Comments on “Unity and diversity”

I think there’s a liberating nature to that concept […] It allows for a playfulness and an engagement in life that is more enjoyable than the alternative. I’ve aspired to convey some of those things for a long time now, maybe not so clearly before because it hasn’t been so clear to me. But I do believe that the greater ability you have to tolerate ambiguity, the more successfully you can steer your life. The alternative point of view—the complete dismissal of ambiguity, trying to rationalise irrationality—can be very destructive.

Jeff Tweedy - musician.

I just found out this cite today while listening to Wilco and I think you may like to know it. Coming from a somewhat popular person, you could say that “participation” is in the air too. Perhaps you are working in a direction that could resound among many more people than it seems.

Ooops. I forgot to mention that, by the way, the quote is from a december 2009 interview.

Source: Here and here.

I guess the quick, easiest way is to listen on youtube:

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
A Ghost Is Born
Sky Blue Sky

Hope you enjoy it!

Excellent post David (along with ‘Boundaries, objects, and connections’). I don’t know anything about the world of philosophy, so I’m curious to hear your take on something. I often tend to think of this division between monism and dualism as being related to the division between Essentialism and some Process-oriented view (I don’t know a convenient, consensus term for the latter, so maybe you can help with that as well). Are these related?

If so, are they both confused stances in a similar way that monism/dualism are? I.e. reality is neither composed solely of essential elements nor is it only a confluence of processes, but both descriptions should be folded into a complete stance.

Indeed, Monism would correspond with something like Process Philosophy (beneath all the diversity of the cosmos is an underlying dynamic whole) while Dualism relates to Essentialism (the diversity of the cosmos is the diversity of essential units).

“I think probably in general there’s no particular alignment of the process/essence distinction with the monism/dualism one.”

I’m glad to get your feedback on this. Is this because they pertain to different areas (philosophically)?

“I think it’s probably a mistake to take anything as fundamental…”

Agreed; there is meaningness, but not ‘the meaning’.

”…it could be the hypothetical Unified Field Theory.” But then we are no longer discussing ontology, correct? Regardless, it’s interesting to see physicists discuss the seething foam of the quantum vacuum (non-duality of emptiness and form?).

“Uh… why not?”

I have no idea. As I mentioned, I know nothing about philosophy, so I posed this question as a matter of curiosity.

“FWIW, I think this analogy is misleading (because it’s only an accidental and superficial similarity).”

If you’re referring to my mentioning ‘emptiness and form’, I’m only familiar with these applying to a broad range of codependent definitions. Unless you’re alluding to the hasty comparison of physical phenomena with subjective experience, in which case I totally agree. Despite the vaguely poetic intention, it was probably not even worth mentioning those terms.

I don’t disagree, but I would phrase it differently. It is not that there are objects out there in the world, and we are deciding whether they are separate things or all one thing. There are phenomena we observe, and in order to make predictions, we hypothesize objects and categories. The question is how firm the boundaries of these objects and categories are. Your “dualists” are what I call “rationalists”–people who believe that it is possible to describe a section of reality with a logical description, based on atomic symbols with Boolean truth values, without losing information.

The anti-rational, monist movement of post-modernism is actually only an anti-Rationalist movement, but it thinks it has deconstructed rationality in general, because its members are classically but not scientifically trained, and so are unaware of any alternative methods of rationality.

Hi, David! Thank you for really deep insights about meaningness nature, it is a continuous pleasure to read truly! In your interpretation of Kegan’s model, I see many reflections of my experience, and I feel more like fluidity/participation is what I was striving to reach unknowingly for a really long time, feeling that “there was always something in between all the extremes” like nihilism and eternalism (for which I hadn’t even got precise descriptions for quite some time, just kind of disgust or disappointment). I even feel some strong connections between this striving and my values that started to develop before acquiring math education.

Question. Have you ever considered the relation of meaningness recognition to the effectiveness of organizing of our knowledge (in a broad sense)?

It does seem to me that aim for meaningful ideas may save a lot of time that may be spent on rigorous fact-checking, because when you see the compatibility of ideas on the level of their meaning - to me it looks like trying to integrate them into my relatively carefully (responsibly) tailored picture of the world, that is to make use of all my well-thought parts of the knowledge.

And as an example of how I see it works - when I’m reading books I start to develop “a feel for the author’s thinking style” and use it as the context for interpretation of his words. And if I see that my experience is resonating with the author’s words very well (making the ideas clearly understandable and organically compatible with my knowledge) - it may implicitly mean that this compatibility is signaling about rigorous factual compatibility of knowledge too. Also, it may be a wrong call, but often it really saves time and the more you read, the more accurate the overall picture is becoming. I see it as an example of informal reasoning that helps us to omit repetitive deep investigation of similar ideas and to intuitively make use of our “experience as a whole”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely not arguing about the uselessness of fact-checking and exact thinking! Not a bit. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to responsibly organize our knowledge.

To justify consideration of this “useless relation” I would say that it gives me a clue for WHY a strong feel for what idea of meaningness is - seems to be highly related to the very effective thinking and thinking styles of R. Feynman, A. Kolmogorov, R. Hamming and many more grand figures of science, as I extrapolate their personalities from readings (it is enough of even 1/10 of a book to recognize such a familiar thinking style, though I’m not all that excellent at the verbal description of how I’m doing that, for now). I dare to think those guys were familiar with that flavor of [knowing about] meaningness.

P. S.: as an even more concrete example I feel the constant resonance of experience with the Meaningness book, giving me high flexibility of thinking about stuff written here in a meaningful way. Many ideas here were intuitive for me, hence I can’t stop enjoying the ease of referring them to my thoughts and observations. It seems I was attracted to many questions clustered around meaningness.

Thinking about errors and the worst possible outcomes of such reasoning: It may be I failed at pointing out the similarity of our views, or we are both fatally wrong (excuse me a joke).