Unmaking Sense

Episode 10.32: Protection Rackets that define our habitual dual space to our disadvantage.

Jumping into a dual space as a cure for our enslavement to allegiances and habits of mind and behaviour that are not solutions, but the sources of our problems; in other words, Protection Rackets.

Episode 10.31: Reconfiguring our worlds according to the parameters of a dual space to think better.

The way we choose to think in the dual space is far superior to our traditional inherited ways of thinking, not least because it frees us from the controlling influence of the vested interests associated with gods and souls and churches and political orthodoxies.

Episode 10.30: Defining the dual space of human possibility dynamically through iterative resonance.

What are the characteristics of the dual space we are trying to find our way into?

Episode 10.29: Duality does not involve everyday opposites but completely different ways of thinking

Why the pairings between hope and despair, or happiness and misery, do not furnish good examples of what we mean by duality and the contrasts between dual spaces. To move into a framework defined by a dual space is to have one’s ways of thinking and evaluating changed. Different things come to matter and we acquire new ways to make sense of life and the world. Moving into a dual space quintessentially illustrates what we mean by “Unmaking Sense”.

Episode 10.28: Dualities with one side comprehensible but wrong the other incomprehensible but right

We look at the mathematics and physics of duality and how theories and explanations can have duals. Typically, one version is simple and easy to use but wrong, the other more complex but right(er).

Episode 10.27: Language as abbreviation; conceptual hourglasses whose meanings reach up and down.

We explore the connections between language as abbreviation and rhetorical flourishes that grasp the fleeting ideas that might otherwise disappear; and we describe the parallels with the technical terms we use in mathematics and science.

Episode 10.26: Language as conceptual abbreviation, especially mathematical language.

How we compact meanings using words and symbols, and a reference to the question of what kind of understanding this entails when our symbols and abbreviations stretch well beyond anything most mortals can imagine or conceive.

Episode 10.25: Rhetoric as a device to lay hold on ideas that might otherwise be lost forever.

Rhetoric as a weapon in the armoury of ideas that allows us to grasp in an instant some fleeting fancy that might otherwise escape us forever, even though most such ideas do in fact recur. Connections to trusting our intuitions and pursuing them even though they may prove misguided because in the process we may develop other insights that can be transferred to more fertile locations rather as a beneficial gene can be transplanted into other DNA.

Episode 10.24: Why we shouldn’t bury our waste-paper baskets and what happens if we do. Abduction.

We start to think more intently about the creative process, and especially the relationship between bright ideas, wrong ideas, and the painstaking filling-in of the gaps that must inevitably follow behind the work of great pioneers guided by abductive leaps. Waste-paper baskets help lesser mortals understand the creative process to be less inspiration and more perspiration than most clever people like to admit.

Episode 10.23: The six Asimov Foundation novels as clues/embodiments of how we need to unmake sense.

We return to Isaac Asimov’s six “Foundation” novels and the clues they afford to how we can unmake our sense of history and imagination. This apparently disconnected episode prepares the ground for several of the episodes that follow, and so makes public the waste-paper basket of ideas that lies behind them in an attempt to embody what we have been advocating.