Nothing too fancy here. Some homegrown Oregonian response to the real Fuller challenge: how to get this newer stuff integrated. I show by example.
For those just joining us, we've been recently investigating an extension of the Wayne Roberts' "etu" idea (equilateral triangular units) to the "etu" of Bucky Fuller's Synergetics ("equilateral tetrahedral units"), a core concept in so-called Martian Math.
I'm somewhat bumbling along in this one (below), reiterating how three edges a, b, c multiplied, give abc the volume by "closing the lid" in a tetrahedral model of multiplication.
What are the practical applications? A better understanding of American literature you say?
I'm calling what's happening tonight a "Wanderers Happening" while being deliberately vague on what that means. We've never gone with a membership roster. Dues were for the coffee fund.
You'll have seen the drift into video as my medium of choice a lot of the time. I appreciate the bandwidth and the different blend of skills. We learn by doing. Since I'm doing stuff like teaching online anyway... staying in practice.
The venue is not Linus Pauling House nor anywhere in Asylum District, and no, not at the gallery either, although that seems to be coming along.
As a matter of historical fact, I was one of those students in Walter Kaufmann's philosophy classes not long after Martin Heidegger died, in 1976, the year of my high school graduation.
Kaufmann has been identified as a "forgotten philosopher" (not by me anyway) by Wes Cecil on Youtube, whom I also follow. Not to be confused with Stuart Kaufman of Santa Fe Institute, Walter was a native German who immigrated to the United States and joined its military to fight the Nazi party, which Heidegger had by then joined.
One of Walter's chief missions in life as a translator was to bring to German writings a fresher more contemporary English. He tackled translating Frederick Nietzsche's writings and devoted himself to disentangling this corpus from what the Nazis later did with it. He was fighting the Nazis even then.
He tackled translating a lot of other German writers as well, including Goethe.
I finished my BA degree in 1980 having written a thesis on Wittgenstein's stuff, with Rorty an adviser. Victor Preller was my main Wittgenstein teacher.
C.J. Fearnley asks the question, as to what criteria to apply when mining in philosophy.
My question was: can I read, study, embrace, and even love the ideas of
someone with such connections to Nazism? It is a difficult question,
reasonable people may disagree.
Does it matter if some parts of a philosophy stink? Maybe not. We mine stinky, sometimes toxic stuff for real in the Earth, and then send it through supply chains to manifest in our own personal lifestyles as finished goods, theater props from prop inventory.
Lets "get off it" with Heidegger why not? We talk about the "stink of Zen" a lot, yet respect it.
I'd tackled some Heidegger, despite Kaufmann's warnings (fruit never far from the tree etc.), but without serious tutelage. I had a full docket as it was. I wasn't looking into Buckminster Fuller much yet, either. I just never got around to reading much Heidegger, nor listening to much Wagner, either.
My trajectory through philosophy took me into the Wittgenstein corpus, which I'll liken to a "particle accelerator" wherein words themselves develop "meaning trajectories" in semantic space. Plus new ones (new words) pop up all the time, already deliberately self-entangled, such as Tylenol (medical space) and Corolla (motor vehicle space).
Weird right? That I'm mentioning commercial brands?
My online philosophy mentions Pepsi a lot, investigating its "meaning" (just a dark colored carbonated liquid? -- I think not). I'm influenced by advertising (especially Italian flavored) and mass media. That means I see how action through language changes our coordination (think of dance numbers) and sense of timing (comic sense), over time. Programming matters.
What impressed me as I emerged in the World Trade Center lobby, from the PATH train, that time, was how big business is metaphysical in flavor. The displays were thick with diagrams of processes and workflows, as people strove to come to grips with the tenuous. Business people don't call what they do philosophy or metaphysics, as marketing tells them not to.
Now that 21st Century philosopher Peter Sloterdijk embraces Fuller to some extent, if not the specific skeletal structure of Synergetics quite yet (the "concentric hierarchy"), and given he's considered a "next Heidegger" among some German language thinkers, I'll accommodate the fact that, even though I fly the Kaufmann flag (I like to think), in terms of combating creeping fascism (neo-Romanism?), Martin is by now a part of the team, a consultant, when it comes to "technology" and its meaning (and its dangers), going forward.
We'll be linking up with AI here somewhere, I'm sure.
Where Heidegger has also popped up on my radar, is back when I was tracking Hermenet (a company) and Fernando Flores, its founder. Flores was partnering with Werner Erhard around various projects, per The est Graduate Review.
I could see where a Cult of Hermes might fit in, even as I've worked on my Cult of Athena programming (a kind of Narnia for me?) over the years. I was still in Jersey City at that time, having my fantasies about re-purposing The Stanley. I was into Synergetics by then, and in communication with Bucky.
I was reminiscing about Cubespace recently, with a Golang startup guy, at one time located at the top of a US Bank building, but probably not the one you're thinking of, if you're thinking of one. East side. On Grand.
The point of Cubespace was cross-fertilization, which in horticulture is an important topic, as in gardening, but when it comes to tending a fragile open source ecology... we don't have much practice thinking in those terms.
I'll sidebar here to mention Sheri Dover popped up at OSCON, fond memories of our OMSI-side party the year before. She knows horticulture and went to OSU for the purpose of studying it. Cross-fertilization would not be lost on her as an accelerator cornerstone.
The Ruby and Python meetups would be far enough apart to not mutually interfere with presentations, yet might be going on in parallel. Universities foster synergy the same way, which is why maybe in a parallel universe a University of Portland might have made a Cubespace its priority.
We get the reality we get.
Today I imagine we would have Clojure and Golang groups adding to the mix, with more opportunities for all of us to lurk in on meetings. I pick up Java going to Java meetups and just taking in whatever they say and do. I'm not a missionary here to secretly convert anyone. I'm brushing up on Java.
Perhaps a Language Palace will again materialize out of the mists. Portland hasn't surrendered its forgotten crown of Open Source capital, bequeathed by Christian Science Monitor some decades ago.
The Youtube channel has been wending its way through the details of C6XTY, as a way of familiarizing viewers, without needing to own the material (plastic in this case), with a space frame known to NASA space station designers as the octet truss. Bell (the telephone guy) used it to make what he called "kites" (also towers).
A reason for those bends in the story line is Sam's decision to open a popup gallery in downtown Portland, just east of the North Park Blocks, between the US Customs House building, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The Youtubes could mix in with other screen projections, as standalone movies (media files). We won't need to stream over the network, in other words. Visitors will have their own cell phones (if they so choose).
Tonight I found myself commenting on Willamette Week whereas not so long ago my commentary turned to Joe Rogan, Abby Martin the guest, with Oliver Stone and "Man X" among the topics.
Although I'm an older "pensive cowboy" type, reminiscent of some more high desert stereotype (an Oregonian from Redmond maybe?), I'm able to keep up with a lot of the big city banter, such as we find in Willamette Week regarding the latest developments on the punk scene.
I'm media-savvy enough to maybe have something new to say. I get to be trendy, from time to time.
I'm touching the bases in the Youtube arena, shall we say. I'm not going for megachurch status, in terms of viewership, however I do want to have my ducks sufficiently in a row to stay intelligible. For that reason, more recent Youtubes, when not focused on the CCP, have been documenting 4D Solutions (the DBA) and the Oregon Curriculum Network (OCN), sculpting them to have clear definitions.
The chronological sequence is more place-based, in that we saunter down SE Division apiece, establishing a role for a school in a neighborhood: both teach the history (of the place), and share it with students (including with people from far away, tourists).
In the blogged excerpt here, I'm skipping directly from "latticeWorks 1" to what might be considered its sequel. Making C6XTY is the focus in both, as a way into understanding our School of Tomorrow lattice (a major station stop).
Then I'm rounding it out with a followup on what I was thinking with regard to OMSI and the "whole number volumes" meme.
I'm not ripping off a title so much as pointing to that very title: Maps of the Mind by Charles Hampden-Turner. I believe I have more than one copy.
The one open next to me has yellow highlighter pen annotations and is open on Map 44: Freud's French Revolution: Jacques Lacan interpreted by Sherry Turkle.
That sounds pretty cerebral doesn't it, and that's just one of so many maps of the mind contained herein. Having these collected and presented in "map" format is valuable, if only because "map" and "planet" go together, or "cosmic body" or "polyhedron" (thinking of wire-frames, i.e. networks or graphs).
Yes, R. Buckminster Fuller gets a map in tandem with others. Not the "omnidirectional halo" (No More Secondhand God) or biosphere model (with twilight zones). However I'm going back to Lacan for the purposes of this post.
In a recent Youtube I feature another Youtube about the genesis of the new logo of the International Mathematicians Union (IMU). I cite the opening section on the Jitterbug, however this is a hypertoon that passes on to the three intersecting phi rectangles of the icosahedron, and then Borromean Rings.
Borromean Rings are displayed as the Lacan mind map, three interlocking head-shaped rings. These rings form a special topology and were used in the branding associated with the Borromeo family, hence the name. Lacan finds a use for this metaphor. So does the IMU.
I'm planning to share these details in my next Youtube, as I'm expecting content in that form will provide the higher bandwidth people often need to get first impressions. If the judgement is sufficiently in favor of exploring more, then maybe my writings become more what to study.
In my case, I came to Alan Watts through his writings in my teens and twenties, whereas I didn't take in much audio until I could mine Youtube for that purpose.
