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The use of topology in this research

What is the difference, in this work, between the mathematised topology of fixed shapes (measured geo-metric figures) commonly used by most mathematicians, and the most basic form of topology that is a  ‘Rubber Sheet Geometry’ (without metric)? The latter is non-algorithmic, not using numbers, measures, not counting sides and edges, etc. and describes with simple shapes that get distorted any situation ‘in shaping’ – i.e.  it includes change or movement, is not static. It does not use valuings (no numbers or names to value or devalue). The following little hisory helps to understand the connection between these two forms of topology, mathematical, and non-mathematised.

• A biased little history of Topology [pdf]

Robert Sapolsky on thinking with categories 

Introduction to Human Behavioural Biology    7mn30-8mn30, 9:30, to  22mn.  Summary: 

Categories are convenient representations of something we apprehend, what we look at, but they have limitations.

• We think in categories (and then put things/people in boxes, label them, reducing them)
• We impose categories on things that are not categorical
• We take a continuum and break it into arbitrary boundaries
• Why? [naming] “makes it easier to remember.. and evaluate” [to survive]

Fundamental Categories: Pattern & Movement are parameters of

(2,3) representation

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6874035804457472000-kNPj

This little video demonstrates that shape (or pattern) and motion (or movement or activity), can be  combined in various ways (e.g. move the cup, move the plate, move them relatively to each other) and re-combined endlessly. The combining occurs in the brain through perception, and in the mind through perspectives, expressed as explanations, descriptions of experience, and rationalisations.

Shape and activity perceived separately can be combined to ‘animate’ and the result represents and appears like ‘life’, so the combination can animate anything, and the mind can ascribe ‘life’ to it. The Animated Geometry simply does not differentiate shape from movement, but apprehends ‘distorsion’ and a situation’s “shaping” – shape and motion are geometric reductions. Recombining them, or re-integrating them, is not quite the same as not fragmenting them in the presenting situation.

This Animated Geometry is inherent and more basic than the parameters, in that it does not separate or fragment shape (or pattern) from movement (or change). It apprehends without these reductions the “shaping” of what is at hand, and  the “distortion”. The Topologic Situation Modelling^© method is a formalisation of this, starting with three basic geometric rules, using a geometric discipline of mathematics: ‘Rubber Sheet Geometry’ (topology).

In philosophising, many writers reduce “all that is” to either shapes/patterns [N2dual] or movement/activity [N3polar], or to “patterns of activity” or “active patterning. This leads to over-generalisations that make one or the other or the combinations (N2,N3) or (N3,N2) “primary”, supposedly “the” universal “nature of reality”. Only not everyone agrees and this “universal nature of reality” depends on the one describing it. Why?

The above pattern-&-motion set of parameters of representation is the nature of the “Brain Simulation we live in”, the “Matrix”, but its bias depends on the individual tendencies. A visual preference produces these two fundamental parameters; other preferences produce other parameters.

Einstein E=mc2:

The philosophical Mind-Body Problem and the Matter⇔Energy solution

Albert Einstein explains  the special theory of relativity:

“Space and time are manifestations of the same thing”.

Space and time are manifestations of the same thing.
He did not say « matter is energy », but that both are «manifestations» of something else. This something else we apprehend but cannot represent in the same way as space or time and everything known to be ruled by them. The research on this website views both these manifestations (to our senses and mind) as expressions of that something else than space or time, as representations of what presents to awareness. Space and time are REpresentations.

 Sc-numbers ‘equals’ translated as H-‘is’ in humanities

At the scale of a human being,  body and mind are REpresentations associated with being a living creature, but neither is all that a human ‘being’ is. In a person, matter and thought (or mental activity) are a horizontal symmetry, expressions of ‘what’ a person is. In practical terms, the matter of the body’s tissues can be broken down to provide fuel for the brain’s activity, but if one views the matter of the body tissues “as” energy, that is using the body tissues as mere ‘resource’ for the brain, mind, and head, and it results in physical wasting deterioration. Symmetrically, the brain’s activity can govern the rebuilding of the body, but that does not mean that the mind or consciousness or the nervous energy “creates” matter. This idea is derived from taking quantum theory out of its sub-atomic context (domain of definition and application). This symmetry can resolve many of the paradoxes of  The Mind-Body problem. Topologically, it is a horizontal symmetry, at surface.

The connection of the ‘something else’ to physical forces or the human timed-space of ExPERIence, is a vertical symmetry oriented to that surface that manifests as gravity or is felt as heaviness, and expressed in linguistic contexts as gravitation, gravid state, grave situation (e.g. urgency, emergency), etc.

The ‘Rubber Sheet Geometry’, more simple than other modelling method, makes these notions easy to understand in a concrete way with spatial and visual aids that can be related to daily life, whereas conceptual explanations make them extremely intricate and abstract.

The ‘Brain Simulation We Live In’, made real to the high mental faculties,

is not the entire situation that presents to awareness

The visualising 2D ‘Screen of the Mind’

The tea cup in the video above demonstrates how this 2D ‘reality’ in the mind and in sensory perception can be interpreted, by analogy, in the spiritual psycho-philosophies as ‘an illusion‘ (a visual illusion), or as a ‘dream‘ (not being ‘awake‘ or ‘aware‘ of what is being represented this way).

Sapolky: we do this to ‘remember and evaluate’ – to survive  [see video above]

…but now for societal survival/success rather than for BioLife

The neurological ‘Brain Simulation We Live In’

The brain’s neocortex constructs this with patterns and movement, and this is computable, but his represents only the higher mind faculties, including turning sensations into emotional meaning.

The mind’s reality for the body or self to know in details, specifics & generalisations

is an integration of these.

Building the Fabric of Reality with parameters (see under the tab Theory)

More details on this process, which uses parameters of representation, in the archives section Perspectives>Theory>Fabric of reality

The Brain Simulation that is Real to the Mind as the only ‘Reality’, ‘world’ or universe

It is useful in many situations, but not all of them. There is no mystery in this cognitive phenomenon; it involves brain constructions, mind interpretations and body sensations limited to sensory ‘information’. Yet, geometrically, this is simply a limited perspective on what presents to awareness, a Re-Presentation, a geometric projection that constructs a changing timed-space by separating motion from the 3D world and then re-integrating it as time or change; but the result is not quite equivalent to what is being observed.

– section under construction –

Representations to work things out versus gauging the situation that actually presents

What presents to awareness is more than the representations. It can be apprehended ‘directly’ and modeled with the Rubber Sheet Geometry (non-measured shapes in shaping). See pages Geometry, and pages Atelier.

Ultimately, the human mind and neocortex brain have the extraordinary capacity to create abstract realities, turn them into stories, and ‘believe’ them. Not everyone can, though, and there are other less common mind-brain-body abilities.

The Perspectives Mapping method©

General Perspectives and parameters of representation were the subject of the first part of my PhD research (cognitive anthropology of collective, cultural frameworks of explanation, and description of experience). This led me to the method of Perspectives Mapping^©. The cartographies that this method produced left anomalies and an unexplained domain, which was brought to light in the second part of my research, through the Topologic Situation Modelling method^©.

The following articles are a more recent formulation of the first part of my research , now somewhat clarified by collecting the Parameters of Representation. This  brings to light how the common ways of framing, naming, measuring, and evaluating experience and explanations, are impairing the ability to detect what they do not re-present out of the situation that presents directly to observation or awareness — they limit and impair awareness of the entire situation. They also impede the ability to understand behaviours around limits in the human world and the Boundary parameter of topologic deployment in wild biology.

‘Sustainability’ is a good example; so is ‘Health’ (human, landscape, planet)

This essay was written to explain the difference between ‘sustainability’ and the principles used for the Foraging Station Experiment (e.g.  reduced disturbance and deformations).  ‘Sustainability’ is a good example of how perspectives of representation and the Up-/Ex- direction create a panoply of biased representations that are inconsistentand can never agree –  incoherent as a whole for the collective Store of Human Knowledge, and leaving the nagging question, ‘what IS sustainability’? The resulting mess of abstractions and models has not only impeded coherent local and global actions, and most importantly overall, actually doing something about not going too far for the planet, our species, and people’s resilience. It has also overshadowed the issue with reasoning based on a ‘System’ of wasting economy ruled by ‘legal persons’ that have not physical body (organisations, institutions…) and thrown into oblivion the lost grounding in nature and daily living at human/animal scale that drove the invention of the word ‘sustainable’ originally from physical ecology concerned for BioLife (not just physical or material systems). The PhD theoretical study demonstrated that the same process has occured for the notion of ‘Health’; ageing diseases also involve ‘sustainable’ care of the body’s BioLife over a lifetime.

• Sustainability (for BioLife) Vs Sustainable development                                           [pdf]

Perspectives Mapping: for people and researchers, and AI

Perspectival Mapping can detect bias, ‘place’ the perspectives relative to each other and detect what they do not represent – this helps de-polarising representations biased by perspective. It is also a semantic tool to translate knowledge from one field to another, based on the meaning of their abstractions rather than the specific patterns they describe that manifest in a particular field – this helps de-fragmening knowledge, and apply one fields’ findings or models to another field.

Parameters of Re-presentation of presenting situations

• Re-Presentation and non-oriented activity                                                               [pdf]
• List of parameters and modes of representation                                                      [pdf]
• Summary of parameters of representation                                                               [pdf]
• Primary: the generic Up-/Ex- direction                                                                      [pdf]
• Perspectives: as basic as intervals                                                                           [pdf] (how the categorical mind sees the world)
• Morphisms of representation and the non-oriented view                                          [pdf]

Relevant PhD thesis chapters that discuss parameters and perspectives (2008)

Ch4 – Perspectival observation                                            [pdf    181 KB]
Ch5 – Many Perspectives                                                     [pdf    246 KB]
Ch6 – Validity and Valuing                                                    [pdf    610 KB]
App B2– Representation Coginitive Experiment                  [pdf    413 KB]

All perspectives have a Domain of Definition or Validity or Application

Physical scientist learn early on that any mathematical function has a Domain of Definition.
In the humanities, however, few are aware that theories have a Domain of Application. The information used to define a theory depends on a certain context in which it applies, and outside of this domain, it simply does not apply, it is irrelevant.
In either case, this means that whichever statements are made about a situation are only true within a Domain of Validity.
Since the 1990’s, much work has gone into making social, medical, and psychological scientists aware of this and to teach them to state clearly their human assuptions (e.g. the white young healthy male framing of medical findings was very over-generalised in the 20th century). It is not yet very common to see a medical scientist stating their physical presuppositions about how a person’s physiology operates: it is usually assumed to operate ‘normally’, and therefore be ‘dysfunctional’ if it functions differently. The recent focus on people with neuro-atypical brains has opened neuroscience to this, but not yet physiology of the body.

One more step is required: the ability to formulate a researcher’s general state of deployment of  health and intellectual activity. Discerning this in research will allow to correlate the types of findings with the tools of observation (big-data level of population level information, machine technology  to reconstruct views at the nano level, classic instruments to observe at human scale, the observer’s own means of observation, sensory and mental), and produce maps of the domains of definition, application, validity, which may be organised using topologic deployment. Consequently to this, the actual biological sensing might no longer be invisible or made logically non-existent by numbers and words.

Domain of validity /definition /application, to avoid ‘personal’ evaluations of a person and their life

In practice, someone in a constant state of high activation does not apprehend a situation in the same way as someone living a quiet life in the country. Their bodies will not reat either in the same way, say to sensory stimulation or medication. This could help predict the dose-related effects of medication.

In daily life, this helps stoop assuming that others function and experience life necessarily in the same way because we  are ‘all human’. Not all humans live their life in the same state of deployment. If we did, would we distinguish ‘normal’ people form high achievers or sub-achievers? Topology also allows to stop using such an elitist, evaliuation-based view of people.