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Cognitive glass ceilings impeding integrative comprehension
Patterning Intuition with the Fifth Discipline (Part #8)
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The Patterning Instinct offers a cognitive history of 4 patterns of meaning -- widely appreciated as noted. However it effectively shifts phase in raising the question as to the future, framed as a 5th pattern of meaning. The argument above is that comprehension of 5th-order thinking is necessarily a particular challenge with which humanity is confronted in the present. Arguably there are particular features to this challenge which could be usefully compared to confrontation with a puzzle or a riddle (Global Governance as a Riddle: but is a solution the answer to the question? 2018).
Understood metaphorically as the Gordian Knot faced by Alexander the Great, this continues to be cited with respect to the current issues of governance (Mapping grossness: Gordian knot of governance as a Discordian mandala? 2016). Commenting on a session of the World Economic Forum, John Jullens argues that: It's as if the global economy is being strangled by a gigantic Gordian knot from which it cannot untangle itself (The Gordian Knot of Global Economic Growth, Strategy-Business, 15 October 2013). "Cutting it" may not however be consistent with the ingenuity otherwise associated with solving riddles.
4-fold cognitive closure: There is a sense in which the ease of describing the four previous historical phases in The Patterning Instinct can be seen in terms of a form of (premature) cognitive closure in a mode of explanation which is unchallenged by the dilemmas of the present with regard to the future. This is only too obvious in the governance of major countries at this time, to say nothing about global governance. There is perhaps a case for recognizing a form of "cognitive glass ceiling" with which conventional thinking is faced.
Any intuitive recognition of the coherence of a 4-fold patterning merits consideration in the light of the work of Marie-Louise von Franz (Number and Time: reflections leading toward a unification of depth psychology and physics, 1974) a focus she inherited from Carl Jung. A chapter in that study is entitled: The Number Four as the One-Continuum's Model of Wholeness in all Relatively Closed Structures of Human Consciousness and in the Body. Therein it is noted that:
The number four thus signifies (as Menninger points out) a peculiar border number [Zahlwort und Ziffer: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Zahl: Zählreihe und Zahlsprache. Zahlschrift und Rechnen, 1957]. This boundary aspect of the number four is reflected in many figures of speech. Many languages, for instance, possess a trial and quaternal case beyond the dual, but never more. Also, in all languages the numerals up to four are etymologically formed as adjectives, but never higher ones... Only beginning with number five do we find, as Menninger states, genuine "empty" numbers, detached from their objects.... Since Jung devoted practically the whole of his life's work to demonstrating the vast psychological significance of the number four, I must refer the reader to his writings in this connection.... The fact that mankind's repeated attempts to establish an orientation toward wholeness possess a quaternary structure appears to correspond to an archetypal psychic structural disposition in man (pp. 114-115).
Further examples cited include:
- Minkowski's and Einstein's four-dimensional model of the universe in theoretical physics.
- the four distinct forces in nature: the nuclear, the electrical, the weak (beta decay) interaction, :and the gravitational.
- the four dimensionless constants of nature assumed by Arthur Eddington
- in quantum mechanics and relativity, the electron must be described by a wave vector with four components -- explaining electron spin and the position.
- control by four is the sharp boundary for complete transmission of information.
- the triple codes of DNA and RNA are built up on a quaternio of bases which can be combined in 43 = 64 variations.
Further insights are offered from a philosophical perspective by Antonio de Nicolas (Four-dimensional Man: meditations through the Rg Veda, 1978). In recognizing the limitations of a single language as offering a pattern of meaning, this focuses on the use of four complementary languages in the Rg Veda, as summarized separately (Epistemological challenges: Language, Global Strategies Project).
Appropriate to the central role of time in Part 5 of The Patterning Instinct -- in referring to the future -- is the manner in which this transcends the 4-fold quaternary pattern. With respect to the complex relation to the fivefold, von Franz notes:
In China the number five possesses the same significance as four does with us, because it is taken to represent the centered four... This concept is also found in the West, in the alchemical idea of the quinta essentia. The quinta essentia is not additively joined onto the first four as a fifth clement. but represents the most refined, spiritually imaginable unity of the four elements. It is either initially present in and extracted from them or produced by the circulation of these elements among one another. (pp. 120-121)
There is however a challenge to comprehension of the 4-fold, especially evident in the continuing controversy associated with the various versions of the Swastika, as discussed separately (Swastika as Dynamic Pattern Underlying Psychosocial Power Processes: implicate order of Knight's move game-playing sustaining creativity, exploitation and impunity, 2012).
Cognitive "dilemmas": Potentially relevant, it is appropriate to note the understanding of currently recognized "dilemmas", and how these might relate to the pattern phases in the book.
| no dilemma | Part 1: Everything is Connected | consensus; no conflict? |
| dilemma | Part 2: Hierarchy of the Gods | conflict between two requirements |
| trilemma | Part 3: The Patterns Diverge | conflict between three requirements |
| tetralemma / quadrilemma | Part 4: Conquest of Nature | conflict between four requirements |
| pentalemma | Part 5: The Web of Meaning? | conflict between five requirements |
Whilst there is great familiarity with dilemmas and contradictions, there is far less recognition of a trilemma and a tetralemma. The latter is more commonly recognized in Eastern traditions and is notably featured in the work of Kinhide Mushakoji (Global Issues and Interparadigmatic Dialogue: essays on multipolar politics, 1988). The following examples, and the relations between the lemmas, are discussed separately (Intuited complementarity: environmental cycles and learning cycles? 2018).
Pentalemma: Appropriate to this argument is the rarity of a pentalemma, understood as implying a conflict between 5 separately undesirable alternatives. Cited indications of the implied challenge are offered by:
- Roger Hilsman to Rusk, The Five-Fold Dilemma: The Implications of the Sino-Indian Conflict, November 17, 1962,
- Solutions Online Think Tank-American Prisons: a Five Fold Dilemma (Drugs, Gangs, Juvenile Offenders, Me), 21 May 2010
- Russia and the World Energy Council (2018): "Energy Minister Alexander Novak gave a keynote speech to delegates entitled 'Searching for a Balanced Solution to the Energy Trilemma'. He emphasised that when we look at issues of sustainable development in the context of long-term energy policy, we ought to expand the focus of our attention somewhat by adding two more prongs -- economic growth and energy efficiency -- to the trilemma, and that it would therefore be more accurate today to refer to a 'pentalemma'".
More substantive indications include:
- David Löwenstein (A Uniform Account of Regress Problems, Acta Analytica, 32, 2017, 3):
This paper presents a uniform general account of regress problems in the form of a pentalemma - i.e. a set of five mutually inconsistent claims. Specific regress problems can be analyzed as instances of such a general schema, and this Regress Pentalemma Schema can be employed to generate deductively valid arguments from the truth of a subset of four claims to the falsity of the fifth. Thus, a uniform account of the nature of regress problems allows for an improved understanding of specific regress objections or arguments, and, correspondingly, of the general logical geography of the debate about infinite regresses.
- Johan Galtung (Toward a Conflictology: the quest for transdisciplinarity, In: Dennis J.D. Sandole, et al, Handbook of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, 2008):
Expanding the conflict horizon from the dilemma to the trilemma yields compromise, a sometimes adequate way out; expanding to the Buddhist tetralemma yields the both-and and the neither-nor as ways out of a dilemma and can take the more advanced forms of creating new realities as negative or positive transcendencies. Combining the trilemma and the tetralemma we get the pentalemma, the five-point outcome horizon the present author uses often in theory and in the practice of mediation.... What happens if no such dilemma solution acceptable to the house -- divided against itself but still one house -- is found? The answer is that it continues as two houses, heading either for the pentalemma outcomes, or for apathy, a gradual outer or inner paralysis that takes the form of inaction or depression (unipolar), with occasional outbursts of manic behavior (bipolar), often violent.
These are discussed separately (Decision-making capacity versus Distinction-making capacity: embodying whether as weather, 2015) with respect to enhancing strategic discourse systematically using climate metaphors (Five-fold ordering of strategic engagement with time; Five-fold cognitive dynamics of relevance to governance?). That discussion mentions the even rarer use of hexalemma and heptalemma, although an octalemma is seemingly recognized by Edward Andersonto (Problem of Time in Quantum Gravity, 2012). The Euthyphro "dilemma" is restated as an octalemma by Richard Goode (Nothing Is Permitted: an argument for moral eliminativism). Consideration could therefore be given to Strategic Octalemmas (2009).
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