Form, Finesse, and Force

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

My recent thoughts about effective strategies for positive social transformation led me to an emphasis on "outflanking" or "playing the weak side" (in sports), but using "just enough" activism to destract the adversary. The outflanking would resemble the mode of finesse. The activisim (whether it be green or otherwise) is visible "force." The power of the evolutionary "truth" or "insight" itself is the form. 

Would like to just start up a conversation about these three. 

d

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Check out this excerpt from The Undivided Universe, by David Bohm and Basil Hiley. They posit that electrons and other elementary particles are guided by "active information." Bohm's notion of active information is reminiscent of his notion of "proprioceptive thought" in his book Thought as a System. Proprioceptive thought involves feedback from the environment and from one's body parts, etc. and adjusts to the total context. In The Undivided Universe Bohm and Hiley suggests that the particle is getting information (like feedback) from a quantum field substrate (below or within regular classical physical reality) which hits the road running. By that I mean the information is poised to create or form an adjustment in the way the particle moves or acts. The purpose of the information is not merely to be in and of itself as a thing or as a matter of fact, but is to (at least potentially) synchronize activities within the total field. This type of information is a dance step more than it is a thing that is read. It is, in Bohm and Hiley's words, an 'in-forming.' Thus the word "form" is not just used in a static noun sense. It is not just "a form." It is a forming action, as in "to form." Bohm and Hiley are (to use my words) "thinking like energy (and energy fields)" instead of thinking like matter. They are conceptualizing physical reality in terms of verbs more than in terms of nouns. The nouns are just appearances along for the ride. The verbs do the reality. The form forms so atomatically and naturally that the forming it does seems to be its essential nature more than the form it is. Form is a verb. After the excerpts I include one of my poems which verbifies nouns into verbs, or begins to "think like energy." 

from The Undivided Universe, by David Bohm and Basil Hiley: 

While we are bringing out above the objective aspects of information we do not intend to deny its importance in subjective human experience. However, we wish to point out that even in this domain, the notion of active information still applies. A simple example is to be found in reading a map. In this activity we apprehend the information content of this map through our own mental energy. And by a whole set of virtual or potential activities in the imagination, we can see the possible significance of this map. Thus the information is immediately active in arousing the imagination, but this activity is still evidentially inward within the brain and nervous system. If we are actually traveling in the territory itself then, at any moment, some particular aspect may be further  actualized through our physical energies, acting in that territory (according to a broader context, including what the human being knows and what he is perceiving at the that moment). 

We therefore emphasize once again that even the information held by human beings is, in general, active rather than passive, not merely reflecting something outside itself but actually , or at least potentially, capable of participating in the thing to which it refers. Passive information may in fact be regarded as a limiting case in which we abstract from the activity of information. This is essentially the kind of information that is currently used in information theory, e.g. as used by Shannon. The puzzle in this approach is that of how information that is merely passive within us is able to determine actual objective processes outside of us. We suggest that passive information is rather like a map reflecting something of these processes which can guide us to organize them conveniently for our use, e. g. by means of algorithms that enable us to calculate entropy or other such properties. 

If the notion of active information applies both objectively and subjectively, it may well be that all information is at least potentially active and that complete passivity is never more than an abstraction valid in certain limited circumstances. In this context our proposals to use the concept of active information at the quantum level does not seem to be unnatural. 

 

To show how these ideas work out in more detail, we can go once again into the example that we gave earlier of the electron in an interference experiment.We could say that this particle has the ability to do work. This ability is released by active information in the quantum field, which is measured by the quantum potential. As the particle reaches certain points in front of he slits, it is 'in-formed' to accelerate or decelerate accordingly, sometimes quite violently. 

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from Fly on the wall. (unpublished book of poems): 

Work of Art

Nouns work like verbs.

“The catch” isn’t a stringer full of fish.

It’s the movement of a glove fulfilling its destiny.

That’s the way this task is completed,

an undoing of jobs done.

The whistle at the end of the shift

becomes a whistle while you work,

keeping time with saws singing through their teeth,

and with the drum of headstrong hammers,

‘til a job is an expression of your heart

beating life into the tools.

© 2005 Darrell Moneyhon

[Layman Pascal]

Flanks certainly have a tactical and ethical role in mobilizing a metaphysics of adjacency, proximity, edges, etc. One is reminded of the often undervalued therapeutic power of gentle touch, Reiki, light massage, etc. in the hands of a expert -- as opposed the tense client's assumption that they need "strong pressure" to make a change. But on the other hand light touches only work for certain things. When is outflanking and "just enough" activism effective and how does it know when to trade off with alternative styles?

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Good questions. When? How much? How much should you lean on a bicycle when rounding a curve? Probably has to be done in that "proprioceptive" not-quite-identified-but-felt manner of thinking that Bohm valued. Or a more "subtle," and/or right brain, gestalt-background awareness/sensitivity. 

Correction from my typed excerpt above. The word "evidentually" was, of course supposed to be "evidently." 

Speaking of subtle consciousness, this continuation of the excerpt (from same passage) hints to Bohm's and Hiley's believe in a sub-quantum substratum of a more "causal" nature, using the Vedic terms, that is.

from The Undivided Universe, Bohm and Hiley: 

Although the quantum equation (3.8) may look like a classical law implying pushing or pulling by the quantum potential, this would not be understandable because a very weak field can produce the full effect which depends only on the form of the wave. We therefore emphasize that the quantum field is not pushing or pulling the ship that it guides. So the ability to do work does not originate in the quantum field, but must have some other origin (a suggestion which we shall discuss presently). 

The fact that the particle is moving under its own energy, but being guided by the information in the quantum field, suggests that an electron or any other elementary particle has a complex and subtle inner structure (e.g. perhaps even comparable to that of a radio). This notion goes against the whole tradition of modern physics which assumes that as we analyze matter into smaller and smaller parts its behaviour always grows more and more elementary. But our interpretation of the quantum theory indicates that nature is far more subtle and strange than perviously thought. However, this sort of inner complexity is perhaps not as implausible as may appear at first sight. For example, a large crowd of people can be treated by simple statistical laws, whereas individually, their behavior is immensely more subtle and complex. Similarly, large masses of matter reduce approximately to a simple Newtonian behavior, whereas the molecules and atoms out of which matter is built have a more complex inner structure.  …

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I do get the sense that the non-local quantum effects (or "quantum mechanics?") are/is mostly a subtle body/reality thing, and that the quantum realm is more or less equal to the Vedic subtle realm. This was, I'm pretty sure, also the conclusion of Boyer in his historical review of quantum theory (see his excerpt within the excerpt below from my in-progress book Your Third Nature). Boyer mentions Bohm's articulation of a "super-implicate" order which sounds a lot like Vedic "causal" body/reality. 

from Your Third Nature (in-progress) by Darrell Moneyhon: 

Just as Einstien opened our eyes to the possibility of more equivilency between energy and mass than we previously assumed, Bohm sees more of an equivilancy between the UL and UR quads than we previously assumed. I think the relative equivilance which he begins to expose (in the form of a “system” which cuts across the previously subjective and objective domains) is the result of sensing a perspective which is deeper than the previously surface-bound perspectives in which a difference between “subjective” and “objective” make perfect sense. David Bohm is one of the pioneers of the depth view of reality which we are purporting and promoting here in this book.

Based on this depth view of reality and its corrolary that convergence happens the deeper we go, the notion that it takes an observer to collapse the quantum wave function seems rather contrived. It is contrived because it leaves science clinging to a “surface-centric” viewpoint (more on that shortly) and its assumption of a consistent difference between subjective and objective reality, when, according to our new depth-informed theory, neither of these categories really applies at the sub-atomic and/or flare-core level of investigation. It's a more “transpersonal” and “transobject” zone in there, where the boundaries of self and other, self and object, are transcended.

An excellent article by Robert W. Boyer, published in the periodical NeuoQuantology, gives a chronological account of “interpretations” of quantum function wave collapse which have been offered since Bohr's original, “Copenhagen,” interpretation. Bohr's observer effect, in which the act of observation is thought to cause a collapse of the quantum wave function, is replaced by increasingly less surface-centric views. By “surface-centric” I mean that the quantum theorists started off assuming that reality must correspond to how things more-or-less act here at the surface. This seems similar to how the astronomers and thinkers prior to Corpernicus' time assumed that the planets must revolve around our familiar earth. At the earlier stages of quantum theorizing, we assumed that the rest of reality must surely “revolve around” (conform to) the kind of physical reality we experience here at the surface.

Here in this familiar surface reality, there is a definite location to things. That includes, of course, the separate location of an observer (the subjective perspective) and the observed object (the objective perspective). Bohr's “observer effect” and “inviolable wall” are most likely contrivances resulting from clinging to a surface-centric view which insists that the rest of reality must surely revolve around (conform to) our current reality here at the surface of physical things or “classical” objects.

What seemed to evolve in quantum theory in the years since the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum wave collapse was the notion of a reality with depth. I already identified mathemetician and physicist David Bohm as being one of the pioneers of this depth view.

My strong belief that the depth dimension has been an important missing piece of our reality-view puzzle seems partially confirmed. Although I am only now investigating these more recent quantum theory ideas, I somehow seemed to have anticipated the general direction that these much sharper thinkers than myself would be heading. By being willing to take on the perspectives of deeper realities (partially observed, partially deduced) both myself and the quantum theorists blazing a trail ahead (or beside) me get new insights about how “reality” might really be. In the quantum physics camp a multi-level model of “reality” similar to our flare model here emerged.

David Bohm's neorealism proposed an “implicate order” which is a quantum reality substrate of the “explicate order” of the world of classical objects. The implicate order of a quantum realm guides but does not rigidly determine the physical realities here at the surface. Here are a few snippets of Robert Boyer's description of Bohm's theory:

It is a mathematical theory of the motion of particles in which the path of a real elementary particle is guided by a real nonlocal wave. In this interpretation atoms are real classical objects; and the underlying waves are also real but are a more abstract, subtler level of nature. The underlying wave field is nonlocal and beyond the conventional level of ordinary spacetime. It is an underlying, deterministic, causally efficacious nonlocal field that permeates the physical.

...In this perspective discrete events in ordinary space and time can be described as also being encompassed in a subtler level of existence underlying it. This subtler level is less localized than discrete ordinary space and time. Causation is spread out in waves of a subtler medium of nonlocal space-time, permeating the more concrete gross level of space-time where sensory objects are experienced as independent and localized with causation modeled in terms of classical ‘billiard ball’ mechanics.

This more abstract level of nature allows for new ways to address major quandaries in classical physical realism about mind and consciousness. In this expanded ontology the theorized closed physical causal chain does not mysteriously unlink to insert an emergent conscious mind at some stage of evolutionary neural complexity, and the conscious observer is not epiphenomenal or powerless as in physical realism. Rather, the mind of an individual conscious observer is nonlocal, and it influences physical events via the underlying psi wave. The implicate order that includes mental space permeates matter, and causally guides it.

...Though specifying the two levels, explicate and implicate orders, this interpretation is not psychophysical dualism. It emphasizes causal seamlessness between these two levels, as well as quantum wholeness in which the more expressed classical explicate order is a grosser manifestation of the subtler, more encompassing implicate order. And both exist within an ultimate universal plenum or super-implicate order. It is thus a non-dual or monistic account.

Boyer goes on to describe even more recent interpretations. These newer theories posit three levels of reality. He then notes how these newer conceptions of reality seem to mirror the ancient Vedic concepts of “gross,” “subtle,” and “causal” levels. 

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Layman Pascal said:

Flanks certainly have a tactical and ethical role in mobilizing a metaphysics of adjacency, proximity, edges, etc. One is reminded of the often undervalued therapeutic power of gentle touch, Reiki, light massage, etc. in the hands of a expert -- as opposed the tense client's assumption that they need "strong pressure" to make a change. But on the other hand light touches only work for certain things. When is outflanking and "just enough" activism effective and how does it know when to trade off with alternative styles?

[Edward theurj Berge]

As an adept of the martial application of tai chi, it certainly requires a lot of proprioceptive subtlety and sensitivity. But it also trains in quite hard, even brutal, explosive martial techniques. And how to use them in combination with soft where appropriate. There are times when one just has to punch someone out, plain and simple. Or use high velocity adjustments like chiropractic in a healing application. As always, focus, sensitivity and precision are key.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Yes, Both/and, and, as you say, when and how much also. But I'm talking about overall, average, best strategy. Or a default program. It's always important to overide the default program when the situation calls for it, but it is also important to have an effective default program up and running. Re the default program meta-strategy: If they see you coming, they'll prepare. When they don't see you coming they won't be ready and your chance of success is, overall, maximized when you think (and prepare) for more outflanking than head-on attack. 

darrell