Allan Ralph Andrews, born September 13

In Dante, a higher Water Well rises up from Earth Trigram toward Paradise in Wind Trigram, just below God in highest Heaven Trigram.

The I Ching inter-subjective illusions and Dreamtime infinite game and finite game system are constantly evolving. Plato generated a Heaven Trigram in which God was the sun shining on the Form of the Good in Wind Trigram, but human mind, chained in place in Mountain Trigram, viewing light from fires in Flame Trigram within a complex system that is the Cave of Lake Trigram, viewed objects carried though walkways in Water Well Trigram that caught the light from the fires in Earth Trigram and cast shadows in Thunder Trigram. But, the same mythology can be altered, per Harari in SAPIENS to make money the form of the good in Wind Trigram, receiving the collected energy and agricultural goods from Heaven (supplied by the energy of the Sun), but tracked by accountants using accounting scripts in Mountain Trigram, supported by military activities in Flame Trigram, supporting scientific, industrial, and technical activities in Earth Trigram that supply a global market in Thunder Trigram that become desirable because of a media driven ideology in Lake Trigram, supported by the market empires of Water Well rooted finally in the new inter-subjectivity of newly redefined Dreamtime Heaven Trigram.

Freud created a mythical ego in Mountain Trigram, that transactional analysis call the “Adult Voice. This system can imagine a super-ego Parent Vice in Wind Trigram, and a voiceless “Egg” in Water Well, “Id, per Freud, the emergent libido of this Id, becoming the Child Voice in Earth Trigram. Lake is the deep unconscious that supplies energy from Heaven Trigram that supports this libido out of Thunder Trigram and Flame Trigram.

In social systems, as discussed above, this energy manifests in Heaven Trigram as aboriginal pride, in Wind as aristocratic greed, in Flame as martial anger, in Mountain as partisan envy, in Earth as addictive gluttony, Thunder as vulgar lust, in Water Well as obedient slavery, in Lake Trigram as dogmatic sloth.

But the permutations of this mythology, this inter-subjective are endless, and so are the opportunities for selfish groups, the plunder elite particularly, Plato’s Philosopher Kings, the ancient Aryan PIG power triangle, in our game of symbolic letters, to use these systems to amass wealth and power at the expense of others and the ecological peace and well being of the planet to which this imaginary global I Ching Brain is now so destructively attached.

Allan Ralph Andrews, Bakersfield CA, 6:56 PM, 4/12/2015

Insects are Protostome, they develop mouth first, and upside down, with an exoskeleton and a deterministic developmental system that tells every cell what to do. They are the triumph of the Eldest Daughter Yin WHEN that controls the WHEN of every stage of development with the DNA patterns in their genes. This is what controls an ant hill, the development of the queen sends out chemical messages that control the WHEN system of the behavior of the workers that tend her.

Humans are a triumph of the Deutrostome system, the mouth develops after the anus, and the body system is the reverse of the insect, with the skeleton made of bone rather than chitin, on the inside, rather than the outside. The human WHEN is an open WHEN that depends on memories in the library system of the hypothalamus stored in the cerebral cortex, quite separate from the HOW memories storied in the basal ganglia and cerebellum, these are skill memories, conditioned memories per Pavlov. This double memory system, Athena for the WHAT and WHERE and WHY of both fact and meaning, and Hephaestus (Vulcan) for the skills and movements, allows humans to store information in memes as well as genes. The development of complex speech allowed this meme system to become social and to be stored in linguistic products like the works of Homer, the Tripitaka of the Buddhist, the Torah, all of which were once stored by memorization and passed on from generation to generation. But, the invention of scripts and accounting systems, number systems, musical notation, to record these bits of information, the development of printing system to duplicate them, coding systems to communicate them through electrical codes, electronic codes, digital memory systems, all of this has given the meme system ever greater sophistication and has given it the power to understand and control the genes that were its source.

This effort would not be possible without the rich inter-subjective creativity of the brain, without Consciousness as Art, without fantasy and illusion, without the fantasy work of the Heaven Trigram Dreamtime Zamani, I Ching global brain. But, as Harari points out in Sapiens, this same creative illusion can destroy as well as create, can generate folly as well as prophecy, fanaticism as well as faith and hope.

The strange jumps that this inter-subjective global I Ching brain makes should not be a shock. There is intelligence in the random behavior of social groups, and the random behavior of social humans creating their own inter-subjective notions, can generate hidden patterns when subjected to evolution and entropy, to the hidden hand of natural selection, which can work on memes just as it can work on genes. We should not be surprised to see the same selective forces generate systems of predation in society that they have created in nature.

But, we must be very careful not to jump to conclusion that feed our own prejudices and social needs, as the Social Darwinists did when they developed an erroneous idea of the implication of evolution for social structures. As Richard Alexander has shown in Biology of Moral Systems, the “selfish group” driven by nepotism, and other factors, can exert more influence than the “selfish gene,” and, therefore, can be more dangerous in the final analysis.

Allan Ralph Andrews, Bakersfield, CA, 4/13/2015 9:23 AM

Which brings us back to James P. Carse and his Finite and Infinite Games and the dangers of using the Finite Games of money and power and property to end and infinite game or to stamp out evil, these are the real sources of evil for Carse. He seems to be making a point related to the ideas of Harari in Sapiens. It may be true that Consciousness as Art, refer to discussions above and elsewhere, may be necessary to the development of the integrity of the human brain, but the implications can be dangerous.

In the Passion of the Western World, Richard Tranas (Ballantine, 1991) discusses the development of the thought of Socrates and Plato, op. cit, p. 31, Socrates appears to be concerned with the very notions brought up by Nicholas Humphrey in Consciousness as Art, if consciousness is a way of generating illusions to integrate the self, what are the moral, the behavioral, the larger implications of such an operation by the brain. Socrates appears to be questioning these inter-subjective illusions and their implications for the integrity of his own existence, and the price he paid for the public debate of these concerns, was his own life.