The Jungian Unconscious, Unreality, & MMORPGs

Post Reply New Topic

True ... in this case, you could say that we are looking at the reverse. From a standpoint of no-nouns, only-verbs, the question would not be "is it an entity" but something along the lines of "is it a real phenomenon?"




Why do you think that his assertions established a good case?
[/quote]

Well, it was several years ago I read that (while hanging out in a glass geodesic dome building painted to be a scale model of the Earth (and located precisely on the 90th meridian of longitude)), but here's my attempt.

In thinking about the mountain, Fuller took a temporal perspective much greater than ordinary human experience - watching relatively flat landmass like India collide with relatively flat South Asia, where the topography rises, becomes undulating due to the waves resulting from the collision vectors. Over geologic time, the wave breaks and subsides through processes we call erosion.

On other scales, the things we think of as solids (ie, a table) are in fact mostly empty space - physics tells us that the table resists the movement of our hand not because the atoms are solid, but because they are composed of 'particles' that are energy in motion, and this energy creates an cohesive resistance that we interpret as solidity. Looking into the subatomic particles reveals even smaller 'particles' which are energy events (composed of energy events as far down as we can understand).

He laid out a good explanation of his concept of pattern integrity - weightless, invisible metaphysical (there's that word that makes you suspicious!) construct that become manifest in matter. Take a particular knot (square knot, slip knot, whatever you prefer). That pattern can be made manifest on a cotton cord, and moved up and down the cord. If the cotton cord is attached end-to-end with a nylon cord, the knot can be moved to the nylon. Humans are no different - we develop, constantly taking in and putting out various chemical elements; when the calcium is in our blood or bone, we say it is part of us, and when we excrete it, we say it is not. The human is not the calcium; it is a complex knot, a pattern integrity that embraces the atoms for a while, then moves on just as the knot does.

As I said, I like Fuller. I think he had a brilliant mind, especially when it came to architecture.

My difficulty with him is that, like many great thinkers, he ended up taking his ideas much too seriously. His metanarrative was, as you say, based on patterns. He applied that metanarrative to his observations and, because it seemed to fit, he assumed that he had discovered something significant.

The late sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, wrote that people often presume that their assumptions concerning their experiences are rational. They then consistently interpret experiences in terms of their commonsense assumptions. Ultimately, they conclude that, because they obtain consistent results from applying their consistent assumptions, that they have discovered consistency. Actually, they have simply engaged in circular logic.

Fuller was a brilliant man. However, his sweeping generalization concerning certain patterns is a clear example of the problems with deductive logic.

Read the thread, then you'll also know WHY I refer to them! ! I state in my second big post on the thread that a MMORPG is a....

...... Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay Game.....( like Eve Online, World of Warcraft, GuildWars, Everquest etc)

Last edited by ouinon on 04 Dec 2007, 11:36 am, edited 7 times in total.

By "popular fictional worlds" "in which it is possible to immerse oneself" i meant those "in use" since many people had the time/leisure, money, education, and DESIRE to spend longish and repeated periods of time involved in reading a story, or the time and technology etc to watch many films. I obviously agree that great tales and mythologies have been around for far more than 200 years, (! !) but i meant in the kind of personal intimate way that MMORPGs and modern novels are available to people, in which can spend hours every day.
Maybe the increasing greed/hunger for "escapism" so called, is actually an expression of peoples search for something to replace their dreams. Either because they are not sleeping enough ( which tends to radically reduce REM sleep to bare minimum, and make recall harder), or because they are not eating enough Vitamin B5 or B6 for good recall, OR because the dismissal of the Unreal makes dreams look insignificant, valueless, and so people pay little or no attention to them.
And lose touch with that other space, or "dimension", and possibly with our most powerful tool for experimenting with life, trying out behaviours, exploring experiences, in the "unreal" world of dreams. Where we may also discover how to access greater knowledge than we are aware of possessing.
?