Retrospective 2020-33–34

This is a summary of my reading and painting the last two weeks (August 10–23, 2020).

Painting

I am currently participating in the #drawingaugust challenge on Twitter and have been working on a series of portraits. I have also made some paintings based on photos by Skye Hirst. My other paintings are here.

Reading

The Heart by Norm and Skye Hirst
I have read Norm and Skye Hirst’s article on The Heart, Shoulds and Overcoming the Trap of Scientific Materialism. Norm and Skye Hirst bring old assumptions that keep us blind into focus, and engage us in how to grow Life-Centric living and thinking awareness. It’s about how to better navigate as we create our lives together. Much of the suffering in the world can be traced to the ignorance of how life has provided us with the capacity for living in harmony.

The Unknowable by Gregory Chaitin
I finished reading The Unknowable by Gregory Chaitin, which is a companion to Chaitin’s The Limits of Mathematics.

Once a branch of mathematics has been formalized, it becomes a combinatorial object, i.e., a set of rules for combining symbols, and fit for metamathematical investigation. You can then put it under the metamathematical microscope and analyze it. The limitation is that it’s impossible to formalize all of mathematics. Any formal axiomatic system is either inconsistent or incomplete. It either proves false theorems, or doesn’t prove all true theorems.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic. It’s fascinating to see how Chaitin reduces Gödel’s proof to less than 20 lines of LISP code (pp. 62–64). Gödel had to get his hands dirty and poke around in the mathematical engine. It was very hard work. Chaitin uses LISP to do the hard work.

Five years after Gödel, Turing found a deeper reason for incompleteness. Turing derived incompleteness from uncomputability. All possible algorithms can be expressed by any programming language, but everything cannot be reduced to an algorithm, i.e., to the repetition of rote operations. Algorithmic systems are extremely weak in entailment (see Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself). You cannot equate quality with quantity, and construction with computability, in a non-algorithmic system.

A key takeaway is that formalisms for deduction failed, while formalisms for computation succeeded. Formalism is triumphant in computing, but not in reasoning—not even in mathematical reasoning.

A Process Model by Eugene Gendlin
I have started reading A Process Model by Eugene Gendlin. Gendlin was a philosopher who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, felt sense, and focusing. It’s interesting to see how he works with all the logical force words are capable of in his book. I will definitely take the time to review this book.

Previously, I have reviewed Gendlin’s books on Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge and Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective.

Here are two YouTube videos with Gendlin:

• Living is always a fresh forming.
• Rogers and Gendlin. Gendlin says at the end (@ 4:20) that we don’t have to give the body to mechanics.

Embodied Learning
Finally, I would like to mention Camille Litalien’s TEDx talk on Embodied Learning.

Camille Litalien is a dancer and says that uncontrived, pre-verbal, integration of the body-mind is a natural capacity for all humans. She refers to this intelligence as embodiment.

Camille Litalien noticed that her physicality was deeply affected by the buildings she was in. They man-made structures deeply affected her mind and emotions. (This reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s “the quality without a name“.) Litalien noticed that these idealized forms were out of touch with the sensous world, and thereby of her own self. She felt like she was enforcing her mind and body into yet another idea.

We need to consciously step out of abstracted man-made structures, architectural, intellectual, cultural. This can be done through a sense of play. Through sensing, hearing, feeling, we can invite the opening and the release of contracted and restricted patterns, whether emotional, physical or mental. Here is a transcript of the talk.