Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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A Science of Prisms In the 1970s the US inventor
Buckminster Fullerdeveloped a theory, also called "Synergetics", that
approached systems from a holistic perspective that is basically the opposite
of the reductionist perspective of Physics. Fuller's philosophy was inspired by
one of his own inventions, the "geodesic" dome (1954), a structure
that exploits a very efficient way of enclosing space and that gets stronger as
it gets larger. "Synergy" is the
behavior of a whole that cannot be explained by the parts taken separately. For
example, a star attracts a planet: humans could not have predicted this by
simply studying the two bodies separately. Synergetics, therefore, studies a
system in a holistic (rather than reductionist) fashion. The way it does this
is by focusing on form rather than internal structure. Because of its emphasis
on shape, Synergetics is, de facto, a branch of Geometrics, the discipline of
configurations (or patterns). Synergetics employs
60-degree coordination instead of the usual 90-degree coordination. The
triangle (and the tetrahedron) instead of the square (and the cube) is the
fundamental geometric unit. The tetrahedron is the minimal system with the
fewest possible points. Fuller argued that reality
is not made of "things", but of angle and frequency events. All
experience can be reduced to only angles and frequencies. Fuller found
"prisms" to be ubiquitous in nature and in culture. All systems
contained in the universe are polyhedral, "universe" being the
collection of all experiences of all individuals. Synergetics rediscovers, in
an almost mystical way, most of traditional science, but mainly through
topological considerations (with traditional topology extended to
"omnitopology"). For example, Synergetics proves that the universe is
finite and expanding, and that Planck's constant is a "cosmic relationship". Synergetics unifies
Physics and Metaphysics. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Self-organization and the Science of Emergence" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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