Be the First on Your Block to Amaze Your Friends

In any pursuit which deals with talent as an important factor towards success, academic or official licensing is of secondary importance. What is of prime importance is the result which is obtained through the use of the medium and how it is received by those to whom it is directed. Pedigrees are of questionable importance when the dog is sleeping while the burglar makes off with the solid gold dinner service. Nor do they help your legal defense when the mail carrier is bitten. Likewise, it is useless to have a grandmother who read tea leaves and a Scorpio rising in your chart, if you cannot land a boyfriend, keep a husband, get a job or avoid pregnancy. How you ever noticed how a man’s best friend will always be his opposite in appearance? The women you have always had as your best friends have been opposites of your own appearance, have they not? If you are extremely pretty, you best friend may have been the one you found yourself trying to convince others of accepting as beautiful even thought they may not have seen it at the time. If you are an active type, you will attract quiet people. If you are quiet, you will gravitate towards energetic types. In short, the reasons opposites attract is because we need those opposites to make ourselves whole. Sometimes there are two types of human beings, who, being usually unaware of their true nature, go through life complaining about their unrequited love—invariably to none other than those individuals who become the sometimes-disdainful objects of their desires. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Unfortunately, if caterwaulings are long and loud enough, and their love objects are nice enough, even though dominant by nature, a very curious phenomenon develops. The dominant love object, in attempting to “keep peace” and divert grave traumas on the part of his or her suitor, becomes literally vampirized by the “weaker” person! Thus, it becomes a situation wherein the master finds himself fast becoming the slave—but without the benefits of such an arrangement, as the newly developed “slave” had not based his or her choice of a “master” upon any natural pleasures of the flesh or mental attractions! There are two side of man that must be developed, that is, there are two lines of possible development that must proceed simultaneously. These two sides of man, or two lines of possible development, are knowledge and being. It is a necessity to develop knowledge, and particularly self-knowledge, because one of the most characteristic features of man’s present states is that he does not know himself. Generally people understand the idea of different levels of knowledge, the idea of the relativity of knowledge, and the necessity for quite new knowledge. What people do not understand in most cases is the idea of being as quite separate from knowledge; and further, the idea of the relativity of being, the possibility of different levels of being, and the necessity for the development of being, separately from the development of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

A Russian philosopher, Vladimir Solovieff, used the term “being” in his writings. He spoke about the being of a stone, the being of a plant, the being of an animal, the being of a man, and the divine being. This is better than the ordinary concept because in ordinary understanding the being of man is not regarded as in any way different from the being of a stone, the being of a plant, or the being of an animal. From the ordinary point of view a stone, a plant, an animal are or exist, exactly as a man is or exists. In reality, they exist quite differently. However, Solovieff’s division is not sufficient. There is no such thing as the being of a man. Men are too different for that. In the past, we discussed how the man is divided into seven concepts. In addition to this we already know finer divisions. They may live entirely under influences A. They may be equally affected by influences A and C. They may be more under influences B than A. They may have a magnetic center. They may have come into contact with school influences or influence C. They may be on the way to becoming men no 4. All these categories indicate different levels of being. The idea of being enter into the very foundation of thinking and speaking about man in religious thought, and all other divisions of men were regarded as unimportant to comparison with this. Men were divided into pagans, unbelievers, or heretics on the one hand, and into true believers, righteous men saints, prophets, and so on. All these definitions referred not to differences in views and convictions, that is, not to knowledge, but to being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In modern thought people ignore the idea of being and different levels of being. On the contrary, they believe that the more discrepancies and contradictions there re in a man’s being, the more interesting and brilliant he can be. It is generally, although tacitly, and not always even tacitly, admitted that a man can be given to lying, he can be selfish, unreliable, unreasonable, perverted, and yet be a great scientist or a great philosopher or a great artist. Of course this is quite impossible. This incompatibility of different features of one’s being, which is generally regarded as originality, actually means weakness. One cannot be a great thinker or a great artists with a perverted or an inconsistent mind, just as one cannot be a prizefighter or a circus athlete with consumption. The widespread acceptance of the idea that inconsistency and amorality mean originality is responsible for the many scientific, artistic, and religious fakes of our present time and probably of all times. It is necessary to understand clearly what being means, and why it most grow and develop side by side with knowledge, but independently of it. If knowledge outgrows being or being outgrows knowledge, the result is always a one-sided development, and a one-sided development cannot go far. It is bound to come to some inner contradiction of a serious nature and stop there. Some time later we may speak about the different kinds and the different results of one-sided development. Ordinarily, in life we meet with only one kind, that is, when knowledge had outgrown being. The result takes the form of a dogmatization of certain ideas and the consequent impossibility of further development of knowledge because of the loss of understanding. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The exchange of words and glances between individuals in each other’s presence is a very common social arrangement, yet it is one whose distinctive communication properties are difficult to disentangle. Pedantic definitions seem to be required. Any individual may give information through linguistic means formally established in society for this purpose, namely, speech or recognized speech substitutes such as writing and pictorial signs or gestures. One speaks here of an individual sending messages to someone who receives them. However, the individual may also give information expressively, through the incidental symptomatic significance of events associate with him. In this case one might say the he emits, exudes, or gives off information to someone who gleans it. Linguistic messages can be “about” anything in the World, the sender and the subject matter having no necessary connection, coinciding only when autobiographical statements are being made. Expressive messages are necessarily “about” the same causal physical complex of which the transmitting agency is an intrinsic part. Consensus as to the meaning of linguistic messages seems more firmly established than it is in regard to that of expressive messages. Linguistic messages can be translated, stored, and help us as legal evidence; expressive messages tend to be ones for which the giver cannot be made legally responsible, it being usually possible for him to deny that he meant quite what others claim he meant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Linguistic messages are felt to be voluntary and intended; expressive messages, on the other hand, must often preserve the fiction that they are uncalculated, spontaneous, and involuntary, as in some cases they are. Ever linguistic message caries some expressive information, namely, that the sender is sending messages. In any case, most concrete messages combine linguistic and expressive components, the proportion of each differing widely from message to message. The information that an individual provides, whether he sends it or exudes it, may be embodies or disembodied. A frown, a spoken word, a kick is a message that a sender conveys by means of his own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that his body is presented to sustain this activity. Disembodies messages, such as the ones we receive from letters and mailed gifts, or the ones hunters receive from the spoor of a not distant animal, require that the organism do something that traps and holds information long after the organism has stopped informing. This study will be concerned only with embodies information. No ordinary English verb seems to cover all the senses—sights, hearing, smell, tastes, and touch—that restrict the media and provide the receiving equipment through which an individual is able to obtain information. Terms such as “perceive,” which have a special visual reference, have had to be used in a wider way, while terms such as “experience” have had to be used more narrowly. Some terms such as “audit” or “monitor,” have had to be manufactured. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In everyday thinking about the receiving sense, it is felt that ordinarily they are used in an “unveiled” or “direct” way. This apparently implies a restriction on boosting devices—mechanical, chemical, or electrical—except s these raise the faulty senses of a particular individual to average unassisted strength: glasses, for example, but not binoculars; devices to assist with audio impairment but not microphones. Electric lighting would have to be allowed as merely raising a room to day-time standards. When one speaks of experiencing someone else with one’s unveiled sense, one usually implies the reception of embodies messages. This linkage of unveiled senses on one side and embodied transmissions on the other provides one of the crucial communication conditions of immediate interaction. Under this condition any message that an individual sends is likely to be qualified and modified by much additional information that others glean from him simultaneously, often unbeknownst to him; further, a very large number of brief messages may be sent. Now the individual can, of course, receive embodied messages by means of one’s unveiled sense without much chance of these communication roles being reversed, as when he spies on persons through a crack in the wall or overhears them through a thin partition. Such asymmetrical arrangements may even be established as part of an occupational setting, as in the procedure by which psychoanalysts or priests observe their clients without being as easily observed in return. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Ordinarily, however, in using the unveiled senses to receive embodies messages from others, the individual also makes oneself available as a source of embodies information for them (although there is always likely to be some differential exploitation of these monitoring possibilities). Here, then, is a second crucial communication of face-to-face interaction: not only are the receiving and conveying of the unveiled and embodies kind, but each giver is himself a receiver, and each receiver is a giver. The implication of this second feature are fundamental. First, sight begins to take on an added and special role. Each individual can see that he is being experienced in some way, and he will guide at least some of his conduct according to the perceived identity and initial response of his audience. In the asymmetrical case, where a person is being spied upon by direct or indirect means, he may greatly modify his conduct if he suspects he is being observed, even though he does not know the identity of the particular audience that might be observing him. This is one of the possibilities celebrated in Orwell’s 1984, and its possibility is one of the forces operative in socially controlling person who are alone. Further, he can be seen seeing this. Ordinarily, then, to use our unveiled sense is to clearly seen as the agents of our acts, there being very little chance of disavowing having committed them; neither having given nor having received messages can be easily denied, at least among those immediately involved. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The factor emerges that the special mutuality of immediate social interactions is when two persons are together, at least some of their World will be made up put of the fact (and consideration for the fact) that an adaptive line of action must always be pursued in this intelligently helpful and hindering World. Individuals sympathetically take the attitude of others, present, regardless of the end to which they put the information thus acquired. In human society every act of every individual tends to become a gesture, since what one does is always an indication of what one intends to do. The consequence is that the individual in society lives a more or less public existence, in which all his acts are anticipated, checked, inhibited, or modified by the gestures and the intentions of his fellows. It is in this social conflict, in which every individual lives more or less in the mind of every other individual, that human nature and the individual may acquire their most characteristic and human traits. The two distinctive features of face-to-face interaction: richness of information flow and facilitation of feedback have enough structuring significance to provide one analytical rationale for the separate treatment this reports gives to the social norms regulating behaviour of persons immediately present to one another. The physical distance over which one person can experience another with the unveiled sense—thereby finding that the other is “within range”—varies according to many factors: the sense medium involved, the presence of obstructions, even the temperature of the air. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

On Shetland Isle, during cold nights, mainland visitors walking together alone the bay in apparent isolation who laughed loudly by the strict local standards could cause Shetlanders an eighth of a mile away to rise their eyebrows. Conversely, when an individual whispers or uses eye expressions, his body acts as a focusing barrier, effectively restricting the usual sphere of propagation of sense stimuli, so that reception is limited to those very close to him or directly in front of him. On the subject of the disciplined use of language, in addition to courses in the philosophy of science, every school—again, from elementary school through college—offer a course in semantics—in the processes by which people make meaning. The fact that some English teachers have been consistently obtuse in their approach to this subject means they ignored it. This has always been difficult for me to understand since English teachers claim to be concerned with teaching reading and writing. However, if they do not teach anything about the relationship of language to reality—which is what semantics studies—I cannot imagine how they expect reading and writing to improve. Every teacher ought to be a semantics teacher, since it is not possible to separate language from what we call knowledge. Like history, semantics is an interdisciplinary subject: it is necessary to know something about it in order to understand any subject. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

However, it would be extremely useful to the growth of their intelligence if our youth had available a special course in which fundamental principles of language were identified and explained. Such a course would deal not only with the various uses of language but with the relationship between things and words, symbols and signs, factual statements and judgements, and grammar and thought. Especially for young students, the course ought to emphasize the kinds of semantic errors that are common to all of us, and that are avoidable through awareness and discipline—the use of either-or categories, misunderstanding of levels of abstraction, confusion of words with things, sloganeering, and self-reflexivness. Of all the disciples that might be included in the curriculum, semantics is certainly among the most “basic.” Because it deals with the processes by which we make and interpret meaning, it has great potential to affect the deepest levels of student intelligence. And yet semantics is rarely mentioned when “back to the basics” is proposed. Why? My guess is that it cuts too deep. To adapt George Orwell, many subjects are basic but some are more basic than others. Such subjects have the capability of generating critical thought and of giving students access to questions that get to the heart of the matter. This is not what “back to the basis” advocates usually have in mind. They want language technicians: people who can follow instructions, write reports clearly, spell correctly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

There is certainly ample evidence that the study of semantics will improve the writing and read reading of students. However, it invariable does more. It helps students to reflect on the sense and truth of what they are writing and what they are asked to read. It teaches them to discover the underlying assumptions of what they are told. It emphasizes the manifold ways in which language can distort reality. It assists students in become “crap-detectors.” Students who have a firm grounding in semantics are therefore apt to find it difficult to take reading tests. A reading test does not invite one to ask whether or not what is written is true. Or, if it is true, what it has to do with anything. The study of semantics insists upon these questions. But “back to the basics” advocates do not require education to be that basic. Which is why they usually do not include literature, music, and art as part of their agenda either. However, of course, in using the ascent of humanity as a theme, we would of necessity elevate these subjects to prominence. The most obvious reason for such prominence is that their subject matter contains the best evidence we have of the unity and continuity of human experience and feeling. And that is why in our teaching of the humanities, we should emphasize the enduring creations of the past. The schools should stay as far from contemporary works as possible. Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own times—its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Their knowledge of the form and content of these arts is by no means satisfactory. However, their ignorance of the form and content of the art of the past is cavernous. This is one good reason for emphasizing the art of the past. Another is that there is no subject better suited to freeing us from the tyranny of the present than the historical study of art. Painting, for example, is more than three times as old as writing, and contains in its changing styles and themes a fifteen-thousand-year-old record of the ascent of humanity. This does not mean we should subsume art under the heading of archeology, although it is recommended that the history of art forms be given a serious place on the curriculum. However, art is much more than a historical artifact. To have meaning for us, it must connect with those levels of feeling that are in fact not expressible in discursive language. The question therefore arises whether it is possible for students of today to relate, through feeling, to the painting, architecture, music, sculpture, or literature of the past. Well, only with the greatest difficulty. They, and many of us, have an aesthetic sensibility of a different order from what is required to be inspired, let alone entertained, by a Shakespeare sonnet, a Haydn symphony, or a Hals painting. To oversimplify the matter, a young man who believes Madonna to have reached the highest pinnacle of musical expression lacks the sensibility to distinguish between the ascent and descent of humanity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, I do not want to tarnish the reputation of popular culture. The products of the popular arts are amply provided by the culture itself. The schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they re not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response. There is no excuse for schools to sponsor rock concerts when students have no heard the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin. Or for student to have graduated from high school without having read, for example, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Twain, Melville, or Poe. Or for students not to have seen at least a photograph of paintings by Goya, El Greco, David. It is not the point that many of these composers, writers, and painters were in their own times popular artists. These artists are relevant not only because they established the standards with which civilized people approach the arts. They are relevant because the culture tries to mute their voices and render their standards invisible. It is highly likely that students, immersed in today’s popular arts, will find such an emphasis tedious and even painful. This fact will, in turn, be painful to teachers, who, naturally enough, prefer to teach that which will arouse an immediate and enthusiastic response. However, our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknow to them. Above all, they must be down humanity’s artistic roots. And that task, in our own times, falls inescapably to the schools. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

There are two subjects indispensable to an understanding of where we have come from. The first is the history of technology, which as much as science and art provides pat of the story of humanity’s confrontation with nature and indeed with our own limitations. It is important for students to be shown, for example, the connection between the invention of eyeglasses in the thirteenth century and experiments in gene-splicing in the twentieth: that in both cases we reject the proposition that anatomy is destiny, and through technology define our own destiny. We need students who will understand the relationships between our technics and social and psychic Worlds, so that they may begin informed conversations about where technology us taking us and how. The second subject is, of course, religion, with which so much painting, music, technology, architecture, literature, and science are intertwined. The curriculum must include a course in comparative religion. Such a course would deal with religion as an expression of humanity’s creativeness, as a total, integrated response to fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. The course would be descriptive, promoting no particular religion but illuminating the metaphors, the literature, the art, the ritual of religious expression itself. Many say schools and religion must not touch on each other. However, if we do not ask them to consider how different people of different times and places have tried to achieve a sense of transcendence, I do not see how we can claim to be educating our youth. No education can neglect such sacred texts as Genesis, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavd-Gita. Each of them embodies a style and a World-view that tell as much about the ascent of humanity as any book ever written. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Much like we have churches that teach religion, we should also have centers that teach the United States Constitution on the weekends, over and over, like the preachers do in the church. Perhaps we can decrease violence and educate people from all walks of life what the United States of America’s Constitution provides for American citizens. This recognition of the law of our land would also reduce protests and property violence because people could reference their Constitutional Rights and others would have to recognize them. This could also reduce the instance of school bullying, discrimination, and arrests. Perhaps it would also help to begin and sustain a serious conversation that will allow us to distance ourselves from the thought-World, and then criticize and modify it. Over the years, research on these various mechanisms for creating, transforming, and destroying agents or strategies (and therefore types) has led to the establishment of an important trade-off principle, usually referred to as exploration versus exploitation. This principle captures the tension of Complex Adaptive Systems between creation of untested types that may be superior to what currently exists versus the copying of tested types that have so far proven best. This trade-off characterization has turned out to be illuminating across a wide range of settings from simple genetics to organizational resource allocation, wherever the testing of new types comes at some expanse to realizing benefits of those already available. Two extremes illustrate the trade-off. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Eternal boiling occurs when the level of mutation, temperature, or noise is so high that the system remains permanently disorderly. In such a state, any potentially valuable structures are broken apart before they can be effectively put to use. Organizations and polities sometimes find themselves in periods of continuous upheaval that produce this effect. There may be striking new ideas, but before it is known whether they will actually work, their underpinnings are swept away in subsequent waves of change. If mutation rates are too high in a biological population, there will be many variant organisms that cannot survive, along with a few that are important improvements over earlier types. However, a surprising new discovery will itself be subject to high rates of (usually lethal) mutations, and so its superiority will not have enough time to establish itself in the population before it is disrupted by deleterious random chance. In these situations, exploration completely swamps exploitation. Premature convergence is the opposite phenomenon. Premature convergence occurs when needed variability is lost too quickly. This can happen when very speedy imitation of an initial success cuts off future system improvements. A fashion in health care can sweep through a community and wipe out alternatives that might have proven superior with some additional testing and refinement. A new product can become a standard before sufficient trials of alternatives have occurred. A new variant that might actually have the potential to be better may lose out because it cannot overcome the advantages accruing to the established standard. In these situations, exploitation quickly swamps exploration. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

There are not simply two ways that something good can go wrong. In general, investments in options and possibilities associated with “exploration” frequently come at the expense of obtaining returns on what has already been learned, “exploitation.” The two possibilities form a fundamental trade-off. An early and striking exposition of the trade-off occurred in the context of the “two-armed bandit problem,” in which a player with a fixed supply of coins plays two slot machines that have unknown and potentially different rates of payoff. To decrease sampling error in estimates of which machine pays more, and thereby increase longer-run expected gains, coins should be played on both machines. However, to maximize gain in the short run, coins should be played on the machine that is currently estimated as best paying. The trade-off can be seen in many different practical situations. For example, companies must decide whether to invest resources such as capital and management attention, in developing ideas for wholly new products or in marketing, refining—or reducing costs of—existing products. Students must decide between taking more courses in a subject in which they have done well or trying out new fields. Though there is not a single decision maker, the gene pool of a biological species also confronts the problem. Higher mutation rates will produce move variations on currently fit animals, with attendant chances of discovering improvements. However, they will also yield higher levels of infant mortality due to lethal random changes in organisms’ genetic codes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The exploration of making new animals unlike their parents comes at the cost of forgoing the fitness already embodies in the parents. Lowered mutation would make offspring more similar to the parents, exploiting what the parents have proven to be valuable in reaching reproductive readiness—but at the cost of exploring less. For decades, people have proposed replacing automobiles with some form of mass-transportation system, and it seems that cost revolutions (including inexpensive tunnelling) may finally make this practical. Before junking the car, though, it is worth seeing how it might be improved. Molecular manufacturing can make almost anything better. Automobiles can be made stronger and safer, lighter, higher performance, and higher efficiency, while getting excellent milage and burning clean, inexpensive fuels, perhaps in fuel cells powering quiet electric motors. Using aerodynamic forces to hold the car to the road, there is no reason why a comfortable passenger car should not be able to deliver uncomfortable, drag-racer acceleration. To imagine an affordable car built with molecular manufacturing, first imagine loading it with all the attractive features that you have ever heard proposed. This includes everything from today’s self-adjusting seats and mirrors, excellent sound systems, and specially tuned steering and suspension systems, through automated navigation displays, emergency braking, and reliable super-duper airbags. Now, instead of just having the position of the seats, mirrors, and so forth adjust to a driver, as some cars do today, our smart-material BMW will also be able adjust its size, shape, and color (already possible), facing owners with choices such as, “What should our BMW look like for this occasion?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Those seeking an image of solid conservatism and wealth will also drive these cares. But they may still be interested in certified antique BMWs, made from traditional steel, paint, and rubber. If environmental regulations permit it, the car might even have a genuine gasoline-brining engine. The latter can no doubt be cleaned up by fancy nanotechnology-based emission-control systems. Our transportation system today effectively ends in the upper atmosphere. Travel beyond still takes the form of “historic missions.” There is no reason for this situation to continue for long, once molecular manufacturing becomes well established. The cost of a spaceflight is high because the spacecraft are huge, fragile things, made in such small numbers that they are almost hand-crafted. Molecular manufacturing will replace today’s delicate monsters with rugged, mass-produced vehicles (which, with greater efficiency, need not be so large). The vehicles will cost little, but the energy? Today, the energy cost of a ticket to orbit in an efficient vehicle would be less than one hundred dollars. Low-cost vehicles and energy will drop the total cost to a fraction of this. We will know that spaceflight has become inexpensive when people see the Earth as just a small part of the World, and understand in their bones that space resources make continued exploitation of Earth’s resources unnecessary. In the long run, efficient, clean, low-cost manufacturing can transform the way human beings affect the Earth by their presence. Even stay-at-home humans will be better able to heal the damage they have done. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

At Riverside Residence 1, there’s space for all of it. 👏 All your clothes, shoes, furniture – you name it, we’ve got a place for it! Can’t wait for you to take in the spacious floor plan for yourself.