On the Omnidirectional Halo

Synergetics is a geometric vision pumped full of as much significance as possible. Getting all experiences to mean something in terms of geometry might seem undoable at first, but the tack is to get a view of thinking itself, to present the thinking process in terms of a geometric model. By thinking about thinking in terms of geometry, all thought content is thereby brought within its scope.

The synergetics model of thinking is derived by analogy to the electromagnetic spectrum. It helps that we already have a vernacular wherein like-minded people are "on the same wavelength" and wherein ideas get "tuned in". In synergetics, the brain is the metaphorical "TV transceiver" wherein sense-relayed programs are presented to experience.

The electromagnetic spectrum as traditionally depicted in text books is a linear affair, from shortest to longest wavelengths. Synergetics depicts this continuum of shortest to longest as concentric spherical networks, the way we have been taught to view electrons (the ones in s-orbitals at any rate). The highest frequency systems (e.g. gamma particles) are towards the center, whereas larger scale phenomena (e.g. the portion of the spectrum visible to the naked eye) occupy middle to outer layers of the spectral onion.

To think, then, is to highlight one spherical band within the continuum, to select a channel. Higher and lower bands are "dismissed as irrelevant" because, relative to the tuned-in system, these higher and lower frequency bands are too close together, or too far apart to merit close attention.

Too close together might mean: too detailed, too trivial, too nitpicky, or literally too small to be sensed. Too far apart might mean: too general, too cosmic, or too spread apart in time and/or space to be noticably part of the visible pattern. Amidst all the transceiver brain traffic, some thoughts are too fleeting, escaping before becoming incorporated, classified or organized within a larger system. Other thoughts are too long in dawning, by which time the train of thought to which they might have attached has long ago vanished over the horizon.

The tuned system itself consists of inter-related events, points of focus. Synergetics models the relationships among our set of relevant considerations as lines of tension around the circumference of a sphere. This is because synergetics consistently associates order with a squeezing implosive action, disorder with a radial explosive action. Radial vectors each act on their own, pointing away from a common center, whereas tension vectors collaborate, and exert leverage against the center by pulling together at 90 degrees to radiation, i.e. around a circumference.

The World Wide Web, with its page-events tensively intercohered by hypertext links, is topologically spherical in a literally geographic sense: the Web servers on which the pages are resident dot the globe, while activated links cause text to travel in a circumferential traffic pattern. Whether the Web also works to contain the entropic tendencies of conflicting cultures is a question about the integrity of its sphericity in a non-literal, metaphysical sense. Synergetics makes the leap from literal to non-literal in the blink of an eye -- to a view of the global weather pattern, with local highs and lows in pressure.

For further reading:

• Synergetics 500.00
• Angle versus Frequency
• Re Interfacing Mathematics to the Real World (Mar 27, 2002)
• Java applet by Kirby Urner
• GST: New Low Level Associations for the ‘System’ Concept