![Reflections. Reflections.](../images/D_Forest-1a2.jpg)
expansions
misc.
Δ |
making sense |
experience and expression
1.1. Beings perceive their environment by constructing an internal model from those pieces of data that their senses are able to gather. No being can see past this. 1.2. Born expecting their world to make sense, children see only foundations around them. They build on these regardless, imagining viability to be that which seems to them to work. 1.3. Children learn as best they can; their understanding of the information on which they depend to do so developed as well as limited by their experience.
2.1. Our world is a model we construct in our minds from those elements of it that we have the ability to recognize because they have proved to be significant. 2.2. reality is like the floor of a cave in the darkness, felt as the head of a walking stick pressing against the palm of our hand. Even though our experience of it can only ever be a perception it is nonetheless real. 2.3. reality never is, and can never be, quite as we perceive it; it is simply what to us makes sense.
3.1. beings survive by interacting not just with inanimate entities but with other beings. Elementary societies formed in the primordial environment as they found advantage in these social connections. 3.2. Over generations, simple relationships became increasingly complex, and various forms of interdependence evolved into multi-cellular, modular, and symbiotic beings. 3.3. From communication, languages developed, continuing and reflecting the preconceptions that beings inherit, and framing their perception —right or wrong, good or bad, mad or not.
4.1. culture frames our experience of the world; it is a meta-language, circumscribing both our understanding of language and of culture. 4.2. As we develop, the cultures of our 'family', 'community', 'region', and 'state', which surround us in our ontogeny, nest inside us like Russian dolls, building a unique personal culture. 4.3. Each of us expresses our personal culture constantly and unavoidably, non-verbally even more than verbally; it is what gives meaning to who we are and to what we do.
5.1. Imprinting our environment with constructions and artifacts, cultures also pattern our perception. 5.2. Through the paradigm culture provides, we are able to anticipate and interpret the responses we receive from the world around us. By balancing their candor with their kindness we are able to find and maintain our place its society. 5.3. In a foreign culture, when uprooted, categories evaporate that to us seemed certain. Discovering our perception is not absolute and universal, we become dumb, 'home-sick' for the authentic connection we feel in the well-established constructs of familiar company.
6.1. We learn about reality from the stream of data that it stimulates in our senses. 6.2. Inside the womb, as sensory data is filtered and translated into functional information, our unique personal culture begins to develop from that of our mother. 6.3. culture trains our development like a trellis trains a vine. Moment by moment our experience blindly meshes in layers, crystallizing around a genetic algorithm. 6.4. We incorporate understanding, privation, and error equally and impartially into ourselves, absorbing the world that we come to know.
7.1. Communicating effectively is vital to successfully integrate with our surrounding society and obtain its protection and support. First we cry; and then we suckle. 7.2. Infants are instinctively aware that being shunned can be a death sentence. Children relentlessly demand conversation. Any fear that they may have is readily overwhelmed by their drive to communicate. 7.3. Patterns of expression, imprinted on us during early ontogeny, frame the conversations through which we negotiate meaning and develop into who we are. Interposed between us they establish our interpersonal relationships in later life.
8.1. Every being's survival depends upon it making sense of both its internal and external environments. 8.2. The conversation between a being's internal and external worlds determines its biological and psychological well-being. 8.3. If the soul is ineffable and the psyche is understood as a meta-biological construct, then our fluency is a reflection of the impact of our experience, and of any interventions that are made in our lives.
θ incorporation ψ on being heard
from D-MakingSense.php#D_intro.
The shouts of children racing from class to playground tumble happily into chaos like fireworks at carnival: "Crazy! Let's do it!" "Wicked!" "You're mental!" Children follow instinct to choose leaders; to them our history seems like a comic strip. And yet, while they're occupied with new experience their schooling absorbs them, their growth developing framed by the environments it represents.
from D-MakingSense.php#D5.1.
shaping cultures
On the night of 10th May, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. Winston Churchill, UK Prime Minister.
from D-MakingSense.php#D8.3.
interventions
There is art to medicine as well as science, and warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or chemist's drug.
In whatever way health conditions are expressed, their physical consequences and need for empathy intrinsically impact on the wellbeing of everyone associated with them. All healthcare interventions, whether made actively, through surgery, chemical or physical therapies, psychotherapy, or social support; by simply engaging with a healthcare provider; or when interventions are made by one party and the discussions regarding these are had with another, necessarily engage all involved in profound cognitive interaction and communication.
"To my patients, who have paid to teach me."
a complete aetiology
sorry! This note is being edited. Please use the contact form (accessible via the link at the bottom of main pages) if you would like to be notified when it is re-published.
called from D-MakingSense.php#D8.3
Hippocratic Oath
Written between the fifth and third centuries BC, the Hippocratic Oath is an expression of medical ethics, attributed to the Greek doctor Hippocrates. Its third undertaking, quoted here, is from a version of it by Louis Lasagna written in 1964. His version of it is that which is most common today.
The Hippocratic oath is the earliest expression of medical ethics in the Western world, establishing several principles which remain of paramount significance today. These include the principles of medical confidentiality and of doing no harm. As the seminal articulation of certain principles that continue to guide and inform medical practice, the ancient text is of more than historic and symbolic value. It is enshrined in the legal statutes of various jurisdictions, such that violations of the oath may carry criminal or other liability beyond the oath's symbolic nature.