Representation, memorability and metaphor

Engaging with Insight of a Higher Order (Part #6)

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Memorability: There is a major challenge to insight of a higher order in that any "re-cognition" of it may only be temporary -- a momentary flash. This has been eloquently described in the fictional account by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing of the encounter of a "development agent", from the benevolent galactic empire Canopus, with a person on a planet facing disaster:

To say that he understood what went on was true. To say that he did not understand -- was true. I would sit and explain, over and over again. He listened, his eyes fixed on my face, his lips moving as he repeated to himself what I was saying. He would nod: yes, he had grasped it.

But a few minutes later, when I might be saying something of the same kind, he was uncomfortable, threatened. Why was I saying that? and that? his troubled eyes asked of my face: What did I mean? His questions at such moments were as if I had never taught him anything at all. He was like one drugged or in shock.

Yet it seemed that he did absorb information for sometimes he would talk as if from a basis of shared knowledge: it was as if a part of him knew and remembered all I told him, but other parts had not heard a word. I have never before or since had so strongly that experience of being with a person and knowing that all the time there was certainly a part of that person in contact with you, something real and alive and listening -- and yet most of the time what one said did not reach that silent and invisible being, and what he said was not often said by the real part of him. It was as if someone stood there bound and gagged while an inferior impersonator spoke for him. (Re: Colonised Planet 5 - Shikasta, 1979, pp. 56-57).

This was quoted in the context of a discussion of the erosion of collective memory, critical of an overly optimistic Club of Rome report (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory -- a critique of the Club of Rome Report: No Limits to Learning, 1980).

With a new invasion of the Middle East underway at the time of writing, the point is succinctly made by the oft-quoted adage of George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. How is the survival of global civilization to be ensured if recent history is so readily forgotten?

Representation: It is in this light that the above-mentioned hypothetical scenarios with respect to Minding the Future (1980) merit revisiting. How may insight of a higher order have already been embedded in cultures highly vulnerable to forgetting? What are the viable holding patterns -- wisdom containers understood as vehicles for traversing time?

Curiously the issue is explored more attentively with respect to seed banks able to conserve plant genetic diversity for the future (beyond any nuclear holocaust), as with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It is only speculatively, in relation to extended space travel to other solar systems, that the issue is considered with respect to preserving memetic diversity and cultural heritage over generations.

The issue can be discussed in terms of mnemonic triggers (In Quest of Mnemonic Catalysts -- for comprehension of complex psychosocial dynamics, 2007). Examples worth considering, implying requisite connectivity and coherence, could be clustered as follows:

• symbols, including "stones" (Rosetta Stone, Philosopher's Stone) and devices (Holy Grail) variously framed as of profoundly elusive significance, if only as metaphors
• circlets of beads (Designing Cultural Rosaries and Meaning Malas to Sustain Associations within the Pattern that Connects, 2000)
• pantheons (and the associated myths relating their deities)
• tales / fables / myths, notably those understood as teaching stories, or indicative of quests and exemplars, as in the case of Mullah Nasruddin (cf Idries Shah, Special Illumination: the Sufi use of humor, 1977).
• board games (Sustainability through Magically Dancing Patterns: 8x8, 9x9, 19x19 -- I Ching, Tao Te Ching / T'ai Hsüan Ching, Wéiqí (Go), 2008)
• rituals
• memorials (Enstoning in memorials and monuments, 2012)
• tools of divination (I Ching, Tarot, etc) ("Divination" and "wisdom", 2010)

Strange attractor: The possibilities above can be understood as implying a strange attractor with which any process of engagement is inherently mysterious (Now as the Ultimate Cognitive Strange Attractor A continuing invitation "down the rabbit hole"? 2014). As with the myth of the Holy Grail, there is a sense of panacea. This in turn might be combined with the alchemical myth of the alkahest as the universal solvent capable of dissolving any container designed to encompass and restrict it -- and, by extension, any "problem".

This myth can be fruitfully explored in terms of the current design challenges of a fusion reactor within which plasma has to be constrained in such a way that it makes no contact with the walls of its toroidal container (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006)

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