Mtsbwy! or May the squiggle be with you! This is what we call the squiggle greeting: It means that you wish for the person you greet with it to awaken, be mindful of, or simply appreciate their squiggle sense, that is, their sixth sense of the complementary nature, such that they might transcend detrimental either/or thinking, and achieve, experience and enjoy at will the benefits and wonder of sentient metastability, that...
BOOK REVIEW - “For the past twenty years Scott Kelso’s research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self-organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains) perceive, intend, learn, control, and coordinate complex behaviors. In this book Kelso proposes a new, general framework within which to connect brain, mind, and behavior. Kelso’s...
THE COMPLEMENTARY NATURE – J. A. Scott Kelso and David A. Engstrøm. Cambridge (Massachusetts): MIT Press. ISBN:0-262-11291-4. 2006. Reviewed by Arthur Fabel. The 2000 United States presidential election was decided by some 500 votes out of 100 million, evenly split between conservative and liberal, red and blue states, rural or urban, and so on. The 2004 election was similar, and recently in Germany the vote for...
“As long as Knecht permitted the flow of inner images to come without direction, as they do, like dreams, in the initial stage of relaxation, there were two principal scenes which emerged from the stream and lingered, two pictures or symbols, two parables. In the first Knecht, as a boy, followed the Master along a variety of ways. The Music Master strode before him as his guide, and each time he turned around and showed...
“This marvellous book describes a wealth of biological features in terms of the structure of the underlying dynamical space, its bifurcations, and its attractors. This dynamical space is parameterised (say by the frequency of a gait), and as the value of the parameter changes, the dynamics changes, sometimes significantly (such as changing from a trot to a gallop). Moreover, the change can also depend on how the...
Coordination comes in many guises and represents one of the most striking, but least understood features of living things. Over the last 20 years or so a new foundation for understanding coordination has emerged called Coordination Dynamics. Grounded in the concepts of self-organization and the tools of nonlinear dynamics, appropriately extended to handle informational aspects of living things, Coordination Dynamics aims to...
“Perfect defenses are not always an advantage. Complete protection can become a hindrance for it limits you in other ways.” House Harkonnen, From The Dune Series — Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson “Body and mind are two phenomena, observed under different conditions, but of one and the same ultimate reality. Body and mind are aspects of the living being. They operate within a peculiar...
Book Chapter by Armin Fuchs* and Viktor K. Jirsa* 1 Introduction “Does old Scotty still make a living from finger wagging?” A question asked by an Irish man who had known Scott Kelso since both were children. The answer: “Yes, and doing quite well, actually” triggered the much tougher question: “What can be studied there for half a life span?” Such was not possible to respond in detail as we were at the airport in...
OLAF SPORNS – “The division of our world (natural and social) into distinct contraries or opposites has become almost universal practice in most fields of human endeavor and inquiry, including science. Undeniably, imposing such divisions on space and time, wave and particle, order and chaos, action and perception, or organism and environment have enabled significant progress in our scientific understanding of...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO & DAVID A. ENGSTRØM – have written The Complementary Nature to summarize their research plan. In this book, Kelso and Engstrøm contend that ubiquitous contraries are complementary and propose a comprehensive, empirically-based scientific theory of how the polarized world and the world in between can be reconciled. They nominate the squiggle (~), as the symbolic punctuation for reconciled...
