Category: ENGLISH

Quite a few of my best friends are getting uncomfortable whenever I’m going to start saying this word once again: “multi-perspective”.

Because this is what I call what I have been seeing more and more and everywhere for a few years now, like a little plant that is slowly spreading more and more in all kinds of places. But my friends don’t want to talk about leaves as much (as I do), and how could you blame them? After all, my friends are interested in other things too, like art and culture, or which wardrobe to buy, or where to get the best. (“Thanks for the tip, Jim, we found one!”)

I still live in this world, after all, and I know and appreciate the value of such conversations. We live in the city, so the stuff that grows there isn’t that important after all. My friends are not botanists who could engage in my attention to detail, which is what it takes when you want (or need) to examine leaf structures. I have to, I can’t help it. “Damn, this is important! Yes, even that one particular little plant growing there between the cracks in the road.” And so my friends flinch slightly when I point again to a leaf of a plant and exclaim: “multiperspective!”.

My friends don’t seem to see for the city how a plant is becoming dominant right now that will probably have completely reshaped our thinking in a few years (and I suspect that this very thinking will be necessary to turn the trolley around once again, and so maybe, like in a computer game, get to the next level. As I said, I suspect that, but nobody can know that yet. Just as you can never know how the future will develop. But there are weather forecasts. And I am something like a weatherman. Because as fate would have it, that’s exactly what I’ve been studying for more than 20 years. What exactly? That little plant.

Weed, i.e. cannabis, i.e. the plant that at least a few more people are interested in, is: absolutely nothing compared to it. I can see how what is emerging is already colossally changing our thinking. “Yes, yours too! Just look, then you can see it. And don’t think that it’s normal, just because all your friends feel more or less the same way.

How can I say? You can clearly see it if you look in the other direction than most are used to. The view of the universe is dark, if one has the sun in the back. On earth, this phenomenon is called “night”. But the night is coming to an end. And you can already perceive the dawn. If you look in the right direction, of course. If you look anywhere, then you very likely don’t get that it’s dawn.

The plant is getting bigger from day to day, here is a particularly beautiful specimen I have now come across: Can you please take a look at it? Listen to the this podcast, and every 30 seconds recall the word “multiperspective”, imagine in your mind my voice and what I have been saying for years about the structure of the leaves. Can you see it now?

For those of you who don’t know WTF I’m talking about – this plant, of course, has also been noticed by others. People who put it differently. More and more people are describing the same phenomenon, it’s just not so easy to tell because they describe it from many different angles and give it different names.

Judith Aston pointed me to the term metamodernism, I would think it is the same thing:

Of course, one could now ask: “Okay, this thing, this little plant, metamodernism, multi-perspective or whatever, it’s coming anyway. Why should we intervene somehow (and how at all?), it’s nothing bad, isn’t it? So why spend so much energy on something now, when there are other things at least as important?”

This question is very justified and I would answer quite soberly: “Because you want to educate your children well today, in order to prepare them well for the future. So you have to teach them today, how to recognize the plant, how to understand its effects in order to be able to work with the plant and not against it. On the other side are then at best those who later constantly get tangled in the branches of the plant because they have never learned to see it.

A few words about stories, consider them true. As true as stories can be. All stories are made, are constructed, are artificial, would never occur so in nature. There are no true stories, one could even say the true story itself, is an invention and yet stories are all we have and all that is, we owe to stories.

Without words, bundled into stories, we could not remember the world. We could only see and hear and feel and taste what is, we could perceive the world, but it would be gone as soon as the moment passed and disappeared into the past. We would not be able to remember anything. Everything would consist only of the moment in which it is. Without words, the only place we could live would be the everlasting, eternal moment.

A story is nothing more than a bunch of words that rhyme in a certain way. The rhyme is what holds the words together so that they can be remembered, transported from brain to brain, last [1].

Words may be an approximation of what is, stories, on the other hand, are arbitrary. Stories do not care whether they are closer or farther from what is. Stories only care about whether they rhyme. The better the rhyme, the better the story.

Not every brain appreciates all rhymes equally. For example, some prefer simpler rhymes, some more complex, some funnier, some more serious, some with a clearer melody, some with a more polyphonic one. And so not every brain appreciates the same stories, but all brains appreciate stories.

Words outside of stories make no sense, fall apart, are empty words. The number of non-bundled words a brain can remember is limited, the number of stories a brain can remember may also be limited, but it is vast. You can see it for yourself once you turn your gaze inward. Look at all the stories you can remember, all the stories that make you who you are.

All stories are inventions. They are all that we have. All that we are.

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[1] There are techniques and technologies to transfer knowledge out of brains (books, movies, ect.) but this can only be (inanimate) temporary storage.

People often think that things make sense when they can be expressed linearly. Something is convincing if it can be said in words, in the form of a text, preferably in a book or in a (linear) film. And so one checks things (thoughts, observations) not only in the academy for their meaningfulness by checking whether they can be expressed in linear-causal logic. It is a standard procedure to distinguish sense from nonsense, signal from noise. Can something be explained in linear-causal terms? If so, it must be true.

The method of ordering things in a linear causal way is wonderful and has been instrumental in getting us to where we are as a humankind. Linear causal thinking has enabled us to develop not only the technologies that largely shape our lives around the world today, but also the societies and cultures in which we live. Linear-causal thinking shapes just about every aspect of life, how cities look as well as how communities are structured, how power plants or means of transportation are constructed.

And yet it is probably not the only method of recognizing and expressing meaningfulness. Another method (and I am tempted to say the other method) is non-linear, multi-causal thinking as expressed, for example, in Korsakow. Every thing (every thought, every observation) has many references at the simultaneously. All things influence each other, exert forces on each other. Thereby everything is always in motion and every thing has effects on all other things. This seems to me to be the basic principle, which is valid on all levels and everywhere in the universe. Within an atom as well as within galaxies. Our societies behave this way, our relationships with each other, everything we do has effects in all directions (the flap of a butterfly) and everything we do is at the same time the result of forces acting on us from all directions.

People often think that things make sense if they can be expressed linearly. I suspect it might be the other way around:

Linear forms of expression make sense of things that can be expressed in linear forms. Things that cannot be expressed linearly, on the other hand, seem meaningless, they seem to be “noise”.

Could it be that noise does not exist in the sense that what seems to us like noise is actually signal and we just cannot read it?

“Everything is a tool that shapes thinking?” you might ask, “How is a cup a tool that shapes thinking?”.

This question can be answered with a simple thought experiment, that works for any thing or thought that has not been present at an earlier point in time.

The thought experiment goes like this:
Imagine what the world would look like, if a particular thing/thought has not been invented?

Thoughts build up on each other. Every thought builds up on previous thoughts just like every experience builds up on previous experiences. What goes for thoughts and experiences also goes for things. If one thing would not have been invented at one point in time, then all the consequential things would not have come into existence either. ( -> path dependence).

What does this mean for “cup”:
No cup, no way to store liquid, no way to store liquid, no way to store gas, no gas, no car. So without a cup we would live in a world without cars (and many other things that can be deep-liked back to the invention of the cup – which is: a lot!).

So everything that is here at the moment, everything that humanity currently has available, shapes our imagination and creativity to imagine possible futures, which is – of course – a first step to get there. And in those futures, the people in the future will imagine and come up with new things and thoughts. Things and thoughts that then again build the groundwork for future things and thoughts.

Just like in the past. When you look back at the past you can see how one thought is built on others and how thoughts branch off from on an other, just like an idea that has many implications, just like “no cup” “no car” and also “no cup”, “no coffee” in front of me, next to the computer on which I type these words. And most likely, “no cup” “no computer”, either and maybe not even the words, or at least far fewer words and certainly no typing, because most likely, without the invention of a cup, typing would not have been invented, either.

Let’s get off this rollercoaster of a thought experiment and get back to the comfort of our world now.

So what do you see, when you look through your eyes?

All the things you can see, can be put in one of two categories.

A) Things that you understand and B) things that you don’t understand.

And if you are like me (or most grown ups for that matter) there are far more things in front of you, that you understand, than you don’t understand. And understanding only means, that you are satisfied with the level of understanding, you have reached. The vacuum cleaner for example, that lies next to me (I need to clear it away at some point) –
of course I don’t understand on a deeper level how this vacuum cleaner functions, but I have a general understanding. I certainly don’t understand the details and I might not even know all it’s practical uses, but I am happy with my level of understanding. I don’t want to explore deeper. Only my attitude (not the thing itself) makes this vacuum cleaner part of my universe of things that I understand.

I treasure the things I don’t understand more. Other people for example, especially the ones who are close to me.

I understand that there are people that see this the opposite way. Some people seem to be happy to live in a world, they understand. Where they have reached a level of understanding they are fulfilled with. And nevertheless I can see the comfort this might have (for example there is far less doubt), I do not envy these people. I am a seeker, a researcher using scientific tools and methods to understand better.

Things shape thinking and thinking shapes things.
It is this feedback loop, that propels us humans forward.