My history professor, Dr. Gobbledegook, is dyslexic. He continually claims that understanding the past is the best method for understanding the present. He continually studies more and more selective material about the past. The history of the recent civilization as it is captured by some historians in a selective presentation of the past. It’s the best we can do. I draw a similarity with archeologists who study fossils. They will readily admit that a small fraction (maybe 1%) of past living organisms and materials get fossilized. This is a poor representation, but most archeologists are aware of this and put those frames of reference into accordingly localized conditions. Some do not and I reel in anguish at the over generalization that confuses cultures with other that bare no resemblance to each other. One notable theorist surmised that older cultures did not exercise because he happened to come across on that did not exercise. He concluded that exercise was not performed because it represented a water of precious calories. He simply excluded the fact that the entire asian continent and sub continents where daily exercises of various kinds is a morning standard formulary of behaviors. For billions of people and has been for many thousands of years. Whether its tai chi, martial arts, yoga of many hundreds of varieties developed over longer than most Americans and their religious predecessors can conceive of. He also was not able to include more biological impacts of exercise that stabilizes blood sugar, improve adrenal and other hormone adaptivity, protect against cardio vascular diseases, and is virtually a panacea for a healthy life. These kinds of oversights and mis-representations make up the bulk of todays human perception, cognition and subsequent behavior.
Which do you think you know more about, the past, present or future? Does the past inform the present or obscure it?
History doesn’t not guarantee a better understanding of anything. It notable does reduce your odds for understand by the conventions views, methods and ideologies of historians. It is unlikely that you will even understand the past by studying history.
You have to understand the present from the point of view of the present. By including present conditions I mean including as wide a range of perspectives as you can. This is a creative process because you are looking to understand things in terms and ways that did not exist before the conditions of today. That is the present. These conditons inform the past, not vice versa.
This includes a kind of creativity. You have to create understanding by including a wider scope of perspectives.
Basing things on the past requires that you are going to extend the. Circumstance of the past to the present in a linear, symmetrical way. It has been well established that the universe does not function in linearities and symmetries. That is one of the kinds of delusional mis-representations that have produced massive errors in the entire history of humans and is occurring with worse effects than ever today, and will continue to degenerate.
Those linear processes represent the kinds of idealism that continues to spiral peoples behaviors into more simplistic group and more oppositional behaviors.
How about the conditions of the future. Do we know that much more about the conditions in the past, present or future? Which ones do we know more about in terms of the conditions that make them up.
A much more individualized approach.
Understanding the wider contexts and conditions involved in different cultures in different times of history does not just mean entertaining thought about the things that occurred. The understanding is not the same as knowing events that occurred. The events represent the outer forms of what, where, when. At some point we must concede that a more inner representation is essential to our understanding.
The combination of narrow views of our world as well as narrow inner depictions of our world is the most misleading way to look at anything.
Another feature is to try to understand the conditions and how the conditions have changed rather than the occurrences. To understand how conditions have changed for the inner experience and the outer.
The historical view that history informs the present is backwards, it reinforces putting things into prepackaged narrow understanding that only reinforce themselves.
Professor Gobbledygook mixes up as things were and as things are. He mixes up his understanding with the understanding he has been taught. His own understanding has been displaced by the books he reads. He likes the game “war” because it simplifies contexts down to scopes that fit in with his understanding.
When the civilizations collapsed he looks to indicators like education, economics, not the relational contexts of ideologies as areas of displacement of human characteristics and homophylic (preference for likenesses and familiarities) properties that reveal what kinds of relating and perception that determined the resulting failure of a society.
Understanding things in terms of the past or in newer terms of the present requires creativity. The ability to use words and ideas in new ways. These characteristics are more inclusive, do not break down into separate, discrete packets of data. They are more flexible and present greater networks of understanding.
The prepackaged approach is also the historical approach.
History
The development of new ideas. New ideas often do not have a place immediately. Things ideas are slowly integrated. They are integrated by how people can relate them to the past ideas. As society developed an agreement around what things are, and how what things that are new will be given a place. Their new idea and understanding of the idea will be modified, interpreted to fit into the past understandings and contexts. It will be decided by the commonality of ideas. The commonality always represents the most simplistic, the most easily recognized, easiest to understand, most useful to that common way of understanding and thinking. The lowest common denominator will be the outcome, and hence, few people will understand the idea as it was when the idea was first developed. Or as the event occurred. That context will be replaced by the context of commonality.
A good example is when readers of Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan offer interpretations that are not at all a representation of Nassim’s Idea. That idea was juxtaposed with other events that are not demonstrative of a black swan event.
This is the classic case of linguistic displacement. We could also call it ideological displacement.
The only way to understand the idea as it was original put forth is to be able to recognize it in the spirit of originality in which it occurred. The spirit of open minded discovery. The spirit of unbiased inquiry. The spirit of creativity combined with analysis. Every scientists aspiration.
ANTHROPOLOGY, AGRICULTURE LED TO GROUP THINK
The shift form hunter gatherer to agricultural societies was one of the largest shifts to social reinforced perceiving, feeling and thinking. Larger groups living together were part of the agricultural process. Agriculture makes little sense because it is much more labor intensity that hunter gatherer. It provided a greater sense of security, safety an simplistic easy to follow living. As Nassim correctly identifies such group think; “A convenient way to die.” Group think is socialized thinking. It is represented by a correspondence to a centrally modulated system. That central modulation replaces diversity. This is assisted by a strong reinforcement of conformity. Conformity to narrower models of thinking and relating. This is indispensable. As more peripheral characteristics get replaced by simpler centralized ones. More rigid forms. More centralized understandings in society at large. This entails that the more centralized understandings become forever more removed from contexts of the real world. This is because the more peripheral, the new, the spontaneous, the random, the creative, etc. are closer to the nature of life’s and the universes functionalities. They become idealized forms of life.
Large groups of narrow, conformed, centralized, rigid, codified processes are a mechanism of displacement of greater values and functionality.
The idea of the various supernatural forces as a causative has always been a feature of early humans. The supernatural as a cause of events, becomes more rigid, more centrally codified, more conformed into narrower accepted, approved and simplified models that inform, perceptions and behaviors. Central codification, removed from empirical understandings of the real world.
More narrowly identified, socially reduced parameters into a more simplistic and reductive by a smaller sampling of things, reduced to a more singular one. Resulting in god and money which are fairly synonymous.
Homophyly, more similar natured people arise that reinforces the simplistic over and over. Continuously narrowed.
These eventually led to some groups developing an even more centralized position that was based on a power hierarchy.
Which had to maintain its power. Had to reinforce its power. Addictions control, becoming more the central feature of human life.
A constant reductions to the nature of life. As in the people so on planet and vic a versa. A holism of multiplicities that we will never escape by our delusional simplifications.
(One of the ways to study this process is through an analysis of percolation theory. How would we analyze the reduction of pathways. Compared to the multiplication of pathways. The dominance of less creative thinking by a group more organized by homophily.
Mathematically we develop the formula by the design that increase in understanding is represented by more integrated networks as P=1. Possible link to link is 1. A break in the interconnectivity is presented by P-1. Possible link to link is -1. Values closer to 1 represent more relationship and values closer to zero represent lesser integration. We gather data through word usage and idea usage by individuals and identify them into the groups of less creative and more creative. We can then analyze the results in terms of graphs representing the networking of the groups. The problems arise in the interpretations of data fields. (Gaussian) We are applying this idea to groups investigating a particular field, such as historians. An example of such an application is found in the PNAS report “Flexibility of thought in high creative individuals represented by percolation analysis.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1717362115
Education and interest. I think diversity of materials is essential for interest to develop. Diversity of the structure, structure s, audio visual approaches, other non structural components, A diverse re presentation, ways of represent actions representations, with a variety of actions,
Break up an understanding into smaller questions.
Multiple choice should be arranged according to sequence of questions linked together. Not just random questions here and there. This develops more organized step by step thinking made of small steps.
Test’s could be arranged in ways that organize thinking into more interrelated steps. These smaller steps show up in all kinds of research. See above research as well as cellular feedback concepts;( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680159/ )
Then there's the use of re using old teaching materials rather than creating or finding other sources for more modern material. Shore more creative material
How can we encourage positive states interest a creativity, as a broader more flexible use of words and ideas. A wider representation and scope of word an idea usage.
Through word and idea play.
Many assignments are given as a prescription or a form that your writing should fit into. Is the same process as people fitting into social conditions and conformity.
Conformity is more important to them than there own value.
This is also found in using a prompt for assignments.
Education also does not stress developing explanations in writing. Just expressing an opinion that is close to the teacher opinion is all that is required. Developing the ways of organizing and illustrating material is not stressed.
This is exemplified by such instructions as “Before you begin, decide on the type of essay you want to write. This is a hinderance to innovation. Trying to create or decide on an outcome to develop first is a sure way to avoid innovation. Another form of prepackaged operations. This may work well for a shopping list but not so good for communicating with someone you have never met.
These processes interfere with recognizing different conditions and making a choice based on being able recognize two, or more in reality, different conditions. There is little analytical decision making process and being able to make decision and developing methods for how that is done. All representative of creative processes.
The degrades to process of discerning between sets of ideas, their understanding and presentation.
Education promotes the ongoing development and movement towards shallow superficial understandings that represent and reinforce conformity.
Education reinforces fitting into an outer false model, method, form.
Putting options into a box,
What you should do with your content.
Told what to do and how to do it.
Filling another persons agenda,
Fitting into another personas agenda.
Outer form as an assignment to complete. Or an outer form of a job, very little self value, little self developed and oriented interest.
Areas of inner value, personal access, personal relationships are reduced.
Society has degraded the personal relationship such that there is very little relational developmental processes. Idealism discourages creativity through lack of idea play. Singular proofs, one dimensional relationships.
(Resulting in the smell of modern society.)
JUNG
Jung’s early ideas comprised by a system based on introverted, extroverted, male, female. This later evolved into the word persona for the first two categories. Outer persona and inner persona.
The outer persona, Jung, job, money, house, hair, makeup, clothes, but not just clothes, the right clothes, the right hair the right makeup. the outer has become prescriptive approaches. We base much on it. Race, skin, hair, much meaning, much value.
Sharing falls into this prescriptive, shallow, narrow prescriptive method based on outer material based culture.
Evidence of sharing form other cultures. The banana example.
Communal Family. The context of family is different
The banana example.
How clean a culture is.
Everyone having a bandanna, not one person having a banana and sharing
The rescue developed through sharing is trust, partnership, relationship, inner values. The come from this kind of sharing not from other ways of sharing. Not from pre-scripted ideas of what sharing means. How sharing is done. Who does the sharing. Who has the things to share. No, it’s much more community minded. How does the community function.
Sharing in the community and sharing between individuals was also in a wider context. Children were taught importance of sharing in this way. A banana was given to each child to share. So first of all every has something to share. So the object being shared was not the important characteristic of sharing. Sharing has a broader purpose. A broader context and meaning. Another kind of value.
Sharing was about connection. The importance of sharing is the development of inter-relatedness. Strengthening inter connectedness. We exist together. Not by the things we share but by the sense of togetherness. By our sense of community we start to determine how to function. We learn what is important. How to recognize context with value and meaning that is the basis of our relationships, community and within the context of life around us.
Aggressive or enforced egalitarianism is another example of how communities operated. Today over consumption is a given in society. It is more than accepted, it is encouraged. It is not recognized as a devaluing principal. An addiction. A loss of context and relationship.
Another example is how someone was treated in they were over hunting. The community said the person was “insulting the meat.” They were shunned from the community. Which meant that when the person ran low on resources they would find it harder to survive. So the importance of sharing had real consequences as well. But that was only a part of the nature of sharing.
The communal sharing of many things influenced a more egalitarian society. But it can not be referenced outside of al those many brand conditions and considerations.
Communal Family. The context of family is different. Children are raised by a wider group of people. They grow up easily referring to a Mom or Dad who are not their actual biological parent. They may emigrate out of the group at some time and find it easy to make other significant bonds within other groups they may attach to as easily as any Mom or Dad. Or brother or sister for that matter.
Todays sense of trust in other has a much smaller context. Degraded by many social constructs. Outer socially determined interests. By business, government, media, educators, religions, that created the outer shell. One of the keys to understanding this is the prepackaged, pre-scripted, protocols of idealistic approaches.
