From global weather patterns to global whether patterns?

Psychosocial Learnings from the Spiral Form of Hurricanes (Part #9)

[Parts: First | Prev | All] [Visuals] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

The various patterns presented above, in 2D or with their implications for 3D, are necessarily ideal abstractions variously susceptible to comprehension -- possibly through a degree of intuition. Suggestive comparisons with black holes may evoke another form of intuition to the extent they recall the experience of depression or being cogitively "in a spin". Reference to cyclones and hurricanes are suggestive of another kind of credibility to the extent these may have psychosocial analogues.

Weather mapping: It is therefore curious, as noted above, that there is widespread familiarity with global weather patterns as regularly presented by the media -- with real-time animations accessible on the web (Earth: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions). It is all the more curious in that "win", "weather" and "sea" are all a source of metaphor to describe familiar psychosocial conditions and dynamics. Yet there is seemingly little effort to provide a comprehensible map of the "whether patterns" relevant to global decision-making. A case for doing so has been made separately (Weather Metaphors as Whether Metaphors: transcending solar illusion via a Galilean-style cognitive revolution? 2015). Common "cyclones" could then be recognized as the variously emergent issues of governance: employment, housing, food, environment, security, justice, etc. -- however these might be fruitfully related to responsible global agencies (industry, academia, government, civil society, religions, etc).

With respect to cyclones on the surface of a planetary globe, these are recognized as rotating counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere; anticyclones rotate in the oppiste direction in each case. This is due to a coriolis force. Chirality is also recognized in the case of black holes. It is far from clear what analogues to such effects merit consideration in psychosocial systems. In psychophysical perception, misperception of body orientation due to the Coriolis effect (also referred to as the Coriolis illusion) can induce nausea and is a concern for pilots, for whom it can cause extreme disorientation. This suggests possible relevance to the challenge of global governance.

The helical representations -- whether symbolic or inspired by biomimicry -- could be understood otherwise by associating them to some degree with a global form, as an Earth analogue of global civilization understood in psychosocial terms. As is obvious from the presentation of global weather patterns, cyclones feature variously on the surface of the globe. Rather than emphasizing the relationships between them "superficially" as "skelions", triskelions, or otherwise) or "longitudinally" as with helices (triple, or otherwise), such idealization could be associated with approximations to a sphere -- as variously offered by the spherically symmetrical polyhedra. The degree of abstraction is then deliberately reduced for mnemonic purposes.

Polyhedral arrangement: Examples are provided by the following, based on various choices on how many issue/agency "cyclones" are to be distinguished. These derive from Arranging the flowers to engender an ecosystem? (2014), an exercise in representing the "cyclones" as "flowers", given the challenge of flow to comprehension (Flowering of Civilization -- Deflowering of Culture: flow as a necessarily complex experiential dynamic, 2014).

Following the argument above with regard to polyhedral holding patterns of different complexity, some indicators are offered by extending into three dimensions what might be considered the "2-flower" (biskelion) pattern of the Tao symbol, as illustrated by the following images and animations.

Schematic animation of a "4-cyclone" tetrahedron	Schematic of animation an "8-cyclone" octahedron
Animations developed using Stella: Polyhedron Navigator

Of interest in this mnemonic approach is the representation of the compatibility between the flowers in the "ecosystem" constituted by the choice of polyhedron. This could be indicated by how the directionality of the arrows (clockwise/anti-clockwise, inward/onward) meshes with the neighbouring flowers (or "clashes" with them). A more complex example is offered by the "12-flower" case of the dodecahedron as indicated below.

Alternative animations of a "12-cyclone" dodecahedron

[Parts: First | Prev | All] [Visuals] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]