Immortal Dialogues of Tao: but how do you speak??! Words are importaaant!

Reporter: I do not know, but certainly she has experienced a broken marriage ...
Michele: What do you say?? 
Reporter: Maybe I touched a topic that does ... 
Michele: No. .. no ... is the expression. It is not the issue, not the argument, not the subject ... is the expression.Wedding in pieces But as she speaks ...!?!?! 
Reporter: Prefers "relationship in crisis? but it's so kitsch ...
Michele: Kitsch! Where do you go to take these expressions, where picked up ...??!??!( touching his heart) 
Reporter: I'm not a beginner ... 
Michele: a beginner ... but as she speaks?
Reporter: ... even though my environment is very "cheap"... 
Michele: Your environment is very ...?
Reporter: It is very "cheap" 
Michele: Your environment is very ...?
Reporter: It is very "cheap" 
Michele: But how is this? [Slap sound] 
Reporter: Listen, you're crazy! 
Michele: And two. How to talk! How to talk! Words are important. How you speakkkkkk!

Ascolta

Trascrizione fonetica

Red Wood Pigeon

Every schoolboy knows about Tao

In the first chapter of Mind and Nature Bateson outlines a series of evidence (ironically titled "Every schoolboy knows..." (or should know...) which explicitly express a basis for an epistemology of living systems:

"By education most have been misled;

So they believe because they were so bred.

The priest continues what the nurse began,

And thus the child imposes on the man".

John Dryden, "The Hind and the Panther".

"Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new."

• SCIENCE NEVER PROVES ANYTHING.

• THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED.

• THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE.

• THE PROCESSES OF IMAGE FORMATION ARE UNCONSCIOUS.

• THE DIVISION OF THE PERCEIVED UNIVERSE INTO PORTS AND WHOLE IS CONVENIENT AND MAY BE NECESSARY, BUT NO NECESSITY DETERMINES HOW IT SHALL BE DONE.

• DIVERGENT SEQUENCES ARE UNPREDICTABLE.

• CONVERGENT SEQUENCES ARE PREDICTABLE.

• "NOTHING WILL COME OF NOTHING".

•  NUMBER IS DIFFERENT FROM QUANTITY.

• QUANTITY DOES NOT DETERMINE PATTERN.

• THERE ARE NO MONOTONE "VALUES" IN BIOLOGY.

• SOMETIMES SMALL IS BEATIFUL.

• LOGIC IS A POOR MODEL OF CAUSE AND EFFECT.

• CAUSALITY DOES NOT WORK BACKWARD.

• LANGUAGE COMMONLY STRESSES ONLY ONE SIDE OF ANY INTERACTION.

• "STABILITY" AND "CHANGE" DESCRIBE PARTS OF OUR DESCRIPTIONS.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Tao variations

the map of Tao is not the Tao

The treatment of logical levels in the Russell hierarchy leads to several epistemological implications, in particular to the diversity of the logical level of description and described:

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED

This principle, made famous by Alfred Korzybski, strikes at many levels. It reminds us in a general way that when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain. But in a more abstract way, Korzybski’s statement asserts that in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported, the Ding an sich. Above all, the relation between the report and that mysterious thing reported tends to have the nature of a classification, an assignment of the thing to a class. Naming is always classifying, and mapping is essentially the same as naming.
Korzybski was, on the whole, speaking as a philosopher, attempting to persuade people to discipline their manner of thinking. But he could not win. When we come to apply his dictum to the natural history of human mental process, the matter is not quite so simple. The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and the territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side, is probably unable to distinguish name from thing named. It is certainly not concerned with this sort of distinction. It therefore happens that certain nonrational types of behavior are necessarily present in human life. We do, in fact, have two hemispheres; and we cannot operate somewhat differently from the other, and we cannot get away from the tangles that that difference proposes.
For example, with the dominant hemisphere, we can regard such a thing as a flag as a sort of name of the country or organization that it represents. But the right hemisphere does not draw this distinction and regards the flag as sacramentally identical with what it represents. So "Old Glory" is the United States. If somebody steps on it, the response may be rage. And this rage will not be diminished by an explanation of map-territory relations. (After all, the man who tramples the flag is equally identify it with that for which it stands.) There is always and necessarily be a large number of situations in which the response is not guided by the logical distinction between the name and the thing named.

fanfare for a common Tao

Cremated, Ashes scattered scattered in a bower at the Tanglewood Music Center in Berkshire County, Massachusetts

Undecidable Tao

Proposition VI: To every ω-consistent recursive class c of formulae there correspond
recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg(v Gen r) belongs to Flg (c) (where v is the free variable of r).

or:

All coherent axiomatizations of arithmetic contains undecidable propositions.

In one of the most important works of logic of all time Kurt Gödel in 1931 proved two theorems limiting based on Principia Mathematica, but in fact valid (...and related systems) for every formal system powerful enough.

The first incompleteness theorem states that:

In every mathematical theory T expressive enough to contain arithmetic, there is a formula φ such that if T is consistent, then neither φ nor its negation Neg(φ) are provable in T.

with some simplification:

In any consistent formalization of mathematics that is sufficiently powerful to axiomatize the elementary theory of natural numbers - that is, powerful enough to define the structure of natural numbers with the operations of sum and product - it is possible to construct a proposition that is syntactically correct which can be neither proved nor disproved within the system itself.

The second incompleteness theorem of Gödel, already quoted, obtained, essentially, by formalizing the proof of the first incompleteness theorem within the theory itself, states:

For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

with some simplification:

No consistent system can be used to prove its own consistency.

the Decalogue of Tao

The foreword to Kieslowski & Piesiewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, London: Faber & Faber, 1991

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I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

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Stanley Kubrick, January 1991

K.K. was in France and was doing an audition to an actress who told him this story: years before he was ill, was destroyed on the verge of suicide ... one morning she was coming out of the house, in Paris, and she realizes that as he walks across the street is Marcel Marceau, the greatest mime ever, which is going about his business ... all of a sudden Marceau's glance, only a very brief look, just a moment ... she said at Kieslowski that look who saved her life, she no longer killed herself just for that look ... a look of Marceau clearly that's not really any one look, but this is not the point ...

the point is what Kieslowski says, with whom she is well along, that maybe the meaning of all  the life of Marceau, his birth, because he came to the world, was just to make that look, that one moment to save her life ..

Powazki Cemetery, Warsaw