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Jan Krikke on Jean Gebser and the Chinese Perspective
2023-10-26T10:08:30Z
<p>Jan Krikke: /* Socio-cultural dimension */</p>
<hr />
<div>= Jean Gebser's blind spot: The Chinese “perspective” =<br />
<br />
=== Summary ===<br />
<br />
The German philosopher [[Jean Gebser]] (1905 – 1973) claimed that the invention of linear perspective in the early Renaissance (15th century) represented a new stage in the development of human consciousness. Humans became aware of space. Gebser further argued that Cubism represented the next shift in consciousness, with humans becoming aware of spacetime. Gebser overlooked the fact that the Chinese, in the 11th century, had already developed a “perspective” that integrated space and time. This essay looks at the implications of Gebser's oversight.<br />
<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
<br />
In 1949, Jean Gebser published the original German version of his influential book ''The Ever-Present Origin'' in which he identified five stages (or “structures”) in the evolution of human consciousness. The book influenced the American philosopher Ken Wilber, the founder of the Integral Movement, who also identified distinct phases in the development of consciousness. <br />
<br />
Gebser uses the history of the pictorial arts to illustrate the development of consciousness. Humans first drew two-dimensional drawings on rocks, then images that included the horizon, then pictures with structured space using linear perspective, and then, with Cubism, “four-dimensional” space that he referred to as “aperspectival.” <br />
<br />
<br />
{| class=wikitable<br />
|- style="vertical-align:top"<br />
! rowspan="2" |Structure<br />
! colspan="3" | 1. Space and Time Relationship<br />
|-<br />
| a) Dimensioning<br />
| b) Perspectivity<br />
| c) Emphasis<br />
|-<br />
| Archaic:<br/>("Primal man")<br />
| Zero-dimensional<br />
| None<br />
| Prespatial<br />Pretemporal<br />
|-<br />
| Magic:<br />(10 000 BCE)<br />
| One-dimensional<br />
| Pre-perspectival<br />
| Spaceless<br />Timeless<br />
|-<br />
| Mythical:<br />(2500 BCE)<br />
| Two-dimensional<br />
| Unperspectival<br />
| Spaceless<br />Natural temporicity<br />
|-<br />
| Mental:<br />(1500 CE)<br />
| Three-dimensional<br />
| Perspectival<br />
| Spatial<br />Abstract temporal<br />
|-<br />
| Integral:<br />(2000 CE)<br />
| Four-dimensional<br />
| Aperspectival<br />
| Space-free<br />Time-free<br />
|}<br />
'' 1 - Gebser's five structures linked to the awareness of time and space''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser associated the Mental structure with the invention of linear perspective. Developed in the early days of the Renaissance, linear perspective gave European artists for the first time a geometrical tool to create the illusion of a seamless, continuous 3D space on the two-dimensional picture plane. <br />
<br />
The key to the invention of linear perspective was the invention was the vanishing point, the imaginary point on the horizon where parallel lines meet. The vanishing point enabled the artist to create a “coherent” pictorial space. The space in the work of earlier artists, like the Italian master Giotto, was incoherent because it lacked the unifying vanishing point. <br />
<br />
Gebser called the invention of linear perspective a key moment not just in art. It was a reflection of evolving human consciousness. He wrote: <br />
<blockquote><br />
Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age [i.e. from the invention of perspective to the Modernist Revolution] the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the 'unperspectival' age [i.e. Middle Ages, Giotto]. <br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
While linear perspective reflected an awareness of space, Gebser argued that Cubism incorporated the factor of time in their work by depicting objects as if seen from multiple perspectives. This led to an awareness of the Fourth Dimension and what Gebser referred to as the “aperspectival.” In Gebser's words: <br />
<blockquote><br />
These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the [modernist] age of the dawning new consciousness as the “aperspectival” age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern [quantum] physics, but also by developments in the visual arts [Cubism] and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the 'new' (i.e. modernism].<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Optics ===<br />
<br />
Gebser's account of European art, and especially the modernist revolution, leaves several crucial gaps. The first one is the role of the Japanese woodblock print ''(Ukio-e)'' in kick-starting the modernist revolution. The Japanese print played a key role in moving the European pictorial arts away from its optical tradition. <br />
<br />
Traditional European art was based on optical principles that emerged in Greece over 2,000 years ago. Greek artists used ''claire-obscure'' (the optical effect of light and shadow) to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional picture plane. The Renaissance invention of linear perspective was a natural progression of this optical approach to the pictorial arts. <br />
<br />
Optical representation remained the norm in European painting until the 1860s, when artists in France discovered the Japanese woodblock print. Struck by the visual immediacy of the Japanese prints, modernist pioneers like Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh moved away from optical representation, starting with the elimination of claire-obscure. <br />
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[[File:2_Japanese-print.jpg|none|800px]]<br />
''2 - Japanese print (Ukio-e) and Édouard Manet's The Flute Player''<br />
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Having eliminated the optical effect of light and shadow from their painting, the modernist pioneers, later known as the Impressionists, “deconstructed” linear perspective. Trying to duplicate the visual immediacy of the Japanese print, they suppressed or eliminated the “suction effect” created by the vanishing point, as can be seen in landscapes by Van Gogh and Cezanne.<br />
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[[File:3_no-suction.png|none|800px]]<br />
''3 - Van Gogh and Cezanne suppressing the suction effect of the vanishing point''<br />
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<br />
Cezanne went a step further in his deconstruction of linear perspective. In his ''Still Life with Basket'', he brought objects in the background forward to the picture plane by making them larger. Moreover, he depicted the objects in the painting as if seen from different vantage points. A diagram by art historian Erle Loran shows that Cezanne integrated multiple vantage points in a single image. <br />
<br />
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[[File:4_Cezanne.jpg|600px|border|none]]<br />
''4 - Cezanne combined objects seen from different vantage points in a single image (diagram © Erle Loran)''<br />
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<br />
Cezanne's work inspired Picasso to take the deconstruction of linear perspective a step further. While Cezanne integrated multiple vantage points of objects in a single image, Picasso integrated multiple vantage points of an object in a single form. This resulted in the “distorted” portraits that became a hallmark of Cubism. <br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:5_Picasso.jpg|600px|none]]<br />
''5 - Picasso combined different vantage points of objects in a single form''<br />
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Like Cezanne before him, Picasso offered no explanation or theory for his pictorial experiments and left it to the critics to interpret his work. Prominent art critic Guillaume Apollinaire praised Cubism for its attempt “to get rid of perspective, of that miserable tricky perspective, of that fourth dimension in reverse, of that infallible device for making all things shrink [i.e. the vanishing point].” <br />
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In his essay ''The Cubist Painters'' (Les Peintres Cubistes), published in 1913, Apollinaire was the first to make a connection between the fragmented, multi-perspective nature of Cubist art and Einstein's theory of relativity and the so-called fourth dimension. His interpretation was taken over by other writers, including Gebser. <br />
<br />
Gebser, who was part of Picasso's circle in Paris, saw Picasso's work as an expression of the fourth dimension, a notion popularized by mathematician Charles Howard Hinton in the late 19th century. Hinton, who also coined the term hyperspace, argued the fourth dimension “exists as a transcendental yet material space accessible to both the mind and the physical senses.” <br />
<br />
After Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the term space-time largely replaced the notion of the fourth dimension, but Gebser stuck with the latter. He linked it to different structures in the evolution of human consciousness and a new way of understanding the world. He wrote:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
But whereas the preoccupation of the Early Renaissance was with the concretion of space, our epoch is concerned with the concretion of time. And our fundamental point of departure, the attempt to concretize time and thus realize and become conscious of the fourth dimension, furnishes a means whereby we may gain an all-encompassing perception and knowledge of our epoch.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Architects to the rescue ===<br />
<br />
In the second decade of the 20th century, the modernist revolution in architecture gathered steam. Artist-cum-architects from the Russian Supremacist movement, the German Bauhaus, and the Dutch ''De Stijl'' movement pioneered the development of a “machine aesthetic” which would lead them to embrace axonometry. <br />
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[[File:6_DeStijl.jpg|border|600px|none]]<br />
''6 - Axonometric drawing of De Stijl architecture, Gerrit Rietveld (drawing © Diego Inzunza)''<br />
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The modernist architects were unfamiliar with the Chinese origin of axonometry but they found it ideal for their rendering their “blueprints” of a modern architecture suitable for the industrial era. In an exhibit in Paris in 1924, De Stijl's co-founder Theo van Doesburg used axonometry for his proto-modern architecture. The exhibit drew international attention and led to the European embrace of axonometry. <br />
<br />
Today, axonometry is used by every architect, designer, and engineer the world over. It is a key feature of computer-aided design systems. All structures of any consequence built in the world today start their lives as axonometry projections.<br />
<br />
Given that Gebser was intimately familiar with the developments in art and science, it is remarkable that he was unfamiliar with or didn't recognize the significance of axonometry. Alas, he was not alone. It is possible to read 100 accounts of the modernist revolution without finding a single reference to axonometry. <br />
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Axonometry, known in Chinese as ''dengjiao toushi'' (“equal-angle see-though”) emerged from Chinese architecture and became part of Chinese painting in the 10th century. Chinese artists used the device in the so-called hand scroll painting, a pictorial format that takes the viewer through a pictorial narrative in space and time. <br />
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[[File:7_Chinese-hand-scroll.png|800px|none]]<br />
''7 - Chinese hand scroll, a pictorial synthesis of space and time''<br />
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Rather than a sequence of separate images, the hand scroll is a continuous, seamless image. It explains why the Chinese artists used axonometry. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry does not assume a fixed vantage point. The Japanese ''Ukio-e'' masters became masters in exploiting the graphical possibilities of axonometry.<br />
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[[File:8_Japanese-print.jpg|800px|none]]<br />
''8 - Japanese print in axonometric projection''<br />
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Axonometry was introduced to the West in the 18th century, when Jesuits returning from China brought illustrations featuring axonometry back to Europe. The device was used for technical drawings, such as ballistic calculations, but its aesthetic quality was not recognized until the 1920s, when the Bauhaus and De Stijl embraced axonometry. <br />
<br />
In 1932, the American architect Claude Bradgon, in his book The Frozen Fountain, gave the first description of the aesthetic quality of axonometry. Bragdon seemed to anticipate Gebser's notion of the “aperspectival” - the view in which the observer sees things are they are rather than as they appear to our eyes. Referring to the isometric version of axonometry, Bragdon wrote: <br />
<blockquote><br />
Isometric perspective, less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image — the thing seen by the mind's eye.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Long before Einstein integrated space and time in physics, the Chinese had integrated space and time aesthetically. Axonometry has roots in China's ancient yin-yang classification system. The early Chinese spoke of ''Yu'', “space-universe,” and ''Zhou'', “time-universe.” A little more than 2000 years ago, these words began to appear together: ''Yu-Zhou''. ''Yu'' is yin, and ''Zhou'' is yang. ''Yu-Zhou'' is the conceptual basis of axonometry.<br />
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[[File:9_origin-of-axonometry.png|600px|border|none]]<br />
''9 - Origin of axonometry and its development as a global standard''<br />
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<br />
The notion of space plays a key role in Gebser's work, but he is not always clear on its meaning. Space means different things to astronomers, architects, and quantum physicists. Moreover, Gebser's claim that the invention of linear perspective led to an increasing awareness of space is questionable at best.<br />
<br />
European philosophers like Immanuel Kant theorized about space in the 18th century, but up to the early 20th century, space was rarely discussed in aesthetic terms. Modernist architects rather than painters took the lead in defining space. They discussed space as if they had discovered a new medium. <br />
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In 1912, the noted architectural theorist Rudolph Schindler wrote: “The architect has finally discovered the medium of his art: SPACE.” De Stijl co-founder Theo van Doesburg wrote in 1916: “The foundation of buildings is space. Hence the visual consciousness of the architect ought to be based on the Idea of Space.” <br />
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[[File:10_KatsuraPalace.png|800px|none]]<br />
''10 - Japan's Katsura Palace and Frank Lloyd Wright's proto-modern architecture''<br />
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Frank Lloyd Wright, the grandfather of modern architecture, was strongly influenced by Japanese architecture, which he recognizes as an art of space. His apprentice Edgar Tafel recalled Wright saying: <br />
<blockquote><br />
The Japanese house, with its sliding screens, gives a unique sense of movable space. With each rearrangement of the screens, we become aware of the ‘shape of the space’, or, like the Japanese print, of merely an interruption of space, a moment in space. Another dimension, he called it. Imagine the surprise he experienced when, by chance, he came across a quotation from Laozi [Lao Tzu]: ‘The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in.’<br />
</blockquote><br />
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The latter is a liberal interpretation of Lao Tzu's comment on space, but it captures the essence of the idea. Lao Tzu said: “Though clay is used to form a vase, in what there isn't lies its use. Thus, by using what there is, one uses what there isn't.”<br />
<br />
=== Integral perspectives ===<br />
<br />
Gebser was one of the many influences on Ken Wilber, the American philosopher who developed a framework that integrates philosophy, physics, psychology, and spirituality. Wilber's theory complemented Spiral Dynamics (SD), a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies. The two models are integrated in SDi (Spiral Dynamics Integral). <br />
<br />
Like Gebser, Wilber identified distinct stages in the evolution of human consciousness. While Gebser identified five stages or structures, Wilber ultimately identified eleven different stages, including the Gebser-inspired “integral-aperspectival” stage. <br />
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[[File:11_nine-stages.jpg|600px|none]]<br />
''11 - The nine stages of consciousness in the Spiral Dynamics Integral model''<br />
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<br />
Wilber's model has been widely applied in different disciplines and has influenced many in the fields of psychology, sociology, and behavioral science. But like Gebser's model, it cannot be mapped to non-Western cultures without some reservation. <br />
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The structures and stages identified by Gebser and Wilber ostensibly apply to both individuals and entire countries and cultures. But when we look at the attributes given to the stages, they reflect a Western worldview and value system. In the SDi model, the Rational Self is associated with capitalist democracies and the Sensitive Self is associated with social democracies. <br />
<br />
Politically and socially, the SDi model would classify China and most other countries without representative democracy as Rule/Role Self. China is commonly seen as fitting the profile of an authoritarian country. But China also has attributes associated with the Sensitive Self, among them consensus and an emphasis on group needs. They are qualities we typically do not associate with representative democracies like the US or India. <br />
<br />
A Chinese version of the Integral model would have a different value system and a different emphasis. Ethics and reciprocity would be high on the list. They reflect China's Confucian roots. Confucianism encourages personal development, but individual growth does not relieve the individual from reciprocity, which is an ethical dimension of yin and yang. <br />
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Chinese ethics is unique because of its close relationship with aesthetics. It is rooted in a simple, humanistic truth: Whatever is beautiful, graceful, or harmonious cannot be bad.<br />
<br />
The American art historian George Rowley was the first scholar to note the importance of aesthetics in the Chinese worldview. In his magnificent book ''Principles of Chinese Painting'', Rowley compared the world views of India, Europe, and China. He wrote: <br />
<blockquote><br />
Each culture seems to have had a special bent. Reason and corporeal beauty were the fortes of Greek art. The Hindus had such an urge toward religion that the religious symbol vies with the natural sensuousness of their tropical forms. <br />
<br />
Everywhere in the art of Western Europe the importance of the individual person and his ingenuity in handling material and technical problems were paramount. In each case dominant cultural traits determined the character of the art. <br />
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What was dominant in China? Here we meet a unique and surprising answer. The Chinese way of looking at life was not primarily through religion, or philosophy, or science, but through art. All their other activities seem to have been colored by their artistic sensitivity.<br />
<br />
Instead of religion, the Chinese preferred the art of living in the world; instead of rationalization, they indulged in poetic and imaginative thinking; and instead of science, they pursued the fantasies of astrology, alchemy, geomancy and fortune-telling.<br />
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If these observations seem to be unduly imaginative, consider the painting in its own right. Chinese painting never became the handmade of religion except during the influence of Buddhism, a foreign religion; it avoided the pitfalls of reason, whether the Greek beauty of mathematical proportions or the modern limitations of pure abstracts; it escaped the glorification of the personal ego as exemplified by expressionism, romanticism, or surrealism…<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Socio-cultural dimension ===<br />
<br />
Jean Gebser enriched the debate on the evolution of human consciousness and he inspired others to explore this complex issue. But his failure to recognize the East Asian role in the modernist revolution makes his account of art history incomplete. This in turn led him to overlook the wider socio-cultural dimension of the modernist revolution. <br />
<br />
We saw that China, through the mediation of Japan, played a seminal role in the revolution in Western art and architecture. The Japanese print inspired European artists to move away from optical representation. As a result, the modern painting was no longer a copy of optical, material reality. It became a reality ''“an sich”'' (a thing in itself), most famously and exemplary in Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Starry Night.<br />
<br />
Similarly, Frank Lloyd Wright, inspired by Japanese architecture, moved Western architecture away from its sculptural aesthetics toward an architecture based on space. Wright's Japan-inspired architecture became a “blueprint” for a machine aesthetic based on “structural” rather than on sculptural principles. <br />
<br />
Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright were among the few modernists to acknowledge Japan's role in the modernist revolution. Van Gogh copied several Japanese prints in oil and canvas and told his sister to look at Japanese prints if she wanted to understand the new direction in European art. Wright argued that the Japanese print was “at the root of all this so-called modernism. Strangely unnoticed, uncredited.”<br />
<br />
De Stijl co-founder Theo Van Doesburg, who popularized axonometry in the West, understood the implications of the Eastern role in the modernist revolution on yet another level. In his paper ''The New Style in Art'' (1916), Van Doesburg referred to the “immateriality” of modern art, writing:<br />
<blockquote><br />
In fact, what is happening is nothing but the shifting of an Eastern notion of Art into a Western notion. Today this is possible, now that materialism has annulled itself.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:12_immaterial-art.jpg|600px|none]]<br />
''12 - “Immaterial art” from De Stijl's Piet Mondriaan; a dynamic equilibrium''<br />
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More than any other modernist, Van Doesburg understood the ''zeitgeist'' of the era. This is most apparent in his 1922 paper entitled ''The Will to Style: The New Form-Expression of Life, Art, and Technology'', arguably the most insightful document of the modernist revolution.<br />
<br />
Van Doesburg argued the problems facing Europe in the aftermath of WWI required a collective response. It was the task of artists, architects, and designers to develop a human-centric machine aesthetics that could be used to build houses, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure using industrial methods. <br />
<br />
In ''The Will to Style'', Van Doesburg described the broader cultural struggle facing Europe and how it should be approached. He saw the modernist revolution as part of a larger socio-cultural revolution to find a new equilibrium. While Van Doesburg never referred to China, the method he proposed echoed the Chinese principle of reconciling yin-yang opposites. He wrote:<br />
<blockquote><br />
What then is the nature of this struggle which is not only ongoing in art, science, philosophy, and religion but which is also manifested in our daily life as a struggle for a spiritual and material existence? Every work of art, be it contemporary or from the past, offers its answer. <br />
<br />
This struggle, which is rooted in the structure of life, is a struggle of two polar opposite forces, which we may call Nature and Spirit, or the female and the male principle, the negative and the positive, the static and the dynamic, the horizontal and the vertical—they are the unchanging elements on which the contradiction of our life is founded, and which manifest themselves in dynamic change. <br />
<br />
The end of this struggle, the leveling of these extremes, the neutralizing of this polarity, is the content of life and is also the basic object of art. This balancing, which is expressed in art as harmony or vital tranquility, is the criterion for the essential meaning of any work of art.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Van Doesburg's views are as topical today as they were 100 years ago. Our time calls for reconciling opposites in all their manifestations: idealism and realism, human and nature, rights and obligations; individualism and collectivism, freedom and responsibility, competition and collaboration. Reconciling opposites reduces frictional loss for all.<br />
<br />
=== Conclusion ===<br />
<br />
The question remains why Gebser, like Wilber, overlooked the fact that China had developed axonometry, a projection system that conceptually anticipated the “aperspectival”. A possible explanation is Gebser's focus on Picasso, whose name he mentions more than any other artist. <br />
<br />
Gebser used the word perspective both literally and figuratively. The word perspective has its roots in the Latin ''perspectus'', the past particle of which is ''perspicere'' (inspect, look through, look closely at). Picasso's incorporation of multiple “perspectives” in his work could be the germinating idea of Gebser's notion of the aperspectival.<br />
<br />
Gebser equated the aperspectival with the Fourth Dimension, a term that appears nearly 200 times in his book. Remarkably, he does not mention the name of Charles Howard Hinton, the 19th-century mathematician who introduced the concept of the fourth dimension in his 1880 book ''A New Era of Thought''. <br />
<br />
Hinton, also a writer of science fiction, discussed the idea of “higher-dimensional spaces” beyond the usual three-dimensional space. His writings on the fourth dimension were influential in mathematical and philosophical circles. Hinton invented the so-called tesseract to visualize the fourth dimension. Notably, the tesseract is based on an axonometric projection.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:13_Hinton.png|600px|none]]<br />
''13 - Hinton's notion of the fourth dimension, illustrated with a tesseract''<br />
<br />
<br />
Ken Wilber, who adopted Gebser's notion of the aperspectival, also used the term perspective in a literal and figurative sense. His concept of the “aperspectival” refers to a way of understanding reality that is not limited by a single point of view, belief system, or cultural context. It implies a more comprehensive or holistic perspective that integrates multiple viewpoints and perspectives.<br />
<br />
It is not surprising that Wilber overlooked axonometry. He was more concerned with psychology and his views of art, like Gebser's, were largely informed by the Western intellectual tradition. <br />
<br />
More difficult to explain is why Frank Lloyd Wright initially failed to recognize axonometry. Wright had a large collection of Japanese prints, many of which featured axonometric projections. He visited Japan on several occasions and worked in Japan. He built one of Japan's first “Western” hotels. <br />
<br />
Moreover, axonometry was ideal for Wright's innovative architecture. Traditional Western architecture was designed from the outside inward. Technical drawings consisted of two parts: the elevation (the façade) and the floor plan. Wright designed homes from the inside out. He started with the floor plan (the interior space), which determined the shape of the house. <br />
<br />
An axonometric drawing can capture both elevation and the floor plan in a single drawing and true to scale. A conceptual drawing can be used to produce a technical drawing. <br />
<br />
Wright also should have been familiar with William Farish, the British scientist who in the early 19th century invented isometry, a technical projection system “of equal measures” that gave axonometry a geometrical basis. Farish responded to the Industrial Revolution, which required a projection system that provided exact measurement, without the optical distortion of linear perspective. <br />
<br />
In isometric projections, the height, width, and depth of objects are projected as they are, rather than as they appear to the eye. Moving the axis of isometry by 45 degrees results in axonometric projection (see the tesseract above). <br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:14_Farish.jpg|600px|none]]<br />
''14 - Isometric projection from William Farish ''<br />
<br />
<br />
By the early 20th century, axonometry had become part of the curriculum of most architectural training courses in Europe. Dutch architect Cornelis van Eesteren, who produced the axonometric drawings for the 1924 De Stijl exhibit in Paris, confirmed to this author that he learned about axonometry during his training as an architect. Van Eesteren, too, was unfamiliar with its Chinese origin. <br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:15_Lissitsky.png|600px|none]]<br />
''15 - Axonometry in “Proun” series of Russian artist El Lissitsky''<br />
<br />
<br />
While axonometry resembles Gebser's aperspectival notion, it is not “perspectival” in Gebser's sense of the word. Rather, it breaks through the vanishing point into boundless space. As George Rowley explained, <br />
<blockquote><br />
We [the West] restricted space to a single vista as though seen through an open door; they [the Chinese] suggested the unlimited space of nature as though they had stepped through that door and had known the breath-taking experience of space extending in every direction and infinitely into the sky.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
== More Information ==<br />
* [[Jean Gebser]]<br />
* [[Jan Krikke]]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Cybernetics_Valuable_to_the_Commons_and_for_Understanding_AI&diff=110739
Cybernetics Valuable to the Commons and for Understanding AI
2017-12-19T09:33:21Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Cybernetics, the basis of AI, is based on a three-step method that can be applied to nearly every domain and to every issue confronting the world todayhe world today</p>
<hr />
<div>Cybernetics has been overshadowed by artificial intelligence in recent years, but the value of its core method remains valuable for nearly every conceivable domain - including the Commons and other fields that define our era. A brief history of cybernetics can also shed light on what AI can and cannot do and remove some of the many misunderstandings about AI. <br />
<br />
In 1948, American scientist Norbert Wiener published his landmark book 'Cybernetics, or the control and communication in the animal and the machine.' The word Cybernetics is derived from the Greek cybernḗtēs, meaning steersman. ‘Control and communications in the animal and the machine’ refers to the discovery by neurophysiology that minuscule electrical impulses, alternating between ‘on’ and ‘off’, control neurophysiological bodies. It was the primary reason why Wiener and his team opted for binary rather than analog computing.<br />
<br />
At the start of the Second World War, the US government tasked Wiener to develop computers with unrivaled speed and accuracy. The US military required high-speed calculations for breaking the enemy code, calculating ballistic tables, and for anti-aircraft gun sight predictor mechanisms. <br />
<br />
Transdisciplinary<br />
<br />
Cybernetics was transdisciplinary by birth. In the introduction of his book, Wiener described his collaboration with Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth, a neurophysiologist at Harvard Medical School. ‘For many years Dr. Rosenblueth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man’s land between the various established fields. Since [binary code inventor Gottfried] Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his days. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower.’<br />
<br />
Mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, neurophysiology, systems theory - the list of scientific disciplines that stood at the cradle of cybernetics is a long one. But the basic principle is simple. Cybernetics is the control and self-regulation of a given electrical system and relies on the concept of feedback. The word ‘feedback’ was coined by James Clerk Maxwell, the father of electromagnetic theory. Feedback involves the dual principle of ‘pre-set state’ and ‘actual state’. The pre-set state is the state set by the user; the actual state refers to the deviation of the preset state. <br />
<br />
A textbook example of feedback and its use in cybernetics is the auto-pilot used in today's aircraft, is one of the many products of cybernetics. Prior to the flight, the navigator programs the autopilot the fly the aircraft from A to B. The onboard computer takes into account the payload, the fuel, the expected weather conditions and many other variables. Together they constitute the preset state. Once in flight, the auto-pilot constantly checks the actual state (position) of the aircraft and compares it to the preset state programmed by the navigator. <br />
<br />
The onboard computer operates with Boolean IF/THEN logic to assure that the actual state of the aircraft returns to the preset state. IF the computer is pushed off-course by strong side-winds, THEN the ailerons (rectangular flaps at the back of the wing) will move to initiate a course correction. IF it encounters strong headwinds, THEN the engines will increase its thrust to keep the aircraft on schedule. IF the aircraft is low on fuel, THEN the onboard computer will maintain current speed to preserve fuel. <br />
<br />
Intent<br />
<br />
The automatic pilot illustrates that the cybernetic method is based on a three-step model: Plan, Quantify, and Steer. Plan defined the aim, purpose of course; Quantify defined the resources involved or required to execute the plan; and Steer is the operating principle to reach the target within the defined parameters. This three-step approach of cybernetics is used in many things we take for granted today, from the thermostat in our homes to automobile navigation systems. It can also be applied to any other domain, from city planning to climate change and poverty reduction. The key is reliable data so we can accurately define the second step - Quantify. <br />
<br />
But the greatest value of the cybernetic method arguably is the first step: Plan. It requires us to formulate our aims within realistic parameters. It requires us to set priority and, most importantly, define our intent. What is it that we are trying to achieve? This, in turn, touches on ethics, morality and, as some may say, spirituality. <br />
<br />
Artificial Intelligence has obscured this key lesson of cybernetics - a plan based on intent. AI differs from cybernetics only in that it was expanded to include the concept of self-learning. The concept of self-learning could have been incorporated in cybernetics, and the field could have been called second-generation cybernetics. It would have avoided much confusion about the notion of intelligence. If intelligence is defined as an ability to solve logical problems, AI is not much more than a sophisticated Boolean algorithm. And if social and emotional intelligence are included, AI must take cultural differences into account. Cybernetics never faced this dilemma because it had a clear three-step method.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110736
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-18T02:04:50Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
<br />
=Discussion=<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke:<br />
<br />
The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
'''Converging analog and digital''' <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
'''Purpose''' <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but reflect popular thought about the issue - see sources below.<br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
=More information=<br />
<br />
'''Sources:''' <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing - Columbia University<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Technology]]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110709
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-17T09:22:05Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Can the analog-digital dichotomy define the limits of AI? This is a brief survey on the current state of the debate.</p>
<hr />
<div>The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
'''Converging analog and digital''' <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
'''Purpose''' <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but reflect popular thought about the issue - see sources below. Her <br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
'''Sources:''' <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing - Columbia University<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110708
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-17T09:19:59Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Can the analog-digital dichotomy define the limits of AI? This is a brief survey on the current state of the debate.</p>
<hr />
<div>The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
'''Converging analog and digital''' <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
'''Purpose''' <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but reflect popular thought about the issue - see sources below. Her <br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
'''Sources:''' <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing - Columbia University<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110707
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-17T08:58:49Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Can analog/digital divide define limits of AI? This is a brief, but not complete, survey in the state of the debate.</p>
<hr />
<div>The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
Converging analog and digital <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
Purpose <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but reflects popular thought about the issue:<br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
Sources: <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital Is life analog or digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm Being Analog - Carol Wilder]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110706
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-17T08:50:22Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Analog-digital divide may shed light on limits of AI</p>
<hr />
<div>The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
Converging analog and digital <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
Purpose <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but probably reflects popular thought about the issue:<br />
<br />
'''ANALOG DIGITAL'''<br />
Body Mind<br />
Hand Finger<br />
Female Male<br />
Qualitative Quantitative<br />
Space Time<br />
Atoms Bits<br />
Icon Explanation<br />
Likeness Name<br />
Nonverbal Verbal<br />
Process Product<br />
Weeds Flowers<br />
Marijuana Cocaine<br />
Harley Kawasaki<br />
65 Mustang 97 Acura<br />
Gear Switches<br />
Mime Monologue<br />
Rolodex Database<br />
Gears Switches<br />
Right Brain Left Brain<br />
Plato Aristotle<br />
GUI UNIX<br />
Actual Virtual<br />
Actual Virtual<br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
Sources: <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital Is life analog or digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm Being Analog - Carol Wilder]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110705
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-17T08:44:14Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Can the analog-digital dichotomy define the limits of AI?</p>
<hr />
<div>The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance systems. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies. <br />
<br />
Over the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40,000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40,000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons which operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture 'Are Brains Analogue or Digital', explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson points at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. He adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
Converging analog and digital <br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equations performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes. <br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer. <br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
Purpose <br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper 'Being Analog'. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. The answers ranged from the whimsical to the profound but probably reflects popular thought about the issue:<br />
<br />
ANALOG DIGITAL<br />
Body Mind<br />
Hand Finger<br />
Female Male<br />
Qualitative Quantitative<br />
Space Time<br />
Atoms Bits<br />
Icon Explanation<br />
Likeness Name<br />
Nonverbal Verbal<br />
Process Product<br />
Weeds Flowers<br />
Marijuana Cocaine<br />
Harley Kawasaki<br />
65 Mustang 97 Acura<br />
Gear Switches<br />
Mime Monologue<br />
Rolodex Database<br />
Gears Switches<br />
Right Brain Left Brain<br />
Plato Aristotle<br />
GUI UNIX<br />
Actual Virtual<br />
Night Day<br />
Actual Virtual<br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities: psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose. <br />
<br />
Sources: <br />
<br />
Is life analog or digital - Freeman Dyson<br />
[http://%5Bhttps://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-is-life-analog-or-digital Is life analog or digital?] <br />
<br />
Back to analog computing<br />
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/back-to-analog-computing-columbia-researchers-merge-analog-and-digital-computing-on-a-single-chip/ Back to analog cumputing]<br />
<br />
Being Analog - Carol Wilder<br />
[http://cat4chat.narod.ru/wilder_analog.htm Being Analog - Carol Wilder]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tackling_the_Analog-Digital_Divide_as_AI%27s_Greatest_Challenge&diff=110704
Tackling the Analog-Digital Divide as AI's Greatest Challenge
2017-12-16T16:07:40Z
<p>Jan Krikke: The analog-digital dichotony may define the limits of AI in its current (binary) iteration</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
The digital revolution heralded the virtual end of analog computers. The use of analog systems has since been confined to highly specialist areas like inertial guidance system. But analog is making a come-back. Digital processors have become smaller and hotter and the limits to ever faster speed and performance are coming in sight. Moreover, digital computers have limits when it comes to processing wave-like analog continuous phenomenon we find in biology - and most crucially in the brain. Scientists are now trying to find ways to combine analog and digital in hybrid chips and other technologies.<br />
<br />
In the past 40 years, digitization has become the norm. Nearly all media, the Internet and nearly all industrial processes today are digital, courtesy of high-powered processors and sophisticated algorithms. The process is of digitizing is as easy as it is ingenious. A textbook example is "digital music." The sound wave is sampled more than 40.000 times a second. Each sample is given a binary number and the numbers are written to a storage device. An audio system reads the binary strings and converts the string back into an analog sound wave. A sampling rate of 40.000 times a second is high, largely obscures the missing information in the analog-digital conversion, but it still is discrete rather than continuous. <br />
<br />
In biology and other more sophisticated processes, this missing information can be decisive. The human brain, perhaps the most complex of all living organisms, is still not fully understood. The brain works with voltages, which are analog, while firing neurons operate on the binary principle of on and off, firing and non-firing. The noted mathematician Freeman Dyson, in his 2014 lecture Are Brains Analogue or Digital, explained the complexities of understanding brain functions like memory. <br />
<br />
"It seems likely that memories are recorded in variations of the strengths of synapses connecting the billions of neurons in the brain with one another. But we do not know how the strengths of synapses are varied. It could well turn out that the processing of information in our brains is partly digital and partly analog. If we are partly analog, the downloading of a human consciousness into a digital computer may involve a certain loss of our finer feelings and qualities." <br />
<br />
Professor Dyson point at a third possibility: The processing of information in our brains is done with quantum processes, and the brain is the biological equivalent of a quantum computer. By he adds this is speculation: "Quantum computers are possible in theory and are theoretically more powerful than digital computers. But we don't yet know how to build a quantum computer, and we have no evidence that anything resembling a quantum computer exists in our brains. Whether a universal quantum computer can efficiently simulate a physical system is an unresolved problem in physics." <br />
<br />
Converging analog and digital<br />
<br />
The intricacies of the brain exist on the cellular and quantum level and are governed by electrical voltage variations. We can safely assume that variations in one part of the brain instantaneously impact other parts of the brain, as well as the rest of the body. Digitizing such quantum-level variations, no matter how high the sampling rate, results in loss of information. Moreover, converting digitized data to analog output requires massively complex equation performed in real time, a special challenge in simulating biological processes. Analog computing directly solves ordinary differential equations that are at the heart of continuous (wave-like) processes.<br />
<br />
Scientists are attacking the problem in various ways. Yipeng Huang, a computer architecture engineer at Columbia University, developed a chip architecture conceived as a digital host with an analog accelerator. He points out that computations that are more efficiently done through analog computing get handed off by the host to the analog accelerator. In other words, the chip interleaves analog and digital processing within a single problem, applying each method according to what it does best. The high performance of the analog computing speeds the computation by skipping initial iterations and the incremental digital approach zeroes in on the most accurate answer.<br />
<br />
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Dartmouth College presented a paper on a new analog compiler that could help to enable simulation of whole organs and even organisms. The compiler takes as input differential equations and translates them into voltages and current flows across an analog chip. The researcher used an analog chip design from electronics engineer Rahul Sarpeshkar to test their compiler on five sets of differential equations commonly used in biological research. Sarpeshkar said in an MIT news release. “With a few transistors, cytomorphic (cell-resembling) analog circuits can solve complicated differential equations — including the effects of noise — that would take millions of digital transistors and millions of digital clock cycles,” <br />
<br />
Current attempts to integrate analog and digital processes are primarily aimed at improving and speeding up complex equations required for analog processes. The issue does not seem to concern AI experts and the Singularity community who believe science will develop non-biological intelligence that will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence in a few decades. They point at the exponential growth in the power of computers and believe reverse-engineering of the human brain is possible with sufficient computing power. Only time will tell whether infinite binary computing speed can sufficiently compensate for the "missing information" of analog processes in creating artificial human-like intelligence. <br />
<br />
Purpose<br />
<br />
The debate on the analog-digital divide has a surprisingly long history, not only in technical differences but also on the intuitive and theoretical level. It has been addressed by Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gregory Bateson. Carol Wilder, professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York, discussed the aesthetic dimension of the analog-digital issue in her paper Being Analog. She wrote: "It has become apparent that analog/digital carry both precise meanings at the level of physiological, chemical, and electrical processes and broadly metaphorical meanings when applied to human communication and behavior." Wilders conducted an informal survey asking students what they identified with analog and digital phenomena. <br />
<br />
The analog-digital debate serves to remind us that predictions about the birth of the first humanoid are premature. Assuming it is desirable, relying only on computing may not be the best strategy. AI could do well to adopt the method used by Norbert Wiener when he developed Cybernetics: an interdisciplinary approach. It could include experts from the field of physics, biology, macrophysics as well as from the humanities, psychology, philosophy, epistemology and specialists in meditation and other spiritual practices. A meeting of such minds could not only help to separate fact from fiction, but also give direction and purpose.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109980
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-18T04:35:58Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
<br />
<br />
=Text=<br />
<br />
By Jan Krikke:<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalence in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.'' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear or “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is supported by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein to provide a rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, who ostensibly [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gino-Severini "synthesized"] Cubism and Futurism, admitted in his autobiography Life of a Painter (1946) that the modernists merely repeated what they heard in cafes and that no one really understood the scientific theories. As we will see below, Geber's claim that his view is supported by the visual arts is tendentious.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies it to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the early explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a woman as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic incongruity'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapses the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yves-Alain Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Intelligence]]</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tao_versus_Transcendentalism&diff=109975
Tao versus Transcendentalism
2017-09-17T06:58:41Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
This short essay tries to explain why China rather than India is likely to be the world’s next most influential nation. Various economic, social and ideological factors may be at play, but we should start with the “great divide” between China and India: China imported Buddhism but India did not import the Chinese notion of Tao.<br />
<br />
“Eastern” thought is varied and complex. But when discussing Tao, the sequence and context are unambiguous: First there was Tao, then the I Ching, then Tao-inspired Confucianism, then Buddhism, and then the Taoist religion, instituted by Chinese thinkers concerned the Chinese would lose sight of Tao. <br />
<br />
'''Binary universe'''<br />
<br />
Lao Tzu, presumed author of the Tao Teh Ching, explained the nature of Tao more than 2000 years ago: "There was something unmoving, unchanging, all-pervading, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of Tao.” Lao Tzu admits this “something” is unknowable and he doesn’t project vistas of the transcendental found in Indian religions. But he does point at Tao’s “constituent parts” – Heaven and Earth. <br />
<br />
Heaven and Earth is code for the binary opposites the Chinese identified as being at the heart of the universe, and by extension human nature. They codified this binary universe with the eight trigrams denoting gradation of generic classes of Heaven (“plus”) and Earth (“minus”). The eight trigrams formed the basis of the I Ching.<br />
<br />
Ancient Chinese sages made it an art, if not a science, to identify every conceivable opposite in nature, both concrete and abstract. They reasoned that nature being a binary phenomenon they would do well to apply this very same principle to their everyday lives in order to “insert” themselves in the binary universe with the least amount of friction.<br />
<br />
'''Qi and Ki'''<br />
<br />
Lao Tzu explained how to identify binary opposites: “While clay is used to make a vase, in what there isn’t lies it use.” “Difficult and easy accomplish each other. Long and short define each other.” Chuang Tzu, after Lao Tzu, explained how to apply the binary principle to come to terms with human disagreement, in his case the discord between Confucianists and Mohists but still applicable today: “If you wish to affirm what they [either side] deny and deny what they affirm, the best means Illumination.”<br />
<br />
In Tao, binary opposites are defined by a mutual tension. This makes them complimentary. The Chinese call this tension qi or chi (ki in Japanese and khi in Korea). The Japanese use the Chinese character for ki in words like aikido and denki, the latter having the modern meaning of electricity. Tao can be seen as a prescientific recognition of (electro)magnetism. One of its most refined human expressions is the Japanese tea ceremony, essentially a “ki ceremony.” It is the art of “being there without being there” - without disturbing the equilibrium created by the settings.<br />
<br />
'''Tao and global consciousness'''<br />
<br />
A large part of humanity has already developed a level of “global consciousness” through cultural cross-fertilization. Broadly stated, Europe impacted global consciousness through science, East Asia through aesthetics, India through spiritual practices, and Africa through the soul of its music. Having been “exported,” these cultural developments are often reimported after having been modified abroad. The West embraced Japanese “application technology” in the 1980s that greatly impacted the global economy, many Indians have embraced modern Western approaches to meditation techniques and yoga, and African musicians now play “World music.”<br />
<br />
Take nearly any issue confronting humanity today to realize they are binary opposites: rich and poor, human and environment, male and female, progressive and conservative, socialist and capitalists, rights and responsibilities, etc. Reconciling opposites is second nature for people born and raised in Tao-imbued cultures, even if mostly subconsciously. The I Ching, the "Bible” of Tao, is a psychological tool to reconcile opposites in the mind. Marysol Sterling Gonzalez, in her book I Ching and Transpersonal Psychology (1995), referred to the I Ching as a “psychological computer.”<br />
<br />
'''Ethics and aesthetics'''<br />
<br />
Art historian George Rowley (1949) juxtaposed the Western, Indian and Chinese outlook on life and concluded: “The Chinese way of looking at life was not primarily through religion, or philosophy, or science, but through art.” If not logical in the Western context, the Chinese insistence on reconcile opposites leads to aesthetics playing a big role in life.<br />
<br />
For people imbued with a Tao-inspired worldview, ethics and aesthetics are abstractly related. If something is beautiful, it cannot be bad. Kenji Ekuan, prominent industrial designer in Post-War Japan, personified this ingrained belief. Ekuan was groomed to become a Buddhist priest but when he saw the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, he decided to become a designer and devote his life to creating beauty. The ethical response was an aesthetic response.<br />
<br />
If the latter seems overly anecdotal, there can be little doubt that reconciling opposites in the broadest sense of the word – human and nature, rights and responsibilities, the personal and the collective – is the theme of our time. Tao suggests that reconciling opposites precedes transcendentalism.<br />
<br />
''This essay was extracted from my book The Corridor of Space and other writings.''</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Tao_versus_Transcendentalism&diff=109974
Tao versus Transcendentalism
2017-09-17T06:48:41Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Created page with "Jan Krikke This short essay tries to explain why China rather than India is likely to be the world’s next most influential nation. Various economic, social and ideological..."</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
This short essay tries to explain why China rather than India is likely to be the world’s next most influential nation. Various economic, social and ideological factors may be at play, but we should start with the “great divide” between China and India: China imported Buddhism but India did not import the notion of the Chinese notion of Tao.<br />
<br />
“Eastern” thought is varied and complex. But when discussing Tao, the sequence and context are unambiguous: First there was Tao, then the I Ching, then Tao-inspired Confucianism, then Buddhism, and then the Taoist religion, instituted by Chinese thinkers concerned the Chinese people would lose sight of Tao. <br />
<br />
'''Binary universe'''<br />
<br />
Lao Tzu, presumed author of the Tao Teh Ching, explained the nature of Tao more than 2000 years ago: "There was something unmoving, unchanging, all-pervading, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of Tao.” Lao Tzu admits this “something” is unknowable and he doesn’t project vistas of the transcendental found in Indian religions, but he does point at Tao’s “constituent parts” – Heaven and Earth. <br />
<br />
Heaven and Earth is code for the binary opposites the Chinese identified as being at the heart of the universe, and by extension human nature. They codified this binary universe with the eight trigrams denoting gradation of generic classes of Heaven (“plus”) and Earth (“minus”). The eight trigrams formed the basis of the I Ching.<br />
<br />
Ancient Chinese sages made it an art, if not a science, to identify every conceivable opposite in nature, both concrete and abstract. They reasoned that nature being a binary phenomenon they would do well to apply this very same principle to their everyday lives in order to “insert” themselves in the binary universe with the least amount of friction.<br />
<br />
'''Qi and Ki'''<br />
<br />
Lao Tzu explained how to identify binary opposites: “While clay is used to make a vase, in what there isn’t lies it use.” “Difficult and easy accomplish each other. Long and short define each other.” Chuang Tzu, after Lao Tzu, explained how to apply the binary principle to come to terms with human conflict, in his case the discord between Confucianists and Mohists but still applicable today: “If you wish to affirm what they deny and deny what they affirm, the best means Illumination.”<br />
<br />
In Tao, binary opposites are defined by a mutual tension. This makes them complimentary. The Chinese call this tension qi or chi (ki in Japanese and khi in Korea). The Japanese use the Chinese character for ki in words like aikido and denki, the latter having the modern meaning of electricity. Tao can be seen as a prescientific recognition of (electro)magnetism. One of its most refined human expression is the Japanese tea ceremony, essentially a “ki ceremony.” It is the art of “being there without being there” - without disturbing the equilibrium created by the settings.<br />
<br />
'''Tao and global consciousness'''<br />
<br />
A large part of humanity has already developed a level of “global consciousness” through cultural cross-fertilization. Broadly stated, Europe impacted global consciousness through science, East Asia through aesthetics, India through spiritual practices, and Africa through the soul of its music. Having been “exported,” these cultural developments are often reimported after having been modified abroad. Western economies embraced Japanese “application technology” in the 1980s that greatly impacted the global economy. Many Indians have embraced modern Western approaches to meditation techniques and yoga, and African musicians now play “World music.”<br />
<br />
Take nearly any issue confronting humanity today to realize they are binary opposites: rich and poor, human and environment, male and female, progressive and conservative, socialist and capitalists, rights and responsibilities, etc. Reconciling opposites is second nature for people born and raised in Tao-imbued cultures, even if mostly subconsciously. The “bible” of Ta, the I Ching, is a psychological tool to reconcile opposites in the mind. Marysol Sterling Gonzalez, in her book I Ching and Transpersonal Psychology, referred to the I Ching as a “psychological computer.”<br />
<br />
'''Ethics and aesthetics'''<br />
<br />
Art historian George Rowley (1949) juxtaposed the Western, Indian and Chinese outlook on life and concluded: “The Chinese way of looking at life was not primarily through religion, or philosophy, or science, but through art.” If not logical in the Western context, the Chinese insistence on reconcile opposites leads to aesthetics playing a big role in life.<br />
<br />
For people imbued with a Tao-inspired worldview, ethics and aesthetics are abstractly related. If something is beautiful, it cannot be bad. Kenji Ekuan, prominent industrial designer in Post-War Japan, personified this ingrained belief. Ekuan was groomed to become a Buddhist priest but when he saw the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, he decided to become a designer and devote his life to creating beauty. <br />
<br />
If the latter seems overly anecdotal, there can be little doubt that reconciling opposites in the broadest sense of the word – human and nature, rights and responsibilities, the personal and the collective – is the theme of our time. Tao suggests that reconciling opposites precedes transcendentalism<br />
<br />
''This essay was extracted from my book The Corridor of Space and other writings.''</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109973
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-17T01:39:21Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalence in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.'' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear or “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is supported by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein to provide a rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, who ostensibly [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gino-Severini "synthesized"] Cubism and Futurism, admitted in his autobiography Life of a Painter (1946) that the modernist merely repeated what they heard in cafes and that no one really understood the scientific theories. As we will see below, Geber's claim that his view is supported by the visual arts is tendentious.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies it to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the early explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic incongruity'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapses the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yves-Alain Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109971
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-16T05:03:57Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Chinese axonometry missing link in Jean Gebser theory</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalence in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.'' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear or “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is supported by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein to provide a rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, who ostensibly [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gino-Severini "synthesized"] Cubism and Futurism, admitted in his biography Life of a Painter (1946) that the modernist merely repeated what they heard in cafes and that no one really understood the scientific theories. As we will see below, Geber's claim that his view is supported by the visual arts is tendentious.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies it to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the early explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic incongruity'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapses the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yves-Alain Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109970
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-16T02:01:29Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Chinese axonometry missing link in Jean Gebser theory</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalence in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.'' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear or “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is supported by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein to provide a rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, in his biography, admitted the modernist didn't understand modern physics and just repeated what they heard in cafes. As we will see below, support in the visual art is also not supported by the facts.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies it to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the early explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic incongruity'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapses the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109969
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T17:36:53Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Chinese axonometry missing link in Jean Gebser theory</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.'' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is supported by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein to provide a rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, in his biography, admitted the modernist didn't understand modern physics and just repeated what they heard in cafes. As we will see below, support in the visual art is also not supported by the facts.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the earlier explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic incongruity'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109968
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T17:27:38Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Did Jean Gebser look for Chinese axonometry?</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.''' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
'''Art and Modern Physics'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein the provide rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, in his biography, admitted the modernist didn't understand modern physics and just repeated what they heard in cafes.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the earlier explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in plastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted [https://www.google.co.th/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F_m3cRR4bIXVs%2FSGJOc-_TUYI%2FAAAAAAAAAS8%2FY2Dy2CTaWf0%2Fs320%2Fcezanne_diagram.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjan777.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F06%2F&docid=-0DzCgYQOi01dM&tbnid=qeFuS7qfY5wfqM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320&h=246&client=firefox-b&bih=533&biw=1152&q=cezanne%20diagram&ved=0ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=246&imgdii=_KUpSSX_IG_RfM:&vet=10ahUKEwjAqIWo2afWAhXLwI8KHXxVBNUQMwgqKAYwBg..i&w=320 Cezanne’s work]. <br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109967
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T17:14:11Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin. Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.''' Claude Bragdon, 1932<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. When art theorists invoked Einstein the provide rational for the Cubists he said pointedly: "This new 'art' has nothing to do with the Theory of Relativity." Gino Severini, in his biography, admitted the modernist didn't understand modern physics and just repeated what they heard in cafes.<br />
<br />
<br />
Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called ''dengjiao toushi'', roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evoked Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, which should be clear to anyone familiar with Cezanne's work (see Loran and Bois below). Gebser apparently accepted the earlier explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], which is an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In the lower right part of the painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109961
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T11:39:06Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not be detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. He sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. Gebser merely followed contemporary explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], at best an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-round, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109959
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:51:20Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. He sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. Gebser merely follow contemporary explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], at best an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109958
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:49:36Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. He sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-natural temporality <br />
<br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-abstract temporarity <br />
<br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage without providing an explanation. It is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. Gebser merely follow contempory explanation of Picasso's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon], at best an aesthetic and conceptual incongruity. In this painting, Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109957
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:42:15Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. He sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-<br />
natural temporality <br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-<br />
abstract temporarity <br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage. This is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. It derives from a conceptual incongruity created by Picasso in his LesDemoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In [https://iias.asia/iiasn/iiasn9/eastasia/krikke.html A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace], I explain its modern application in the real world. [http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/File:Bois,_Y.-A._Metamorphosis_of_Axonometry.pdf Metamorphosis of Axonometry] by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109956
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:37:03Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, '''a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature,''' where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser's definition is "supported" by neither modern physics nor the visual arts. He sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-<br />
natural temporality <br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-<br />
abstract temporarity <br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage. This is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. It derives from a conceptual incongruity created by Picasso in his LesDemoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to plastically depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace, I explain its modern application in the real world. Metamorphosis of Axonometry by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109955
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:32:32Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Exitement of the "new"'''<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obli¬ged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate defi¬nition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was important, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-<br />
natural temporality <br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-<br />
abstract temporarity <br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage. This is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. It derives from a conceptual incongruity created by Picasso in his LesDemoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to plastically depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace, I explain its modern application in the real world. Metamorphosis of Axonometry by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109954
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:30:48Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Understanding Chinese axonometry can help to understand Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
Exitement of the "new"<br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obli¬ged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate defi¬nition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
<br />
Gebser sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored but few coherent theories emerged. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was a momentous event, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-<br />
natural temporality <br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-<br />
abstract temporarity <br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage. This is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. It derives from a conceptual incongruity created by Picasso in his LesDemoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aesthetic collapse'''<br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to plastically depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace, I explain its modern application in the real world. Metamorphosis of Axonometry by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Incongruity_of_the_Aperspectival_View&diff=109953
Incongruity of the Aperspectival View
2017-09-15T09:21:43Z
<p>Jan Krikke: The Chinese projection system known as axonometry has been a blind spot among Western art historian, as it was for Jean Gebser</p>
<hr />
<div>Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
The notion of "perspective” plays a key role in Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, and by extension in Ken Wilber’s “integral perspectives.” Linear perspective may be a useful metaphor for what Gebser tried to convey, but two factors must be taken into account: 1) linear perspective is based on an optical illusion, it is a human construct that has no equivalent in reality, and 2) China developed axonometry, its own pictorial device to project the illusion of space on the 2D picture plane. <br />
<br />
'''Isometric perspective [a geometric version of axonometry], less faithful to appearance, is more faithful to fact; it shows things nearly as they are known to the mind. Parallel lines are really parallel; there is no far and no near, the size of everything remains constant because all things are represented as being the same distance away and the eye of the spectator everywhere at once. When we imagine a thing, or strive to visualize it in the mind or memory, we do it in this way, without the distortion of ordinary [sic] perspective. Isometric perspective is therefore more intellectual, more archetypal, it more truly renders the mental image -- the thing seen by the mind's eye.' Claude Bragdon, 1932''<br />
<br />
Gebser defines perspective on the bases of the historical evidence of its development. In the early days of the Renaissance, European artist used Euclidean geometry to develop linear of “scientific” perspective, a graphical tool to organize optically perceived space on the two dimensional picture plane. Lines perpendicular to the picture plane recede to and converge at the so-called vanishing point at the horizon. <br />
<br />
Note that the horizon and the vanishing point of linear perspective are illusionary. They do not exist in reality. Linear perspective merely creates the illusion of space, (space as an aesthetic phenomenon becomes “3D” only when we delineate it). Note also that linear perspective relies on the horizon. It is “bound” to the terrestrial plane and can not detached from the horizon. <br />
<br />
Gebser uses perspective both metaphorically and concretely as a measure of growing consciousness (my emphasis):<br />
<br />
''Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reor¬ganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obli¬ged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the „unperspectival“ age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate defi¬nition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the „aperspectival“ age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the „new.”''<br />
<br />
Gebser sound like a man caught up in the excitement of the Modernist Revolution in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, when many ideas were explored but few coherent theories emerged. There is no doubt that the discovery of linear perspective was a momentous event, even while we can take issue with Gelber’s use of the word discovery. Linear perspective was not discovered the way we discover new planets. It developed gradually and had its precursors in medieval and earlier attempts to depict space using converging lines of projection. It was the geometric invention of the vanishing point converging at the horizon that enable artists to depict a coherent pictorial space on the 2D picture plane.<br />
<br />
If we interpret the word perspective in the pictorial manner in which Gebser applies it, (creating the illusion of a coherent space on the picture plane), and if we look at Chinese art history, we see that the Chinese achieved this feat 1000 years before the artists of the Renaissance. The Chinese developed a projection system called dengjiao toushi, roughly translatable as “equal-angle see-through”. The projection system came to be known in the West as axonometry. Linear perspective was developed by artists; axonometry has its roots in Chinese architecture.<br />
<br />
Gebser’s “five dimensions” rely on the notion of perspective in the sense we have discussed, and he applies them to the ages he has delineated:<br />
<br />
1) The Archaic: zero-dimensional: non-perspectival pre-spatial pre-temporal<br />
2) The Magical: one-dimensional: pre-perspectival spaceless-timeless<br />
3) The Mythical: two dimensional: unperspectival spaceless-<br />
natural temporality <br />
4) The Mental: three dimensional: perspectival spatial-<br />
abstract temporarity <br />
5) The Integral: four dimensional: aperspectival space free-time free<br />
<br />
Gebser evokes Cubism as illustrative of the 5th Integral stage. This is a highly contentious assumption, and has no basis in fact. It derives from a conceptual incongruity created by Picasso in his LesDemoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso ostensibly depicted a women as if seen from different vantage points in one single form. <br />
<br />
Incorporating multiple views in one single form is mixing painting and sculpture. When viewing a sculpture-in-the-road, the factor of time is involved. A painting is by definition a static object. We can suggest movement (as the Italian Futurists did), but an attempt to plastically depict time in a pastic form collapse the aesthetics of the medium. Anyone familiar with the work of Erle Loran (1943) on Cezanne can see Picasso simply misinterpreted Cezanne’s work.<br />
<br />
The Modernists’ struggle with linear perspective was resolved with the embrace of axonometry by modernist architects in the 1920s. In A Chinese perspective for Cyberspace, I explain its modern application in the real world. Metamorphosis of Axonometry by Yve-Alan Bois is an extraordinary explanation of the “perspective” offered by axonometry, despite him only mentioning its Chinese roots in passing and hence ignoring its unique quality of integrating space and time. Had Gebser been familiar with axonometry and its (Chinese) qualities, he may have found it a better metaphor for his aperspectival theory.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Integrating_Jean_Gebser_and_Lawrence_Taub&diff=109845
Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub
2017-09-08T03:43:17Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age and Caste Move the Future). Both Gebser and Taub offer us a macrohistory of the development of humanity. Gebser’s model is primarily vertical, Taub’s model primarily horizontal in that he provides a timeline with a cultural-geographic dimension. <br />
<br />
Gebser’s model traces the development human consciousness through the age in five stages - the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, Mental and Integral structures of consciousness. This makes his model vertical, from lower to higher consciousness. I take Gebser’s use of the word consciousness to mean “perception of what we perceive to be reality.” <br />
<br />
Taub relies on three models but we will focus on the Caste Model. His starting point is the ancient Indian notion of Caste, and he traces development of humanity, and implicitly human consciousness, through the four caste stage: Spiritual, Warrior, Merchant and Worker Caste. Note that the Caste System that evolved later is a corruption of the ancient notion of caste.<br />
<br />
'''The Caste Model'''<br />
<br />
Gebser’s model is better known (an excellent summary is [http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html here]), so let’s only describe Taub’s model in some detail. <br />
<br />
Ancient Indian sages believed humanity, in all its diversity, can be “classified” in four generic types. Each individual has elements of the four castes, but one caste (trait) usually dominates in most individuals. A table of the four castes from Taub’s book illustrates the seven key features of the [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-four-basic-castes-of-the-world.pdf four castes]: their world view, ruling elite, skill and tools, social ideal, source of power and economic-political unit.<br />
<br />
In ancient Indian thought, the four castes take turns in “ruling the word.” They are the prominent caste at a given age in an everlasting cycle consistent with the cyclical view of time in India. Taub’s remarkable claim is that the four castes ages can be associated with actual historical periods and [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-caste-model.pdf cultural-geographic regions]. In other words, Taub’s Caste Model has two parameters: time (vertical, historical period) and space (horizontal, geographic region). <br />
<br />
'''Cultural-geographic dimension''' <br />
<br />
Taub’s Caste Model does not contradict Gebser’s model, and abstractly they can be seen as complementary. However, the latter is focused on the vertical axis of human history but offers limited insight for the horizontal. The first three of Gebser’s five stages are global, the Mental is situated in Europe, but he does not situate the Integral stage.<br />
<br />
Lacking a cultural-geographic dimension, Gebser’s model does not have the predictive power offered by Taub's model. The Caste Model offers insight why China is poised to be the next prominent region. Using the Caste Model, Taub was also able to predict seemingly unpredictable events, among them the religious-spiritual revolt in Iran and the growth of fundamentalism. <br />
<br />
'''Integration'''<br />
<br />
Both Gebser's and Taub’s model can present difficult hurdles for those unfamiliar with or resistant to big picture models. The Caste Model requires the reader to (1) accept the notion of caste and (2) that the cultural-geographic regions correspond with the four caste types. It asks readers to accept an entirely new world view and suspend a Euro-centric view of history. The reader also has to comprehend the integration of the Caste Model with the Sex and Age Models. <br />
<br />
Geber’s model requires us to accept his use and definition of consciousness and his use of the word “perspective.” The latter is based on the incorrect assumption that only Europe developed a pictorial projection system. China developed axonometry, conceptually related to the so-called “aperspectival” view but developed in the “pre-perspectival” Magic stage. The Russian Suprematists used axonometry to escape the perspectival view Gebser describes, best illustrated in El Lissitzky’s [https://www.google.co.th/search?q=prouns+lissitzky&hl=en&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih5ry_lYvWAhVIrI8KHbIcBnUQ_AUICigB&biw=1152&bih=533 Proun series]. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry also offer a view of infinity.<br />
<br />
Both Gebser and Taub provide remarkable insight in the evolution of humanity. Gebser’s model arguably sheds more light on human (and one’s individual) consciousness, Taub’s model helps us to understand how and why consciousness changes from one cultural-geographic regions to the next. It is for the reader to decide to what extend the models overlap and can be integrated.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Integrating_Jean_Gebser_and_Lawrence_Taub&diff=109844
Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub
2017-09-08T01:50:10Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age and Caste Move the Future). Both Gebser and Taub offer us a macrohistory of the development of humanity. Gebser’s model is primarily vertical, Taub’s model primarily horizontal in that he provides a timeline with a cultural-geographic dimension. <br />
<br />
Gebser’s model traces the development human consciousness through the age in five stages - the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, Mental and Integral structures of consciousness. This makes him model vertical, from lower to higher consciousness. I take Gebser’s use of the word consciousness to mean “perception of what we perceive to be reality.” <br />
<br />
Taub relies on three models but we will focus on the Caste Model. His starting point is the ancient Indian notion of Caste, and he traces development of humanity, and implicitly human consciousness, through the four caste stage: Spiritual, Warrior, Merchant and Worker Caste. Note that the Caste System that evolved later is a corruption of the ancient notion of caste.<br />
<br />
'''The Caste Model'''<br />
<br />
Gebser’s model is better known (an excellent summary is [http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html here]), so let’s only describe Taub’s model in some detail. <br />
<br />
Ancient Indian sages believed humanity, in all its diversity, can be “classified” in four generic types. Each individual has elements of the four castes, but one caste (trait) usually dominates in most individuals. A table of the four castes from Taub’s book illustrates the seven key features of the [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-four-basic-castes-of-the-world.pdf four castes]: their world view, ruling elite, skill and tools, social ideal, source of power and economic-political unit.<br />
<br />
In ancient Indian thought, the four castes take turns in “ruling the word.” They are the prominent caste at a given age in an everlasting cycle consistent with the cyclical view of time in India. Taub’s remarkable claim is that the four castes ages can be associate with actual historical periods and [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-caste-model.pdf cultural-geographic regions]. In other words, Taub’s Caste Model has two parameters: time (vertical, historical period) and space (horizontal, geographic region). <br />
<br />
'''Cultural-geographic dimension''' <br />
<br />
Taub’s Caste Model does not contradict Gebser’s model, and abstractly they can be seen as complementary. However, the latter is focused on the vertical axis of human history but offers limited insight for the horizontal. The first three of Gebser’s five stages are global, the Mental is situated in Europe, but he does not situate the Integral stage.<br />
<br />
Lacking a cultural-geographic dimension, Gebser’s model does not have the predictive power offered by Taub's model. The Caste Model offers insight why China is poised to be the next prominent region. Using the Caste Model, Taub was also able to predict seemingly unpredictable events, among them the religious-spiritual revolt in Iran and the growth of fundamentalism. <br />
<br />
'''Integration'''<br />
<br />
Both Gebser's and Taub’s model can present difficult hurdles for those unfamiliar with or resistant to big picture models. The Caste Model requires the reader to (1) accept the notion of caste and (2) that the cultural-geographic regions correspond with the four caste types. It asks readers to accept an entirely new world view and suspend a Euro-centric view of history. The reader also has to comprehend the integration of the Caste Model with the Sex and Age Models. <br />
<br />
Geber’s model requires us to accept his use and definition of consciousness and his use of the word “perspective.” The latter is based on the incorrect assumption that only Europe developed a pictorial projection system. China developed axonometry, conceptually related to the so-called “aperspectival” view but developed in the “pre-perspectival” Magic stage. The Russian Suprematists used axonometry to escape the perspectival view Gebser describes, best illustrated in El Lissitzky’s [https://www.google.co.th/search?q=prouns+lissitzky&hl=en&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih5ry_lYvWAhVIrI8KHbIcBnUQ_AUICigB&biw=1152&bih=533 Proun series]. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry also offer a view of infinity.<br />
<br />
Both Gebser and Taub provide remarkable insight in the evolution of humanity. Gebser’s model arguably sheds more light on human (and one’s individual) consciousness, Taub’s model helps us to understand how and why consciousness changes from one cultural-geographic regions to the next. It is for the reader to decide to what extend the models overlap and can be integrated.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Integrating_Jean_Gebser_and_Lawrence_Taub&diff=109843
Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub
2017-09-08T01:43:39Z
<p>Jan Krikke: </p>
<hr />
<div>Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
<br />
This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age and Caste Move the Future). Both Gebser and Taub offer us a macrohistory of the development of humanity. Gebser’s model is primarily vertical, Taub’s model primarily horizontal in that he provides a timeline with a cultural-geographic dimension. <br />
<br />
Gebser’s model traces the development human consciousness through the age in five stages - the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, Mental and Integral structures of consciousness. This makes him model vertical, from lower to higher consciousness. I take Gebser’s use of the word consciousness to mean “perception of what we perceive to be reality.” <br />
<br />
Taub relies on three models but we will focus on the Caste Model. His starting point is the ancient Indian notion of Caste, and he traces development of humanity, and implicitly human consciousness, through the four caste stage: Spiritual, Warrior, Merchant and Worker Caste. Note that the Caste System that evolved later is a corruption of the ancient notion of caste.<br />
<br />
'''The Caste Model'''<br />
<br />
Gebser’s model is better known (an excellent summary is [http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html here]), so let’s only describe Taub’s model in some detail. <br />
<br />
Ancient Indian sages believed humanity, in all its diversity, can be “classified” in four generic types. Each individual has elements of the four castes, but one caste (trait) usually dominates in most individuals. A table of the four castes from Taub’s book illustrates the seven key features of the [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-four-basic-castes-of-the-world.pdf four castes]: their world view, ruling elite, skill and tools, social ideal, source of power and economic-political unit.<br />
<br />
In ancient Indian thought, the four castes take turns in “ruling the word.” They are the prominent caste at a given age in an everlasting cycle consistent with the cyclical view of time in India. Taub’s remarkable claim is that the four castes ages can be associate with actual historical periods and [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-caste-model.pdf cultural-geographic regions]. In other words, Taub’s Caste Model has two parameters: time (vertical, historical period) and space (horizontal, geographic region). <br />
<br />
'''Cultural-geographic dimension''' <br />
<br />
Taub’s Caste Model does not contradict Gebser’s model, and abstractly they can be seen as complementary. However, the latter is focused on the vertical axis of human history but offers limited insight for the horizontal. The first three of Gebser’s five stages are global, the Mental is situated in Europe, but he does not situate the Integral stage.<br />
<br />
Lacking a cultural-geographic dimension, Gebser’s model does not have the predictive power offered by Taub's model. The Caste Model offers insight why China is poised to be the next prominent region. Using Caste Model, Taub was also able to predict seemingly unpredictable events, like the religious-spiritual revolt in Iran and the growth of fundamentalism. <br />
<br />
'''Integration'''<br />
<br />
Both Gebser's and Taub’s model can present difficult hurdles for those unfamiliar with or resistant to big picture models. The Caste Model requires the reader to (1) accept the notion of caste and (2) that the cultural-geographic regions correspond with the four caste types. It asks readers to accept an entirely new world view and suspend a Euro-centric view of history. The reader also has to comprehend the integration of the Caste Model with the Sex and Age Models. <br />
<br />
Geber’s model requires us to accept his use and definition of consciousness and his view of “perspective.” The latter is based on the incorrect assumption that only Europe developed a pictorial projection system. China developed axonometry, conceptually related to the “aperspectival” view but developed in the “pre-perspectival” Magic stage. The Russian Suprematists used axonometry to escape the perspectival view Gebser describes, best illustrated in El Lissitzky’s [https://www.google.co.th/search?q=prouns+lissitzky&hl=en&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih5ry_lYvWAhVIrI8KHbIcBnUQ_AUICigB&biw=1152&bih=533 Proun series]. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry also offer a view of infinity.<br />
<br />
Both Gebser and Taub provide remarkable insight in the evolution of humanity. Gebser’s model arguably sheds more light on human (and one’s individual) consciousness, Taub’s model helps us to understand how and why consciousness changes from one cultural-geographic regions to the next. It is for the reader to decide to what extend the models overlap and can be integrated.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Integrating_Jean_Gebser_and_Lawrence_Taub&diff=109842
Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub
2017-09-08T01:42:03Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Comparing the models of Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub</p>
<hr />
<div>Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age and Caste Move the Future). Both Gebser and Taub offer us a macrohistory of the development of humanity. Gebser’s model is primarily vertical, Taub’s model primarily horizontal in that he provides a timeline with a cultural-geographic dimension. <br />
<br />
Gebser’s model traces the development human consciousness through the age in five stages - the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, Mental and Integral structures of consciousness. This makes him model vertical, from lower to higher consciousness. I take Gebser’s use of the word consciousness to mean “perception of what we perceive to be reality.” <br />
<br />
Taub relies on three models but we will focus on the Caste Model. His starting point is the ancient Indian notion of Caste, and he traces development of humanity, and implicitly human consciousness, through the four caste stage: Spiritual, Warrior, Merchant and Worker Caste. Note that the Caste System that evolved later is a corruption of the ancient notion of caste.<br />
<br />
The Caste Model<br />
<br />
Gebser’s model is better known (an excellent summary is [http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html here]), so let’s only describe Taub’s model in some detail. <br />
<br />
Ancient Indian sages believed humanity, in all its diversity, can be “classified” in four generic types. Each individual has elements of the four castes, but one caste (trait) usually dominates in most individuals. A table of the four castes from Taub’s book illustrates the seven key features of the [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-four-basic-castes-of-the-world.pdf four castes]: their world view, ruling elite, skill and tools, social ideal, source of power and economic-political unit.<br />
<br />
In ancient Indian thought, the four castes take turns in “ruling the word.” They are the prominent caste at a given age in an everlasting cycle consistent with the cyclical view of time in India. Taub’s remarkable claim is that the four castes ages can be associate with actual historical periods and [http://www.krikke-groningen.nl/jan/the-caste-model.pdf cultural-geographic regions]. In other words, Taub’s Caste Model has two parameters: time (vertical, historical period) and space (horizontal, geographic region). <br />
<br />
Cultural-geographic dimension <br />
<br />
Taub’s Caste Model does not contradict Gebser’s model, and abstractly they can be seen as complementary. However, the latter is focused on the vertical axis of human history but offers limited insight for the horizontal. The first three of Gebser’s five stages are global, the Mental is situated in Europe, but he does not situate the Integral stage.<br />
<br />
Lacking a cultural-geographic dimension, Gebser’s model does not have the predictive power offered by Taub's model. The Caste Model offers insight why China is poised to be the next prominent region. Using Caste Model, Taub was also able to predict seemingly unpredictable events, like the religious-spiritual revolt in Iran and the growth of fundamentalism. <br />
<br />
Integration<br />
<br />
Both Gebser's and Taub’s model can present difficult hurdles for those unfamiliar with or resistant to big picture models. The Caste Model requires the reader to (1) accept the notion of caste and (2) that the cultural-geographic regions correspond with the four caste types. It asks readers to accept an entirely new world view and suspend a Euro-centric view of history. The reader also has to comprehend the integration of the Caste Model with the Sex and Age Models. <br />
<br />
Geber’s model requires us to accept his use and definition of consciousness and his view of “perspective.” The latter is based on the incorrect assumption that only Europe developed a pictorial projection system. China developed axonometry, conceptually related to the “aperspectival” view but developed in the “pre-perspectival” Magic stage. The Russian Suprematists used axonometry to escape the perspectival view Gebser describes, best illustrated in El Lissitzky’s [https://www.google.co.th/search?q=prouns+lissitzky&hl=en&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih5ry_lYvWAhVIrI8KHbIcBnUQ_AUICigB&biw=1152&bih=533 Proun series]. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry also offer a view of infinity.<br />
<br />
Both Gebser and Taub provide remarkable insight in the evolution of humanity. Gebser’s model arguably sheds more light on human (and one’s individual) consciousness, Taub’s model helps us to understand how and why consciousness changes from one cultural-geographic regions to the next. It is for the reader to decide to what extend the models overlap and can be integrated.</div>
Jan Krikke
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=Integrating_Jean_Gebser_and_Lawrence_Taub&diff=109841
Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub
2017-09-08T01:32:56Z
<p>Jan Krikke: Created page with "Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub Jan Krikke This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperat..."</p>
<hr />
<div>Integrating Jean Gebser and Lawrence Taub<br />
<br />
Jan Krikke<br />
<br />
This short essay compares the models of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) and Lawrence Taub (The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age and Caste Move the Future). Both Gebser and Taub offer us a macrohistory of the development of humanity. Gebser’s model is primarily vertical, Taub’s model primarily horizontal in that he provides a timeline with a cultural-geographic dimension. <br />
<br />
Gebser’s model traces the development human consciousness through the age in five stages - the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, Mental and Integral structures of consciousness. This makes him model vertical, from lower to higher consciousness. I take Gebser’s use of the word consciousness to mean “perception of what we perceive to be reality.” <br />
<br />
Taub relies on three models but we will focus on the Caste Model. His starting point is the ancient Indian notion of Caste, and he traces development of humanity, and implicitly human consciousness, through the four caste stage: Spiritual, Warrior, Merchant and Worker Caste. Note that the Caste System that evolved later is a corruption of the ancient notion of caste.<br />
<br />
The Caste Model<br />
<br />
Gebser’s model is better known (an excellent summary is here), so let’s only describe Taub’s model in some detail. <br />
<br />
Ancient Indian sages believed humanity, in all its diversity, can be “classified” in four generic types. Each individual has elements of the four castes, but one caste (trait) usually dominates in most individuals. A table of the four castes from Taub’s book illustrates the seven key features of the four castes: their world view, ruling elite, skill and tools, social ideal, source of power and economic-political unit.<br />
<br />
In ancient Indian thought, the four castes take turns in “ruling the word.” They are the prominent caste at a given age in an everlasting cycle consistent with the cyclical view of time in India. Taub’s remarkable claim is that the four castes ages can be associate with actual historical periods and cultural-geographic regions. In other words, Taub’s Caste Model has two parameters: time (vertical, historical period) and space (horizontal, geographic region). <br />
<br />
Cultural-geographic dimension <br />
<br />
Taub’s Caste Model does not contradict Gebser’s model, and abstractly they can be seen as complementary. However, the latter is focused on the vertical axis of human history but offers limited insight for the horizontal. The first three of Gebser’s five stages are global, the Mental is situated in Europe, but he does not situate the Integral stage.<br />
<br />
Lacking a cultural-geographic dimension, Gebser’s model does not have the predictive power offered by Taub's model. The Caste Model offers insight why China is poised to be the next prominent region. Using Caste Model, Taub was also able to predict seemingly unpredictable events, like the religious-spiritual revolt in Iran and the growth of fundamentalism. <br />
<br />
Integration<br />
<br />
Both Gebser's and Taub’s model can present difficult hurdles for those unfamiliar with or resistant to big picture models. The Caste Model requires the reader to (1) accept the notion of caste and (2) that the cultural-geographic regions correspond with the four caste types. It asks readers to accept an entirely new world view and suspend a Euro-centric view of history. The reader also has to comprehend the integration of the Caste Model with the Sex and Age Models. <br />
<br />
Geber’s model requires us to accept his use and definition of consciousness and his view of “perspective.” The latter is based on the incorrect assumption that only Europe developed a pictorial projection system. China developed axonometry, conceptually related to the “aperspectival” view but developed in the “pre-perspectival” Magic stage. The Russian Suprematists used axonometry to escape the perspectival view Gebser describes, best illustrated in El Lissitzky’s Proun series. Unlike linear perspective, axonometry also offer a view of infinity.<br />
<br />
Both Gebser and Taub provide remarkable insight in the evolution of humanity. Gebser’s model arguably sheds more light on human (and one’s individual) consciousness, Taub’s model helps us to understand how and why consciousness changes from one cultural-geographic regions to the next. It is for the reader to decide to what extend the models overlap and can be integrated.</div>
Jan Krikke