Fields of Love and Their Lessons for Physics

Montréal, August 14, 2000

Trying to explain the way the world works in terms of 'material things' has not worked out very well. There are all kinds of loose threads, so to speak. And yet, the obvious option of starting from notion of the flow of energy or 'field', the 'other option' proposed by Heraclitus in 500 B.C., by Kepler ('magnetic rivers') in the early 17th century and by Einstein (general relativity) in the 20th century have not found popular acceptance in the culture.

Millennia of western cultural tradition, building our view of reality 'bottom-up' from discrete, solid entities does not want to yield easily to the 'fuzzy' ideas of field theory. After all, everybody 'knows' that the world is filled with solid, tangible 'material objects' and its difficult to see how one could ever conceive of a world without starting from 'matter'. Or is it?

The notions of 'things', in the minds of the three philosophers mentioned does not 'go away', ... instead of being seen as 'discrete', stand-alone items which are absolutely independent from their environmental container, these philosophers saw them, instead, as 'features' of the evolving environmental flow, like vortices in a river which are kinetically independent, but at the same time, they ARE the containing substance (field, flow etc.) which they are moving in.

Ok, you may say, but that would deny the clarity of the boundary between the 'thing' and its containing space'.

Yes it would, and that is one of the problems which already exists with discretist (materialist) models. The boundary between the human being and its environment is far from clear. Like the paleozoic 'fuselinid', a tubular sea-worm nourished by the flow of nutrient-rich waters through its tubule, it is hard to separate human from the fluid atmosphere it is immersed in. If one were to simply the digestive structure of the human in the manner of the fuselid, by straightening out its intestine and noting that the key features were an opening for the flow of environmental substances through the mouth, down the long tube and out the anus, ... the human would start to have the same amibiguity as the fuselinid with respect to where does the organism stop and where does the containing environment stop? Without the lining of bacteria on the inside of the tube, humans could not live, and communities of humans are immersed in a kind of circulating sea of substances (gases, water etc.) which cycles in one end and out the other and that we are effectively 'swimming' in.

And, there's no help on 'discrete boundary' issues on the neural side of things. The current biochemical view of the neural, endocrine and immune systems is that the together consitute a 'psychosomatic network' and this informational network most definitely doesn't stop at the surface of our skin but goes on out into the environment (the skin is simply an information exchange zone). According to U.K. (University of Bath) biologist, Alan Rayner, ""Boundaries are therefore incomplete reactive interfaces for communication and response between changeable insides and outsides, -places of opportunity for transformation - rather than fixed limits of isolated entities"

With many biologists now claiming that 'the organism is the environment' (e.g. Humberto Maturana (Univ. of Chile), Doug Caldwell (Univ. of Saskatchewan), Alan Rayner (Univ. of Bath)), and, as a consequence, that the Darwinian notion of 'natural selection' and 'survival of the fittest' (which are based on the notion of 'discrete' organisms) is defunct, ... the Heraclitean, Keplerian and Einstein views of the world as intrinsically 'immaterial' are looking better and better.

But what about the 'hardness' and tangibility of 'matter', you might ask, ... when you hit your head against the wall, it's solid matter ('dense matter' even) against solid matter?

Well, we already know that if you look more closely at the matter, down at the atomic level, there's far more space between what we're calling matter than there is matter. And each time we look in more detail, there's more and more space which is unoccupied by matter. Not only that but there are little particles and quarks and things sailing right on through and currents where molecules from the outside float in and molecules from the inside stray off into the environment. The 'solid form' of a human comes more from 'field', ... the multi-level codynamical cooperation between the tiniest scales and the macroscales of things. 'Cooperation' is an implicit, immaterial thing.

And what could be more cooperative and more immaterial than 'love'?

So perhaps a bit of exploration into 'love' and the geometry of its fields of influence could help us with putting together a 'unified field theory' which has no innate dependencies on the notion of 'matter', but instead sees 'matter' as a 'feature' of 'field' just as a vortex is a feature of fluid flow.

While this may sound a bit far-fetched at this point, ... the 'stories' of quarks and whatnots being told to keep together the notion of a discrete material base to our world are getting rather far-fetched themselves.

In order to 'get to' the geometry of love, this essay 'borrows' from psychology, and includes an exchange with a Jungian psychologist ('André) which delves into some of the 'anomalies' popularly encountered in the fields of love. 'Anomalies', according to Einstein, are the place to look for an understanding of phenomena; i.e. the underpinnings of things start to show themselves when things get 'out of joint'.

Also in this essay is a note which was recently sent to an online psychology journal 'Psycoloquy' concerning a troublesome recent finding in regard to Tycho Brahe's 'compromise model' for the solar system. Tycho put together a model which combined the features of both the Ptolemaic 'geocentric' model and the Copernican 'heliocentric' model; i.e. he suggested, why not honour the planets revolutions around the sun, but put the stake-in-the-ground with respect to space at the position of the earth, so that the heliocentricity would be there but all of the movements would be relative to a stationary-in-space earth.

What shocked Howard Margolis (Univ. of Chicago) when he 'bumped into it', was that there is a 'cognitive illusion' associated with Tycho's model which he termed 'Tycho's illusion' and which had been apparently overlooked for the 400 years since Tycho presented his model. The 'shocker' is that the fixed reference frame model of our solar system as seen by an observer on the earth is innately incompatible with the fixed reference frame model of our solar system as 'seen' by an observer on the sun. The implications are that 'something has to give' here, ... and that 'something' appears to be nothing other than 'matter', the stuff with the discrete and persisting property of existence which captured the imagination of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention our present day western culture.

So, in addition to the psycho-physics exchange with André on 'fields of love', a copy of the submission to 'Psycoloquy' is appended in regard to 'Tycho's Illusion' and the wooden stake it seems to drive through the heart of the materialist model of physics, the notion of a 'dead universe infected with life', ... a stake which is being driven in, somewhat appropriately, by biologists rather than physicists.

At the end of the 'love-fields' and 'Tycho's Illusion' segments, a brief epilogue is appended which further ties together some long-standing 'loose threads'.

* * *

August 14, 2000

dear andré,

the issues of love and understanding which you touch upon have lured my evolving imagery of understanding a little bit farther 'out of the mist'. your jungian vibes, which seem to somehow connect you to the same reservoir of harmonics as my keplerian vibes, inevitably cooresonate with something in me, and in this co-resonating, the fog lifts a bit more. This is particularly true when i am, as i am at the moment, in a field of particularly high intensity in the domain and issues of love and understanding.

i wanted to share with you the nature of my this morning's fog-lifting illumination, and there's no doubt in my mind that, for me, sleep and dreams are a kind of magic library for understanding (a library of implicit rather than explicit knowledge) which you gain access to when you fall asleep. whilst in the library, you check out one of the 'implicit volumes' and refresh your understanding of 'the creative containing unity' from which you emerged when the 'material you' was born and which your 'forgetful self' will rejoin when the 'material you' dies. the trickster librarian, meanwhile, will not allow you take the 'implicit understanding volume' back through the threshold from sleep to wakefulness, thus you must try to memorize 'parts' of the volume (sub-networks of relationship) and bring this implicit relational understanding back through into wakefulness, which is rather difficult. i have gotten better at it by sleeping during the day and making many trips back and forth oriented by some deliberate 'shopping' missions.

the 'double-bind' you speak about in your note below, has been only too real and present with me this last little while, and it has induced me to think and not-think very deeply about the nature of harmony and understanding, as it relates to harmony of two persons relative to harmony of the whole and the 'self', from all the 'angles' my experience allows me to.

what my dream-library trip brought back to me today were two citations as follows;

* * *

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Lao Tsu, 'Tao Te Ching'

"Furthermore, a great distinction exists
between the consonances of the single planets
[two body dynamical view] which have been unfolded
and the consonances of the planets in pairs
[three body codynamical view, two planets plus the sun].
For the former cannot exist at the same moment in time
while the latter absolutely can; .." . . ."... if the ratios
of the journeys are harmonic, all the other affects
which the planets have will be necessitated and bound up
with the journeys, so that there is no room elsewhere
for establishing harmonies."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Kepler, 'Harmonies of the World'

* * *

along with these two citations, i was able to smuggle back the implicit, relational understanding which is common in and across both of them, ... viewing the two as a kind of 'rosetta stone' (a more compact smuggling method) which allowed me to decipher the meaning contained in the enigmatic words of lao tsu in the terms of physics and human relationships expressions of kepler.

kepler, incidentally, thinks of the planets and sun in terms of 'cherishing' each other; "None the less, however those things may be [what sight or consciousness is in the sun], this composition of the six primary spheres [of planetary revolution] around the sun, cherishing it with their perpetual revolutions and as it were adoring it . . ."

your allusion to defying gravity brings to mind this thought that 'that which possesses the greatest force is not the most important' in understanding the way the world works, .. the small magnet held above a fork on the dinner table, which easily overcomes the entire attractive force which the huge mass of the earth can muster, seems to be telling us something; ... is it not telling us that the view of force and matter and attraction and repulsion is not the 'big story'?, ... since the 'weak' force of gravity induces a landscape-shaping (transformative flow-inducing) order in the world which is quite magnificent while the far stronger force of magnetism is responsible for 'disorder' in the form of 'polarizing' and conflict?

in any case, what the rosetta stone citations told me, which i smuggled out when the dream-librarian was looking the other way, ... was that there are two types of 'love' pulls, ... 'bring together-love' and 'polarizing love'. that is, gravity behaves as if it comes from the containing space and pulls on things to bring them together, ... for example, gravity persistently pulls on the things within its constituency like mountain ranges, and constituents respond by slowly transforming or 'morphing', ...evolving into more gentle and aesthetic things as they rejoin the undifferentiated whole. gravity, while it's nowhere near as powerful as magnetics, doesn't seem as 'two-faced' as magnetics; i.e. it wants to bring everything together while magnetics wants to selectively attract and polarize things. so, gravity is a geometrical metaphor for 'togetherness-love' and magnetics is a geometrical metaphor for 'polar-love'.

now the implicit understanding from my dreamtrips was that 'togetherness love' is a more complete form of love which includes 'polar-love' in the same manner that a broad landscape constitutes an implicit contextual frame which contains and includes explicit content-ual features, ... so that when one observes the system of sun and planets, one can 'sense both' at the same time, the implicit contextual landscape of the simultaneous harmony of whole-and-part (the implicit contextual landscape of 'togetherness-love') and the explicit features of the sequential harmony of planet-sun pairs (the discrete and explicit 'content-ual' features of 'polar-love').

what kepler was meaning, when he said; 'there is no room elsewhere for establishing harmonies' and what lao tsu was meaning are the same, ... that 'togetherness love', the love which is implicit and 'cannot be told' includes and is in the primacy over 'polar love', the love which is explicit and tellable. what this says, then, is that it is folly to attempt to understand the way the world works and to 'manage the self' by starting from 'polar love', ... we can never 'get to' togetherness love by starting from 'polar love' because we would be 'starting from the wrong reference ground, ... we would be 'putting our ladder up against the wrong wall'.

'polar love' is innately contentious, when we line up two thing so that they consistently 'attract' rather than repel, we are at the same time unleashing repulsive forces elsewhere. if i were given a thousand randomly oriented magnetized iron filings and asked to 'put them in order' to remove all polarity conflicts, by the time i was finished, what would i have? .... i would have a large magnet which was now producing huge attractions and repulsions in the domain beyond but including my little 'management' domain, ... attractions and repulsions which would be so powerful as to cause repercussive backlash which would break and shatter all the ordering of my little domain which i had worked so hard to achieve.

ordering things or 'managing the self' on the basis of 'polar love', ... purification by 'selecting what is 'good'' and 'excluding what is 'bad'' is innately self-defeating.

on the level of people, if i seek to first to perfect my 'polar love', my two-body love, ...if i put this in the primacy, then i am working against my 'togetherness-love'. as kepler says; the fact that nature manifests simultaneous harmony of whole-and-part ('togetherness love'), means that 'there is no room elsewhere for establishing harmonies'. but this doesn't mean that conflict must 'rule' and become dominant, nor that 'conflict' must be at odds with 'togetherness love', ... 'conflict' can instead be the catalyzer of whole-and-part harmony. as lao tsu says, 'These two spring from the same source but differ in name;', ... 'togetherness love' is the contextual landscape which contains and includes 'polar love'.

but woe to those (like we of the western culture) who build their community and their understanding on a base of polar love, because the more intense love and alignment they achieve, the more they amplify inductive forces of conflict relative to the togetherness love of enveloping Nature. and this is the source of much depression and anguish which, from the ground level of polar love, appears to be 'the way the world works'; i.e. one does not have the redeeming notion that there is a containing 'love-landscape' which reduces the ups and downs of life to tiny explicit features within a far broader, containing context of love.

as kepler and lao tsu say (and the theory of relativity), ... one must ground one's understanding and community actions in the more fundamental 'harmony of whole-and-part' ('togetherness love'), and see 'polar love' in its natural context as a supportive love which can contribute to the attaining of 'togetherness love'. this is a very different way to perceive and respond to things than seeing 'polar love' as something to be valued 'in its own right', as a discretist 'love unit' or 'love atom' from which to 'bottom-up' construct a loving universe (as in arranging the iron filings). 'make love, not war', the slogan of the sixties, is innately dysfunctional if embraced with the wrong primacy, building bottom-up from love-units rather than using polar love as a supportive pivot for the attainment of 'togetherness love'.

both my waketime and dreamtime have been informing me of why it is difficult for these 'meanings' of kepler and lao tsu to 'come through' in our western society. the implications of the primacy of gravity over magnetism, ('togetherness love' over 'polar love') is that 'discrete material things' are, in effect, a 'cognitive illusion', they are a simplified way of looking at our world, a world which is, instead, 'immaterial', ... a world of relationships within a continuously evolving energy flow. clearly, our 'self' is not a thing, ... as heisenberg notes, our 'self' does not participate in physical processes, ... but what our 'self' does do is to provide us with the cognitive illusion of a material world, a useful artifice for 'managing the self', but in no way an 'objective reality' existing 'in its own right'.

my note to psycoloquy on 'tycho's illusion' comes directly to this point, that given our sensory experience of the world, our observations of the sun and planets for example, there could be no explanation which allowed 'matter' to exist as a persisting state of 'being'. 'matter', instead, must be viewed as a shifting holographic energy interference pattern, in the same manner the persisting heraclitean candle-flame is the stable image of an underlying fiery flow.

tycho's illusion implies as much, but it is a difficult pill to swallow for a culture which has built its whole worldview upon a binary, discretist, materialist base, ... a constructed world built upon a base of 'polar love atoms' whose continuing 'perfection' and technology based 'refinement' can only amplify the forces of its own destruction.

in my own case, the awareness is coming to me that continual periods of love and strife which come from struggling with the issues of focusing on 'polar love', if they can be endured, eventually bring one to the question, ... what the hell is keeping us together in spite of the intense oscillations of attractive love and rejection anguish?, ... slowly the thought comes that there must be another, bigger, 'containing love' which we have been excluding from our awareness during our 'polar love' strife, ... a 'togetherness with everything' love which provides a much more stable and harmonious grounding for our 'self'. and in this awareness, the awareness follows that 'polar love', instead of being an explicit objective in its own right, is a supportive artifice for cultivating our awareness and attainment of 'togetherness love' - being in a codynamical unity with (i.e. 'at one with') the containing whole, . . . of being 'in the tao'.

i don't know if this makes any 'sense' to you, but it brings alot of things into connection for me, so i thought i would share it in the spirit of your salutation,"Good luck to . . . all of us."


At 11:30 AM 8/13/00 -0500, you wrote:



>Thanks for your note. Your realizations certainly make sense to me.


>It is, as you know, the way we are imprinted by our culture to associate
>the ego with the self (or "Self", as Jung would note). It is at the root of
>our pain, as far as I can tell, and a very dangerous and unsatisfying way
>to try to live.


>To "lock-in", as you put it, must be terrbly painful and frightening.
>And as long as one holds to rationality as though to a life preserver in a
>vast, dark sea (which is fairly apt as an image of ego to Self, I think).
>there is a deep, natural urge to let go, and a simultaneous desperation to
>hang on tighter. This seems to be the dynamic of depression, an awful
>double-bind which affects us all -- in varying degrees at different times.


>I agree there are archetypes for both rational and irrational process.
>Imagine the titanic battle that can exist! We want, at some level, to open
>to and embrace the "mother" of nature's harmony, yet our repressed
>experience of the personal mother will likely cause a rejection of that


>It reminds me of the way Dr. Rolf used to speak about gravity and the human
>body. If we are aligned with gravity, it supports us in some way. If we
>fight it, we're screwed. Imagine fighting (or trying to deny) gravity!


>And yes, the terror that could come at the instinct to help that would
>necessitate you going back to a "two body harmony" rather than a "multi
>body harmony" would seem the inevitable response, like going against your
>own instinct to LIVE.

>Good luck to . . . all of us.


>Be well.



* * *

Commentary on Margolis on Cognitive-Illusion [1]

Ted Lumley
Goodshare International
Montreal QC, H2X 2K5

Abstract: A fundamental flaw in mainstream cognitive inquiry underpinning 'Tycho's Illusion' (Margolis) can be revealed by 'bringing into cognitive connection', the conceptual notions captured in the citations in paragraphs 3. from Kepler [2], Harris [3] and Margolis [1]. The flaw can be expressed in terms of a contention between sensory perception and rational, material-kinetic reason as follows;

~~~If it is possible in nature, as our senses report, that three or more bodies can move together in SIMULTANEOUS HARMONY or SIMULTANEOUS CODYNAMIC, then it must follow that the ponderable spatially extended stuff we call 'matter' is in this case a 'cognitive illusion'~~~

That is, there can be no solution for ternary, or more populous systems of simultaneous codynamics (volumetric harmony), which allows for a persisting material 'being' of the codynamical participants; i.e. such 'volumetric' harmony is a motion-shaping property of space which (a) takes precedence over issues of material kinetics, (b) demands a continuous 'becoming' of the apparent 'material constituents' and (c) is in fundamental contention with the notion of the persistent 'being' of matter.

Traditional scientific experimentation to validate material-kinetics-based scientific law proceeds by reducing multi-body, simultaneous codynamics or 'volumetric motion' to the 'two-body' case, thus excluding the simultaneous codynamical information from the experimental datasets and forcing 'closure' artificially, between theory and experimental 'results'. The effective two-body re-framing is achieved by imposing the non-relativistic abstractions of 'fixed reference frame' and 'absolute time' on the systems under observation. The difference in cognitive visualizations which emerge from the unfolded two-body dynamics versus the raw, multi-body codynamics lies behind the current toppling of Darwinian 'natural selection' and its subsumation by the co-operative eco-geometries of, for example, 'nested proliferation theory' [5].

* * *

1. The above-stated central proposition is consistent with Einstein and Infeld's comment in 'The Evolution of Physics' [4]; "Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. . . . A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of the greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone."

2. The cognitive 'trick' which we play on ourselves, which convinces us of the persisting 'being' of matter is 'observer-detachment'; i.e. it is to assume, non-relativistically, that the objects we are observing are moving not with respect to ourselves but with respect to a fixed inertial (euclidian) reference frame. This 'trick' decouples us from our relativistic codynamic with the observed object, excluding information on observer codynamics, and paving the way for an apparent conflict-free theory based on multiple observer-observed dynamical perspectives. The exclusion of the information on codynamics between the observer and his multi-constituent containing space equates to the imposing of an assumption of a single objective reality perceivable in exactly the same way by multiple observers. However, if two observers seek to understand the simultaneous co-dynamical context between two observer-observed dynamical perspectives where there is, as in the general case in nature, relative motion amongst observers and observed such that all three objects (two observers plus the observed) participate in a simultaneous codynamic, there is no solution which allows for the persisting 'being' of the material constituents involved; i.e. the 'material constituents' must be regarded as 'artifacts' of the containing space-time 'field', aka 'cognitive illusions'.

3. The following three comments by Kepler [2], Harris [3] and Margolis [1] expose the basic ingredients of the cognitive trickery which we inflict upon ourselves; i.e. (a) as Kepler says, there is a basic incompatibility between the 'rational' perception of sequential two-body harmony (material-kinetic oscillation) and 'sensory' (relational) perception of simultaneous multi-body harmony (volumetric geometrical transformation), (b) as Harris infers, we tend to forget that the reference framing assumptions which underpin our inquiry are shaping the visualized results of our inquiry (and in this case 'hiding' the basic conflict in the material-kinetic view exposed by Kepler), and, (c) as Margolis infers, cognitive illusion induces us to leap over the top of our own reasoning, which would have exposed the 'cover-up', and come to rest, instead, on our expected but flawed conclusions.

3a. "Furthermore, a great distinction exists between the consonances of the single planets [two body dynamical view] which have been unfolded and the consonances of the planets in pairs [three body codynamical view, two planets plus the sun]. For the former cannot exist at the same moment in time while the latter absolutely can; .." . . ."... if the ratios of the journeys are harmonic, all the other affects which the planets have will be necessitated and bound up with the journeys, so that there is no room elsewhere for establishing harmonies." . . . Johannes Kepler



4. The equations of Newton and traditional scientific experimentation to validate rational law consistently evokes the 'cognitive trick' of decoupling the observer from his codynamic with the observed and in this manner sustains the notion of a persisting 'being' of material objects. That is, it is 'standard practice' in science to reduce or 'unfold' the 'volumetric motion' associated with three-body (multi-body) codynamics to two-body motions which can be seen in terms of the trajectories of matter within a fixed reference frame. Relativity, on the other hand, insists on doing away with the imposition of the abstract notions of absolute time and fixed reference frame underpinning material kinetic inquiry. As Einstein and Infeld say in 'The Evolution of Physics'; . . . "The equations of the new theory [relativity] are, from the formal point of view, more complicated, but their assumptions are, from the point of view of fundamental principles, much simpler. The two frightening ghosts, absolute time and an inertial reference system, have disappeared."

5. The current toppling of the Darwinian notion of 'selection' has been facilitated by new experimental technology which no longer demands the reduction of multi-body (multi-organism) codynamics to the two-body case. In the paper 'Do Bacterial Communities Transcend Darwinism?' [5], Douglas Caldwell et al note that prior experimentation involved the isolation and study of particular organisms relative to their environment. Such experimentation reduced or 'unfolded' the geometry of multi-organism codynamics to geometry wherein each organism on its own is studied in the context of its 'engaging with the environment' and later, the results from multiple single organism studies synthetically integrated into the broader context of community dynamics. This type of experimental inquiry strips out and excludes the inter-organismic multi-body codynamical information which implies the primacy of space-geometry over the movements of individual constituents. That is, in multi-body codynamics, the movement of the individual simultaneously transforms the 'opportunity landscape' which contains (includes) and gates the movement of the individual.

6. Inquiry which includes the relativistic, reciprocal self-referentiality between an object (organism) and its containing constituency of objects (organisms) is fundamentally richer in information than the reduced two-body datasets preconditioned by the notion of dynamical independence between the object (organism) and its containing space. As Caldwell et al note; "Until the development of fluorescent molecular probes and confocal laser microscopy, there were few alternatives to isolating microorganisms from their communities prior to laboratory study. . . . This [new technology] affords the opportunity to perform community-level [multi-body codynamical] laboratory experiments that are not possible with plants and animals due to their large size. . . . Consideration of communities as units of proliferation (and hence as units of evolution) requires a more generalized theory of life, amenable to the formulation of community-level hypotheses and tests."

7. The cognitive trick of 'observer decoupling' from the multi-body codynamics it is immersed in is, in effect, invoked when bodies or organism are 'isolated' for scientific study of their properties and behaviours. That is, the movements of each body or organism in their natural environment are influenced or gated by their containing 'opportunity landscape' the shape of which is simultaneously, reciprocally determined by the codynamics of the constituents. Understanding the simultaneous reciprocity between multi-body (multi-organism) codynamics and the dynamics-gating shape of their containing 'opportunity landscape' is vital to an understanding of the way the community co-evolves. With the codynamical information in hand, the cognitive imagery which is subsuming 'survival of the fittest' is as described by Alan Rayner [6], where "Individuality is nurtured, valued, but restrained from running away with itself. Responsibility is shared, collective." Since world wars have been fuelled by a belief in 'selection' and an ethic of 'survival of the fittest', it would seem time for science to fully expose the information-excluding cognitive trickery at the base of 'Tycho's Illusion'.

* * *

[1] Margolis, H. (1998) Tycho's Illusion: How It Lasted 400 Years, and What That Implies About Human Cognition PSYCOLOQUY 9 (32)

[2] Kepler, Johannis, 'Epitome of Copernican Astronomy & Harmonies of the World', 1618, Prometheus Books (1995).

[3] Harris, Laurence, 'The Mars/Sun Collision Illusion: Motion is Not Visualizable in Two Different Reference Frames Simultaneously' Commentary on Margolis on Cognitive-Illusion PSYCOLOQUY 9 (33)

[4] Einstein, Albert and Infeld, Leopold, "The Evolution of Physics", 1938, 1996, Simon and Schuster.

[5] Douglas E. Caldwell, Gideon M. Wolfaardt, Darren R. Korber, and John R. Lawrence, 'Do Bacterial Communities Transcend Darwinism', Advances in Microbial Ecology, Volume 5, Plenum Press, New York, 1997

[6] Rayner, Alan D. M., 'Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries', 1997, Imperial College Press London

* * *

Epilogue to 'Fields of Love and Their Lessons for Physics'

Montréal, August 14, 2000

The above essay and inserts are the product of a continuous exercise in 'bootstrapping', the evolving of a relational view of the world which has no dependencies on fixed theory or fixed concepts though it uses them in its description. For example, one can speak of 'things' in the 'same-sounding' terms of discrete material philosophy but the intent can instead be in terms of 'features of the field' as a vortex is a purely relational feature of a fluid flow; i.e. it is nothing more than relationships and its substance (field-flow etc.) is, at the same time, the substance of its containing environment.

Bootstrapping works in the same fashion as holography, wherein patterns form (image) wherever things (e.g. field relationships) 'interfere' constructively. Thus we have the observation that the operative geometry of 'polar love', the 'attraction' of a man for a woman can quickly 'flip polarities' and turn into 'repulsion' ('There's a thin line between love and hate', as the song goes) 'looks alot like' magnetism and the operative geometry of 'togetherness love', the desire for cooperation which evolves natural community and which transforms a rugged social landscape into a more gentle and aesthetic one 'looks alot like' gravity.

Reflecting on the two relations together, there seems to be yet a further relationship and that is that 'togetherness love' includes 'polar love' as a special case subset; i.e. there are polar love couples in a multi-couple community just as there are planet-sun orbital pairs in the multi-pair solar system. These geometrical relationships can be hypothesis as being innate in nature and then tested against other likely situations. For example, now that we've bootstrapped an 'inclusive' relationship between 'together-love' and 'polar-love' with the help of 'gravity' and 'magnetism', we've evolved the geometric relationship farther than where we were with 'gravity' and 'magnetism' by using our complex experiential data from the love relationships. We could therefore apply the new 'inclusive relationship' to 'gravity' and 'magnetism' and say that gravity and magnetism are one field with gravity being the 'mother' of 'magnetism' in that gravity was 'context transforming' while 'magnetism' was a discrete, special-case included feature; i.e. that gravity was the 'opportunity landscaper' which gates and modulates the emergence of magnetic effects, while the inducing effects of magnetism simultaneously and reciprocally transform the gravity field.

This 'unified field view' of gravity and magnetism is just an unevaluated example of how to develop hypotheses with bootstrapping and doesn't have to 'hold true' to use the bootstrapping results to investigate all kinds of natural phenomena, such as the alternatives of a 'material' base (explicit causal kinetic based change) and 'immaterial' base (implicit field relationship transformation) for our cosmic space-time container.

For example, in the psychology of love discussion, applying the geometric model from the bootstrapping to the topic of 'depression', we can see that 'depression' emanates from an unnatural reversal of the topology of 'togetherness love' and 'polar love'. This topology, working back through the solar system and Kepler's solar system based 'archetypal' model for intellection, applies also to the relationship of 'intuitive intellection' and 'rational intellection'; i.e. to 'contextual intellection' and 'content-ual intellection'.

So we could say that the 'depressed person' has put his 'content-ual intellection', his 'rational view of the world' into an unnatural primacy over his 'contextual intellection', his 'relational view of the world'. He is so polarized on what 'he is' or 'he is not', what 'he needs' and what 'he lacks', what 'he can do' and what 'he cannot do', etc., ... that he fails to see himself in the far broader terms of his contextual identity, his unique opportunity transforming identity. While the former view can reduce him to 'almost nothing' if circumstances deny him access to opportunity, the latter view has him see himself as 'the world'; i.e. as a unique feature of the world whose movements simultaneously and reciprocally transform the world. This contrast in rational versus relational views of the 'self' and how they lead to depression and suicide is well-demonstrated in the film 'It's a Wonderful Life' with Jimmy Stewart. Deprived of access to the funds he needs for his business, his 'rational' view of 'self' takes a dive and he attempts suicide but is escapes death and is induced to reflect on his 'relational' view of 'self', the identity which comes from the simultaneous reciprocal transformation in his containing environment associated with his movements, a view which restores his naturally healthy outlook.

This 'flip' in the primacy of views, from rational-over-relational, our western cultural tradition, to relational-over-rational which agrees with the geometry of nature, is what is currently happening in biology which is overturning the Darwinian notions of selection and 'survival of the fittest'. When one puts the relational view over the rational view, organisms are no longer seen as discrete units of evolution, but instead, as 'features of the environment', ... networks of relationships. The old notion of discrete units of evolution, as in Tycho's Illusion, are thus now seen as 'cognitive illusions', ... a simplification of the more complex notion of 'things' as webs of relationships with a particular 'form' coming from the constructive interference of their multi-scalar constituencies (molecules, cells etc.).

In summary, there is a wealth of data to support a non-matter based relational model for nature, including our observations on the 'geometry of love', as the general theory of relativity and its 'primacy of field' predict, however, the cultural and linguistic dependency on a 'discretist' base is so deeply entrenched and interwoven into the fabric of our lives, that it will not be easy to assimilate this more nature-consistent and harmony-cultivating view.

An additional obstacle to updating our worldview to relativity has been the materialist dominated stewardship of space-time concepts in physics, where the research economy seems to have a dependency on the preservation of discretist concepts. It is in biology where the scientific theory icons are really being shattered and this may well force the hand of physics and open the door to the far more reasonable and nature-consistent 'relational-over-rational' view of the world

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