Cognitive Navigation of the Elements as Indicative Strategic Metaphors
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 17 Apr 2023
Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service
Engagement via Technomimicry with Global Entanglement of Earth, Air, Fire and Water
Introduction
14 Apr 2023 – Much is made of the possibility of being a part of community and of society more generally. Hence the many references to participation. The facilities of social media encourage this in many ways, as do esports. Being part of a family or group is a common aspiration. Nations may well aspire to being a part of the international community, irrespective of the extent to which its nature may be called into question (International Community as God or Sorcerer’s Apprentice? 2015)
These examples all suggest that the process of being a part of a larger context, as currently understood, is held to be adequate to the viability of a global society. Arguably this is far from being the case in an increasingly fragmented society. With “whole” as the complement to “part”, the viability of wholes of many kinds is widely challenged or suspect as totalitarian. This may well translate into the problematic experience of a person, and hence the widespread concern with the extent of the mental health crisis — and the challenge to any integrative processes and aspirations.
Rather than the elusive nature of a “whole” and the experience of participation in it, the possibility anticipated here is the sense of a “wave” as a better articulated complement to “part”. This follows from the distinctions between wave and particle in physics, most succinctly indicated by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Whilst identity may indeed be framed and understood through the particular, the question is how it might be more fruitfully comprehended as a wave.
The question is whether, as imagined, the shift in perspective is radical enough — if only as a means of reframing individual experience. As famously argued by the physicist Niels Bohr: We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough (1922). Irrespective of inter-personal or inter-group relations, the challenge is coming rapidly “to a head” — to coin a phrase — in relation to climate change and the environment. Is that primarily a challenge of “re-cognition”? Ironically any focus on “part” evokes recognition of the challenge to “partnership” in the present times.
Humans may indeed conceive themselves to be part of the environment in which they are embedded. The question is whether this understanding addresses the need for a transformation of that relationship, as separately argued with respect to radical cognitive engagement with environmental categories and disciplines (Existential Embodiment of Externalities, 2009). Ironically a case can be made for revisiting the framing offered by the classical elements of the environment — categories which have been so influential in the past: Earth, Air, Fire and Water (and later Aether).
Rather than being abstruse and obscure — as an intellectual abstraction — the argument here is that this shift is readily accessible, even immediately and familiarly so. Rather than understood as a radical change in a pattern of categories, it is a process of apprehending experience otherwise. Any framing by categories is then itself a direct inhibitor of that experience — or potentially so. The inhibition of this experiential mode is then to be understood as a misleading consequence of systematic labelling of the environment. Its features are thereby reified through the categories labelled in this way — and not otherwise. Even more problematic is the effort to achieve a form of closure by and within such a pattern of categories.
The insight has been expressed otherwise by the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the somewhat elusive experience of flow (Finding Flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life, 1996). Understood otherwise, the concern here is with psychosocial analogues to the widely recognized process of “achieving lift-off” in the light of well-recognized insights from helicopter development and the subsequent explosion of interest in practicalities of quadcopters and the like (Combining Clues to ‘Ascent’ and ‘Escape’, 2002).
The argument is inspired by the development of the familiar helicopter, and the more recent extremely rapid development of multi-rotor drones: tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters and octocopters. Some of these are now allegedly of great significance in military strategy in Ukraine (David Hambling, Small Quadcopters Rule The Battlefield In Ukraine, Forbes, 29 April 2022; Dan Sabbagh, ‘They’re starting to die’: fears Ukraine’s drone supremacy may soon be over, The Guardian, 10 April 2023; Jason Sherman, Drone-on-Drone Combat in Ukraine Marks a New Era of Aerial Warfare, Scientific American, 3 April 2023).
The question here is however whether and how the quality of thinking regarding multi-rotor drones offers insights into the development and viability of 2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold, 5-fold strategies, and the like — especially when the “five turnarounds” of the Club of Rome’s Earth4All initiative are deemed to be a key to the survival of humanity. It is however intriguing that drone development is also now a popular focus of hobbyists — in striking contrast to the contexts within which global strategies are now developed.
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