1. A historic parallel: a cultural handicap We are at Mendel again. There is an unmistakable parallel between a single person trying to drive attention of members of a learned society to general rules and principles that are discernible on multitudes of objects in the 19 th century and a single person trying to drive attention of members of a learned society to general rules and principles that are discernible on multitudes of objects in the 21st century.
The difficulty is that a) the idea to be raised is new, b) it needs thinking, c) it necessitates a change in perspectives, d) it is told by means of boring numbers, e) it unveils a huge system of logical relations, f) these logical relations have no established names for the concepts, yet. The similarity is, that a) the members of the learned society are not really stupid, b) they only want to be left alone, c) they want to keep congratulating each other how clever and wise they are, d) they share a cultural handicap – and this cultural handicap is the subject I wish to say a few words about to you, my dear friends. 1. The neurotic inhibition of intelligence – a faux pas Some few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak in person to one of the members of this Society, an opportunity for which I am thankful and which I hope to be able to reciprocate. The faux pas I unintentionally committed was by remarking – with guards lowered, because of the friendly and nourishing conversation with a nice and clever fellow – that I see the real difficulty in making people *want to *Learn to Count, as opposed to that chimp-like usage of their digits what they believe to be counting, to be based in the normal neurotic inhibition of intelligence. Well, this really closed the door in the mind of my conversation partner. Not enough that I state that I can count and all the people have no idea of what counting is, above elementary school level, above all that, me having the cheek to call him, to his face, an intellectually inhibited person, inhibited because of being a neurotic – this was just about the call for a very polite, polished and friendly end to the conversation. 1. The healthy person is a mixture of all psychiatric symptoms Bear with me, if after comparing myself to Mendel, now I recall troubles Freud has had coming from calling excitation patterns that are spreading (with an exponent >1.0) like a viral disease, “sexual” excitations. The term “sexual excitation” means and has meant in the trade avalanching patterns, also observable in hysteric rages, and in a negative – overly flattening, inhibitory – version in induced stupor and flexibilitas cerea. This is the name for the avalanching pattern of nervous excitation propagating across the central nervous system. History has it that at the time the concept was introduced, the sexual excitation pattern was the best known and most obvious pattern to name the idea after. In the trade, one knows that depression is too much of serenity, schizophrenia is too much of creativity, hysteria is too much of emotional expressivity, paranoia is too much of caution/foresight, servility is too much of empathy, autism is too much of concentration, and so forth and so forth. The “too much” means usually too frequently and too long and too regularly, not only too intensely. The way names are assigned to observations is by using the extreme grade of the property and using it as a description of the whole range, well into the middle, usual extents. 1. The neurotic inhibition of intelligence – a cultural asset The property to follow rules means that one saves a lot of senseless work. We do not have to reinvent the wheel every generation and every individual. Once we have learnt that a²+b²=c², we do not have to figure out complicated methods to calculate surfaces or angles or distances. Members of a subculture recognise each other by means of the beliefs and values they share. If it had been that easy to leave the shared knowledge of Aristoteles, Galileo and Copernicus had had no troubles at all. If it had been that easy to drop the knowledge codified by Newton, Einstein would have met much less resistance. If it had been so easy to leave aside all that unordered, messy, belief-based convolute of empty words about what makes garden peas green or yellow, serious work could have begun about 40 years sooner. The social stability is based on the common smell, shared by all the chimps which reside on the same tree. 1. Self-declaration of competence of we the people A self-made man is a good thing. A self-declared prophet is usually a complicated case. A self-declared innovator can hardly be otherwise. A body of competent persons installed by higher authorities is not really a collection of self-declared persons. In fact, there is a natural opposition between Pilate and the person he judges (“you had no authority, had in not been transferred unto you from higher above” vs. “You say I am a king, though my kingdom is not of this world”.) FIS is a self-constituted body, but it is made up of mostly hetero-cephal (from-others-authentificated) agents, and so far, there is no perspective of it following the model of the Morawian Society of Natural Philosophy Research – not that it had helped Mendel much, that his contemporaries had constituted themselves as an auto-cephal organisation. The point to decide is: can FIS – be it as one organisational body, be it as many individual members – imagine to declare itself to be A Clever, Innovative, Ground-breaking, Free-thinking Society of Original Thinkers? Or, as is usual, do the members first discuss: “Who had allowed us to think so?”, “Is there a permission to be obtained to call ourselves so?”, “Is this in accordance with what is expected from us by those in positions above us?”, “Would such a thing agree to the general principles that are to be followed?”, “Would this not be against the spirit of what we represent?” By meditating on these questions of “Who has allowed me to think for myself?” one can easily see the wide marge connecting the neurotic inhibition of intelligence with the opposite, the narcissistic production of neologisms and the weakened stringency of associations, so typical for the early onset of M. Bleuler. This introspective essay should serve as a preparation for the coming contribution to the discussion about meaning and information, because it is necessary to know that one looks oneself, as an individual, explanations into patterns, like into patterns of colours of garden peas. If one has no inner permission to deduct from observations, the explanation is futile, because the learner is not in a position to think anything originating from his own brain. Lacking today in the same fashion words for concepts like Mendel had lacked words for concepts he delineated and pointed out, by means of numbers, the explanation about the relationships between meaning, information, dislocations, order and numbers, needs the active collaboration of a working mind, not only that of a recording device. He who is (too much) well-groomed to be uppity-minded, he will not chase his own hallucinations. Only explications that come from others in position of authority can have an intellectual value for people who have suffered a European schooling of thinking correctly. Still, I shall submit my concept of how information, energy, meaning, and so on, can be read off large tables that mirror simple facts, which create new connections among concepts in the brain of the reader – if only he is able to let it happen.
_______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
