Dear LO'ers,
Because of a sense of spareness, I will reproduce only very limited parts
of At's message.
Before I follow the path to the heart of the matter, I like to mention
something of natural multi-dimensional meandering. At described a
meandering river in x, y and z coordinates. Here is another example which
my father told me long ago.
My father once explored the interiors of Papua New Guinea. He followed
with a small boat a meandering river through the tropical rain forest. At
a certain point, he came aware of a lot of broken trees along the borders
of the river. A few days earlier a hurricane passed that area. Also my
father was impressed by what he saw: the hurricane had followed the river,
also leaving a meandering track of broken trees. But the river meanders
and the hurricane meanders had different amplitudes and frequencies. You
can imagine that the pattern of the two winding tracks (river and
path of broken trees) was something strange. But there was even something
more fantastic: the hurricane had sometimes broken the trees near their
roots, sometimes in the middle of their trunks, sometimes only the crown
of the tree was broken off. And this altitude difference of breaking
points followed a sinusoid pattern too. A real visual 3D meandering! And
it will not surprise me, if the travelling speed of the hurricane (the
fourth dimension) variated in an oscillating manner as well (like the
speed of the water in a river).
Now I return to linear thinking.
When does linear thinking occur? I have thought about this question from
different viewpoints and angles. I think that linear thinking is an
exception, but it could occur when a person has a well defined goal for
his thinking in mind: he knows what the outcome of his thoughts will be.
In linear thinking, there are two directions possible: forward and
backward.
Good examples of forward linear thinking are mathematical proofs, such as
the proof that two triangles are congruent if the lengths of their sides
are simmilar. Even all the different proofs of the Pythagorian Theorem are
results of linear thinking, despite the different starting points of these
proofs. However, it is not so common that the future goal of thinking is
well defined; that the outcome of the thinking is precisely known. That is
different with backward thinking.
Linear backward thinking means the thinking backward from the known
final results to the starting point. In retrospect one can reconstruct a
straight line between the two.
For instance, if we think of the entropy production as is described in
At's primer, we easily could say: "How logic that entropy has to be
produced, if energy flows". The clearance is obvious, despite the
difficulties and irrigularities of the path of the original forward
thinking. It is somewhat simmilar of what Edward de Bono once told to an
audience. The ant searching for a specific leaf high in a tree, follows a
difficult path with numerous try-and-errors along wrong branches. It
is fairly straigt forward for the ant once being at the leaf to find
its way back to the ground. Linear backward thinking could generate a
"aha"-exclaim.
Maybe a synonym for linear thinking is "reasoning". But in the above
paragraphs I introduced the WHY in my reasoning. I have tried to explain
why some sorts of thinking might be linear. And this is the moment to copy
a small part of At's contribution:
> But let us look for unexpected possibilities by enter the realm of
> metanoia, a topic which Winfried Dressler, Arthur da Silva and others
> are questioning.
>
> A metanoic possibility is to understand that the seven essentialities
> do not say all about creativity. They describe the curved path in
> creative space which a person's creativity traces. They help us to
> observe all the curves (non-linearity) in that path. In other words,
> they help us to describe the mechanics or FORM of that path. But they
> do not formulate the dynamics or CONTENT of the path. In other words,
> they tell us HOW the path curves, but they do not tell WHY the path
> makes this or that curve. In other words, as soon as we busy ourselves
> with the HOW (seven essentialities) AND the WHY (???????), then our
> motion in the creative space will be nonlinear.
Again, the HOW and WHY-discussion. I had easily well copied another
contribution of At (LO20344) where he gave in simmilar words answers to my
questions (LO20323) about the time needed to follow the laminar track of a
flow (linear!) towards a turbulence and thus passing a bifurcation point.
That discussion was focussed on the Reynolds number (FORM/mechanics/HOW)
and the entropy production which leads to turbulence (CONTENT/dynamics/ WHY).
I will redirect my thought flow towards the groove of linear thinking and
catch up At's contribution:
> It is almost as if the WHY plays the role of an 8th essentiality! Is
> this WHY not actually the 8th essentiality? No. Each of the seven
> essentialities has to do with the HOW and not the WHY. The 8th cannot
> be different from them. Furthermore, what is the ??????? of the WHY as
> the seven essentialities are of the HOW? Or to formulate the question
> in other words:
>
> What content has the seven essentialities as form?
>
> What a strange (awkward?) question!
That might be, but not for me. To know why the X-mas tree has that
specific form, and why it has these sharp needles instead of velvet-soft
leafs; why it has a different form than the oak tree. That are the type of
questions that give our lives a the food to live. In most sciences the
era of descriptions of forms is coming to an end (demoGRAPHY, geoGRAPHY,
petroGRAPHY, crystalloGRAPHY, etc.); sciences are now entering the era
of the WHY (demoLOGY, geoLOGY, petroLOGY, crystalLOGY)
My answer to the above question is:
Because the 7 essentialities PRODUCE more than they consume, e.g. specific
order=creativity.
But maybe we could even formulate an even more principle question (which
is also the very answer):
What content has this sentence as form? (What a strange question :-))
At, I must cut almost the rest of your message now, because of reasons of
spareness. It is also because I want to touch slightly on an item At and I
had dialogued privately on this topic: the role of directions of thoughts
and the role of time.
Thoughts follow a track. Maybe the future of this track is uncertain. It
could be linear, it could be zig-zagging, it could be curved, it could
form a loop. But thoughts move through a multi-dimensional space. We may
take a snap shot of the thought and even the direction of that very
thought on that very moment could be frozen in the snap shot. However the
dynamics behind this movement are not possible to fix.
Snap shotting directions is also possible in the 7-D creativity space of
the seven essentialities. All of them have a kind of direction included
(the most obvious is the first one: becoming-being/liveness). And to make
things even more complicated, the seven essentialities all together
influence each other in a dynamic way. But the space is not suitable to
decipher the dynamics. 'Why' is a question which lives in an other world.
I may give you the impression that all these things were clear for me from
the beginning. That is certainly not the case. It is our corporate
learning and teachings with numerous loops, that give me the courage to
write all these words.
>
> But is it not exciting how spareness and meandering are related to
> each other? If we keep to a straight line in out thinking by
> considering only one topic as if this topic cannot be exhausted, then
> our thoughts cannot not meander to other topics. Or to question it
> once again, why do Leo not say:
>
> "Let your thoughts rush straight forward to a sea of ideas."?
I will give the audience the answer: because this is not possible.
Even on an isotropic floodplain a river could not avoid meandering.
The laminar (linear) flow has enough free energy to develop automatically
into meanders.
At, and all the others may I thank you for the joy I perceived when
passing an important vortex of my (thinking) live. I am keen for the next
one.
dr. Leo D. Minnigh
minnigh@library.tudelft.nl
Library Technical University Delft
PO BOX 98, 2600 MG Delft, The Netherlands
Tel.: 31 15 2782226
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Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.
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--Leo Minnigh <L.D.Minnigh@library.tudelft.nl>
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