Places of Tao

Machapuchare or Machhaphuchhare (माछापुछ्रे) "Fish Tail" in English, is a mountain in the Annapurna Himal of north central Nepal, 6993 m. high. It is revered by the local population as particularly sacred to the god Shiva, and hence is off limits to climbing.

Machapuchare has never been climbed to its summit. The only attempt was in 1957 by a British team led by Jimmy Roberts. Climbers Wilfrid Noyce and A. D. M. Cox climbed to within 50 m of the summit via the north ridge, but did not complete the ascent; they had promised not to set foot on the actual summit. Since then, the mountain has been declared sacred, and it is now forbidden to climbers.

duality and complementarity of Tao

A painting by Jim Thompson  

In the process description is useful, having made a distinction of description, to move from a dualistic logic of opposites or the type or/or (good/bad, beautiful/ugly, black/white ...) to a logic of the type and/and, taking into account the recursion between form and process.

In 1976 Francisco Varela proposed to describe the recursive complementarity between process and form as:

the thing / the process that leads to the thing

as examples:

form/process
territory/map
describing/described
observer/observed
subject/object
environment/system
family/individual
context/ordinary action
whole/part
circle/line
recursive/lineal
mind/body
cybernetics II/cybernetics I
autonomy/control
organization/structure
aesthetic/pragmatic
art/technical
being/becoming
learning II/learning I

F. Varela, "Not one, not two", CoEvolution Quaterly, 1976

the Teh of Tao

- 9 -

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.  

(Antennae galaxies - Hubble image- ESA)

 

Tao meta-learning

The application of theory of logical types by Russell and Whitehead was developed by Bateson in the description of learning, with following recursion orders leading to meta-logical levels of learning:

Zero learning is characterized by specificity of response, which—right or wrong—is not subject to correction.

Learning I is change in specificity of response by correc­tion of errors of choice within a set of alternatives.

Learning II is change in the process of Learning I, e.g., a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.

Learning III is change in the process of Learning II, e.g., a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made. (We shall see later that to demand this level of performance of some men and some mammals is sometimes pathogenic.)

Learning IV would be change in Learning III, but prob­ably does not occur in any adult living organism on this earth. Evolutionary process has, however, created organisms whose ontogeny brings them to Level III. The combination of phylogenesis with ontogenesis, in fact, achieves Level IV.

(The logical categories of  learning and communication)

Integration (Temperance) - XIV Major

The image of integration is the unio mystica, the fusion of opposites. This is a time of communication between the previously experienced dualities of life. Rather than night opposing day, dark suppressing light, they work together to create a unified whole, turning endlessly one into the other, each containing in its deepest core the seed of the opposite.

The eagle and the swan are both beings of flight and majesty. The eagle is the embodiment of power and aloneness. The swan is the embodiment of space and purity, gently floating and diving, upon and within the element of the emotions, entirely content and complete within her perfection and beauty.

We are the union of eagle and swan: male and female, fire and water, life and death. The card of integration is the symbol of self-creation, new life, and mystical union; otherwise known as alchemy.

---

The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else. The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind. A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two persons and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens.

If the bridge is broken - and the bridge is very fragile - then you become two, you behave like two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are very angry, absolutely different. You don't remember your morning...how can you remember? Another mind was functioning - and the person becomes two persons. If this bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then integration, then crystallization, arises.

What George Gurdjieff used to call the crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right, the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle.

forever in our Tao

There must be some kind of way out of here
Said the joker to the theif
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Business men they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
No one will level on the line
Nobody of it is worth

No reason to get exited
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talking falsely now
The hour's getting late
Hey

All along the watchtower
The princess kept the view
While all the women came
And went bare feet servants too
Outside in the cold distance
A wild cat did growl
Two riders were aproaching
And the wind began to howl

Hey
Oh
All along the watchtower
Hear you sing around the watch
Gotta beware gotta beware I will
Yeah, Oh baby
All along the watchtower

(Bob Dylan)

Tao level 3 and higher: Epistemology of Tao

In the observation and description of complex systems, which make up all living systems and the interactions between them and the environment, above the level 3 - biology - the beliefs and the "world view" of the subject observer/descriptor start to become important and must be explicit in the observation/description that it does. In particular, the movement cybernetics-second-cybernetics-post-cybernetics is essential to specify their own Epistemology, giving rise to an epistemology of complexity. Traditionally, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with conditions under which you can have scientific knowledge and methods to achieve this knowledge, as suggested by the term, which is a contraction of the Greek words episteme ("knowledge, science") and logos (speech). In general, as such, is included as a part, if not completely identified with thephilosophy of science, which concern with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. In the Anglo-Saxon culture the concept of epistemology is used as a synonym for gnoseology or theory of knowledge, the discipline that deals with the study of knowledge in general.

In the definition of Bateson:

 

EPISTEMOLOGY: A combination of a branch of science with a branch of philosophy. As a science, epistemology studies how particular organisms or aggregates of organisms "know, think and decide." As philosophy, epistemology studies the limits required, and other characteristics of the processes of knowledge, thought and decision.

and in his words:

"Warren McCulloch used to say that those who claim to have direct knowledge, that is not to have an epistemology, is actually a bad epistemology [...]"

"So I call the epistemology as the science that studies the process of knowing, the interaction between the capacity to respond to differences on the one hand and, secondly, the material world in which these differences have their origin in some way.

...

There is a more traditional definition, under which the epistemology is simply the philosophical study of how to learn. I prefer my definition - as in fact you know - because the creature fits into the larger whole, ... and because by my definition Epistemology is definitely identified with the study of phenomena that occur on an interface and a branch of natural history. [...]"
  

The need to make explicit its epistemology - that is our own assumptions about the world - depends on the level of observation. If a microbiologist observes the development of a nutrient broth does not seem necessary, but already at the level of an entomologist observing an ant colony or at the level of etology, the study of animal behavior in its natural environment, it becomes necessary, not to mention interactions with fellow human beings, as in the setting of psychotherapy. 

"The vision of the world - that is latent and epistemology in the "unconscious" - generated by all of these ideas is exceeded by three different perspectives: a) From the pragmatic point of view it is clear that these assumptions and their corollaries lead to 'greed, a monstrous excess growth, war, tyranny and pollution. In this sense, "our" assumptions prove false every day, and what the students make some account.
b) In terms of "intellectual", these premises are obsolete as systems theory, cybernetics, holistic medicine, ecology and psychology of "Gestalt" manifestly best offer ways of understanding the world of biology and behavior.
c) As a basis for the "religion" became the premise that I mentioned
"Clearly unacceptable and therefore obsolete" about a century ago. After the advent of Darwinian evolution, it was expressed quite clearly by thinkers such as Samuel Butler and Prince Kropotkin. But already in the eighteenth century William Blake understood that the philosophy of Locke and Newton could only generate "dark satanic mills."

The Platonic thesis of the book is precisely that epistemology is an indivisible and integrated metascienza the object of which is the world's evolution of thought, adaptation, embryology and genetics: the science of the mind in the broadest sense of term.
Compare these phenomena (compare thought with the evolution and epigenesis with both) is the "search mode" epistemology of science that

It began to seem outdated and that the ideas are still rooted on epistemology, especially on the human, were a reflection of a physical fight and outdated in a curious way with the little we know, or so it seems, on living things. It was as if we thought that the members of the species 'man' materials were totally unique and totally against the backdrop of a living universe generic (instead, only) and spiritual (rather than, material).

In what is presented in this book, the place of the hierarchical structure of the Great Chain of Being will be taken from the hierarchical structure of thought, which Bertrand Russell called "hierarchy of logical types, and seek to propose a sacred unity of the biosphere it contains fewer errors epistemological versions of it that have been submitted by the various historical religions. The important thing is that, right or wrong, this epistemology is "explicit". This will criticize it just as explicit."

"First, I would like you to join me in a little experiment. Let me ask you for a show of hands. How many of you will agree that you see me? I see a number of hands—so I guess insanity loves company. Of course, you don’t “really” see me. What you “see” is a bunch of pieces of information about me, which you synthesize into a picture image of me. You make that image. It’s that simple.
The proposition “I see you” or “You see me” is a proposition which contains within it what I am calling “epistemology.” It contains within it assumptions about how we get in-formation, what sort of stuff information is, and so forth. When you say you “see” me and put up your hand in an innocent way, you are, in fact, agreeing to certain propositions about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it.
I shall argue that many of these propositions happen to be false, even though we all share them. In the case of such epistemological propositions, error is not easily detected and is not very quickly punished. You and I are able to get along in the world and fly to Hawaii and read papers on psychiatry and find our places around these tables and in general function reasonably like human beings in spite of very deep error. The erroneous premises, in fact, work.
On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. At this point you discover to your horror that it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error, that it’s sticky. It is as if you had touched honey. As with honey, the falsification gets around; and each thing you try to wipe it off on gets sticky, and your hands still remain sticky."

(Pathologies of Epistemology) 

Bateson states that the fundamental unit of evolution is not the organism or species, but the organism-plus-environment (ie, mind). He calls this theory cybernetic epistemology:

 

«the individual mind is immanent but not only in body, it is also immanent in channels and messages outside the body, and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by 'God', but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology».

 (Form, substance and difference)

The term epistemology was used by Bateson in many ways: 

1 epistemology as a theory of knowledge.

2. epistemology as a paradigm.

3. epistemology as a biological cosmology. 

4. epistemology as a science.
5. epistemology as a structure of the character.

from: P. F. Dell Understanding Bateson and Maturana: Toward a biological foun- dation for the social sciences

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Vol. 11, n. 1,1985.

«In the natural history of the human being, ontology and epistemology can not be separated. His convictions (usually unconscious) about the world around him (ie, its ontological premises) will determine the way he see it (ie, his epistemological premises) and acting, and this way of perceiving and acting (ie its epistemological premises) will determine his beliefs about the nature of the world (ie, its ontological assumptions). The living man is thus trapped in a web of ontological and epistemological premises. It is awkward to always refer to epistemology and ontology together, but is wrong to think that they can be separated in the natural history ... Therefore in this paper I will employ the single term "epistemology" to describe both aspects of the plot of assumptions that govern the adaptation (and maladaptation) to the human and physical environment ».