Fuzziology and Lifelong Learning
What is Fuzziness?
The Engine of Fuzziness
Need for Fuzziness
Leartning to Solve Problems
Life is not a Problem to be Solved
Holistic Experienve versus Partial Reasoning
Metabolism of 'Borrowed Knowledge'
Learning in Captivity of The System
Learning that Never Ends
Know Thyself
Inseparability of Existential Dynamics
Timelessness
Awareness Rotted in Human Experience
References
Lifelong
learning reflects our lifelong urge to know about our personal and
social worlds [1]; fuzziology [2, 3, 4] focuses on fuzziness
(uncertainty, imprecision) inherent in what we consider as known. The
famous paradox of knowing, formulated by Socrates nearly 2500 years ago
bridges lifelong learning with fuzziology:
The less
we know, the more certain are our explanations; the more we know, the
more aware we are about the limitations of being certain.
Because we
are aware of the limitations of what we consider as certain, we avoid
categorical and precise statements and use explanations that are less
certain. The acknowledgment of the fuzziness that is present in our
knowledge is a stimulus for a lifelong seeking of truth and wisdom; and
it is the search for truth and wisdom that makes human life meaningful.
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What is Fuzziness?
Everything
that we do not know for sure, we usually think, speak or write in a
fuzzy way, that is, by using words and expressions, which convey
uncertainty, ambiguity and doubt. The truth contained in a fuzzy
statement can neither be proved nor disproved, as fuzziness contains
both 'truth' and 'non-truth' at the same time.
Fuzziness is
a holistic characteristic - it does not relate to our thinking
only - it permeates our feelings and emotions, dreams and aspirations,
spiritual beliefs and endeavors. The fuzziness of our feelings does not
need words - it 'voices' through innumerable facial expressions,
movements of eyes and body, nerve signals and gestures, body position
and muscle tone, voice timbre and volume.
Fuzziness is
expressed in our actions - when we act without being sure about what we
really do and aim for, or act with information about the goal we seek
but are ignorant of how to approach it. This is usually the case when
we act a complex or sensitive-to-change situations. Our life is full of
such kind of situations.
Fuzziness is
our companion in the processes of learning, generating hypotheses and
proving theorems. In 1932 Gödel proved that in any axiomatic
mathematical system (theory), there are fuzzy propositions, that
is, propositions which cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms
of this system.
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The Engine of Fuzziness
Fuzziness is
not something that exists 'over there', as a quality of an external
object; it is in our understanding of complexity in which we
live and constantly create and re-create through our experience,
through our thoughts, words and actions. It is in the ways complexity
reflects our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience and
thus constantly creates and re-creates us. So the source of fuzziness
is in the self-referential nature of our beings: we are
simultaneously creators and products of the existential complexity.
Fuzziness in
our understanding of complexity of nature and society is a reflection
of the fuzziness of our knowing about ourselves. According to
Heisenberg - one of the greatest physicists of our time, "The same
regulating forces, that have created nature in all its forms, are
responsible for the structure of our psyche and also for our capacity
to think" [5]. Every time when we learn how to deal with some
conundrum of our 'inward' individual life, we simultaneously reveal a
secret of complexity in which we live, a secret of our 'outward' social
life.
Generations
after generations of humans have lived, live and will continue to live
together with a constantly reproducible fuzziness 'energized' by what
we do not know about ourselves, about our lives, about nature and
existence. And the deeper the processes of our learning and
knowing go into the enigmas we live with, the broader the spectrum
of manifested fuzziness. The famous message of Socrates: " the only
thing we know for sure, is how little we know" relates to the
never-ending renewal of the fuzziness in human knowledge.
The ignorance
about the unknown and the uncertainty about the known, which ever
moves, reshapes and changes, keep the engine of fuzziness going.
Powerful accelerators of this engine are the self-propelling dynamics,
spontaneity and the stunning variety of the life unfolding with its
unpredictable rhythm of never-ending 'stretching', 'shrinking' and
'transforming'.
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Need for Fuzziness
Our growth in
intelligence and wisdom is hardly compatible with the establishment of
rigid mental and emotional patterns. Every fixed idea, prejudice,
stereotype and standard in thinking, every pre-imposed emotional or
spiritual restriction, every blindly followed behavioral pattern,
attachment and addiction decrease our ability to fully experience the
journey of life and acts as an obstacle on the way of realization of
our creativity.
When
consciously 'fuzzifying' the rigideness of our thoughts and beliefs, we
empower our capacity to see the flow of the events of life and to learn
directly from it. The development of our ability for a direct
learning from the lessons of life - from the circumstances and
eventualities of own experience - helps us see the limitations which
fuzziness puts on our knowing and continually explore ways of
transcending them.
The fuzziness
inherent in human knowing is what fuzziology explores, not in order to
reduce or eliminate it (this is an impossible task!), but to understand
and go beyond its limitations.
The words of
the ancient wisdom are always fuzzy; therefore they reach the hearts of
many different people and make sense for them at different situations
in different time of human history. Fuzziology is that hidden
interpreter of the words of wisdom - the interpreter who make them
understandable to the heart and soul, to the mind and spirit of an
individual.
Very
different from the approach of fuzziology are the approaches embraced
by the education system of today's society.
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Learning to Solve Problems
In today's
society, the process of learning is predominantly towards acquisition
of various kinds of expert knowledge - a knowledge which can be used
for solving specific problems. This kind of learning is centred in our
minds (conceptual knowledge) and bodies (practical skill), and
crucially depends on the development of our ability to think in a
rational way, to analyze and synthesize, to extract and study
cause-and-effect relationships, to generate hypotheses and test them
experimentally, to draw out logical conclusions and master skills for
performing certain actions.
The major
goal of problem-oriented learning is to reduce or eliminate fuzziness
imbedded in the process of knowing. In artificially designed systems,
subjected to precise description and control, this goal can be
achieved. When dealing with life and nature, this goal can never
be achieved; the deeper we go in exploring ourselves, society and
universe, the larger becomes the field of our inquiry, as we
constantly come across phenomena and processes which we were initially
unable to see. It is like zooming into infinite numbers of scales
(fractal levels) nested into one another; every scale reveals more
subtleties to be noticed for than the previous.
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Life is not a Problem to be Solved
"Life is not
a problem to be solved but reality to be experienced" - these words
belong to the Danish philosopher S. Kirkegaard (1813-1856). Infinite is
the number of levels through which reality manifests - from the macro
level of the whole universe to the micro level of a single quark. And
all the levels project on human experience - not only because
everything relates to everything else in the impossible-to-separate web
of existential dynamics, but also because it is through our experience
that we can grasp the meaning of the manifestations of these dynamics
and ride on their inexhaustible power. We are endowed with a limitless
potential to sense - recognize and understand - the meaning of the
events of our experience. In every creative act of realization of this
potential, a level of reality opens some of its secrets to us.
Unfortunately,
our systems of education do not teach us how to listen to and
understand the 'voice' of our experience. Often, this voice appears too
subtle, too soft and too fuzzy in comparison with the loud, sharp and
determinate voice of our minds when hurrying to explain 'precisely' how
the surrounding world works and how to utilize this 'precise' knowledge
for the purpose of control and exercising power over nature and people,
systems and machines.
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Holistic Experience versus Partial Reasoning
Human
experience emerges out of the complex interplay of the four vital
constituents of our nature - body, mind, soul and spirit, while
in constant dynamic interactions with the environment.
However
powerful the body-mind tandem seems to be as a coordinator of our sense
perceptions, it can only see a part of the holistic picture of reality;
therefore the mind-body - centred models of reality - models
which profoundly underpin today's systems of education, are partial.
It does not
matter how precisely we can describe and formulate a partial model, the
precision can never make it holistic. The effects that one's soul and
spirit have on one's life and experience remain excluded from the
picture of reality provided by a mind-centred model. Often this picture
appears as a distorted image of reality.
Partial
models are suitable for describing artificial (human-made) systems;
these systems can be precisely described, dissemble into subsystems and
parts, and then assemble again. Partial models do not make much sense
when used to describe holistic phenomena and processes like those in
nature, life and society. When applied to a description of such
phenomena, a partial model (be it deterministic or probabilistic,
precise or fuzzy) leads to delusion, to false views on reality - views
which can be used for manipulative purposes by those with greatest
influential power in society.
The 's'-components
of human nature - soul and spirit - cannot be
eliminated; they emit mystery and wisdom, and therefore fuzziness,
into our experience, into the process of our knowing about ourselves
and about the world with which we continuously interact, co-adapt and
co-evolve.
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Metabolism of 'Borrowed' Knowledge
Our
educational institutions teach learners how to metabolize so-called
'borrowed' knowledge, that is, a knowledge borrowed from outside
the learners' experience and prepared by socially recognized 'gurus' and
'experts'. After pouring the borrowed knowledge into their brains,
learners are asked to use it for purposes located again outside
them, for example, for producing nuclear bombs and rockets, intelligent
robots and self-organizing machines (who think and work obediently,
unlike humans who are able to engage in unpredictable behaviour),
genetic mutants (with totally distorted natural ability for the
realization of their inherent potential), cosmic stations (mainly for
military purposes, espionage and global surveillance), and so on.
Research institutions from all over the world fervently try to increase
this kind of 'applied' knowledge; the most significant part of which is
directed to serve their sponsors - powerful financial and industrial
corporations - and to help them multiply their profits and satisfy
their growing appetite for global power.
The
artificial world of human-made systems, designed for control and an
insatiable use of natural and human resources, does not like fuzziness
and conflicts with it wherever it occurs. The design, implementation,
development and continuous innovation of human-made systems require
expert-type of knowledge, so educational systems are forced to teach
learners how to accumulate and apply such knowledge.
The more we
immerse ourselves in the artificial world and its requirements for
certainty and precision, the narrower becomes the niche of researching
ourselves, the less able we are to hear and understand the holistic
'voice' of our own nature, to interpret the fuzzy messages of our
conscious and subconscious experience, the fuzzy whisper of our soul
and spirit.
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Learning in Captivity of The System
We all are
pressed to learn how to fit and serve the expanding economic System of
Global Corporate Control - a system based on unequal distribution of
economic power and therefore ruled by those who have such power in
abundance - unbelievably rich financial institutions, corporations and
individuals. Education is a captive of this System and is pressed to
obey it in order to survive; therefore, since our young years, we are
taught how to contribute to making the System stronger. We are rarely
taught how to live and grow in mind and spirit; those who control the
System do not care about this at all. Moreover, they oppose such a
growth as it is much easier for them to manipulate a herd of
narrow-minded 'experts' and precise 'specialists' than enlightened
human beings with broad understandings of social reality; the latter can
be a serious threat for the System's custodians.
We have been
taught how to keep propelling the engine of the System and thus to
increase the richness of those who count in it. If we resist doing
this, the System can easily smash us. A huge army of police, military
forces and security equipped with high tech means of surveillance
constantly allows the System to run so that its elite can act without
troubles. (In the Western type of democracies, if we want to protest,
we must inform the authorities about our intention to do this, to have
their permission and then to 'protest' according to special
instructions, so that the System is not disturbed).
When lifelong
learning remains under support and influence of the System of Global
Corporate Control, it can become a lifelong brainwash which,
instead of emphasising personal growth, teaches learners how to better
fit into the System's requirements, to follow its rules, and to remain
constantly in captivity of dreams for consumption-centred happiness.
This kind of 'happiness' is intensively preached by politicians,
economic 'thinkers' and the mass media paid by the System.
By keeping
individuals' consumption-oriented desires at the highest possible
level, the System distracts their ability to understand and unmask its
manipulations at the lowest possible level, and thus makes it easier
for the mega corporations to expand their control.
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Learning that Never Ends
Know Thyself!
The best way
to be involved in lifelong learning every single day of our conscious
life is to understand the roles of creativity and spirituality in our
personal growth, and through a realization of our potential to learn
from the events of our experience. This potential is infinite!
"Know
thyself" - this is the apotheosis of Socrates' legacy in learning.
For Socrates, the way to know ourselves is also a way to know the
others, and a way to know about everything else that happens in nature
and society. The way to know ourselves is through learning from our own
experience.
What does it
mean to learn from experience? Is it only to make meaning of the flow
of everyday events? Making meaning is associated mostly with our mental
activity. We already discussed that the mind-centred learning is
partial and therefore widely open for manipulations, delusion and
control.. So, mind-centred learning is not a holistic process. Neither
is spiritual learning disconnected from our ability for reasoning.
Forms of learning concerned only with acquisition of knowledge about
our physical health, or about our feelings and emotions, our
subconscious drives and impulses are also not complete.
In J.
Campbell's book "The Power of Myth" one reads: "People say that what
we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that is what we
are really seeking. I think what we are seeking is an experience of
being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane
will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so
that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
Unfortunately,
"the rapture of being alive" disappears every time when death decides
to loudly send a painful signal of its coming closer. Neither the body
nor the mind can happily live with such signals. The beliefs in some
future resurrection or reincarnation or immortality is of help only if
the whole body-mind-soul-spirit complex of an alive individual has a
kind of an experience-rooted awareness about a possibility to avoid its full
disintegration, despite the inevitable disintegration of its physical
nature. Otherwise, without such awareness, a bare belief in immortality
is similar to a self-imposed delusion. If one can only know how to
evoke awareness of being in existence forever, then "the rapture of
being alive" and the inspiration to earn and know will never end.
The
exploration of the origins of fuzziness stimulates the emergence of
such awareness.
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Inseparability
of Existential Dynamics
One of the
three principles of fuzziology - the principle of
connectivity-in-dynamics [1], which explains why the fuzziness is
inherent in human knowing, says: "No thing and no being can exist in
itself or for itself but only in dynamic relationship with other things
and beings". This is also a fundamental premise of complexity, and
relates to the integrity of all existential dynamics - energies,
forces, forms and substances, whose creative, sustaining or destructive
powers are constantly demonstrated at different scales of the universe.
It is through these dynamics that everything that exists, moves, changes
and transforms, from an elementary particle to a gigantic ensemble of
galaxies, becomes connected in a gigantic vortex-like spinning web of
mutually dependent, intricately interwoven and co-evolving
relationships.
Einstein was
among the greatest supporters of the idea of unity. To him belongs the
following quotation: "A human being is a part of the whole, called by
us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself,
his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind
of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of
prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a
few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole nature in its beauty" [6].
Any
individual, indeed, any phenomenon of existence has the totality of
existence at its own base and reflects this totality. As far as
existence has ever been, one can infer that every phenomenon and
especially every individual has an infinite past based on an infinity
of relationships, which cannot exclude anything that existed, exists,
or is liable to come into existence in future.
This stream
of thoughts, which is at the base both of fuzziology and complexity
science, has a strong spiritual connotation.
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Timelessness
What is
timeless - permanent, non-temporal, eternal - in the gigantic galactic
whirlpool, which holds together all the swirling dynamics of existence
(in similar way as a tornado holds together all the swirling dynamics
of constantly interacting streams of air), can be located only in the
hollowness - the cavity, the emptiness - along the central axis of the
whirlpool. Only the emptiness, that is, only what is free of any
materialized dynamics can be timeless and immortal: beyond birth and
death, beyond growth and decay. But it is a particular kind of
emptiness - an emptiness that is impregnated with an immense creative
potential (in the same way as the emptiness of the black holes studied
in physics is impregnated with a monstrous sucking power). Being both
voidness and plenitude, the hollowness in the centre of the existential
whirlpool may be used as a mental image of the ESSENCE of the existence.
The essence
supports not only the integrity of the existence, it endows the
whirling complexity of existence with an ability to self-organize -
expand, sustain and fold together with the material forms, in which
these dynamics are embodied. All embodied-in-matter motions, dynamics
and interactions, all animated forms of existence gravitate to the
voidness of the essence in order to release their energy contents and
die, and to its plenitude in order to be filled with energy and live.
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Awareness
Rooted in Human Experience
In a state of
deep relaxation, when not only our physical bodies are free of tension
but also the minds are free of thoughts, and the emotions cease to
emerge, we can experience the emptiness. After such an experience, we
feel like being born anew, charged by a kind of energy that is similar
to the energy of inspiration. Because of this re-vitalizing effect, the
relaxation positively influences not only the body, but also the mind
and soul. Why not to go a bit further and imagine one's physical death
as a unique kind of relaxation that is necessary for charging anew the
creative potential of those components of the body-mind-soul-spirit
complex (at the Essence of one's inner nature), which do not
disintegrate when the body and the brain die?
In a state of
meditation, the yogis identify their inner nature with the essence of
existence and its unlimited spiritual power. Here is a text used to
keep the consciousness of the yoga practitioners focused at the essence
of their inner nature.
"I am not
only this body, not only these senses, not only this mind and not even
this intellect only. No, I am none of these things in isolation! Each
of them is ever changing and impermanent. Each of them has a beginning
and an end. I am not bound by beginning and end. I have my roots in the
Essence of Existence, which has no birth, no growth, no decay, no
disease, no death. Therefore, the sword cannot cut me asunder! The
spear cannot pierce me through! The wind cannot dry me! The water
cannot wet me! The fire cannot burn me! The sun cannot scorch me! I am
unborn, immortal, immovable, unchangeable, all pervading and infinite.
I am the Totality of the Essence, which is ever by itself, one without
a second!"
By exploring
the sources, nature and dynamics of fuzziness that accompanies our
attempts to grasp the mysterious essence of existence and its infinite
unfolding through the events of life, fuzziology reveals powerful
fountains of inspiration. It is entirely in our hands to use the
limitless energy of these fountains while continually learning how to
live in full realization of our creative potential, and thus to
contribute in the growth of the human consciousness.
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References
1. Delors, J. 1996. The Treasure Within. UNESCO,
Paris.
2.
Dimitrov, V. (2001) Introduction to Fuzziology, in Fuzzy Logic: A
Paradigm for the New Millennium, Eds. V. Dimitrov and V. Korotkich,
Heidelberg-New York (http://www.uws.edu.au/vip/dimitrov/study-of-fuzziness.htm)
3.
Dimitrov, V. et al (2001) Fuzziology and Social Complexity, in Advances
in Fuzzy Systems and Evolutionary Computation, Ed. N. Mastorakis,
World Scientific Engineering Society Press: New York, Athens, pp. 88-93
4.
Dimitrov, V. and Stewart, B. (2001) Social Fuzziology in Action:
Acquisition and Making Sense of Social Information, in Soft
computing in measurement and information acquisition, Eds. L.
Reznik and V. Kreinovich, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg-New York
5.
Heisenberg, W. 1999 Physics and Philosophy, Reprint edition, Prometheus
Books, New York
6.
Einstein, A. 1993 The World as I See It, Reissue edition, Citadel Pr.
Go to Vlad's home page
v.dimitrov@uws.edu.au
Vlad Dimitrov and Steve Wilson
s.wilson@uws.edu.au
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