5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Discrete-continuous
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| 5.9.4 Discrete-continuous Models | ||||
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This data of the eonic effect has an elegant simplicity resembling a certain type of model, a discrete-continuous model, essentially the type of our on-off switch argument, or stepping progression: our turning points become transitions, three centuries in length (a guesstimate), that switch on an off, leaving ‘free action’ in the wake of eonic determination. As an example of a ‘discrete-continuous’ process, if we listen to a concert, we hear the continuous music. But if we listen carefully we will detect a discrete tempo (counting numbers are ‘discrete’), or beat. That’s the absolute minimum example, where the dynamic has been replaced with esthetic productions, leaving only tempo as a mechanical process. So with our ‘eonic’ effect, our drumbeat suggests a tempo. This tempo is a clue to some hidden order, quite invisible in the sequence. This order may be unknowable, but it must show its hand if it has any relation to our world at all. Thus we detect its signature. Tempo is the only property left to analysis after everything else disappears into hypercomplexity. Here is another example. Consider being in the wake of three earthquakes. The discrete series of earthquakes interrupts the continuous field of events, the ‘free action’ in its vicinity. This ‘discrete-continuous’ system shows that the nature of activity is distinct from the natural process, yet the two blend together and influence each other. Note the built in relation of ‘system action’ to ‘free action’, response to the earthquakes. Now replace three earthquakes with a system that changes the ‘degrees of self-consciousness’ in a series of creative eras. We see here the way in which the element of free activity blends with a greater process. That ‘free’ activity endures a considerable loss of ‘freedom’ in a causal circumstance, and ‘relative free action’ near this macro event might show little more than ‘self-consciousness’, simple witnessing of what happens, or actions under constraint to escape. Of course, the problem is that our cultural transformations are not physical events of this type. The discrete series intersects with the continuous field of civilizations, Civilization, tribal areas, as one universal history overlaid on another, the latter being everything on the surface of a planet. We label this series as relative numbers using the abstract number ‘n’, since it starts out of the blue, with unseen antecedents. Note the way we can start anywhere and proceed forward. That is the advantage of this kind of model. We don’t have to explain how hominids got to the Neolithic. It would be nice if we could, but we would strip history of its data to make the two compatible. Since we suspect a net increase in ‘complex information’ at each interval, from an unknown source, this allows us to both reckon with and thumb our noses at, standard reductionism, the bane of Darwin’s theory, which says that nothing can happen that contradicts the theory. Since we already see that each stage of our series almost seems to contradict the previous, that’s obviously a crippled approach. We end with a floating island of historical evolution that just starts at step n, a sort of little Big Bang that is world unto itself. Please note that we are inside the pattern, just after the third transition, a very different perspective from the usual assumptions about being objective observers of the past. There is no objective present to accomplish that task, and we see the previous transitions from the paradigm change created by TP3. We call this a discrete-continuous model to correspond to our intermittent turning points. This kind of model can tell us if two different levels are interleaved. This is a special case of a more general method we could adapt to almost any theory of history. The Old Testament is really applying this kind of logic to its own history, the world’s first ‘eonic model’, but in primitive form. A discrete-continuous model is like the difference between soccer and American football where the continuous game is broken into a series of plays with huddle periods able to reset the game, or change the course of subsequent events at finite intervals. We should thank our good fortune if any data we were working with had anything like the right evidence for such a model. It gives an ‘idea for a universal history’, two in fact, and allows distinctions of potential and realization (e.g. eonic determination and free action), without which standard historical theory is almost demented scientism. The reason is that we can demonstrate, or at least raise the dangerous issue of, teleology using only directionality, and deal with the obvious problems we have seen, among them the embedded nature of the observer. The eonic effect, because of its alternation of fast advance and medieval sluggishness is a prime candidate: a discrete or countable set of turning points emerges from the continuous field of world history. We can discipline teleological thinking and keep it out of ideological mischief. Clearly we are dealing with a teleological system. But all such teleologies tend to reflect the outcome of the turning point from which they emerge. Teleology is about some deeper aspect that impinges on a totality bordering on cosmology. We are struck dumb at the start. But we can discuss incremental directionality on a case basis. This kind of model allows us to give a representation of an ‘evolution of freedom’: the alternation of degrees of freedom as eonic determination and free action, grades of self-consciousness. But most of all we can braid two levels of history together. This model allows us to introduce the net equivalent of a macro-dynamic without committing ourselves to how it works or giving a name to some ghost force. We will see that two questions converge, as the Axial Age is seen as a step in a sequence of three turning points. The relation of the two will be clarified in our first intimations of a simple model of the eonic effect, uniting these two ideas, as a so-called stream and sequence intersection. Our drumbeat shows how the stream of civilizations intersects with a macro-sequence, and with this concept, presto, the phenomenon makes sense, as we will discover. We discover the significance or our mysterious drumbeat as the evidence for a kind of relative transformation, or ‘transition’. |
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