C-63 A great story line
The Nature of Things makes a great story and, like the best stories, provides behavioral explanation along with description. CEM (contingent emergent materiality) makes a good story line for that story. If we were to construct the story as a mystery then CEM provides the plot around which actors engage in avoiding and arranging (soft and hard) collisions – up to, and including, murder.
This we can do once we remove some observer mind-binders: the focus on the order of things and prediction rather than on the Nature of Things and explanation; the ahistorical perspective instead of a historical perspective; the homogenizing of all observed conditions as circumstances – and seeing all change as circumstantial change; all sorts of dynamic mischief (imbalances and neglected interdependence and complementarity such as between structure and function); the reliance on concepts to do theory’s explanatory work … and so on.
CEM’s contingency and emergence, like equifinality and equipotentiality, are established phenomena (aka facts), in and of consequence. It is CEM’s materiality which completes the representation of consequentiality. Behavior and history (the observed, not the observations) are virtually synonymous with materiality and consequentiality. And the behavioral entity’s behavior, as we have seen, is as material – i.e., in and of consequence — as the entity (App. X).
The materiality of CEM provides text to the story.
CEM evinces progress and purpose as characterizations of behavior and history. It accommodates evolution and development in the story as readily as it does contingency and emergence, as readily as it does equifinality and equipotential. It shows the burgeoning presence of compositional change in our history – to the point now where the changes we have made constitute a worrisome set of circumstances.
CEM addresses and explains the whole of our materiality, the quantity and quality of consequentiality within life’s borders of birth and death. It brings evolution and development as stories together in a larger story. And this larger story also tells of their interdependency (App. X: see diagram).
CEM is Excelsior: the observer’s sword. (And the sword of any others … any of us minders who would fully realize ourselves and what we observe.)
This is the blade which Establishment Science should be wielding instead of its feckless use of evolution as concept and theory (beyond its factuality: C-20) … as a story to combat other stories about human history (some of which stories [e.g., creation stories] extend explanatory promise more successfully to those in dire need of behavioral help – with the behavioral problem especially [I: Pbeh]).
My inelegant formula of “I + O = E” underlines the point of overdone circumstantial accounting. Instinct, I, plus outstinct, O, yields extinct, E. Which is to say that the circumstances of body capacity and those of environmental “forces” – or any other conditions so construed – will tend toward humanity’s extinction … in the absence of compositional change capability. CEM suggests that “I + O + 4C = -E” is a prescription for warding off decline and fall (C-51). (Where 4C denotes capabilities of cognition, communication, composition and community.)
Unfortunate – tragic – is it not, that even those compositional capacities and capabilities we now possess seem, in their untutored ways, to have been contributing toward our extinction?
(c) 2012 R.F. Carter
This we can do once we remove some observer mind-binders: the focus on the order of things and prediction rather than on the Nature of Things and explanation; the ahistorical perspective instead of a historical perspective; the homogenizing of all observed conditions as circumstances – and seeing all change as circumstantial change; all sorts of dynamic mischief (imbalances and neglected interdependence and complementarity such as between structure and function); the reliance on concepts to do theory’s explanatory work … and so on.
CEM’s contingency and emergence, like equifinality and equipotentiality, are established phenomena (aka facts), in and of consequence. It is CEM’s materiality which completes the representation of consequentiality. Behavior and history (the observed, not the observations) are virtually synonymous with materiality and consequentiality. And the behavioral entity’s behavior, as we have seen, is as material – i.e., in and of consequence — as the entity (App. X).
The materiality of CEM provides text to the story.
CEM evinces progress and purpose as characterizations of behavior and history. It accommodates evolution and development in the story as readily as it does contingency and emergence, as readily as it does equifinality and equipotential. It shows the burgeoning presence of compositional change in our history – to the point now where the changes we have made constitute a worrisome set of circumstances.
CEM addresses and explains the whole of our materiality, the quantity and quality of consequentiality within life’s borders of birth and death. It brings evolution and development as stories together in a larger story. And this larger story also tells of their interdependency (App. X: see diagram).
CEM is Excelsior: the observer’s sword. (And the sword of any others … any of us minders who would fully realize ourselves and what we observe.)
This is the blade which Establishment Science should be wielding instead of its feckless use of evolution as concept and theory (beyond its factuality: C-20) … as a story to combat other stories about human history (some of which stories [e.g., creation stories] extend explanatory promise more successfully to those in dire need of behavioral help – with the behavioral problem especially [I: Pbeh]).
My inelegant formula of “I + O = E” underlines the point of overdone circumstantial accounting. Instinct, I, plus outstinct, O, yields extinct, E. Which is to say that the circumstances of body capacity and those of environmental “forces” – or any other conditions so construed – will tend toward humanity’s extinction … in the absence of compositional change capability. CEM suggests that “I + O + 4C = -E” is a prescription for warding off decline and fall (C-51). (Where 4C denotes capabilities of cognition, communication, composition and community.)
Unfortunate – tragic – is it not, that even those compositional capacities and capabilities we now possess seem, in their untutored ways, to have been contributing toward our extinction?
(c) 2012 R.F. Carter
S