An investigation of a possible foundation for new poetic-scientific research instruments*

The problem

The Nobel Laureate Physicist Frank Wilczek1 posed fundamental questions that are very hard to answer within the existing scientific paradigm, its ontology and epistemology: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas? … Is the world a work of art? …Is the world considered as a work of art, beautiful?” To my full sensorium—including speculative reason and poetic knowing—the answer is yes but this “Gap” between science and the arts cannot be mapped or explored or analyzed with the limited set of available tools built on speculative reason's ontology or its associated epistemology alone. (Epistemology is about the way we know things when ontology is about what things are.) “Suchness” or the thing in itself is not part of speculative reason's ontology and is not accessible to experimental design. For example, consciousness as a quality of mind is not discoverable by physic's speculative reason driven investigations of the body.2 In contrast and as will be argued, poetic knowing, surrealism, meditation, “leaping over” and directly revealing one's natural face are applicable to multiverse.3 So exploring and discovering the Gap suggests it needs a clear ontology that guides this mapping supporting an appropriate epistemology that merges speculative reason (science), poetic knowing, and somatic experience.

A second issue, and a foundational one, is Von Uexkuell's concept of the extended umwelt being that all animals live in a unique “extended” world that is species specific including its’ ontology and circumscribed epistemology. Quoting Thomas Aquinas: “whatever is known is known according to the manner of the knower”.4 Here not only does the scope of our umwelt limit the scope of knowing but also defines how a Gap emerges and its space-times.5 In taking this position we will also reject the popular ontological view that a single unquestionable “universe” exists. In contrast, we will assert that there are multiple worlds—local and distributed-- producing different ontologies and epistemologies mapping the possibilities for multiple Gaps, not only in them but between them and on their edges.6

What this speculative reason-poetic knowing approach has contributed to Science

In many cases the discovery of a great science changing idea in the Gap left by a discipline's paradigm came from various kinds of knowledge hybrids like those being discussed here. Descartes’ insight came from an angel in a dream; Pasteur's from an artistic insight of the chirality of some crystals; Einstein's vocal expression of the importance of the arts to scientific research; and Kekulé's daydream leading to the discovery of the benzene ring (see Wikipedia for each scientist). Like Descartes the way forward is not known but insights can be discovered and composed or painted or meditated upon in the company of speculative reason that points forward in a messy way.

Returning to Wilczek's questions about beauty, a limited insight can be drawn from the visual perception of the “hard “and fixed mathematical beauty of simulated trees. Such beauty is abstractly related to the beauty that is continuously emergent in the hic et nunc or “here and now” of living trees (Figure 1). What I will call a “Gap” or “error”—a messy concept-- has appeared from such a fragmentation in knowing and understanding of what the beauty of complete “treeness” is. Experience of the gap at this stage is like a “dream” and could provide similar insights and guidance.

Beauty of whole complex systems

Paradigmatic limitations extend to not seeing how a tree or plant shares its body and flows and is part of the beauty in the present instant of it's ecology. Here I am referring to seeing the seductive rhetoric of the rose, the orchid, or the forget-me-not communicating their complex synesthesia of smell, taste, touch, color, and form within their domain not only to other trees but also to within the human body and the bodies of birds, insects, and other animals. Such multiple evolving flows are inserted into and shape such living bodies as scents, food, and empathogen-entactogen. This narrowing, even exclusion of these other ways of knowing lies at the center of this Gap; the merely orderly cannot address a fundamental characteristic which is that trees are fully beautiful across integrated multiple time-space scales using various ways of knowing. In summary as result of the paradigmatic creation of the knowledge Gap and its circumscribed results, as Democritus pointed out: “It well be apparent that it is difficult to discern which properties each thing possess in reality.7”¹

Put more directly within the context of studying the occurrence of knowledge Gaps involving complex systems, the apparent epistemological narrowing of the qualities associated with the wholeness of a complex system into only those parts amendable to the requirements of the scientific method and mathematical space impoverish our ability to understand critical components of a system's dynamic wholeness, its’ hic et nunc including values (what a healthy living system is), creativity, change, and growth as well as all of the other characteristics associated with somatic knowing, art. etc. (This issue was also raised in a slightly different way by two complexity theorists Byrne and Callaghan,8 and as developed for the study of space by Koehler.9 This lack of a theoretical foundation for developing an informed intuition of a complex system's changing pattern as a whole, including critical points for influencing the values of associated processes or morphodynamic rules to maintain or change its valued goals.

New approaches to old complex system issues

Examples of complex system Gap problems that my suggested tools might help clarify include9 : Urban studies plagued by the difficulty of understanding spatial-temporal patterns (the Gap) in complex transportation systems that disrupt efforts to create an efficient spatial organization now or in the future;10 a lived physical place is not a “universal space” in the mathematical sense but rather particular qualitative places generating comparatively different Gaps;11 a mathematical measure constructs a timeless place which does not change since the measurement apparatus and concepts do not change much like a lived place does creating an evolving future Gap;12 dynamic interactions between place and a resident's sentiments suggest that static definitions of urban places generate Gaps that are inadequate for predicting or understanding sentiment generation, the accompanying state of mind (PTSD) and flow of conscioiusness; the actual process of creating a complex place in space is dissected such that various causal paths are emphasized over others even as the holistic and often varying creative process of creating a place is marginalized. Here an ecological fallacy occurs in this dissection because the way a place is sliced is in appropriately generalized to the unsliced whole.13^,14

Architecture, which involves at its heart the creation and maintenance of complex systems, shows why a focus on wholeness including values and the aesthetics associated with a buildings design, its operation, and manner of change and growth is a Gap but one necessary to understanding architectural performance. These issues apply equally well to political, social, and psychological systems. The architect Alexander,14 in his book the Nature of Order, writes:

Various new and unanticipated knowledge Gaps related to those enumerated above will emerge in the future accompanying new technologies such as synthetic biology and engineered organisms in a synthetic environment. These Gaps are barely hinted at now let alone recognized but could be very significant.15 For example, knowing and mapping new emergent Gaps may involve biochemically new DNA inserted into the existing ecology, combined with digital “living” computer programs that redefine what is meant by “life” in such an extended complex system. New concepts of living space-time are likely. Examples include: Androids; sensing bionic skin; so called brain hacks; direct brain stimulation from outside of the skull; bio-nano engineered implants; trans-species organ transplants; artificial intelligence and 3-D biological printing in or on living tissue.16^,17^,18 Such a Gap requires integrated multi-sensor explorations, newly invented symbols and knowing capacities such as those proposed here that are unexplored at this time.

Definition of the knowledge gap

I will define a knowledge Gap as (see Figure 2):

Imagination as the starting point, its attitudes and dual methods, poetic and speculative reason are, as far as their imaginative experience goes, one and the same. Building on this, Surrealist dispositions and techniques (automatism, games, illogical juxtapositions, dislocation, etc.) allow the Gap's silent mystery (the previously unknowable) to speak and inform the now emergent known. Such a strategy, since it is partially driven by the individual's surrealistic approach can only be a necessary method, but not sufficient, because the mystery speaking in its hic et nunc reveals itself only during its extension into the next instant often in a chaotic deterministic manner.23 Within any given set of order parameters including those of space-time,19 knowledge via imagination in the Gap is not discovered but continuously constructed from linear processes, non-linear attractors, interactions, bifurcations, especially in cascades of micro-bifurcations, a process called a macro-, or mu-bifurcation,24 and the consolidation of shifting memory fragments and poetic memes. Because no single method within itself is sufficient, both the implicit structure of deterministic parameters and the unpredictability of unconscious processes are necessary for imagination's transformative reification of what was previously only imagined into new conceptual constructs or artifacts (Figure 2).

Errors in approach and understanding are a kind of Gap that stimulates the imagination too. Katheryn Schulz25 points out that: “…error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul makes room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.” This understanding Gap, this error in knowing results in some cases from the domination of one mode of knowing and the distorted transition from this one mode of exploration--the “objective”--to another, here an often trivialized poetic. This transition should reveal difference and connection; it's a void both empty and full that currently cannot be filled because the dominant paradigm for knowing Being resists. This resistance is one of the basic causes for continuation by restriction of knowing of the Gap. But, each tree's existence emerges as the interaction of the “ten thousand things” as the Taoists would say, synergistically expressed as the flow of the beautiful, mythical, scent, color, physical and energetic at an instant—perhaps a kind of blended fractal relationship—resulting from interactions among and between these boundaries. Such a Gap is also a Gap in the space of awareness which was thought to be continuous but is found to be full of cracks, blind spots, and empty spaces particularly when the trees hic et nunc (here-and-now) is sought out to be known. It is here that we begin to feel and know the root of error.

Knowing and the problem of wholeness

Trees, people, societies, etc., are not born of a mere assemblage of units each independently occupying a here-and-now. They are not a wandering troop of sensations in the void nor a system brought together by ephemeral judgments, nor a set of objects whose being is fixed by the norms of objectivity. In fact the visible, the auditory, the somatic, and the energetic is each and in combination a time-space landscape, a here and now topography as cultivated or uncultivated time-spaces yet to be explored, being wild being producing the Gap. Clearly a new epistemological philosophical investigation is needed to invent the tools to learn again to see the suchness of a world which was damaged with the virtually unitary ascendancy of speculative reason. (This separation may be relatively new. See: Di Pippo.26)

The second proposed tool is poetic knowing. The activity of poetic knowing is not in itself an activity of knowing, but of creation of an art production, performance or of an ongoing dynamic or dialectic (McLuhan's Probes) in accordance with that Gap's inner needs and its own good. It is a knowledge which cannot be expressed in notions and judgments being “unspeakable”, but which is an experience of suchness and “is-ness” rather than logical knowledge. For example, interpretation and creation out of the Gap can be out of the subconscious or poetic analysis; in essence what the surrealists call the “automatic.” It is a creative experience, because it wants to be expressed, and it can only be expressed in a work. Such a work for example can involve special McLuhan Gap probes⁴ such as thought pictures or illustrations of the mysteries, riddles as pictures, “to reach the intellect via the senses”, allegories, musical homophony, automatism, games, illogical juxtapositions, dislocation, the emergent, and word play. Spiritual and subconscious interpretations of such productions ignore the fact that the picture-poems of alchemy—and perhaps those generated here--are connected with scientific productions with the poem teaching about changing processes in the material world.7 Perhaps Duchamp can further clarify these points in practice with his comment on his “ready-mades” like the men's urinal he exhibited as art:

Such a created poetic work for investigating the Gap must be significant of something other than itself; this object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and it must say more than it is. Looking at a single measurement or poetic creation by itself tells us little. What we need is, as Bateson28 would say, “news of difference.” That is, what is the instantaneous difference—the mystery--expressed as a uniform creation between objective measurements and poetic creations that reveal the Gap? Looking more deeply at our proposed method, examples of which are discussed in more detail below, suggests that the integrated artifact-data results are translated into diagrams, videos, etc., to reveal Gap that are, in truth, only one of the projected process of the researcher/artist themselves.29 In turn the contemplation of the results are intended to excite the imagination of the viewer so that a sort of “mystic alchemy or marriage” of the types of knowing can take place revealing what is within the Gap through the act of visual, somatic, musical and other forms of contemplation of this data-artifact juxtaposition.30

From the perspective taken here there is no unitary “natural world” at any level. This view condensed in the hermetic dictum “as above, so below” where the signatures of such multidimensional nature may be found embedded in science, the human body and poetic imagination (poetic knowing and soma).31^,32

Latour and Woolgar33 provide a sociological context for the construction of scientific and for us artistic facts derived for investigating the Gap. The experimental methods suggested involve certain studio and laboratory practices of perception, problem solving contemplation, language, somatic movement and observation, and symbolic creations that upon investigation would yield insight into what these strategies select for or against to know, see, or interpret. (See Wood's,34 discussion of Gombrich's Art and Illusion and https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI )

The methods proposed here are not as wild and crazy as they may seem upon first blush. Studies of a scientific laboratory and their cultures conclude that, as Gearin32 points out “…the methods of physicists appear to differ considerably insofar as they use metaphors and trade spiritual for figurative approaches when ‘journeying through’ cognitive tasks, embodied gestures, and visual representations of empirical or natural processes.” This is all embedded in the politics of scientific paradigms.35 It is no coincidence that contemporary state-of-the-art scientists are employing forms of alchemical language and practice in advanced types of experimentation. Alchemical and hermetic thought and practice were highly influential in the emergence of modern forms of science36 and seem to survive as unsystematic metaphors.

The knowledge contained within the Gap “…does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language. In order to penetrate and interpret this language, I am suggesting that yet another mystery be projected—the investigator's own unknown psychic background—into what is to be explained”.37 Strictly speaking, projection is never made: it happens, it is simply there as in Surrealism. These projections are part of the method, tools, and perception of both poetic knowing and speculative reason; understanding the Gap is an emergent of this mixing.

Speculation on tools to visualize and analyze the gap

A new philosophical cartography such as that being proposed is meant to generate news of difference in the Gap and between it and the system it is embedded in. The starting point is naked insight. To harvest the implications from such insights requires a new medium, one that links speculative reason to poetic knowing and its creations. This tool and medium would allow manipulation of temporal and space systems/symbols, something akin to poetic knowing, that would allow for the private experience of composing or reading or watching a poem, a dance, a painting and the visualization methods of the Gap's hicet nunc. A portion of the solution might lie somewhere between the composition by the investigator of two-dimensional surfaces of each way of knowing and the three-dimensional volume including the fourth (or more) of time that is generated by their interaction.38^,39 This could reveal hidden Gap dynamics19 that manipulate temporal-space systems, and store information in ways such as a work of art or hologram of that work that can be carefully inspected in varying dimensions to generate fascinating new perceptual experiences. Three, four or higher spaces appear to be necessary dimensions for such tools.

For example, the picture above on the left shows an active projection of an evolving pattern of corporate logos (conventional reality) onto a statue of the Buddha in a state of Samadhi. This is an evolving of awareness-embodyment engaged in the creation of conventional reality out of the nothingness of awareness. The Gap is in the active space between the two. As each linked realm moves and changes the news that is the difference evolves and changes in their interaction in varying the content of the Gap.

Investigating a Gap involves both shifting perception and the capacity to interpret symbols and data generated by new tools inserted in the Gap's space-time and in the researcher's poetic-speculative reason's analytic time. Symbolic drivers such as dance and music can be used to sharpen perception to further sense and interpret findings. (For an artistic installation by Yayoi Kusama's that examines this see: http://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/the-exhibition/ and http://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/ .)

Returning to Figure 3, the background bubbles in the left hand picture of the Buddha and trees above are meant to be quantum foam which are illustrated by the painting on the right. This suggests a very complex Gap as one tries to bring together these two autonomous emergent processes, one being physics of emergent bubbles and the other various speculative poetic “meanings” associated with at least some of these multiverses.19

Finally, the multiple tree pictures when brought to dynamic life as they are in reality shows how the meaning of each tree-like fractal object varies. One is embedded in an essential continuous breathing and blood circulation exchange tissue processes, and the next as flowing sap, cellular multiplication, driven by photosynthesis in a varying illuminating space created by moon light as it circles the earth.

General options for getting started

Here is a preliminary and very tentative list of what we need to do to reveal and understand via speculative reason / poetic knowing the “here-and-now” suchness of the Gap itself:

Thoughts on tool options for visualizing the knowledge gap

Animation : The process of knowing the Gap with multiple tools could be animated so that differences can emerge. (See the video “Ryan” at https://aeon.co/videos/artistic-genius-and-fragility-intersect-in-this-surreal-oscar-winning-animation )

Here dissection of various portions of “Ryan's” anatomy and color overlays all depict how he knows himself in a constantly evolving instant in his current hic et nunc or “here and now” translated to the video. Animation allows insertion of colors, a story line, abstract objects (scientific measurements) and indicators of feeling and intensity. This is an entirely open virtual space with its own knowledge limitations2

3-and 4-d Visualizations of fractals : The following 3- and 4-D videos of the Mandelbrot set (or other attractors, etc.) could be tied point-to-point to a poetic production object from the same Gap. (Both videos must be brought to life by clicking on the link http://www4.ncsu.edu/?zwoodst/mandelbrot.html

Holographic Poetry Visualizations : The artifact of the poem or poetic knowing/speculative reason Gap floats in the air inside a cylinder, as seen in a 720-degree space. Here the poem or our merged objects can be read in any direction, at any speed. Such a visualization will produce new insights and meanings. Hyperlinked probes provide a cartography of particular scientific-poetic Gap as an emergent image from its poetic knowing.

Xenolinguistics Visualizations : Xenolinguistics can enable investigation of a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena demonstrating the un-speakability of the mystical, to the instrumental magic of the songs of the shaman or curandera and on to the full range of embodiment.43 We know this as the Gap when we encounter it; essentially the answer is to speak or hear the unspeakable from these domains. Interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or personal or group communion with ancestors and spirits, can be and are analyzed by Slattery's methods using sentient visual languages.

Sentient visual languages— such as Slattery's “Glide” developed in her book and videos—are encountered in or speak from the Gap. Their glyphs are unrelated to the representational linear practices of fixed meaning speech in natural language writing systems. A sentient visual language glyph (see Glide below and paintings by Pin Li) engages in re-combinatory movements with other Glyph's or unfolds within itself on the computer screen to reveal additional meanings. “…it is … possible to create text-as-image that simultaneously insists on the continuing importance of embodiment to human perception and being. The trick is to do both at once, to work at the borderline between text and image, enduring material form and mutable cultural production, without sacrificing either to the other.”.44

Using an invented sentient visual language a dynamic exploration of images and writings of the meaning revealed in the Gap emerging from the continuous unfolding flow between poetic knowing/speculative reason glyph systems. A sentient visual language may also be appropriate for exploring fractal art across multiple magnifications (see 3D Mandelbrot Set http://www4.ncsu.edu/?zwoodst/mandelbrot.html and for visualizing the interpenetrative geometry of space as Tessellation fractals. The continuous flow of Glyphs can be experienced as a maze that one dances through or as an extended metaphor as one Glyph unfolds itself into its’ glyph components much like a Chinese character does.

Glyph symbol interpretation by directly encountering the visualized flow can be enhance and interpreted while under the effect of an empathogen. Such a new observer's perception can produce a shift in reality including the ability to analytically (as defined here) experience the symbolic deity of the plant and other entities. It can engage multiple realities (Shamanic, poetic, scientific and this reality) at the same time (everyday) as the “other” as depicted in a video or simulation. See the following very suggestive examples in Xenolinguistics (visualization of the Gap) https://vimeo.com/16237247 and other examples.

SkinBridge offers a means for investigation of the somatic reality of the Gap via somatic knowing. This involves a tattoo infused with plant ethnogenic substances on one's skin with somatic perception reinforced by the symbols as shown by the investigations of Caroline and Getan cottereau-maudree (https://vimeo.com/34637969)

Concluding comment

I have attempted to describe a knowledge Gap that limits our ability to fully know the dynamic full here-and-now of an evolving object, process or event in space-time. This requires a new theoretical ontology-epistemology and set of tools, means of analysis, and expression that includes the refinement, even shifting of perception in unexpected ways as a means of analysis and for presenting findings. The performing or reading of sentient visual language when combined with productions of poetic knowing—surrealism for example—produces a result that “…is more than a cognitive activity—or rather, it is an activity that takes place in the embodied cognitions of a…subject who is made to realize anew the inextricable entwining of body with mind, image with text. We are the medium, and the medium is us.”44

Footnotes

^* Presented at the 2017 Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences 27th Annual International Conference August 11-13. An earlier version was presented at the 2017Annual Winter Chaos/Snowflake Conference Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY, March 17-19, 2017.

¹ Note: my interest is not in reconciling Snow's45 “two cultures” but in addressing how a more complete knowledge of the reality of complex systems might be achieved by overlapping and blending these ontologies and ways of knowing.

² The view taken in this paper is that Nothingness is the ground from which all arises. As such it is: “Naturally occurring timeless awareness—utterly lucid awakened mind—is something marvelous and superb, primordially and spontaneously present. It is the Treasury from which comes the universe of appearances and possibilities, whether of [this conventional world of of enlightenment.”46) In contradistinction to Heidegger where being is an overcoming of nothingness in the face of dread choosing to continuously recreate the self.47 Heidegger: Being-There (or Nothing), http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/7b.htm )

³

⁴ Recall that a McLuhan probe “…is a means or method of perceiving. It comes from the world of conversation and dialogue as much as from poetics…. [It] is discontinuous, nonlinear; it tackles things from many angles at once. [Our McLuhan probe should] be adapted to discovery and awakening perception and illuminating situations….”.48

⁵ Six evolving integrated temporal levels: virtual, nootemporal, biotemporal, eootemporal, prototemporal, and atemporal. The Borsuk-Ulam Theorem demonstrates their evolving topology.19

Examples of 4-D fractals: