Questing for an imaginal episystemic container: embodying self-reflexivity?

Encycling Problematic Wickedness for Potential Humanity (Part #9)

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Imagination: The focus in this argument is on imagination -- on eliciting it and sustaining it. Imagination can be claimed to be the essence of the process of being human, whereby one reinvents oneself -- recreates oneself. It is curiously and paradoxically conflated with the distraction of "recreation".

There is of course an extensive literature on the nature and value of imagination and its relation to creativity. One thread stresses its intimate relation to reality, as summarized by Robert Avens (Imagination is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield and Cassirer, 1980). It is central to philosophy, as stressed by Patrick Harpur (The Philosopher's Secret Fire: a history of the imagination, 2002). In the surprising associations it engenders, it is vital to the creative process (Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013). It is clearly valued by the young, as most notably exemplified by the explosion of multi-media products evoking imagination.

In a period of burgeoning crises, the question is how collective imagination is nourished and associated with response to the challenge -- enabling it to be creatively reframed as appropriate: "on the fly" in support of strategic nimbleness. How then to recognize and engage with collective fantasies, as separately discussed (Cultivating Global Strategic Fantasies of Choice: learnings from Islamic Al-Qaida and the Republican Tea Party movement, 2010)?

Strong cases have been variously made for educating the imagination (Carol Frenier and Lois Sekerak Hogan, Engaging the Imaginal Real: doorway to collective wisdom, Collective Wisdom Initiative). As "imaginative education", this is the focus of the Imaginative Education Research Group. It can be enabled through a variety of modes, as separately reviewed (Imaginal Education: game playing, science fiction, language, art and world-making, 2003)

As summarized by Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. This interweaves threads of the argument above in that it is knowledge which every possible attempt is made to possess exclusively -- as intellectual property.

The question is then the meaning to be associated with what "encircles the world" and the nature of that process. Is the world to be understood as spherically enveloped and enfolded -- suggesting a degree of enclosure? Is there a dynamic to that enfolding -- as implied by noosphere and its systemic correspondence to biosphere and atmosphere? How does imagination "flow" -- as with intuitive reference to "creative juices" flowing? Does meteorology offer relevant insights? Allusion to noosphere is appropriate given the recognition increasingly accorded to noopolitik, namely the network-based geopolitics of knowledge.

Container: What is to be understood as the "container" enabling imaginal processes? Focusing on container is valuable, as has been stressed in terms of cognitive psychology by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980). It is the container metaphor which governs so many implications regarding what is "in" or "out" -- extending most problematically to "us" and "them", as a consequence of "circling the wagons", as noted above (Us and Them: Relating to Challenging Others -- patterns in the shadow dance between "good" and "evil", 2009).

What might be fruitfully implied by an imaginal container? Einstein's articulation might be challenged in that it could be interpreted to imply that imagination "rings the world" in a purely geometrical sense. The argument developed here is that it is a dynamic "encircling" -- hence the focus on "encycling". Given the common association of "light" with "imagination" -- extending to "enlightenment" -- it is then useful to ask what might be circulating in any encycling process. Various understandings of "circulation of light" then merit attention, as separately discussed (Circulation of the Light: essential metaphor of global sustainability? 2010).

How might the nature of a "noocontainer" be imagined -- a container for the noosphere and for any noopolitik?

Imaginative containers for imagination? There is then case for an imaginative review of possible containers for imagination -- given the degree of paradox they may imply, and the sense in which it is imagining such containers collectively that the present times require. The paradox is highlighted by such as the following:

• The understanding of Douglas Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop, 2007) following his earlier argument for self-reflexivity (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, 1979). The loop can be considered as referring to the twisted circular Mobius strip as a form of container, as discussed separately (Sustaining a Community of Strange Loops: comprehension and engagement through aesthetic ring transformation, 2010).

• The cognitive implications of the Klein bottle as a four-dimensional container, in which inside and outside are not distinguishable, as extensively discussed by Steven M. Rosen (Topologies of the Flesh: a multidimensional exploration of the lifeworld, 2006; Dimensions of Apeiron: a topological phenomenology of space, time, and individuation, 2004).

Other relevant insights were discussed separately in terms of ways of understanding Navigating the dynamics of information fluidity (2014). These included:

• Movement of water and in it as described separately (Enabling Governance through the Dynamics of Nature: exemplified by cognitive implication of vortices and helicoidal flow, 2010).
  
  
• Cognitive modulation understood through electrical metaphors discussed separately with graphics and intimations (Modulating cognitive transformations: electrical metaphors and semiconduction, 2012)
  
  
• Engaging with manifold abstraction: As exemplars of imaginative creativity, mathematicians and physicists now articulate the most appropriate understanding of the complexity of reality through the abstraction of a manifold. This is a topological space of potentially high dimensionality that nevertheless resembles Euclidean space near each point. Whilst necessarily eluding normal comprehension, other than through the formalism of mathematics, the nature of the spaces so indicated is consistent with the quality of the intuited experience of the existential nothingness to which so many feel exposed in one form or another. One understanding of manifold by physics is as a multidimensional brane -- of which of which membrane is a two-dimensional instance. the question is how to engage cognitively and experientially with that insight, as may be speculatively explored (Global Brane Comprehension Enabling a Higher Dimensional Big Tent? Strategic implication in encompassing nothing and coming to naught, 2011).

Untouchable: Especially intriguing is the manner in which creative imagination can be associated metaphorically with the current design issues of a toroidal container to control the flow of plasma such as to enable nuclear fusion. As a challenge this might be compared with that of fruitfully controlling attention, as separately discussed (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006). Even more intriguing is that a primary requirement for a fusion reactor is that the plasma not touch the walls of the container -- which would be destroyed by that contact. This highlights recognition of the conditions appropriate to imagination and the manner in which the boundaries of the container can inhibit creativity -- as is only too evident in architecture of most institutions, especially those of governance.

The topological challenge is then reminiscent of the legendary quest by alchemists for a container capable of holding the "universal solvent" -- that which can dissolve "everything". Expressed otherwise, this would be the form which could "contain" every kind of "point making" susceptible to dissolve it -- an appropriate framing of the challenge of global governance. The association of topology and alchemy is central to a current exploration of Rosen (Dreams, Death, Rebirth: a multimedia topological odyssey into alchemy's hidden dimensions, 2013). Understood in this light, should intellectual property constraints be recognized as the wall of the container with which contact should necessarily be avoided -- if the imaginative process is to be enabled and sustained?

A related understanding of not touching is offered by orbital motion This has proven to be intimately related to imaginative exploration beyond the boundaries of the Earth and the solar system. (Way Round Cognitive Ground Zero and Pointlessness: embodying the geometry of fundamental cognitive dynamics, 2012; ¿ Embodying a Way Round Pointlessness ? 2012).

As noted by Susantha Goonatilake (Toward a Global Science: mining civilizational knowledge, 1999), the metaphors developed by Asian cultures could prove vital to understanding the design and "operation" of an imaginal container. As a specific example, the increasingly appreciative understanding of qi (ch'i) offers indications as to how attention might be integrated with information flows. Classically qi is understood as an active principle forming part of any living thing -- typically explained as "life force", or "energy flow". In the light of the above argument, it can be readily extended to the cognitive modality through which information is attentively managed. This is consistent with traditional recognition of its underlying role in Chinese medicine and martial arts.

Of related relevance to encycling within that culture is the significance of the complex patterns of cycles within the I Ching -- through which conditions are variously transformed into one another, as separately discussed and mapped (Transformation Metaphors: derived experimentally from the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) for sustainable dialogue, vision, conferencing, policy, network, community and lifestyle, 1997).

Epic poetic forms: A seemingly unrelated approach to the design of an imaginative container is the traditional form of the epic poem -- which elicits imaginative reflection through being retold. Of particular interest is the complex pattern of relationships between its parts and the various possibilities of their evoking understanding at different levels. Given the constraints on processing information, poetic metaphor then offers a meta-pattern of connectivity. This is consistent with the observation of Gregory Bateson in explaining why "we are our own metaphor" to a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we're not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity. (Mary Catherine Bateson. Our Own Metaphor, 1972, pp. 288-289)

In the absence of modern epic forms, other than blockbuster myth-making (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc), there is a case for taking further the epic poetry argument by "marrying" it appropriately, and self-reflexively, with the fantasies of astrophysics, as discussed separately (Being a Poem in the Making: engendering a multiverse through musing, 2012). The sense of "encycling", namely rendering into cyclic form, can then be understood in relation to the "ring cycle" of Richard Wagner (The Ring of the Nibelung). It is in this sense that global diversity merits encycling, as suggested separately (Enactivating Multiversal Community: hearing a pattern of voices in the global wilderness, 2012). Framed in this way, there is of course the question of how the meta-pattern of imaginative associations transcends the inhibiting effect of those bent on restricting copyright. Is a meta-pattern vulnerable to copyright restrictions as intellectual property?

Epic song forms: Reference to the operatic Ring Cycle highlights the extent to which poetry extends into song and music. It can be readily argued that a process of encycling has long been evident in rendering of insight into music and song. The process has become ever more evident with new multi-media technology and the access to such modalities it offers at any moment.

Seemingly missing is the engagement with the problematique characteristic of an Encyclopedia -- or of a resolutique. It is however the case that many problems and their remedies are articulated in song and music within a value-imbued pattern of associations.

There is a fundamental disconnect between such articulations in harmonic form and the policy world (in quest of harmony) to which an Encyclopedia is supposedly of significance. This is most evident through the choirs, orchestras and anthems of major institutions. The reverse is also the case, namely that that disconnect renders an Encyclopedia meaningless to many who mandate strategic initiatives. How might encycling enable such engagement, as separately explored (A Singable Earth Charter, EU Constitution or Global Ethic? 2006)?

Episystemic insight: Citing the "global wilderness" (as above) helps to stress the challenge of identifying the voices typically unheard -- and of encycling them into a meta-pattern. That argument can be developed by reference to "episystemic" and recognition that those ignorant of the existence of those voices makes of them terrestrial "extras" (in dramatic terminology), if not "extraterrestrials". The issue is the dimensions of collective intelligence the voices represent, as separately explored (Sensing Epiterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): embedding of "extraterrestrials" in episystemic dynamics? 2013).

The latter document devotes a section to clarifying the relative rare use of "episystemic" (Potential insights from an "episystemic" perspective, 2013). These include the argument of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in viewing attention as the fundamental basis for culture. He noted an "epi-systemic shift" that privileges the activity of the knower who is "given more constitutive roles" (John C. O'Neal, Changing Minds: the shifting perception of culture in eighteenth-century France, 2002, p. 20).

As concluded in that summary, although "episystemic" is presented as distinct from more frequent use of "epistemic", the NSA/PRISM initiative reinforces the valuable argument for vigilance made by Dan Sperber and colleagues (Epistemic Vigilance, Mind and Language, 2010). With respect to "epistemic", Mircea Oancea (Resolution and Consistency in Dialogical Reasoning, 1999) describes the development of the approach of Peter Gardenfors (Knowledge in Flux: modelling the dynamics of epistemic states, 1988) in the domain of argumentation. Given the problematic "success" of the Human Genome Project, it could be asked whether the NSA/PRISM initiative is effectively framed as a Human Memome Project -- with a failure to anticipate any consideration of epimemetics, and the comprehension of memetic analogues to "protein folding".

It is in these senses that an "episystemic" understanding is an appropriate feature of epistemic "encycling" as argued here. The cognitive engagement with encycling can then be more fruitfully related to arguments for the embodied mind, especially with respect to movement (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, 1999; Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: aesthetics of human understanding, 2008; Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 2011).

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