In two words… what defines “science”?

It’s “asking questions”, of course ( silly!  ;-).

Science is also about asking particular kinds of questions, so you’d be missing a lot if you didn’t also ask “What kinds of questions is that?”…  and end up getting to the “big picture” by asking “But then,… doesn’t any question both open your mind to one thing and close it to another?”

So that more precisely defines science is a kind of “open territory” of all the kinds of questions one might ask, hoping to find ones that are particularly “informative” and give us unexpected “insight”, while keeping us clear of “jumping to conclusions” and other pitfalls.   It’s a long process of bending our minds to fit the world we seem to be part of, finding ways to both “get along” and to bend the world to suite us, guided by the landscapes, pathways, open skies and hidden traps of “understanding” and “misunderstanding”,talking to “busybodies” and “not so busy bodies”, that one finds traveling beyond “The Phantom Tollbooth” (ref the Juster & Pfeiffer masterpiece).

the question is...?

What have you been wondering about…?

One of the very most informative and useful questions I ever asked is “What is nature hiding from us?”.  That question came to me about 25 years after my first highly productive question of the kind. which was “what makes life so lively?”    I’ve had SO much fun with both those questions I really cannot tell you!    I don’t feel compelled to “look under every leaf and stone”, but having asked those two questions, using them as a kind of “lens” for studying what’s happening around us, it has made it quite likely that in any natural hiding place I look I’ll find traces of things “making life lively” as a way to study what they’re doing and how, along with leading questions about where they’re headed. Continue reading In two words… what defines “science”?

A Hestian Map – the sacred hearth not at home in an authoritarian world

I’ve been having a very exciting time discovering and building on the many connections between my scientific method for studying the development and organization of Natural Systems, and the wonderfully radical scientific feminism of Pat Thompson’s “Hestian Home Economics” (1,2,3).   They both center on what is at the heart of the liveliness of natural systems, the living culture and the home it makes for itself in its environment.  The protector of that home and hearth fire for the families of pre-ancient Greece was Hestia, the first of foremost of their personal archetypes of divinity, charged with protecting the **SACRED FIRE of HEARTH AND HOME**.  From a physical science of natural systems much the same can be said for the continuity any systems “seed of self-organization” around which it has developed its way of using the energy resources of its environment.   Same statements, two different wonderfully interconnected languages!   ;-)

To pre-Aristotelian Greek culture HESTIA was the first of the children of Cronus, charged with the first duty of civilization, protecting the sacred flame of hearth and home.   In how families still work today, that’s the continuity of their living culture, their ability to exercise their family traditions and practices, inheriting and passing on it’s joys and forms of knowing, adapting to their changing world as a bridge between their generations.   It’s that  CONTINUITY, then, that IS the living flame of a family home and the animating heart of any living culture, the *cont-in-uity* it develops and follows as it branches out, forming new expressions, that hav always been, and clearly still are today, the center of human life, the foundation of all our cultures. They are today also *quite threatened*, by our devotion to rules for demanding ever more productivity from these living cells that make our lives lively, driving everything sacred to us toward “make bricks without straw”, as it were, for the sake of misunderstood authoritarian rules…!

1) for her books look up “Patricia Thompson, Hestia” on Amazon. 2) PDF of Pat’s simple scientific systems thinking, that unlike virtually all other systems theories other than mine has living things and their archetypal living roles, included not excluded 3) How she deconstructs Roman historian Fustel’s history of Greek culture, that replaced the original (Hestian) cultural language with a commercial (Hermian) dialectic.

 

Let’s look at the territory,

and the basic maps of home economics and political economics

montserratnature

The basic map of home economics is a work of caring for the home culture. 

For political economics it’s the battle in the public sphere to gain advantage over others.  Pat Thompson calls them “Hestian” and “Hermian” systems, after the representative Greek gods, and we need to understand the action principles defining them.

The primary duty of the home maker, considering a family as a link on a chain of living culture, is to be the guardian of its flame of life and continuity as a culture.  Its living culture illuminates the home with its light and life, as the home serves as the commons within which the family culture inherits and passes on its traditions as family members live for each other, sustaining an “all for one” life of a true commons (Hestian culture).   Continue reading A Hestian Map – the sacred hearth not at home in an authoritarian world

A “Commons“ is…

A “Commons“

….Is a place, where

An organic culture

defines and makes its home

  • as its defensible and public space
  • for its communities of participants

serving as a “hive” for its internal relationships

  • usually as inclusive and equitable interconnections
  • (everyone to everyone)

serving as a “hub” for its external relationships

  • with its local niche of  ecological partners
  • with its open environment
  • (exploratory connections)
  • with and networks of remote exclusive connections
  • (one to one)

As its “Niche” in the world and “living space”.

 … for example

A “body”   is a commons for its cells

  • But bodies are organized differently than their cells, each needing to be part of a different culture

A “town”   is a commons for its villagers

  • But every town develops from its unique circumstance, so the usual patterns associated with the words are really questions about the individual thing

A “nest”     is a commons for its family or swarm

  • Living things need to sleep, and make secure places where they can “tune out” at night, to reemerge refreshed.
  • and so too the organizations of a commons, that come to a rest at night, to awake refreshed by the reflections of rest.

The Earth   is a commons for life Continue reading A “Commons“ is…

Hay… We finally made the move !

1948_NearTimlof-This NY blog is real glad the WordPress tools are so portable!!   We moved from servers in the Mid-West to ones in Virginia today!    I have more to say than time to write, and another website to build, or well… that’s the plan.   Plans change a lot.

I’ll probably keep just working on the “knowledge bridge”, a tremendous labor of love for me I guess, slowly, slowly, learning how to speak to people in familiar natural language terms about the wonderfully beautiful but unfamiliar deep organization of the living systems.    Why that’s possible is fascinating, that natural language actually evolved *by means of* referring to the working features of the complexly organized systems of life, as a “way to talk” about working with nature’s systems that we rely so heavily on them “just working by themselves”.

So… it really helps to notice that the meanings of our words really do originate from the natural meanings of the complex organizations of things in nature.   It makes natural language, by default, a quite advanced sort of “organic systems theory”.    All one needs to do is “just take a fresh look“, at the things our words already refer to in nature…

Using words like “friend” or “storm” or “house”, you both refer to common “word meanings” and also to the complex systems of familiar natural relationships that the words also refer to, along with how they work in the natural world as their “natural meanings”.     It’s a way to pull your mind back to connecting with the natural meanings of things, and a fuller way to experience them.    To enrich the “word meaning” with the “natural meaning” you just keep adding to your reflections on the things of nature as you experience your natural relationships with them.