Transformative interplay between flat, global and toroidal?

Imagining Toroidal Life as a Sustainable Alternative (Part #12)

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The above argument can be considered relatively simplistic in academic terms. It focuses on how the space on which one imagines oneself to be living can be understood. The subtle complexity of the shift between "flat" and "global" has been emphasized -- and how one believes in explanations regarding "global" in the light of personal experience. The suggestion is that people are free to believe otherwise in the light of their experiences and engagement with much valued symbols. Extensive use is thereore made of images and animations, especially given increasing familiarity with unusual geometry and topology. Hence the focus on the torus. The concern is how to render complex subtlety comprehensible through imagery which is more succinct than text -- "an image being worth more than a thousand words".

The question raised is whether people are as free to engage with experiences to be undestood as "toroidization" (or "toroidification") as has been the case with their dubious engagement with "globalization". Rather than imagining themselves to live "on a globe", can people imagine themselves as living "on a torus"? More intriguing is the manner in which global experience is conflated with coherence and higher orders of integrative experience -- suggesting a sense in which individuals can both think globally and be global in some way, if only as a "global citizen". How might it be possible to think "toroidally" -- even to "be toroidal", and to "toroidify" oneself?. The title of this article suggests the possibility of imagining "toroidal life" -- however that might be understood. The irony is that many forms of life are effectively toroidal in physical terms -- if the digestive tract is understood as a segment of environmental cycles on which the body is dependent.

One valuable indication of this possibility is offered by the proposal by Sabrina Presti for a Torus Governance Network (P2PWiki, 2015).

Although simplisitic, the argument above offers fairly comprehensible images and animations suggestive of ways of being otherwise. It endeavours to establish relationships with new metaphors that have been promoted for particular purposes, notably the doughnut and the pizza -- reframing them from a toroidal perspective and indicating insights from their complementarity. Since the emphasis is on individual choice, there is clearly every reason to continue to think in "Flat Earth" terms when convenient, or to switch to "global" when it suits. The question is whether there are advantages to switching to "toroidal" under some circumstance -- and how the transformation of topology can itself be understood. That challenge was addressed in a previous discussion using vehicle transmission systems as a metaphor -- given the widespread familiarity with "changing gear" (Shifting between strategic patterns: transmission systems and gearing, 2019).

The argument could be seen as consistent with insights from molecular biology which could inform its further development, notably the study of topological ring currents. Physics offers arguments which bear an intriguing relationship to the "directionalities" of the 8-fold pattern of the BaGua (J. Hlinka, Eight types of physical "arrows" distinguished by Newtonian space-time symmetry, Physical Review Letters, October 2014). For the latter:

The octet of symmetrically distinct "directional quantities" can be exemplified by two kinds of polar vectors (electric dipole moment P and magnetic toroidal moment T), two kinds of axial vectors (magnetization M and electric toroidal moment G), two kinds of chiral "bidirectors" C and F (associated with the so-called true and false chirality, respectively) and still another two bidirectors N and L, achiral ones...

This argument is somewhat consistent with the much more sophisticated presentations with respect to the torus, as variously developed by Steven Rosen (Topologies of the Flesh, 2006; Dimensions of Apeiron: a topological phenomenology of space, time and individuation, 2004). His argument focuses on the relevance to the shift in perspective offered by the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip in the light of their topological relationship to the torus -- carefully showing the consistency with preoccupations of physics. He notably argues for the primacy of perception:

The upshot is that physics and philosophy alike must learn to start their work not from the lofty abstractions of Cartesianism, but from the lived experiences of subjects who share a common world. Perception has primacy in such a lifeworld. But isn't ordinary perception repelled by the ambiguities of modern physics? Merleau-Ponty notes that despite this widespread belief, in actuality ordinary perception is itself filled with quantum-like ambiguities -- provided that it is not idealized in the Cartesian way. Though the conventional idea of "common sense" may eschew such apparent anomalies, to the common sense or shared sensibility of the intersubjective world, they are neither unfamiliar, nor are they denied. Merleau-Ponty concludes that "physics destroys certain prejudices of philosophical and non-philosophical thought....The internal critique of physics leads us to become aware of the perceived world" (Bridging the 'Two Cultures': Merleau-Ponty and the crisis in modern physics, Cosmos and History: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 9, 2013, 2, p. 2-3)

Rosen extends his argument both to a univeral perspective (The Self-evolving Cosmos: a phenomenological approach to nature's unity-in-diversity, 2008) and to the nature of individual being (How can we Signify Being? Semiotics and topological self-signification, Cosmos and History: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 2014). The latter evoked a useful clarification by Lisa Maroski (An Emergent Language of Paradox: riffs on Steven Rosen's Kleinian signification of being, Cosmos and History: the journal of natural and social philosophy, 13, 2017, 1).

Whereas such arguments endeavour to render credible a possible shift in perspective from an academic perspective, the bias in the focus above on "imagining toroidal life" is towards engaging with extant metaphors of individual or collective significance. Arguably the case made by Rosen and Maroski is less concerned with empowering the individual in "living toroidally" whatever that might mean -- and the challenge of communicating that possibility more widely through succinct non-textual mnemonic aids. Maroski concludes, for example:

In order for a sociocultural shift to happen, individual shifts must occur. Thus it might be useful to turn to oneself, to one's lived sense of paradox in order to appreciate it in the broader context. How does the Kleinian awareness/ intuition/ comprehension/ aperspectivity presentiate in your everyday life? Facing personal paradoxes usually involves the experience of cognitive dissonance, a sense that who I think I am is not who I appear to be. The psychologist Carl Jung, for example, calls this facing and accepting of otherness in oneself "integrating the shadow". To own your psychologic shadow, dwell with the irony in your life.

More controversially, the bias here is to challenge the simplisitic understanding of metaphors such as the doughnut and the pizza -- to the extent that they obscure recognition of the insights to which Rosen and Maroski draw attention

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