To Explain the way I think
ed. 11/20/06 03/15/07   phil henshaw   idATsynapse9.com    Side One  Side Two

Side One -
In old movies there is sometimes a scene with a grand room full of furniture, covered with sheets.   I tend to look at the flood of information and issues that come to my attention, physics questions, how the world is changing, often personal issues too, for things that are hidden that way.   A sheet draped over a piece of furniture has various signs of something being in the way of your seeing what's really there.   Reading the signs of something hidden from you is an old practice, of course, but I stumbled across something special.

Many of the great discoveries of science have followed from just such realizations, the proverbial apple that fell and hit Newton on the head, for example, or that classical equations for electric fields predicted infinite forces at the center, is another.   The latter is, I believe, the key thorn in the side of classical physics that gave physicists the confidence the old theory was wrong, i.e. caught dividing by zero, and the motivation to look for the evidence of what they already could see had to be there.   It produced the entire atomic revolution and all the technology of the 20th century, just a little nagging contradiction.    Where there's a contradiction, it's fairly reliable to assume there's something hidden, and one of the most common places for nature to hid things is in plane view, things hidden in sight.

Succeeding in finding things hidden in sight is always exciting, even if also a little upsetting, because it changes your world.   One of the things hidden in sight for modern science, and the common perception of events as well, is how nature organizes things.   The evidence of developmental process, bumps on the curves of  change that display smooth transitional shapes between changes in direction , is a sign of a 'draping fabric' of information hiding something underneath.    It's the furniture of life.   There are four 'bends' in the shape natural system events, the start and end of beginning followed by the start and end of ending.   What those draping shapes are hiding are the interior designs of the natural systems that produce them.   It could be a solar flair, or a social movement, a puff of wind or a brain 'storm'.   A great example is the recent history of articles in the NY Times about 'sustainability'.    These events are all things with definite beginning and end, clear developmental processes, organization and consequences and all originate and operate 'out of control'.  These structures are complex but fairly easy to find when you look for them.  They all exploit some recognizable kind of energy 'gradient', serving as a channel and means of channeling energy downhill, but animate and organize themselves spontaneously.  

Not everything presents itself with enough information to see through the disguises of their flows () for what must lie beneath, so those things may not be worth the trouble of making guesses about.   When you do have good evidence, though, and take a view from multiple sides expecting to find the interior worlds of near-living things animating events,  you can often make good guesses and confirm them.   It may not always be useful to consider events this way, but you can check it out far enough to find that internally designed natural systems are probably the only things that animate macroscopic events,  with everything else just being echoes.

This is sort of a problematic 'discovery' in several ways.   Science is built on the idea that everything is controlled from the outside.   It's simply quite unexpected, in formal scientific reasoning, that any structure of nature has any interior, despite it being completely obvious that we ourselves are a prime example.   We're also simply surrounded by myriad variations of natural systems easily shown to be built from the inside.   In other words, this is really a very suspicious kind of discovery, and to have made it must have required breaking a whole lot of rules.    Can you really trust someone who is inclined to break that many rules, seeming perhaps to upset human reasoning in general?    Well, probably not.  

I guess I have to say I'm sorry.   I've learned that it is also really asking too much to expect people to think about thinking on such vast scales.  Unfortunately I spent most of the last 30 years developing my ideas more or less based on the idea that I was making tools for people to better enjoy thinking for themselves.    There's a gap.   While you might accept my assertion that nature will eventually look more natural if we give up the wrong half of our thinking about it, the question remains, which half??    It may not help to say many keys are in our oldest and most primitive ways of thinking, that we all already know how to use and all share.   Maybe I'm at a point where I can think about it in a new way, and get a little help.   We'll see.

There's also the slightly 'dervish' quality of some of my writing and the very ideas it's built on.   Again I need to apologize.   Partly it has to do with my original methods for breaking down barriers in my own thought, sometimes using exaggeration to test the limits and find the flaws.   Some of the wild quality also comes from my periods of having a ball with it and absolutely no one listening, as well as sometimes really straining to find the right words!    No doubt I can do better than splash incomprehensible supergraphic images on people's screens, though.   Still, because I'm nostalgic for the stumbling path I took, and because there is a very material benefit to 'composting' ideas, like for making rich mental soil, I probably won't erase the messy stuff.   Besides, though it's another story, the main gold mines for information about the interior design and behavior of natural systems are the messy and transitional periods of change in-between the regularities.   There's no reason to step on the conclusions of science, just it's assumptions, because science has only been looking at the other stuff.    p.h.

Side Two -
Side one, above, was mostly about a kind of deductive model for inventing things in the haze of information we confront, by attending to its foggy shapes.    How I really think, well one can never know that of course, seems to be neither deductive or inductive, but exploratory.    As the crib sheets explain, 'deductive' reasoning is a matter of following a chain of connections from a general idea to a more specific one, and 'inductive' the reverse.   Scientists and designers often used an inductive process beginning with immersing themselves in some context of information and relations between things, searching for what ties them all together in a way that is useful for deductive reasoning at a later point in time.   Travelers and builders, on the other hand, may more likely look for and follow the signs needed to follow a particular path to an end, using the 'trip' or the 'project' with other general ideas as a guide to deducing individual decisions.   I'm a great fan of immersion in the unknown, and can fairly easily switch to following directions, but I'm most inclined to begin each by first making what might seem like a hopeless mess of things.    I poke around the contradictions I can find to if any are 'live' ones, or throw up all kinds of wild ideas without carefully studying the situation just to watch how they fall apart and get a feel for my first misimpressions and rawest creative hints.   Then I more or less carefully tend to composting the continuous accumulation of abandoned fragments and somewhat studiously combing through them for useful stuff from which to take off in new directions while continuing to poke around and slowly building a versatile point of view.    

Maybe I'll add more description later, and some examples might help, but that seems to put it simply.

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