Learning how to fly

 
    
   It's not as easy to be creative as it is to be destructive,
   There is a strong gradient that pulls all life down, entropy,
   and is constantly at work like gravity. Life succeeds in flying 
   despite this. 

   It is death that surcomes to the will of such gravity, and
   people in free-fall will clutch and claw at those around them
   in fear of falling into that entropic abyss.
 
   People will fall when they are carried aloft by others and let
   go, without ever having themselves learned to fly; to be creative.
   And too many of such people will, like "dead weight" drag all 
   the rest of humanity down with them.

   But life arose from that abyss, and will always do so.
   
   Before you can learn to fly, you have to learn to float:
   1) to learn facts, and 2) to learn how to learn. 

   "Flying" 3), amounts to Creativity and moving about in the 'space'
   opened up by these first two stages.
   
   There are fundamental stages to arising from that depression
   era of entropy into that market economy of life [1]. 

   McClelland and Maslow and Piaget have their own stages and
   evolution has a more general and foliated approach. But essentially
   it boils down to certain stages which must occur in a specific
   order and each stage or era of this progression is often marked 
   by a discrete milestone which we can call a worldview transition 
   analogous to physical phase changes.

   In general, without too much consideration to detail, the stages
   can be labelled fundamentalist, dynamisist, and interpretive,
   Each of which contains the previous state as as subset like
   chinese boxes.

   Douglas Adams describes the stages of civilizations as:  
   Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication. 

   "Survival" marks the era of learning facts and deductive thinking.
   It works on small finite sets of "solids", and establishes simple 
   causual relations between events. It asks such questions as 
   "Where can we find food ?". It is a stage of specificity and
   distinguishment or what we often call "classical" attitudes.
   Here we are concerned with deterministic predictions. This is
   the era of Keynes, of jump starting the economy of life.
   This is the reduction stage or "the stage of subtraction".
   
   "Inquiry" marks the era or stage of understanding the relationship
   between 'states' or definitions, and the idea of infinities. 
   It is the stage of inductive and thinking or "liquid" comparative analogies,
   and deals with  questions like: "Why do we eat ?".  
   It is the stage of generality and non-distinguishments which
   we can call more "modern" attitudes. Here we are concerned with 
   non-deterministic predictions. This is the dynamic era of Hayek, or 
   understanding of the role of the economy in a comparative sense[2]  
   This is the associative stage or "the stage of addition".
   At this stage the "survival" stage is still important and neglecting it, 
   forfets any chance of remaining in this stage.
   
   "Sophistication" marks the stage of more meta levels of consideration
   such as asking: "Where shall we dine ?". Here we are creative
   with applications of compositions of tangible facts learned in the 
   Survival stage and the general ideas, associations, and analogies learned 
   in the Inquiry stage. We interpret their meanings and apply them in the numerous 
   combinatorics of 'gasous' mixtures and superpositions. We also in this
   stage consider more metaphysical concepts like paradoxes, dualisms, holisms,
   etc.  which themselves all boil down to considerations of communications
   theory, information theory, and measurement theory. This ignites our creative
   capacity with the positive feedback needed for that creative activity.
   In this stage our considerations recurse and we begin to understand
   the workings of our own minds as a complex but understandable system
   in relation to its equally complex objective world. This stage is the
   transcendental stage which rises above specificity in the Survival
   stage and generality in the Inquiry stage.  It is the "interference"
   stage because here, the subtraction and addition are performed.
   At this stage the "survival" stage is still important and neglecting it, 
   forfets any chance of remaining in this stage and similarly, this stage 
   cannot function without the mechanisms for association developed in the 
   Inquiry stage.

   These may seem like arbitrarily established stages but there is a
   rationality to them that transcends inductive and deductive logic.
   This "fuzzy", transcendental logic is not finite nor infinite, nor 
   is it neither of these, but it is rather a higher level language 
   composed of thes two logical languages which we are more familiar with
   (induction and deduction). 

   It combines and mixes and superposes these two logics in a 
   "sophisticated" sense and in doing so reveals the relation between determinism
   and non-determinism, between distinguishment and non-distinguishement
   and between all such fundamental dichotomies we encounter in life;
   the most influential of extremes of these dichotomies being 
   the wave-particle duality and the mind-body duality. 

   At this point, the feedback loop is in place, and the dragon
   eats its tail. The subjective mind-body problem if philosophy
   "eats" the objective wave-particle duality of physics.

   The above stages are not discrete in the sense that we are
   in one and not the others, rather they are contained in a 
   'topology' that obviously, we have much yet to learn about.

   We can alternatively think of the three stages as being stages
   of Substantance, Form, and Function. 
   
   The Substantial stage, or stage of Survival is concerned chiefly 
   with tangibles and bartering.

   The Form/formulational stage, or the stage of Inquiry, is chiefly
   concerned with the intangible relationships between things and
   with speculative valuations.

   The Functional/systemic stage, or Sophistication stage, is chiefly
   concerned with permutations of 'meta-objects' without the burden
   of carrying around the deterministic 'proofs' imposed by the first 
   stage, and the inductive 'proofs' of the second stage. 

   This functional stage is only concerned with 'the proof is in the pudding' 
   or the knowledge that is used without proof. This is often called 'common
   sense' knowledge because we usually can't afford the price of space-time 
   to prove that knowledge deterministically (in time), or 
   non-deterministically (in space), but we know it to be 
   useful knowledge none-the-less. 

   The the thinking of Douglas Adam's is surreptitious in this sense
   as he communicates valid knowledge without the having to undergo 
   the time and space consuming burden of proof. Instead, he lays
   out a clear map over the horizon. It is the travelor's problem 
   if they get lost. 

   Now you may say to yourself that all this is nothing really novel
   and we have understood most of it for some time now. The novelity
   is: that this "basis of stages", is as fundamental to all things
   as the x, y, z, coordinates are to space.

   It is in a sense defining the core design for everything around us 
   and determines a 'space-time' in which all life moves, thinks,
   and evolves to its various degrees. It defines the universe
   of subjective ideologies as containing modes no less distinguished 
   from the modes of the physical universe such as the particles, planets, 
   stars and galaxies of all varieties.
      
[1] see Keynes and Hayek
[2] It could be argued that Hayek's thinking belongs as a milestone of the next era
   and that economics made a quantum leap, but I would suggest that my
   attribution of Hayek to this stage reflects my current ignorance of 
   details economic theory's history. But I am convinced that suitable discrete 
   milestones of each era can be established in the same sense that we define three
   color basis, the three dimensions of space, the three "common" modes of 
   matter, the three ...

   Such "trinities" arise naturally out of measurement theory deepest considerations.

[3] Douglas Adams