triangveration: triangulating the truth by ratio |
Tich Backhouse to magistrait: "I will not answer yea or nay. Truth iz harmony, az any marrit man knows, the proportions haz gotta be right. Fifty-fifty ain' it, 'cept in the mind o' a loonie. I means the coin, o' course."
There are X-planations and Y-splanations. The Y advocates pretend to be wise, the truth can be got at. A nudge here, a squeeze there, cut and glue. And behold, all explained shortly in a judgment. Only trust the whys and wherefores. X advocates suggest that nothing finally can be pinned down. The unknown is either a chaos or a continuum, we should leave well alone and not pretend to certain knowledge. It is a futile exercise.
We could go on to A-splanations, that there are too many answers making themselves available, a multitude jostling, B-splanations, that "to be", present tense, did not exist in the past, which is historic, could not possibly affect the continuity of now, which is always now, a river, not a dead port.
And so on. No end to prolixity, a fluid state itself, hardening in one phase, volatile in another, if we give it credence.
Webster:We believe that reasons can be found, causes explained by asking why and effects reported with the presumption of causation in the past because we discovered a penchant for assigning units to experiences, much as we hitch the oxen to the plough, or attach the plough to the oxen. Actions made substantive, even the inchoate.
I shall turn to proportion: energy conserved and directed. Triangulation. Sailing into the air on a breath -- a bird's wing; and the bird singing. Resonation. Ratio. The tangent to a curve. How do we discover an outside tangent? Where is our hinge? For a tangent is a hinge, is it not, triangulated inside or outside the confines of our ouroborus?
The plane-faces of a wave run parallel, like the leaves of a round book, except the hinge of a book is its spine. We could open them until they formed a spherical pattern, and this, too, has its possibilities; what we are after, however, is a progressive curve, a resumption of the line of the curve in each succeeding circular plane.
A continuous tight bedspring. What actuates our coil? Triangular forces, each effect transmitted to the next via a tangent. If i confused you by mentioning plane-faces, it is because this is a field, very tricky to visualize, given as we are, i repeat, to breaking up motion into units, finites, a convenient ruse for learning. We would describe ploughing, if we saw it, as a succession of parallel straight lines terminating at the hedgerows. Ask the oxen. They turn and return, for them the motion is a wave, no break seen or noticed, on the tangent an awkward axial shift in exchange for a respite in the drag. You see, triangulation. In a complicity of dimensions. Vibrations. Resounding.
Webster:
If we cut a slice from our field, much like an apple 
there's our tangential triangle.
Imperfectly drawn. The trouble with mental images is that they lack detail, like visions and
dreams. Detail brings us back down to earth. What a shock! We thought we knew what we
saw in our heads. Impalpable. One touch and it dissolves. So with this field that embraces the
whole of out immediate universe, the source of all energy, all motion, all forces and effects,
which we must put into rational perspective to determine what's there. But we come upon in like
winged scavengers eager for scraps. Gobbling up a crumb her, a drop there, ravenous with our
triangular beaks. Making no sense of these, with our weather eye to the main chance. Where's
the harmony?
By means of a slice from an apple we can temporarily escape the cycle of hunger, or send our children into a different world, with promise in it. Mutating.
Webster:True of a triangle, how the harmony is assigned, conserved.
Suppose these things to be lacking details, such as exactness or distinctness or divisiveness.
It would take a fine eye to calibrate this harmony. Nature has developed the art to a T.
Transcendently. We establish the order of the proportions we discover by means of an inverted
T,
, a symmetrical triangle, hinged for flexibility. Grounded. The irrational made rational.
Triangveration.
We throw a grid over an area of terrain in order to pinpoint any place or locality in it.
We delineate heights, the elevation above sea level, by means of contour lines which slice through the region horizontally. This is a form on net but the holes in it are uneven and lacking detail. In truth a perfect copy is the area itself, anything else falling far short, though it may meet our needs in practice. Depending on what we want. For the net is a description meant to tell us at a distance what a body is like. Dimensionally.
The sewing pattern accommodates a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the curved surfaces of the human body. Cloth which is flat can be cut to approximate the proportions of the model, pinned, adjusted and sewn to an acceptable fit. Although cloth will conform to a curve, as it does on the roll, it cannot follow complications in a curve, not out of any short-comings of the material -- being a net or reticulated structure; there is not any usual way a two-dimensional plane or flat piece of cloth can imitate a three-dimensional body. It is likely true of a three- dimensional facsimile that it falls short of representing something in four dimensions. Four of five and so on. Adjustments are managed by forcing one into the image of the other.
You will notice that the tailor cuts a vee to draw the edges of a curve together. A slice of pie this time, triangulating into the circle. We begin to see the difficulties inherent in representing complicated and complex motions by means of linear models, for they are in another level of dimension. Well, then, the problem is a problem of representation. Sewing patterns solved that difficulty, accompanied by the ingenuities of the tailor. But no-one, short of the naive and idolatrous, mistakes the clothes for the weaver. "Clothes do not make the man," as the proverb goes.
Field Marshals have been know to mistake themselves as agents of God, a sure sign that they have lost the fine eye for details. A vision of how a battle will or ought to go is no guarantee that those caught up in the field conditions will follow suit. Strategy is fine when it works, despite a couple of packs of yelping probabilities* , but it is forcing one set of dimensions on a greater, and needs continual adjustment as it proceeds. By those in the field, within the system, immanent in it.
' "Survival of the fittest?" she said with a slight smile.
He grinned. "No, that's not really what Darwin said. Creatures multiply and specialize to fill all the little niches. Then the environment changes. A grass uses silica to protect itself or an ice sheet comes, and the niches aren't there any more. Species who find new niches live and proliferate. The rest disappear.
"People are just the same, they proliferate, they stratify and modify that behaviour to fit a particular niche. Then the tide comes in to wash the sand castles away..." 'Robert Frezza, "A Small Colonial War," P.159
Del Rey, Ballantine Books, 1989
A grim view, taken remotely as from a niche on Olympus. Most discouraging. But cheer up, this is a jaundiced vision, if it had details they would be fractal. Can we really get a close-up look at the equations of a grand unifying theory, one that assimilates generalized field patterns into a detailed structure, making sense of space and motion? Why not, it's all one, isn't it? Or was the Grand Designer in two minds, in one pulling things together, and in the other, distracted, just as enthusiastically dismantling the lot? Sounds like us, doesn't it, what we are doing? Could it be we see nature as in a looking glass, getting reflected back on our own thoughts and feelings on the matter? Hopeful or jaundiced, synthetic of analytical? "To hold the mirror up to nature." I forget who said that. A poet, probably. Not up to our own minds, then, unless we mean to study humankind in the process. A laudable idea, but not the point. Too much native pride in the species, top of the heap, monarchs of the sandcastle.
Space and motion. What is left out? Behaviour.
Webster:No mention of "inorganic" behaviour, thus fluids and the weather. There is thermal dynamics, studied in or out of context, but in these self-agency or volition (voluntarism) is not implied. How come i am writing this cursory overview of knowledge in general, what are the forces to which i react, willy nilly, like a hayseed blown in the draught from a tornado?
Wizardry, that's behavioural science. I mean the science of the spheres. Whatever the size or composition of the sphere. We can't get into its innards, this beast the individual, nor can we adequately examine the forces that belabour it. So we invent a machine, pretend it is an admissible model and go from there. A timepiece, an analytic engine, an artificial intelligence. Laudable studies. Rationalizations.
Webster:Yet a conscious mind meaningfully decided that it couldn't rule on itself. How on earth did it get up in the morning and eat its egg, boiled soft? By watching itself perform the act? Or its begetter? If you can't get into its head, ignore its role. The every judgment of an action or force is an inference, in psychology, that is, a guess, educated or uneducated.
What has the object to say for itself? Baa or bah?
How to get into the guts of a system and interpret what goes on. An artificial intelligence simulating what is known from observation. This rational mind of ours, letting consciousness and mind, that irrational part, go pick daisies if it wants. Indulge its poetic fantasies. Though this irrational part belongs. Sharing more than a close and intimate relationship.
I can't suggest that nature has a mind and consciousness of its own. Wouldn't be Duns Scotian, would it? But i can wonder [pun]. Speculation is one thing, belief is another. I believe in tangents and triangulation. Purely by intuition. How did any original belief get known? By intuition. That which cannot be meaningfully defined. We can study it and glimpse the mechanism involved. Though an intuitive jump is stepless, when we retrace the steps of a successful intuition we mark its passage. Retracing the steps or building the bridge, inductions and deductions fortified by inference, connecting them meaningfully. Tangents and triangles propagating fields, universalizing knowledge through intuitions, proportions balanced and judged in the imagination, proved in retrospect. A slice of life provides the intuition. Reason lays the groundwork when the objective has been reached. The objective is a vision, the details lacking details, but discovering the unknown is not a matter of laying bricks. And we aren't niches in the structure of the environment. We inherit it. We belong, irrationally, sharing more than a close and intimate relationship. It is us, too.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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