What do flexagons have to do with such a collection of things
as: "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"; A Pattern Language; "Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle"; "An Experiment With Time"; The Cocktail Party Effect; Synchronicity; Strings and Superstrings; Theory of Everything; Taoism; and many other philosophical ponderings? What is all of this telling us?
Möbius Bands and/or Flexagons: Could these be used for a new spin or 'flex' on the present 'string' of exemplars for a Theory of Everything? At this time I have listed only the following very sparse list of notes and references. The intention is to provide some clues for my Theory of Everything, or my 'Flex'osophy. Flexagons might provide invaluable visualization aids for explaining philosophies that may prove impossible to otherwise articulate.
Have fun and ponder on these prompters of my plan.
Your own Flexagon 'Theory of Everything' may be at hand!
An Experiment With
Time - This book made me start to consider the combination of parallel universes along with a continuous cycle of time which only would have one side, like a Möbius Band. Dreams that involve any sort of relationship with any character, even yourself, could be possibly explained by the 'Cocktail Party Effect'.
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm (1983) At this Amazon.com link is a review by Philip A. Stahl which has an interesting paragraph: "This unified order would be described as 'implicate' - and one can ascertain that the explicate order is or can be 'enfolded' into it. In effect, one confronts a universe that has deceived our senses. We are
deceived into believing there exist a multiplicity of entities, when in fact there is only one. We just can't apprehend it from our vantage point." Maybe a bit of this philosophy could be 'enfolded' into a flexagon and just see what unfolds. Maybe the philosophies of Deepak Chopra and David Bohm are on the same flexagon?
Synchronicity might also be explained in a similar manner. The active unconscious may find it highly receptive to 'meaningful' activities occurring at some other place in time. There may be an infinite number of Möbius Bands representing each person with these bands intersecting with themselves or with another
person's)' Bands.
On Dialogue by David Bohm: Thought-provoking collection of writings probing into the dialogue process. Could metaphors in the form of flexagons demonstrate diverse dialogue theories? This book also reminded me about my short look at Jiddu Krishnamurti's writings. Bohm quotes him several times.
David Bohm On Dialogue Group Online: TT (The Table) site containing text, pictures, film, and audio related to David Bohm with emphasis on his book, "On Dialogue." Fascinating. Augmenting ('Auge'menting?) the TT, Optical Dialogue pushes the envelope ('eye'nvelope?) in visual communication.
A Natural Nietzsche Niche? - Nietzsche did believe that we are supposedly living the same life over and over again. Maybe a slight twist to the philosophy provides variations along the way, both vertically and laterally?
I Ching - The following passage from R. Over's I Ching includes the Moebius strip and its relationship to I Ching and other cyclic
occurrences or philosophies.
"Movement returning to its starting point is not only basic to the I Ching but finds a common ground in man's whole intellectual history. It may have started by man's observing the progression of heavenly bodies or the seasonal changes. Primitive man was surely dominated by the fact of seasonal change within nature, and he was undoubtedly more aware of the seasons in the life of man--the "ages of man," as Shakespeare calls them. From this primitive point of observation the idea of change moves like a steady refrain through man's thought: the sophisticated mathematical physiological cycles of Wilhelm Fleiss, popularly called biorhythm today; the fascinating renewal of cells within the human body every seven years; the twisting revolutions of the Moebius' geometric strips and the transformations of the topologists; the intriguing sun-spot activity cycling every eleven years. And this is only a very limited list of man's relationship to the cyclic aspects of life and thought."
"...Our awareness, our capacities to think of alternatives, our evaluations of them, and our eventual
behavioral routines 'might' have been highly inflexible. But the evidence suggests that they are the reverse. People can quite naturally grow up caring about a whole variety of things. It is quite difficult to detect any universal pattern at all: flexibility rules." From "Think" by Simon Blackburn.
"Perhaps the principal thing I absorbed from Professor Prall, and from Harvard in general, was a sense of interdisciplinary values--that the best way to "know" a thing is in the context of another discipline." Leonard Bernstein in "The Unanswered Question", his six talks at Harvard in 1976.
Grange 1999 - His book, "The City: An Urban Cosmology" has become to me a fitting example proving Leonard Bernstein's previous quite profound note. Plato's normative thinking may also be found in the flexagon model just as "resemblances can be found in thinkers as different as Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Whitehead. Plato's Philebus syllabus examining the unlimited, limited, the mixed, and the cause of the mixture.
Charles O. Perry said that, "The difference between the artist and the scientist is that the scientist uses intuition to look toward finding the facts, while the artist uses intuition to intrigue others." Flexagons provide numerous opportunities to both use and enhance intuitive capabilities in many directions.
By Vernon Gutenkunst (B.S. in Chemistry, Army Musician, B.A. in Interdepartmental Sociology)
Flexagon Re'flex'ions Home Page URL: http://hometown.aol.com/verndrei/flex00.html
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