Wednesday, November 03, 2004
American and Canadian Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies activities
Working Notes
Jenni,
Your note is a clear expression of the two purposes that Tom and Pat Adi and I have set on. Our circles of collaborators are many. Nathan, for example is getting a Greenstone digital library system ready to house a digit Glass Bead Game infrastructure where the types of scholarly activities that I have talked about might occur.
We seek to extend an invitation to the community of scholars whose fields of inquiry have been about the cultural realities shaping the conflict that our government feels requires expenditures so large as to dwarf any reasonable social development activity one might imagine.
But this is to say that expenditures are not the only way to solve difficult problems. Sometimes the expenditure itself becomes the problem, the reason why the difficult problem must remain unsolved. Those who are funded develop dependencies on continuing funding. If the funding is to solve the problem, then a conflict arises. Institutions develop that depend on the existence of the problem as a means to justify the existence of the institution.
Education
for example, suffers from many problems.
I have talked about this at home all of your life, and you have heard the voice of Karl Pribram, Alex Zenkin, Fiona and Alex Citkin, Peter Kugler, Ray Bradley, Paul Werbos and many others as they helped me explore the notion that neuroscience requires a deeper and “complex” theory. This more complex theory has become a reality in the stratification concepts that my colleagues and I have developed.
Tom Adi’s work is important for several reasons. The first is that there is a software system that can show results having far greater in fidelity than any other existing system anywhere.
The new work that Adi and I are doing has the protential that we promised to the Intelligence Community as a means to increase the quality of systems like J-39 to the point where a detailed and high quality examination of the details of social discourse might be examined.
The complaints about unfairness in the funding evaluations are not simply a discussion of sour grapes. The discussion is about something that is real and which shapes science through the viewpoints of the common man about things like neuroscience. Churchland’s observations about the in-correctness of classical notions, regarding mind and awareness, are grounded in the difficulties that science has with current political and economic forces.
Science tells scientists that the world is not “rational” in the sense sought by the classical philosophers. Stratification theory, we feel, does explain why coherence is relative to location, ie to the individual, by showing that mental coherence is grounded in electromagnetic and quantum coherence that have location and thus are not universal.
The more complex social values must address cultural differences as real and legitimate. The religious fundamentalism that has arisen in the United States, as a political power, cannot easily overcome a naïve sense that one person is right about all things, and that anyone who feels differently is do be ignored, marginalized or killed.
Perhaps this is why the Founding Fathers talked about a separation of a specific governing religion, a simple belief system, from the political governance of our great American experiment.
Your suggestion is one of many voices that support the end goal of celebrating the diversity that is America. This diversity is not only a secular diversity but also a diversity where Buddhist, Muslims, Bahai, Christians, Jews, Hindus, those with Native American belief systems, and others can feel comfortable and non-threatened.
The digital Glass bead Game may be useful in facilitating this celebration. The founding committee thanks the young scholars for contributions, and I am grateful that your mom and I have been blessed with your presence in the world.