers were either purposely selected, or specially written, for this period in the establishment of SHAPE as a new kind of Journal.
It will NOT be re-hashing old ideas, but on the contrary making original contributions on all the questions that it addresses. It will, therefore, seek to represent the cutting edge of research, and though most of the early contributions will be from the pen of Jim Schofield, the whole idea is to generate a whole school of contributors keen to tackle these crucial questions.
Instead of playing the role of a conduit for the publishing of all and any papers on these issues, it is intended to deliver coherent, comprehensive and new contributions to a 21st century view of the World!