from verse 8/8 of To a louse. by Rabbi Burns.

Despite the primarily erotic sense of the Latin word, in English cupidity originally, and still especially, means 'desire for wealth'.

Here however, cupidity is intended to point more to this primary sense, of the Latin —"cupiditatem 'passionate desire, lust; ambition', cupidus 'eager, passionate', cupere 'to desire'"— to mean simply desire, the desire of life for more life, and then, perhaps consequently, the desire for wealth.

I began to write about phoenix change and the foundations of change management, but this led to a much deeper and more personal reflection on development  — and to the 'thesis' presented here now.

For more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing to-day. —If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine,— I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property. I make them public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another —but, of course, it is not likely.

If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?

Phoenix change refers to developmental change, steered more by the intrinsic characteristics of stakeholders than by imposed agendas, and is the focus of phoenix change consultancy, applying mediation and facilitation methodologies, such as those used in Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology, to individual, organisational, and community projects.

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The red pill represents the drive to wake up, to be authentically engaged, alone, together with everyone else, not watched over and manipulated by machines of insensibility and indifference.

Whosoever fights with monsters must take care through this not to become a monster; when you stare long into an abyss the abyss also stares into you.

Whether the 'machines' are chemical, mechanical, semiotic or not.

Although I believe the translations I have found are faithful, stripped of their context quotations can lose much of their quality. Transliteration of punctuation, for instance, can result in an English that makes their authors sound coarse or uneducated; and 'grammatical transliterations' may substitute gender bias for the gender neutrality of an original.

Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference that I felt detracted from the content of the originals. The edits have been made with due diligence and, although I am not a professional translator or writer, I believe they are both faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit. Original texts are provided for readers to draw their own conclusions.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

in summary

Beings and societies are not like packs of snooker balls, scattered along their fated paths by the Big Bang, nor is their evolution steered by men with beards on fluffy clouds.

Life evolves through a metalanguage of expression, not teleologically, destined or fated, but free within limits.

If we accept that the immortal soul is ineffable, we are conceived, not incarnated, and psychology and sociology are then simply accounts of ontogeny.

The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?    Albert Einstein, 1931.

Conceived as being the essence of ourselves, yet eternal and fully formed, the soul exists free from the reality of physics and biology, independently, and unavailable for any direct examination. It is therefore ineffable, beyond words and definitions, its place in reasoning as the causation of temporal, biological phenomena, a kind of 'magical thinking', a conflation of reference frames.

The soul represents a belief in immortality; one that is encouraged by organized religion but generally abandoned by science. Nonetheless, superseded by determinism and anthropocentrism it remains rooted in the western paradigm — leading to gross errors and cruel injustice.

For a semiotic and biosemiotic account of this please refer to: meta-expression

No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Global, private investors, through the internet, have centralized, aggregated, and effectively now control and own, all forms of social exchange, local, national, and international; including information, communication, education, production, supply, distribution, policing, and government. The right of passage in their cellular society, a share in an illusory global village, increasingly serves to insulate individuals from one another while the ancient rights and powers that individuals had won as consumers and citizens have been voided. With locality atomized, democracy's hopes rely on a continuous, orchestrated plebiscite.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).

While the "sources of information" Einstein referred to seventy-five years ago have vastly expanded, both in type and funding, from the print, radio, and black and white TV of that time, his observations seem as accurate and pertinent today as they were then.

DRAFT

"As nodes in a network the ancient rights and powers that individuals had as consumers and citizens have been voided. Locality has been atomized, and democracy transformed into a continuously orchestrated plebiscite." ancient rights: of contract, in tort, through representation. the plebiscite illusion of the availability of information, of permanence and record, of reliability of ownership, of the wisdom of the crowd 'lowest common denominator' rule. impact of private propaganda, of 24/7 broadcasting, "the illusion of a global village serves to insulate individuals" remote, asynchronous text favours simplistic etiquette, hobbles conversations, mutes underlying differences, diffuses synergy of diversity. groups form around headline causes, avoid complexity and ambiguities, avoid principled engagement. "rights that individuals had as consumers and citizens have been voided" mobile-app agreements used/abused by all 'suppliers' banks > businesses > governments. REQUIRED /DEMANDED. inertial legal transformation driven by NEED to participate. effect a license undisclosed, variable at will by supplier. enable and foster routine eavesdropping/surveillance.

tautological axiom - an axiom that is true by definition.

Linked to from: A-Content.php, {A2_intro}.

.. words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain.

What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language.

Aristotle and Plato wrote of signs and symbols, over two thousand years ago; signs in the world of nature, and symbols in human culture. The terms semiosis, and its study semiotics, come from the Ancient Greek, semeion — 'a sign, mark, or token'.

A thousand years after Aristotle, symbols were understood to be just a type of sign; and now, semiosis is understood as the process by which any word, object, symbol, or nonverbal cue is recognized as being a sign.

Semiosis, from the greek, semio-, meaning sign, plus suffix -sis, equivalent to -ing , literally meaning sign-action, is the recognition of noumena as having significance — as being, in some form or manner, signs.

For a being, anything can be a sign. All beings are signs and, in whatever manner, make signs; these are then recognized by others. Life and semiosis are co-extensive.

Despite these simple, ancient roots, Nazi eugenicists claimed semiotics as the scientific foundation for their xenophobic ideology; but semiosis is elementary and ubiquitous, whereas xenophobia is a mental illness.

Nazi scientists believed there was a one-to-one, fixed relationship between the biological characteristics of individuals and their emergent characteristics. But organisms are not simple biological machines. Their ontogeny and emergent qualities develop as a consequence of interactions with their environment, their biological components, including DNA, only statistically approximating physical traits and racial origins. Race is a category of convenience, not an absolute class of discrete individuals.

In classifying organisms, biology often identifies patterns that seem to indicate a common underlying characteristic when in fact they do not —and vice-versa. Science can only address the behaviour of reality, especially in regard to multicellular organisms, such as human beings, through probabilistic explanations - the inferences that are made from statistical relationships that are deduced from data that has been observed.

Reality is dynamic, every moment a new beginning, a new set of initial conditions. The infinitesimal differences between this one and that which preceded it, transforms its 'final' outcomes - as chaos theory demonstrates. The future evolves through probabilistic states; deterministic approaches have no ability to predict or define it. Our choices emerge from a system of inheritance but this system is made up of cultural as well as genetic components, between which information is exchanged via complex and diverse pathways. The Nazi's simplistic belief, that race could be an absolute measure of behaviour and preference, was merely incorrect.

Science is simple and absolute, neither human nor divine. It has no need or place for faith. Faith corrupts it.

contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..

chaos

Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.

We recognize what we see, this is our perception, inherited then learnt from experience. We see what we expect to see, accordingly constructing and integrating the data that our eyes, and other senses are capable of recording.

Beings, here includes those that are unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae); and those that are both unicellular and multicellular (e.g. slime molds) as well as those that are multicellular and, therefore, societies —cellular metasystems (e.g. humans, ants, jellyfish).

Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it; as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.

Here embodiment refers to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents; and embodied cognition is then simply a description of biosemiosis.

A language is a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information. To communicate, is to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals. Semantic means of or relating to meaning. Meaning refers to the sense or reference of an expression. To recognize, is to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.

Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that should be understood therefore in terms of human experience, needs, and values.

scientism

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein.

Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction..

The theses are linked to both from their brief summaries under the content section of this page, and from the four icons to the right of the index icon in the menu at the top of the screen. Some of the content that they link to can also be found from the submenu of the index icon irself.

We recognize what we see, this is our perception, inherited then learnt from experience. We see what we expect to see, accordingly constructing and integrating the data that our eyes, and other senses are capable of recording.

Beings, here includes those that are unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae); and those that are both unicellular and multicellular (e.g. slime molds) as well as those that are multicellular and, therefore, societies —cellular metasystems (e.g. humans, ants, jellyfish).

Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it; as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.

Here embodiment refers to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents; and embodied cognition is then simply a description of biosemiosis.

A language is a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information. To communicate, is to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals. Semantic means of or relating to meaning. Meaning refers to the sense or reference of an expression. To recognize, is to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.

Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that should be understood therefore in terms of human experience, needs, and values.

scientism

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein.

Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction..