-- Guide to the Water Trail

Stage 1: The Experience of Freedom

Purposeful and Spontaneous Action


"A man is free when he is using a spade."
Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars


THE VIEW OF FREEDOM

We experience freedom when we integrate structures of experience and something real outside those structures.

Preliminary discussion of terms:
experience
you are presumed to know yours -- use it to test my statements
structures of experience
the conceptual tools we use to understand and act on things, including vision, hearing, time, space, organized muscular action, language, mathematics, the judicial system, data
something real outside those structures
it's actually there and it surprises us, baffles us, leaves us uncertain; it presents a multitude of problems and tasks
integrate
change one or both according to their joint involvement

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All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.

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ACTIVITIES INVOLVING FREEDOM

We experience freedom when we integrate structures of experience and something real outside those structures.

You extend structures of your experience into reality and adapt them to that reality during:

EXPLORATION:
Travel
tours to unfamiliar places
Science and Engineering
rational approaches to the material world
Personal relations
things shared and things different
Spiritual pursuits
building belief in a higher power into one's life
WORK:
Projects
achieving a plan
Business
co-ordinating resources and expectations
Professionals
practical tools for hard or complex problems
Artistic creations
presentations of sensations or feelings
COMPETITION:
Games
the rules generate the chances
Sport
skill against elements or adversaries
War
planning and hazard
Politics
ideology compromised in pursuit of power

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CHARACTERISTICS OF FREEDOM FOUND IN THE ACTIVITIES

Characteristics of an experience are features of that experience that people can agree are significant:
You are the judge.

The questions are: how well does the suggested characteristic express something important about the experience? where does the characteristic not fit the experience?

The core characteristics of freedom, as seen in these pages, are the joy of adventure and an intertwining of structured experience and unstructured reality.

There are important peripheral characteristics:

Action
moving, making, doing, expressing
Anxiety
at least anticipation and maybe butterflies in the stomach or worse
Purpose
an end or goal in view
Spontaneity
you don't know what will happen until it does
Absorption
you get drawn in
Imperfections
things never quite work out
Refinement
skills develop with practice and more subtle problems appear
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THE CLUSTER

A cluster is a bundle of connections on a common theme:
"games"
Wittgenstein's analysis shows overlapping and shared features gathered from numerous experiences involving games
text
blocs of text are clear and definite, making analysis of text an all-time favorite
the law of the courts
an array of adjustable clusters used as tools
general experience
concepts hang together -- and new concepts emerge
Notating clusters:
  1. The notation is carried out on a piece of "graph paper";
  2. The name of the cluster (the whole graph) is the theme the connections have in common;
  3. Any item involved in the theme is assigned a row and a column;
  4. A dot (like a "o") is placed in the box formed by the row and column of a single item (each item leads to one dot);
  5. When two different items are involved in the thematic connection, a stroke (like a "1") is placed in the box formed by the appropriate row and column;
  6. The order of rows or order of columns makes no difference. The cluster is the bundle of connections, and nothing more.
Examples:
  1. Hypertext links in this website
  2. Words in blocs of text (sometimes leading to searches through Boolean combinations of strings of bytes)
  3. The characteristics of freedom
Refined analysis of a cluster
core and periphery
isolation and connectivity
consistency and variation
Testing the view of freedom as a cluster
Do the connections between activities and characteristics coalesce and hang together?


Forward -- to Stage 2


All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.