Mutual embedding of disparate cognitive modalities

Requisite Meta-reflection on Engagement in Systemic Change? (Part #6)

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The issue can be presented otherwise by exploration of the pattern of organizational correspondences between science, religion and the military. Necessarily provocative, any such mapping would highlight problematic similarities between mindsets which consider themselves variously unquestionable. Has science effectively taken on the trappings of religion despite seeking to displace it? To what extent does each constitute a particular modality of collective learning -- or of learning aversion?

Potentially even greater insight could be derived from understanding the degree of embedding of each of the three cognitive-behavioral modalities in the other:

• religion ∞ military: the embedding of the military modality in religion is evident in such cases as the Christian Church Militant (Ecclesia Militans) and Islamic jihad. The former notably empowers crusades, as now more frequently undertaken in metaphorical terms. The reverse embedding is evident in anecdotal accounts of individuals framing their military engagement in religious terms, clearly reinforced by deliberate religious endorsement of military activity. Both are evident in the articulation of just war theory.
• military ∞ science: the recognized discipline of military science is the study of military processes, institutions, and behaviour, along with the study of warfare, and the theory and application of organized coercive force. There is a long tradition, of which Leonardo da Vinci was one exponent, of weapons science (and technology), namely the application of science to the design of military hardware.
• science ∞ religion: theology can be understood as religious science, or the science of religion. Of particular relevance in a period of religiously inspired conflict is the potential interweaving of mathematics and theology (Mathematical Theology: Future Science of Confidence in Belief, 2011). This could constitute a bridging modality of a subtlety and sophistication appropriate to the two seemingly incommensurable modalities and the manner of their organization. Mathematics may eventually prove to be the most sophisticated articulation of religious belief, as suggested by Sarah Voss (What Number Is God? Metaphors, Metaphysics, Metamathematics, and the Nature of Things, 1995)

Given the cognitive richness of the patterns of quantum mechanics, could this mutual embedding be explored in terms of entanglement and mirroring -- as could be suggested by the the recent work of Diederik Aerts: on the quantum characteristics of conceptual entities?

Especially intriguing is the manner in which each such modality arrogates authority to itself and to its declarations of truth -- as to what is "right" and what is "wrong". However each also eludes any institutional framing with which responsibility might be associated in legal or ethical terms. Each can be explored as an imaginative fantasy (Cultivating Global Strategic Fantasies of Choice, 2010). This itself clearly engenders difficulties in a complex society characterized by a multiplicity of variously incommensurable perspectives. Is the elusive nature of the "international community" -- as a focus for belief to which appeals are now desperately made -- increasingly resembling the traditional relationship to divinity, however defined?

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