-- 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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All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.
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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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All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.
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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:
- The notation is carried out on a piece of "graph paper";
- The name of the cluster (the whole graph) is the theme the connections have in common;
- Any item involved in the theme is assigned a row and a column;
- 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);
- 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;
- The order of rows or order of columns makes no difference. The cluster is the bundle of connections, and nothing more.
Examples:
- Hypertext links in this website
- Words in blocs of text (sometimes leading to searches through Boolean combinations of strings of bytes)
- 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.