ChaotiCosmos

A Person’s Experiences, ranging from common sense to the highly abstact, are all fundamentally either of “things” (Systems) or “connections” (Relations). The expression (Communication) of the Experience rests in-and-on Signs (for Systems or Relations), signs being acknowledgeably also the Essence of Mind (recognizing the carrier role of the brain). However, Human history records that Relations are almost universally confined to being Relations among Systems.

One of the most dramatic (seems magical if unexplained) simple demonstrations is that of of the visual blind spot. This blind spot is the area on the retina without receptors that respond to light. Therefore an image that falls on this region will NOT be seen. It is in this region that the optic nerve exits the eye on its way to the brain. To experience your blind spot, look at the image below. Close your right eye. Position the image about 20 inches away. With your left eye, look at the X. Slowly bring the image (or move your head) closer while looking at the X. At a certain distance, the O will disappear from sight…this is when the O falls on the blind spot of your retina. Reverse the process. Close your left eye and look at the O with your right eye. Move the image slowly closer to you and the X should disappear

By analogy to the visual blind spot, which is a Perceptual Mind/Brain processing phenomena, WHAT IF there were a sign void in Cognitive Mind/Brain functioning, i.e. a cognitive blind spot with respect to the nature of “Relation”? The answer to this query is the ground for our Applied Philosophical Hypothesis regarding the four possible forms of Relation which is the foundations focus of RELATIONISM. In contrast the Human record has historically nearly exclusively exhibited only one form of Relation, i.e. the Relations among Sytems(things).

[See also the Post dated Monday, March 5, 2007 entitled

“The hallmark of the Renaissance was its holistic quality, as all fields of art, engineering, science, and culture shared the same exciting spirit and many of the same intellectual principles. However, as the centuries passed, the holism of the Renaissance gave way to specialization and intellectual fragmentation. Today, with the scientific work of recent decades showing us at a deeper level the fundamental unity of natural organization, it is time to rekindle the spirit of the Renaissance, returning to the holistic perspective on a higher level, with a new set of principles and theories.” NSF/DOC-Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance:
Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology And Cognitive Science

Knowledge and the Whole
What is missing throughout most Systemic re-constructions arguing for holism is usually any attention to the inevitable, but surprising and paradoxical, realization that a System-as-WHOLE is No-Thing (Bortoft, 1996) and must be explicated through the notion of “InterRelated Relations” (Hamann, 1978).
Human Culture as Whole(Ness): The CoCreative CosmiChaotic (R)Evolution:
Goethe’s Intuitive Intellect and Environmental Philosophy (http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/154/187 Chris Storey 1998)
Two interrelated concepts lie at the heart of deep ecology’s call for an ecological world-view and the accompanying belief that the environmental crisis can be traced to philosophical problems at the heart of the dominant modern world-view. One concept is holism; the other is ecological consciousness.
Metaphysical holism in deep ecology entails a world-view that can be contrasted with the dominant reductionist world-view of modern industrial society. Because of its concern with metaphysical holism, deep ecology is inherently subversive in challenging the reductionist approach of the orthodox scientific world-view. Ecology is subversive because its basic premise is holism.
To propose that any real kind of science could be subversive is no longer a particularly startling claim to make. As Henri Bortoft puts it, science is not an autonomous activity standing outside history. Science can be true, but it is not fundamental. If science is freed from the dogmatic scientism of the past, and if nature can manifest in different ways, then there is the possibility of a different kind of science, which is complementary to mainstream science.
The participatory strand in the science of ecology suggests another approach to science. An Arcadian tradition of participatory methods traced through Henry David Thoreau, for example, bear a strong resemblance to the way of science developed and practiced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the German Romantic poet and scientist. In Goethe’s way of science, wholeness and ecological consciousness are understood as a necessary unity. Goethe’s way of science is subversive, because at its heart is the understanding of wholeness.
The authentic whole is not the totality of the parts that can be grasped intellectually, because there are no parts that are independent of the whole. An example of an authentic whole is the hologram, in which the whole is present in each of the parts. The parts cannot be regarded as separate entities; every part essentially is the result of its relation to the whole, and in fact contains the whole. The whole is encountered within the depth of the parts, and this can only be achieved with a different way of seeing. This way of seeing involves a transformation in the mode of consciousness, a switch from the “analytical” mode to the “intuitive” mode. The analytical mode is verbal, linear and logical. The intuitive mode is holistic, non-verbal and non-linear. The foregoing was extracted from the following paper which Adopters-of-Gnomes (TrueRelationalResearchers) can access at the TrueThinker AHA! Community.